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Trumpism and Clintonism Are the Future - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-clintonismare-the-future.html

politics US parties coalition Democratic party gop clinton reagan

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 16 - No Cached

The presidential election of 1968 was a milestone in partisan realignment — the breakup of the mid-20th-century Democrats and Republicans and the reshuffling of voter blocs among the two parties
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In 2016, this half-century process of partisan realignment is all but complete. What we are seeing instead of partisan realignment is policy realignment — the adjustment of what each party stands for to its existing voter base.
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For a while, the strength of the religious right allowed elite Republicans to trade tax cuts for the rich for support for banning abortion and gay marriage. But as religious conservatism declines, a kind of European-style national populism is rising, for which protectionism and immigration restriction are central issues, not peripheral concerns.
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Although he benefited from the support of working-class whites who resented affirmative action, busing, mass immigration, sexual liberation and cultural liberalism, Reagan himself was animated by an optimistic individualism that had more in common with Chamber of Commerce boosterism than it did with the defensive and combative communitarianism of conservative populism.
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in the midterm election of 1994, when the Republican party captured both houses of Congress, many centrist and conservative Democrats, particularly in the South and West, were replaced by Republicans. The Democrats who survived the slaughter were concentrated in New England and the West Coast, big cities and college towns, and majority black or majority Latino districts. The midterm elections of 2010 wiped out much of the remnant of centrist-to-conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats in the House.
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Today’s Democratic base is, to simplify somewhat, an alliance of Northern, Midwestern and West Coast whites from the old Rockefeller Republican tradition with blacks and Latinos.
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For their part, the Republicans of 2016 rely for their votes on the Southern white and Northern white working-class constituencies that were once the mainstays of the other party. With this partisan realignment over, the policy realignment has begun — the closing of the gap between the inherited program of a political party and the values and interests of its present-day voters.
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In the Republican Party, the inherited program shared by much of the conservative movement and the party’s donors, with its emphasis on free trade and large-scale immigration, and cuts in entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, is a relic of the late 20th century, when the country-club wing of the party was much more important than the country-and-western wing.
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We are accustomed to thinking of the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 as the beginning of a new era. But from the vantage point of 2016, both Reagan and Bill Clinton look more like transitional figures. During this period, the migration from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party of socially conservative, economically populist Democrats, like the supporters of the segregationist Democrat George Wallace’s independent presidential campaign in 1968, was not yet complete. Neither was the flow of moderate Rockefeller Republicans in the opposite direction.
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Long before Mr. Trump threw his hat into the ring in 2015, the economic libertarians who are overrepresented in the donor class and Republican think tanks and magazines were losing to the populists. Opposition to illegal immigration went from being a fringe issue associated with Patrick Buchanan in the 1990s to a central test of whether one was a “true conservative” or a Republican in Name Only.
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Mr. Trump exposed the gap between what orthodox conservative Republicans offer and what today’s dominant Republican voters actually want — middle-class entitlements plus crackdowns on illegal immigrants, Muslims, foreign trade rivals and free-riding allies
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notwithstanding the enthusiasm of the young for Bernie Sanders, the major tension is not between Mr. Sanders and Hillary Clinton. It is between Hillary Clinton and the legacy of Bill Clinton.
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the success of the Democrats in winning the popular vote for the presidency in every election since 1992 except 2004 has convinced most Democratic strategists that they don’t need socially conservative, economically liberal Reagan or Wallace Democrats any more. Many Democrats hope that the long-term growth of the Obama coalition, caused chiefly by the growth of the Latino share of the electorate, will create an all but inevitable Democratic majority in the executive branch
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The Clintonian synthesis of pro-business, finance-friendly economics with social and racial liberalism no longer needs to be diluted, as it was in the 1990s, by opportunistic appeals to working-class white voters.
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on the social and racial issues that are important to today’s Democratic base, it is Mr. Sanders, not Mrs. Clinton, who has had to modify his message. At the beginning of his campaign, Mr. Sanders the democratic socialist focused in the manner of a single issue candidate almost exclusively on themes of class, inequality and political corruption. But because he is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, he has had to put greater emphasis on other issues, including racial disparity in policing and sentencing and the environment and immigration.
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For all of these reasons, it is likely that the future of the Democrats will be Clintonism — Hillary Clintonism, that is, a slightly more progressive version of neoliberalism freed of the strategic concessions to white working-class voters associated with Bill Clintonism.
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Waiting for a Landslide - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...waiting-for-a-landslide.html

compromise realignment politics majority transformative election

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 11 - No Cached

realignments in American politics are usually punctuated by transformative elections, in which the old order suddenly gives way and a new majority emerges in its place.
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This “realignment theory” was embraced by many scholars because it fit the historical record so well. Every 30 to 40 years, it seemed, the American political order had decisively turned over: in 1800, when Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans trounced John Adams’s Federalists; in 1828, when the Democratic-Republicans split into the Democrats and the Whigs; and then on down through Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 victory, William McKinley’s 1896 consolidation of a Republican majority, and the emergence of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition.
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One reason American policy-making has become “less stable, less effective, and less predictable” — in the words of the downgrade that Standard & Poor’s handed to the United States on Friday night — is the enduring influence of V. O. Key’s theory, and the seductive dream of realignment that it conjured up.
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there’s no guarantee that such a majority will be established in time to walk the country backward from the fiscal cliff. And in the meantime, our leaders have a responsibility that transcends their ideological differences: the responsibility to work with one another to keep the country solvent.
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The Obama Realignment - NYTimes.com - 0 views

campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/...douthat-the-obama-realignment

obama election significance

shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 12 - No Cached

When you do it once, it’s just a victory. When you do it twice, it’s a realignment.The coalition that Barack Obama put together to win the presidency handily in 2008 looked a lot like the emerging Democratic majority that optimistic liberals had been discerning on the political horizon since the 1990s. It was the late George McGovern’s losing coalition from 1972 finally come of age: Young voters, the unmarried, African-Americans, Hispanics, the liberal professional class – and then more than enough of the party’s old blue collar base to hold the Rust Belt for the Democrats.But 2008 was also a unique political moment, when George W. Bush’s immense unpopularity was compounded by a financial collapse, and when the possibility of electing the country’s first black president fired the imagination of the nation (and the nation’s press corps). So it was still possible to regard the Obama majority of ’08 as more flukish than transformative – or at the very least, to see it as a fragile thing, easily shattered by poor choices and adverse developments.
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the lesson of the election is that the Obama coalition was truly vulnerable only to a Republican Party that took Obama seriously as an opponent – that understood how his majority had been built, why voters had joined it and why the conservative majority of the Reagan and Bush eras had unraveled.Such understanding eluded the Republicans this year.
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In part, that failure can be blamed on their standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, who mostly ran as a kind of vanilla Republican instead of showing the imagination necessary to reinvent his party for a new era.
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A weak nominee in many ways, he was ultimately defeated less by his own limitations as a leader, and more by the fact that his party didn’t particularly want to be reinvented, preferring to believe that the rhetoric and positioning of 1980 and 1984 could win again in the America of 2012.
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You could see this belief at work in the confidence with which many conservatives insisted that the Obama presidency was not only embattled but self-evidently disastrous, in the way so many voices on the right sought to raise the ideological stakes at every opportunity, in the widespread conviction that the starker conservatives made the choice between left and right, the more votes they would win.
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Those models were wrong about 2012, and they aren’t likely to be right about 2016 or 2020.
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Tuesday’s result ratifies much of the leftward shift in public policy that President Obama achieved during his first term. It paves the way for the White House to raise at least some of the tax revenue required to pay for a more activist government and it means that the Republicans let a golden chance to claim a governing coalition of their own slip away.
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just as Reagan Republicanism dominated the 1980s even though the Democrats controlled the House, our own era now clearly belongs to the Obama Democrats even though John Boehner is still speaker of the House.
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there will come a day when a Republican presidential candidate will succeed where Mitt Romney just failed.But getting there requires that conservatives face reality: The age of Reagan is officially over, and the Obama majority is the only majority we have.
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Time for a new Sykes-Picot Agreement to fix the Middle East - 0 views

blogs.reuters.com/...fers-the-best-chance-for-peace

middle east

shared by jongardner04 on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached

The “contract” is the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divided up most of the Arab lands that had been under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. The world that document created exists now only on yellowed maps, and the issues left unsettled — primarily the need for separate Sunni, Shi’ite and Kurdish territories — have come home begging. War is not fixing this; diplomacy might.
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However, in the intervening 15 months, Turkey and Russia entered the fight, and the Saudis may soon join the fray. Meanwhile, the United States and its allies — as well as Iraq, Islamic State and Iran — never left. Only a massive diplomatic effort, involving all parties now on the playing field, including Islamic State, has any potential of ending the bloodshed. That means a redivision of the region along current ethnic, tribal, religious and political lines.
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The old Sykes-Picot Agreement was enforced by the superpowers of the day, Britain and France, with buy-in from Russia. The immediate aim was colonialism; the long-term goal stability, following the massive realignment of power that was World War One. The lines were literally drawn for the next nine decades.
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Another important goal of the era, creating “Kurdistan,” never actually happened. The 1920 Treaty of Sevres left an opening for a referendum on Kurdish independence. Problem one: the referendum only included plans for Kurds outside of Syria and Iraq. Problem two: the referendum never happened, a victim of fighting that saw the Turkish people separate themselves from the remains of the Ottoman Empire and fight for two years to prevent the dismantling of what is now modern Turkey. The result was 20 million Kurds scattered across parts of modern Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria.
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Out of the new negotiations will have to emerge a Kurdistan, with land from Turkey, Iraq, perhaps Iran, and Syria. Assad will stay in power as a Russian proxy. Iran’s hold on Shi’ite Iraq will strengthen. A Sunni homeland, to include the political entity Islamic State will morph into, will need to be assured via a strict hands-off policy by Baghdad.
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At risk for not acting: an empowered Islamic State, thriving on more chaos. An explosive dissolution of Iraq. A Russian-Turkish fight that could involve NATO. The shift from a Saudi-Iranian proxy war to a straightforward conflict between the two countries. A spark that forces Israel to act. A mini-world war, in the world’s most flammable region, that will create its own unexpected and uncontrolled realignment of power, and leave behind a warehouse of the dead.
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Opinion | There's a Bigger Prize Than Impeachment - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...er-prize-than-impeachment.html

trump impeachment realignment 2020 gop defeat

shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 19 - No Cached

With the benefit of hindsight, impeaching President Clinton was a disaster for the Republicans. Mr. Clinton’s job approval was at a record 73 percent the month he was impeached, Democrats defied the odds and picked up seats in the midterm elections and Mr. Gingrich returned to the private sector.
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For Democrats, leaving Donald Trump in office is not only good politics — it is the best chance for fundamental realignment of American politics in more than a generation
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Mr. Trump is three years into destroying what we know as the Republican Party. Another two years just might finish it off. Trumpism has become Republicanism, and that spells electoral doom for the party.
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What’s left of the party is a rigid adherence to tax cuts, a social agenda that repels most younger Americans and rampant xenophobia and race-based politics that regularly interfere with the basic functioning of the federal government.
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Republicans themselves know it, and that simple fact is a huge problem for them: By and large they don’t like him, and they know he’s a long-term problem for the party — but in the short term they know they can’t get re-elected without his voters. For Democrats, it’s the dream scenario — as long as he completes his term.
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Nothing will unite an increasingly fraying Republican Party more than trying to remove the president anywhere but at the ballot box. Democrats risk the kind of overreach that doomed the Republicans 20 years ago
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in any case Democrats are not likely to succeed in getting votes in the Senate to convict the president.
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Opinion | Joe Biden Is a Transformational President - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-covid-relief-bill.html

biden presidency 2021 transformation transformative Politics

shared by Javier E on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached

We’re seeing a policy realignment without a partisan realignment.
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In a polarized era, the legislation is widely popular. Three-quarters of Americans support the law, including 60 percent of Republicans, according to a Morning Consult survey. The Republican members of Congress voted against it, but the G.O.P. shows no interest in turning this into a great partisan battle. As I began to write this on Thursday morning, the Fox News home page had only two stories on the Covid relief bill and dozens on things like the royal family and cancel culture.
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This is not socialism. This is not the federal government taking control of the commanding heights of the economy. This is not a bunch of programs to restrain corporate power. Americans’ trust in government is still low. This is the Transfer State: government redistributing massive amounts of money by cutting checks to people, and having faith that they spend it in the right ways.
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But income inequality, widespread child poverty and economic precarity are the problems of our time. It’s worth taking a risk to tackle all this. At first Biden seemed like the third chapter of the Clinton/Obama center-left era. But this is something new.
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The law stretches far beyond Covid-19 relief. There’s a billion for national service programs. Black farmers will receive over $4 billion in what looks like a step toward reparations. There’s a huge expansion of health insurance subsidies. Many of these changes, like the child tax credit, may well become permanent.
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I’m worried about a world in which we spend borrowed money with abandon.
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As Michael Hendrix of the Manhattan Institute notes, America spent $4.8 trillion in today’s dollars fighting World War II. Over the past year, America has spent over $5.5 trillion fighting the pandemic.
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There was a premise through American history that if you worked hard you would earn economic security. That’s not as true for millennials and Gen-Z, or many other people across America.
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The role of government is being redefined. There is now an assumption that government should step in to reduce economic insecurity and inequality.
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The Covid-19 relief law that was just enacted is one of the most important pieces of legislation of our lifetimes. As Eric Levitz writes in New York magazine, the poorest fifth of households will see their income rise by 20 percent; a family of four with one working and one unemployed parent will receive $12,460 in benefits. Child poverty will be cut in half.
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This has been one of the most quietly consequential weeks in recent American politics.
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There’s a billion for national service programs. Black farmers will receive over $4 billion in what looks like a step toward reparations.
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There’s a huge expansion of health insurance subsidies. Many of these changes, like the child tax credit, may well become permanent.
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As Michael Hendrix of the Manhattan Institute notes, America spent $4.8 trillion in today’s dollars fighting World War II. Over the past year, America has spent over $5.5 trillion fighting the pandemic.
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the legislation is widely popular. Three-quarters of Americans support the law, including 60 percent of Republicans,
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Somehow low-key Joe Biden gets yawns when he promotes progressive policies that would generate howls if promoted by a President Sanders or a President Warren.
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This moment is like 1981, the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, except in reverse. It’s not just that government is heading in a new direction, it’s that the whole paradigm of the role of government in American life is shifting
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Biden is not causing these tectonic plates to shift, but he is riding them
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Reaganism was the right response to the stagflation of the 1970s, but Bidenism is a sensible response to a very different set of economic problems.
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These realities have created a different emotional climate that the pandemic has magnified — a climate of insecurity and precarity. These realities have also produced an intellectual revolution.
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It was assumed, even only a decade ago, that the Fed could not just print money with abandon. It was assumed that the government could not wrack up huge debt without spurring inflation and crippling debt payment costs. Both of these concerns have been thrown out the window by large numbers of thinkers
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We are now experiencing monetary and fiscal policies that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. This is like the moment when the G.O.P. abandoned fiscal conservatism for the go-go excitement of supply-side economics
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The role of government is being redefined. There is now an assumption that government should step in to reduce economic insecurity and inequality.
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This is the Transfer State: government redistributing massive amounts of money by cutting checks to people, and having faith that they spend it in the right ways.
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With the wind at their backs, Democrats are concluding that Biden’s decision to eschew bipartisanship to pass a relief package is better than Barack Obama’s attempts to attract it
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Republicans have learned that in this new era it’s foolish to fight Democrats on redistribution policy, but they can win elections by fighting culture wars.
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But income inequality, widespread child poverty and economic precarity are the problems of our time
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It’s worth taking a risk to tackle all this.
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At first Biden seemed like the third chapter of the Clinton/Obama center-left era. But this is something new.
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Opinion | MAGA Wants Transgression. Mark Robinson Is the Result. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mark-robinson-maga-trump.html

got corruption culture crisis trump politics us eccentric conspiracy theory

shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 24 - No Cached

Last month, I wrote a column endorsing Kamala Harris for the presidency, in large part because I believe that a Harris victory gives Republicans “a chance to build something decent” from the ruins of a Trump defeat.
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I’m hardening my view. Trump loses now or the Republicans are lost for a generation. Maybe more.
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The reason is plain: The yearslong elevation of figures like Mark Robinson and the many other outrageous MAGA personalities, along with the devolution of people in MAGA’s inner orbit — JD Vance, Elon Musk, Lindsey Graham and so very many others — has established beyond doubt that Trump has changed the Republican Party and Republican Christians far more than they have changed him.
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In nine years, countless Republican primary voters have moved from voting for Trump in spite of his transgressions to rejecting anyone who doesn’t transgress.
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If you’re not transgressive, you’re suspicious. Decency is countercultural in the Republican Party. It’s seen as a rebuke of Trump.
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While many decent people remain — and represent the hope for future reform — Trump’s Republican Party has become a magnet for eccentrics and conspiracy theorists of all stripes
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Trump has set the course of the Republican Party’s cultural river for more than nine years. Fewer and fewer resisters remain, and they’re growing increasingly exhausted and besieged
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Indeed, Trump in his diabolical shrewdness knows how to build and maintain his own base
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He’s shed the Republican Party’s traditional commitment to life. He’ll sprint away from any policy or principle that he believes might cost him power. At the same time, he watches his crowd roar when he demonizes immigrants (MAGA’s true north star) and he sees “red-pilled” young men rally to his side when he punches hard and never backs down.
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Leaders don’t simply enact policies; they dictate the cultures of the institutions they lead
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I’ve compared the cultural power of a leader to setting the course of a river. Defying or contradicting the leader’s ethos is like swimming against the current — yes, you can do that for a time, but eventually you get exhausted and either have to swim to the bank and leave, or you’re swept downstream, just like everyone else.
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the “crank realignment.”
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The mere suggestion that Republican primary voters can and should do better is greeted by scorn and contempt.
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Both parties have always been vulnerable to nominating or electing the occasional crank, but Donald Trump’s ascendance meant that a crank led the party, and the best way to join with him is to imitate him.
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That’s how leaders change institutions. They make them into images of themselves.
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In this case, Trump has done so explicitly. Almost all the worst figures in the Republican Party have ridden Trump endorsements to the top of their local pyramids. Robinson received Trump’s endorsement and swamped his primary opposition. Trump even called him “Martin Luther King on steroids.”
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It’s possible that the Republican Party is simply too far gone, at least for now. A primary electorate that chooses Robinson over more reasonable candidates by 45 points — and a party that blames “the left” for revealing that he’s even worse than anyone knew — does not seem ready to change.
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Where Does This Leave Democrats? Ezra Klein - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ra-klein-podcast-election.html

shared by Javier E on 11 Nov 24 - No Cached

That is roughly what happened Tuesday night. Donald Trump’s victory was not one of the grand landslides of American political history. As I write this, estimates suggest that he is on track for a 1.5-percentage-point margin in the popular vote. If that holds — and it may change as California is counted — it is smaller than Barack Obama’s win in 2008 or 2012, Bush’s in 2004 and Bill Clinton’s in 1992 or 1996. It may prove smaller than Hillary Clinton’s margin in 2016.
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I find myself thinking about the 2004 election. In my lifetime, until today, that was the most total rejection liberals experienced. In 2000, George W. Bush was this accidental president. He’d lost the popular vote. He’d won the Electoral College after winning Florida by a few hundred votes. But by 2004, the lies and the failures and travesties of his administration were clear. The disaster of the Iraq war was clear. And the result was that Bush went from accidental president to unquestioned victor. He won the popular vote cleanly.
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by 2004, Americans knew who Bush was and what he had done. They chose him anyway.
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But it is a huge gain compared with 2020, when Trump lost the popular vote by nearly five points.
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it matters where the mood of America is moving, and the popular vote tells us more about that than the few hundred thousand voters who swing Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
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So what’s behind Trump’s gain? One theory is that this is the postpandemic, postinflation, anti-incumbent backlash. We’ve seen it in country after country. Whoever was in power in 2021 and 2022 is getting annihilated in elections.
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As Matthew Yglesias wrote, if you look at this internationally, the interesting question might be why Trump didn’t win in a landslide. If Nikki Haley had been running, she probably would have.
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But Trump didn’t just win this election. Democrats lost it. President Biden, at 81 years old and hovering beneath 40 percent favorability in most polls, should never have run for re-election. And for months and months and months, the leaders of the Democratic Party, with very few exceptions — shout-out to Dean Phillips — refused to say that.
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It ignored its own voters, to say nothing of the voters it was going to need to win in 2024.
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I was one of the people arguing, beginning back in February, for some kind of competitive process: a mini-primary leading to an open convention.
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The hour was late. The party was scared. It had wasted so much time. And in wasting that time, it had refused to face up to a core problem: Biden wasn’t just too old. Voters were unhappy with his administration, with the wars abroad and the prices at home and the absence of leadership that made them confident that the people in charge knew what they were doing.
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The line in the Democratic Party was and is that Biden’s record ranks him as perhaps the greatest president since Franklin D. Roosevelt
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But Americans did not and do not believe that — and Democrats never reckoned with that fact or came up with an answer to it. That, more than any other reason, is why Kamala Harris lost.
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Harris was dealt a bad hand. She had no time to set up her own campaign. No time to work out its themes or policies or personnel. And she was running, inevitably, as the champion of an administration people were angry at. She could not separate herself from Biden without being accused of disloyalty.
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I think she ran a strong campaign, given how little time and how little room she had to build it.
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she faced a very difficult problem: A popular incumbent can run on her record. A challenger can promise change. Harris could do neither.
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She ultimately ran as the guardian of the institutions. A candidate with Liz Cheney on one side and Liz Warren on the other. But she took for granted the worth and health of those institutions. Was the endorsement of the Cheneys — and the enthusiasm with which it was embraced — a sign of the Democrats’ big tent or a sign of its internal confusion?
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And Harris was burdened by all that had come before her. The Democratic Party had spent years kicking people out of its tent.
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If you wanted to beat Trump, you wanted to win over people like Rogan.Liberals got so angry at me for that, I was briefly a trending topic. Rogan was a transphobe, an Islamophobe, a sexist, a racist, the kind of person you wanted to marginalize, not chat with.
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liberals don’t get to choose who is marginalized. Democrats should have been going on “Rogan” regularly. They should have been prioritizing it
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On YouTube alone, Rogan’s interview with Trump was viewed some 46 million times. Democrats are just going to abandon that? In an election where they think that if the other side wins, it means fascism?
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now we’re here. Trump got the win in 2024 he could see only glimmers of in 2020.
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Emotionally, there are two ways Democrats can respond: contempt or curiosity. I’ve seen plenty of contempt already
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There’ll be a desire to retreat, to hunker down, to draw the boundaries of who is decent and who is deplorable ever more clearly.
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Trump seems to have made huge gains among voters making less than $50,000 a year. The Democratic Party is losing voters who lie at the core of its conception of itself.
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Democrats have to go places they have not been going and take seriously opinions they have not been taking seriously
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When voters are this unhappy with the way you’ve wielded power, you have to want to know why. That work has begun in the Democratic Party — you saw it in the Biden administration’s eventual pivot to border enforcement — but it was clearly too little and too late.
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But Bush’s win in 2004 was not the beginning of a Republican realignment. It was the end of the Republican Party as we knew it.
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To win again, they would need to become more like what had defeated them.
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There’s another part of the 2004 comparison that I’ve been thinking about. Immediately after that election, Democrats became obsessed with winning back the heartland
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ecause what liberals believed about Bush was true. His administration was a disaster, and within a few years, nearly the whole country would agree
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the Bush administration’s overreaches, failures and scandals left the reputation of G.O.P. elites so absolutely smashed that the stage was set for Trump’s eventual takeover of the party.
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Trump is surrounded now by people who are more relentlessly focused on carrying out his will and their own. Republicans have the Senate and the Supreme Court and may well win the House.
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Maybe JD Vance and Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. bring judiciousness. I think it is as or more likely that they egg Trump into ideological overreach. And my God, the corruption we are about to see. So is this the beginning of the Trump realignment, or will this end with Trump’s name and reputation as tattered as that of the Bush dynasty he destroyed?
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But Democrats need to admit that they are at the end of their own cycle of politics. The Obama coalition is over. It is defeated and exhausted. What comes next needs to be new. That means going to new places and being open to new voices. A politics right for the next era will not be a politics designed to win the last election
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Finding what is next, amid the pain of what is about to come, is going to require a lot of conflict and a lot of curiosity.
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Opinion | Let's Not Lose Sight of Who Trump Is - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-second-term-agenda.html

trump victory 2024 analysis election politics US GOP

shared by Javier E on 09 Nov 24 - No Cached

The outcome of the election, it almost goes without saying, puts America on a right-wing populist path, inching ever closer toward a form of autocratic rule rarely, if ever, seen in the nation’s history.
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Trump’s campaign was openly racist, xenophobic and authoritarian and his supporters appear to be willing to jettison democracy in support of an autocratic demagogue who promises to “fix everything” while pandering to their angers, resentments and prejudices.
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Fukuyama went on to say:The move of the working class to the Republicans is now much more entrenched. For Blacks and Hispanics voting for Trump, class was much more important than identity, and Democrats failed to understand that. I really think that the importance of the transgender issue was underappreciated by the Democrats. They simply thought it was the latest civil rights issue when the actual policy was really crazy and offensive to working class voters.
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The MAGA/Republican coalition is clearly a viable competitor. Indeed, the coalition just won the White House — and the Senate. The coalition has proved its ability to retain strong support with the working-class, rural, non-college-educated base, still attract most of the rest of the older Republican electorate, and has demonstrated the capacity to grow into new areas such as Latino and Black men.
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Early predictions of inevitable demographic shifts toward the Democrats missed how identity is complex, and how it can change. In our era of intense polarization, coalitions don’t have to be overwhelming. They just need to be big enough to push a party over in the swing states.
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The first time a person is elected, for example, Reagan in 1980, we vote based on promise, aspiration and potential. The re-election campaign, which this is more comparable to, for Trump, is about legitimation. Voters know what they are getting and say that is who they want in office.
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Trump, Zelizer pointed out, “has been extraordinarily transparent about his hostility toward core democratic principles — the peaceful transition of power, confidence in the election system, limitations on presidential power and more.”
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“When you win an election this broadly,” Francis Fukuyama, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, argued in an email, “you’re entitled to move ahead with your agenda. The only limitations will be capacity (hard to deport 11 million people) and the courts which haven’t been completely made subservient.”
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How big a role did gender play in Harris’s defeat?“Many men and non-college-educated women,” Cain argued, “still equate women with weakness and blustery masculinity with strength.”
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conservative power is consolidated in a way that makes the Biden administration look like the fluke, the last gasp of a dying order.
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The MAGA coalition, in contrast,doesn’t feel like the last stand of a dying electorate at all since Trump actually has managed to diversify the Republican electorate in a broad way. And doesn’t seem like the tyranny of a minority, because — though tyranny it may turn into — it would be the tyranny of the majority, since it looks like he’s clearly on track to win the popular vote.
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The primary threat Trump poses, Fukuyama argued,is to the rule of law. He’s been very clear in the last few months and weeks that he’s really out for revenge. He wants to take revenge on all the people that he believes have been prosecuting him and or persecuting him. And I think that this is where Schedule F (Trump’s proposal to politicize the top ranks of the civil service) really matters. I think he’s going to put people in key positions in the Justice Department that will enable them to open up investigations.
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Fukuyama expects Viktor Orban of Hungary to provide Trump a governing model with “this kind of steady, slow erosion of one check and balance against executive power after another.”
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Donald Trump’s theory of the case was broadly correct. He and his campaign managers believed that it was possible to build on Republicans’ growing strength among white working-class voters to create a multiethnic working-class coalition. He was right: He made strides among Latinos and African Americans, especially men. He increased his share of the Black male vote from 12 percent to 20 percent and carried Hispanic men by nine points, 54 percent to 45 percent.
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The Trump campaign, Galston went on to say,decided that Harris’s stance on transgender issues was the Willie Horton of 2024 and invested heavily in negative advertising that dominated the airwaves. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this campaign helped weaken Harris’s effort to portray herself as a common-sense center-left candidate rather than an emissary from San Francisco.
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Once in power with a supine Republican-controlled Congress and judiciary, Trump will govern despotically as a populist based on his uninformed and increasingly delusional understanding of the nation and its challenges, wreaking havoc on the American political economy and the global political order.
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The scale of Trump’s electoral success and the red shift in Congress makes it clear that Americans have rejected the policies and priorities of the Democratic Party. Many voters cast their ballots based on their perceptions of the economy. Although Harris attempted to highlight improvements in macroeconomic indicators, voters struggling with rising costs for essentials like milk, bread, and gas felt little connection between their financial troubles and abstract measures like G.D.P. growth.
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According to Westwood, “What seems to unify the majority of voters is dissatisfaction with the vision of America articulated by Harris and the Democratic Party.”
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The election outcome suggests that voters did not place much weight on the fear that Trump would undermine a “vision of America,” despite his history of doing just that.
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The election results are in line with work suggesting that people care more about policy outcomes than democracy. Research shows that when people are asked whether they want a candidate that supports their preferred policy but subverts democracy versus a candidate that doesn’t support their preferred policy but is more democratic, they tend to choose the former. Policy trumps democracy.
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Young men of lesser education are hit twice, both in marriage and in labor markets. It is not surprising that they are most likely to voice their grievances in expressions of political dissatisfaction with the status quo. Add onto this that almost without exception around the Western Hemisphere women now constitute the majority of college students and graduates and the full picture of change comes into view.
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While most of the experts I contacted view the 2024 election as a major, and perhaps realigning, development in American politics, some were more cautious in their views.
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my reading of 2024 is that this was a pedestrian “time for a change” election.
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Polling, she added,had long shown that voters were very sour on the direction of the country, the high cost of living after the Covid shocks, and the scale of undocumented immigration. Polls were clear that Trump was more trusted on all those issues. Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6, 2021, probably was troubling to at least some of those who voted for him, as was his divisive rhetoric. But in a two-party system, voters’ choices were severely limited. They could either support Kamala Harris, the sitting vice president of an administration they blamed for the state of the country, or former President Trump, the only alternative on offer.
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much of that expansion can be understood as swing voters moving against an unpopular administration. Harris underperformed Biden with almost all demographic groups. I wouldn’t see the voters who joined the Trump column this year as permanent parts of the Trump coalition. We need to see this expanded coalition hold together for additional cycles before we can draw firm conclusions about change in the G.O.P. generally.
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Americans, in poll after poll, told us how this result should be interpreted — as a reaction to inflation and personal economic unease among many voters. Experts may understand that inflation was an inevitable outcome of successful efforts to save the economy during a global pandemic, that it is now largely under control in the United States, and that we fared better than most peer nations. But, average Americans have been feeling it in their pocketbooks for the last few years. It is incredibly difficult for the incumbent party to win when voters feel their spending power has decreased.
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Donald Trump’s recasting of the Republican Party achieved a decisive victory over the combined forces of moderate center-left and radical left-libertarian political currents uneasily cohabiting under the umbrella of the Democratic Party. Historians may place the 2024 election, or the 2016-24 sequence, in significance for the United States on a par with the elections of 1860, 1876, 1896 and 1932.
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The New Deal party system that was in full force until 1964 has been fully replaced by a new alignment. 2024 ratifies a lasting realignment in the American party system.
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Driving the transformation of politics here and abroad, in Kitschelt’s view, are “changing ‘labor markets’ and changing ‘marriage/family markets.’”
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These changes, according to Kitschelt,have produced new “winners” and “losers.” Changing labor markets have eroded the earnings potential of less educated people, and particularly those in occupations that were in demand in manufacturing. Changing marriage markets have reduced the bargaining power of men to dominate gender relations and the choice of offspring.
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The problem now facing Democrats, Lelkes noted, is that they “will have to grapple with the fact that they are seen as the cultural elite and this is off-putting to a majority of the country, who do not see their values represented by highly educated city dwellers.”
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The moderate and progressive left in the United States thought it could count on disadvantaged minorities as fixed components of a left-wing “rainbow coalition.” But it now turns out in the United States — and elsewhere — that these ethnic groups are internally divided by the same kinds of knowledge-society-induced divisions based on education, occupation and gender that run through the ethnic majority population
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And right-wing populist authoritarians are increasingly skilled to sense these divisions and make their appeals resonate among the aggrieved elements of these minorities, especially younger people without college education, particularly young men.
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The rise of Trumpism in the United States — and right-wing populist authoritarianism around the world — throws down the gauntlet to the remaining liberal and progressive forces to come up with new ideas for institutional innovation and policy reform that include those who have hitherto been losers of multiple decades of social change. The 2024 U.S. election is a signal that the political projects of the existing left have failed.
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The pool of new “losers” is not represented by the Democratic Party and was not by the old Republican Party. A political entrepreneur — Donald Trump — has managed to activate them to drive his ascent. Aggrieved people look for an outlet and recently found one in Donald Trump, many of them never previously Republicans, but now Trumpists.
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Kitschelt’s conclusion is both dark and bleak, suggesting that if Trump’s policies fail to produce a boom economy, his inclination toward authoritarianism will intensify as he tries to hold power in the face of growing public opposition:
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When backed into a corner by policy failure, the greatest danger, then, becomes Donald Trump’s and his strategists’ inclination to suffocate opposition.
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It is at this moment of policy failure, Kitschelt wrote, thatThe hour of political authoritarianism arrives, when the new wagers to create economic affluence among the less well-off and to resurrect the old kinship relations of industrial society turn sour and generate disenchantment among Trump’s own following.
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Trump then may well want to make sure that his disenchanted supporters — as well as those who always opposed Trumpism — will not get another chance to express their opinions.
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If the scenario Kitschelt depicts comes to pass, American voters will finally get to see the real Donald Trump — when it may be too late to do anything about it.
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How to avert America's Brexit - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-9d2f-b1a3564181a1_story.html

business fairness politics crisis social working class government Policy

shared by Javier E on 17 Aug 16 - No Cached

there is a meaningful chance that 2016 could begin a retreat of the United States from the mix of economic policies and the global engagement that U.S. businesses have regarded for decades as central to their success — unless business leaders can move decisively to redefine their goals as harmonious with those of working- and middle-class families.
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The key question is how we rise up in more muscular defense of the interests of U.S. workers and industries without doing permanent damage to our economy. We must also demonstrate that government can function and that business can be a constructive partner to it.
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every generation, we seem to witness an election that startles us, triggering tectonic shocks that change our politics and policies for decades to come. This could be one of those elections. Very much like the realignment revealed by the vote in Britain to leave the European Union, U.S. politics might be transforming into a debate less between right and left and more between those voters who are advantaged by globalization and those who are not.
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For decades, the United States has led the way as the world’s markets for manufacturing, labor and capital have become increasingly interconnected and interdependent. This has benefited poorer nations around the world — most prominently China — as well as large multinational corporations with the reach and balance sheets to compete globally. It has also contributed to a surge in the incomes of well-educated professionals with globally competitive skills.
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our leaders in business and government have offered up a consensus view that chief among the gains from open trade is a small financial benefit — reflected mostly in lower prices for a host of imported goods — spread in a thin layer over an enormous number of people, which in the aggregate offsets the narrowly focused devastation wreaked on discrete industries, workers and communities.
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today’s practical lesson is much simpler: The deal on offer to the U.S. working and middle classes from globalization is in tatters. We have ignored at our peril the dislocations and the uneven distribution of the benefits.
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We need a new agenda promising fairness and growth in equal measure.
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The business community’s agenda for accelerating economic growth is straightforward. It includes making our corporate tax system simpler and more globally competitive; subjecting regulations to rigorous cost-benefit criteria; reforming our immigration laws to admit more highly educated and skilled workers, particularly in the technology and engineering fields; and adopting more free-trade agreements, most notably the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, to stimulate global flows of goods and services. Corporate leaders (and many economists) are convinced that this is the clear path to accelerated growth and job formation.
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in order to create the social circumstances necessary to make this commercial agenda at all politically feasible, the business community must find a way to support — and especially be willing to pay for — an array of policies designed to foster economic fairness that are traditionally opposed by the business lobby.
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This list is long but would include increasing the minimum wage, expanding the earned-income tax credit and reforming unemployment programs; investing in early-childhood education, vocational training, prison-to-work assistance, apprenticeships and college affordability; financing a large-scale infrastructure building program; implementing robust transition assistance for workers dislocated by foreign competition and technological change; and ensuring health-care and retirement income for aging citizens in need.
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The cost of all of this would be, of course, high. But the price of inaction is certainly far more dear. One of the best ways to finance it all might be a national sales levy along the lines of a progressive value-added tax
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To restore credibility to the business community’s agenda, we must work to set in motion the policies necessary to stimulate growing incomes and rising equality. In actuality, growth and fairness agendas are compatible and mutually reinforcing because a stronger middle class — and healthier consumer — would be as good for business as it is for society.
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How Trump got his party to love Russia - The Washington Post - 0 views

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trump russia foreign policy subversion conservative anti-Communist

shared by Javier E on 08 Jan 17 - No Cached

In July 2014, four months after Putin annexed Crimea, only 10 percent of Republicans held a favorable opinion of Russia’s president, according to an Economist/YouGov poll. Today, that figure is 37 percent.
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A recent poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that, while 65 percent of Americans support a congressional inquiry into Russian election interference, a narrow majority (51 percent ) of Republicans oppose it.
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82 percent of Hillary Clinton voters want to maintain sanctions imposed on Moscow in response to its meddling, while only 16 percent of Trump voters do.
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...6 more annotations...
Now that Russia has dropped its official atheism and anti-capitalism, claiming to be the protector of traditional values and Christendom, a growing number of American conservatives are receptive to Trump’s Russian rapprochement.
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Though the opportunists outnumber the ideologues, it’s the true believers who could pose the greatest damage to U.S. foreign policy over the long term. Their proposed strategic realignment with Moscow, predicated upon shared opposition to vaguely defined “Islamic terrorism,” is seductive but wrong: Far from being a potential partner in the fight against Islamic terrorism, Russia does much to stoke it.
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last summer, while rationalizing Trump’s unprecedented vow not to defend NATO allies unless they “pay us,” Gingrich said of tiny, vulnerable Estonia (one of the few NATO members to meet the alliance’s recommended defense budget threshold) that he was “not sure I would risk a nuclear war over some place which is the suburbs of St. Petersburg.
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The need to defend Trump’s victory at any cost has induced conservatives to praise a virulently anti-American anarchist, who is probably in cahoots with Russian intelligence, and whose head they once called for.
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Pro-Russian converts on the American right appear to take two forms. The opportunists simply want power and are willing to sacrifice principles in pursuit of it. The ideologues, meanwhile, see Russia as nothing worse than an occasional nuisance, if not a potential ally in the fight against Islamic extremism.
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In an interview recorded more than 30 years ago, Russian defector Yuri Bezmenov revealed the KGB’s counterintuitive approach to recruiting. “This was my instruction: Try to get into large-circulation, established conservative media. Reach . . . cynical, egocentric people who can look into your eyes with angelic expression and tell you a lie. These are the most recruit-able people, people who lack moral principles, who are either too greedy or suffer from self-importance.” Say this for Bezmenov: He knew his mark.
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What sort of Toryism will emerge from this fractious upheaval? | Eliza Filby | Opinion ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ious-upheaval-thatcherism-dead

conservatives UK brexit crisis politics History

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 16 - No Cached

. A new Conservative government will soon emerge, one that has a parliamentary majority and will be faced with a Labour party that is either in the process of disintegrating or reeling from the shockwaves of internal turmoil
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The Conservative government will charge forward with reform concurrent with the European negotiations so as to avoid the next election being simply a referendum on the Brexit settlement.
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The key question is whether anything has happened in the last seven days to rupture the Osborne-Cameron consensus? Is there still a one-nation will existing within the party?
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...15 more annotations...
Under David Cameron, the Tories came to rediscover what Labour seems to have forgotten, namely that elections are fought and won on the centre ground. It is possible to nudge the dial a little, but victory can only be achieved by straddling the centre while appeasing your core.
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this is a lesson that is deep rooted within the party. One of Cameron’s greatest strengths was his longevity; as leader for over a decade, he was able to make significant progress in reshaping the parliamentary party in his own image
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One of the outcomes of the referendum has been to prompt a new realignment within the party. The old Thatcherite v one-nation split, which admittedly has long been on the wane, has now firmly recrystallised around the new labels of Remainer and Leaver. So the present leadership contest is essentially a battle between one-nation Conservatives with only Liam Fox, the stand-alone candidate from the old school.
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It will be one-nation Tories who will be in charge of making Brexit a reality.
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Brexit can only be part of the solution. An agenda of social reform, which addresses some of the frustrations and divisions that the vote unmasked, is politically necessar
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the referendum debate has provided the rationale and opportunity (given Labour’s dire state) for Cameron Conservatism to be fully realised.
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First, it requires a more robust one-nation vision. One that moves away from offering cosy reassurances to metropolitan liberals that the Conservatives are no longer the “nasty party” (which was essentially what legalising gay marriage did) to one that addresses the concerns of those in Britain’s deindustralised heartlands
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, a one-nation Conservative agenda cannot be seen to enact a divide, as much of Thatcher’s social reform did, between the deserving and undeserving poor or, worse, heed the Ukip agenda, creating a division between immigrants and the indigenous population.
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When Conservatives such as Gove talk about social reform, they tend to centre on the individual, policies that help people realise their potential through opportunity. But surely, if the referendum has revealed anything, political capital needs to be realised at a community rather than individual level.
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Second, the fate of whoever wins the leadership will depend almost entirely on how he or she negotiates Brexit and specifically, what is crucially the central plank of the deal – the balancing of freedom of movement with the freedom to trade. This will not be easy
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If people start feeling that Brexit has not worked for them and do not soon see increases in wages, improved access to social services and a restriction on immigration then the political backlash will begin in earnest
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If the public gets any whiff of a whitewash or if the government is seen to have sold Britain short in any way, the narrative of the “Great Betrayal” will be scripted long before the election.
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Third, the fortunes of one-nation Conservatism will depend largely on the fortunes of the Labour party.
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if under new leadership, Labour was somehow able to resuscitate itself and make a direct charge for the centre ground, a credible revival is still possible.
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Cameron inadvertently has achieved his chief goal: to stop the Tories banging on about Europe.
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Republicans are surrendering to Donald Trump - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...5-bc08-3e03a5b41910_story.html

gop politics history coalition transformative election 1964

shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 16 - No Cached

conservatives today are in something of the same position that Republican moderates were in 1964, as Barry Goldwater steamed toward the nomination. It is difficult to understand today how dramatic a break this was for the Republicans
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the party had prided itself on its progressive stand on race from Abraham Lincoln onward. Goldwater, on the other hand, opposed the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to integrate schools in Brown v. Board of Education and the 1964 Civil Rights act. A hundred years of Republican work on these issues would be thrown away, the moderates felt, were they to nominate Goldwater.
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Trump marks, in many ways, an even larger break from the past than Goldwater. The modern Republican Party has been devoted to free markets and free trade, social conservatism, an expansionist foreign policy and fiscal discipline, especially on entitlements. Remember that the speech that launched Ronald Reagan’s career was an attack on Medicare. On every one of these issues, Trump either openly disagrees or — as with abortion — has a past track record of disagreement.
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...2 more annotations...
Trump’s nomination would transform the party into a blue-collar, populist, nationalist movement with a racial element — much like many others in the Western world. This would be a very different party from Reagan’s or Ryan’s.
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it looks like 1964, also an election that realigned politics, shifting Southern whites to the Republican Party ever since. Then , too, there was enormous energy, new voters and a candidate who thrilled his supporters. Then, too, the establishment could not muster the courage and unity to oppose the front-runner, scared to push back against the energy and devotion of the new populist forces. So instead the party went to the polls in November divided — and lost 44 states.
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Neoconservatives Begin the Long March Back by Martin Longman | Political Animal | The W... - 0 views

www.washingtonmonthly.com/...atives_begin_the_lon059804.php

neoconservatism demagogue 2016 politics crisis

shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 16 - No Cached

In crafting an open letter in opposition to Trump’s candidacy, they are demonstrating that they’re ready to bolt the Republican Party. And it’s not just because they dislike Trump’s very inconsistent isolationism. They don’t like his illiberal attitudes about race, religion, a free press and human rights. They don’t like his cuddly attitude toward Vladimir Putin or his insults towards Mexico’s government, and they are appalled by Trump’s inability to understand that anti-Islamism makes it impossible to have any allies at all in the Middle East. They also just have a visceral distaste for his anti-intellectualism.
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Their itemized objections to Trump are things that most liberals agree with or mostly agree with.
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I’ve looked for signs of realignment. These are things I’d expect to see if there is going to be a landslide election. One of the things I thought I might see is a mass defection of neoconservatives.
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, the reasons are quite a bit deeper than they would have been with Rand Paul. With him, it would have been almost exclusively about foreign policy. With Trump, it’s about much more than that. It’s about basically every value they hold dear.
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Trump's America will be on vivid display at annual conservative gathering - The Washing... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-9845-576c69081518_story.html

trump conservative conference

shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 17 - No Cached

The conservative movement in America now belongs to President Trump.
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Thousands of activists will arrive in Washington this week for an annual gathering that will vividly display how Trump has pushed the Republican Party and the conservative movement toward an “America first” nationalism that has long existed on the fringes.
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Matt Schlapp, the president of the American Conservative Union, which organizes CPAC, said the gathering this year will be an acknowledgment of the “realignment going on politically in the country” and of the rising import of “American sovereignty” to conservatives nationally.
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“There used to be Pat Buchanan’s people, the populist revolt-types and the establishment of the anti-establishment, who’d get a third of the vote in the primaries and we’d beat them back,” said Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican consultant who led a super PAC that supported former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign. “Now they’ve hijacked the Republican Party.”
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And Breitbart, which has been a sponsor of CPAC for years, has more visibility than ever. As Bannon has pointed out to associates, a site that once organized panels titled “The Uninvited” for guests too controversial for CPAC is now shaping the movement’s agenda.
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Meanwhile, the libertarian flavor of the conference during the Obama years has faded. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who won the conference’s presidential straw poll three years running, is not coming to CPAC.
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Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump ally who has given a series of speeches recently on “Trumpism,” said he is “impressed that CPAC has very intelligently anticipated the direction that Trump is going to take the country and understood that he’ll be the dominant voice on the right for the foreseeable future.”
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Sam Nunberg, a former Trump adviser who worked on the businessman’s CPAC arrangements in the years before the 2016 campaign, said the conferences were “pivotal” for Trump because they gave him a tangible sense of how his celebrity could be translated to a career in conservative Republican politics.
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“It’s definitely a show,” said Jimmy LaSalvia, a co-founder of GOProud who left the Republican Party in 2015. “It’s a show that is now designed to perpetuate a fight. Donald Trump lives for the fight. He feeds off the fighting. So does, frankly, the Breitbart organization. It’s all about us versus them. It’s not about ideas.”
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Russia Raises Some Salaries and Pensions for Crimeans - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ses-pensions-for-crimeans.html

russia salaries pensions ukraine

shared by julia rhodes on 01 Apr 14 - No Cached

Moving quickly to envelop Crimea in the Russian bureaucracy and economy, the Kremlin said Monday that it had nearly doubled pensions paid to retirees on the peninsula, raising them to the average levels paid in Russia.
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President Vladimir V. Putin signed a decree raising pensions and another increasing salaries for public sector workers like teachers and doctors, according to a statement posted on the Kremlin’s website. Officials also announced a number of new investment plans and tax breaks for Crimea, which Russia seized from Ukraine two weeks ago after a rushed vote in the Crimean Legislature. The Crimeans even realigned the clock, moving theirs ahead two hours, to be identical with Moscow’s time zone.
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the German government released a statement saying Mr. Putin told Chancellor Angela Merkel in a telephone call that he had ordered a partial withdrawal of Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s eastern border, a source of great tension with Western governments in recent weeks.
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The German statement characterized the troop movement as described by Mr. Putin as “the partial withdrawal of Russian troops ordered from the eastern border of Ukraine.”
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The Kremlin’s statement describing the same telephone conversation made no mention of any troop withdrawals. It said only that the leaders “discussed various aspects of the situation in Ukraine, including the possibility for international involvement in restoring stability” and that the pair had also talked about constitutional overhaul in Ukraine and another troubled region of Eastern Europe, the separatist Transnistria region of Moldova.
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Most New York Graduates Are Ill Prepared, Data Show - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...08regents.html

US education learning schools testing New York

shared by Javier E on 09 Feb 11 - No Cached

new statistics, part of a push to realign state standards with college performance, show that only 23 percent of students in New York City graduated ready for college or careers in 2009, not counting special-education students. That is well under half the current graduation rate of 64 percent, a number often promoted by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg as evidence that his education policies are working.
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In Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Yonkers, less than 17 percent of students met the proposed standards, including just 5 percent in Rochester.
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State and city education officials have known for years that graduating from a public high school does not indicate that a student is ready for college, and have been slowly moving to raise standards. But the political will to acknowledge openly the chasm between graduation requirements and college or job needs is new,
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In the wealthier districts across the state, the news is better: 72 percent of students in “low need” districts are graduating ready for college or careers. But even that is well under the 95 percent of students in those districts who are now graduating.
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A common reaction, Dr. Tisch said, is shock and hesitancy. There are fears of plummeting real estate values, as well as disagreement, particularly in rural areas, with the idea that all students need to be prepared for college.
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A Nuclear Deal With Iran Isn't Just About Bombs - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ran-isnt-just-about-bombs.html

deal iran US politics

shared by jlessner on 02 Apr 15 - No Cached

As the Iranian nuclear talks creep on into double overtime, let’s remember that this isn’t just about centrifuges but also about creating some chance over time of realigning the Middle East and bringing Iran out of the cold.
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“A better deal would significantly roll back Iran’s nuclear infrastructure,” noted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. “A better deal would link the eventual lifting of the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program to a change in Iran’s behavior.”
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Netanyahu also suggests that a deal would give “Iran’s murderous regime a clear path to the bomb.” That’s a fallacy.
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...5 more annotations...
Iran is already on a path to nuclear capability. Netanyahu should know, because he’s been pointing that out for more than two decades. B
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■ We can try to obtain a deal to block all avenues to a bomb, uranium, plutonium and purchase of a weapon. This would allow Iran to remain on the nuclear path but would essentially freeze its progress — if it doesn’t cheat. To prevent cheating, we need the toughest inspections regime in history.
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We can continue the sanctions, cyberwarfare and sabotage to slow Iran’s progress. This has worked better than expected, but it’s not clear that we have a new Stuxnet worm to release. And, partly because of congressional meddling, international support for sanctions may unravel.
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We can launch military strikes on Natanz, Isfahan, Arak, Fordow and, possibly, Tehran. This would be a major operation lasting weeks. Strikes would take place in the daytime to maximize the number of nuclear scientists killed. All this would probably delay a weapon by one to three years — but it could send oil prices soaring, lead to retaliatory strikes and provoke a nationalistic backlash in support of the government.
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Imagine if we had launched a military strike against Chinese nuclear sites in the 1960s. In that case, Beijing might still be ruled by Maoists.
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The Republican Party's 50-State Solution - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-partys-50-state-solution.html

gop conservatism organization success politics

shared by Javier E on 13 Jan 16 - No Cached

The sustained determination on the part of the conservative movement has paid off in an unprecedented realignment of power in state governments.Seven years ago, Democrats had a commanding lead in state legislatures, controlling both legislative chambers in 27 states, nearly double the 14 controlled by Republicans. They held 4082 state senate and house seats, compared to the Republicans’ 3223.Sweeping Republican victories at the state level in 2010 and 2014 transformed the political landscape
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By 2015, there were Republican majorities in 70 percent — 68 of 98 — of the nation’s partisan state houses and senates, the highest number in the party’s history. (Nebraska isn’t counted in because it has a non-partisan, unicameral legislature.) Republicans controlled the legislature and governorship in 23 states, more than triple the seven under full Democratic control.
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“How the Right Trounced Liberals in the States,” by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Theda Skocpol, in the Winter edition of the journal Democracy, documents the failure of the left to keep pace with the substantial investments by the right in building local organizations.
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Away from the national level, the commitment of conservative donors to support a power shift in state government illustrates the determination of the right to eliminate regulatory and legal constraints on markets where their money has proven most productive.
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Attempts to control the White House have become far more risky with the rise of a strong Democratic presidential coalition. In 2012, conservative groups put $700 million in a bid to win the presidency, two and a half times as much as liberal groups, but Obama still won decisively.
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The willingness of conservatives to weather difficulty and to endure prolonged delay has been demonstrated repeatedly over the past decades.
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the result for conservatives is thatyour volunteers and paid activists come out of a values-based institution, which is essentially not a political institution. People are there because of their values. If you come to politics from a club or church or veterans hall, it reinforces the stickiness of your work, your willingness to keep at it even if you are tired.
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When the State Policy Network was founded in 1986, it had 12 affiliated state-based groups and a goal of creating an “interstate freedom network” to spread “the growth of freedom across America until a permanent freedom majority is built.” Today, there are one or more affiliated organizations in every state.
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An examination of IRS reports from all of these conservative groups shows total spending in just one year, 2013, of $142.2 million, with the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s $8.9 million the largest expenditure.
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The complex transactions between the foundations in the Koch Brothers network obscure the dollar amount of their investments in state and local organizations. But the Koch Companies’ June Quarterly Newsletter notes that the Koch brothers “hope to raise $889 million by the end of 2016, about two-thirds of which will help support research and education programs, scholarships and other efforts designed to change policies and promote a culture of freedom in the United States.”
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the right can tap into an embeddedstructure of community-based cultural, religious, social organizations — churches, Elks, veterans halls, gun groups, local business organizations, etc. — that are gathering places with offices, meeting halls, phones and computers that can be used by activist troops for logistical and operational support.
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In 1973, as the Watergate scandal was closing in on the Nixon administration, conservatives financed the creation of two institutions: the Heritage Foundation to counter the left on national policy, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to foster state-based conservative lobbies, interest groups and foundations.
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“progressives don’t have these community based, indigenous resources to educate, organize and mobilize troops anymore.” With the exception of unions, “we have fewer local places to gather and belong.”
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In 2004, major liberal donors financed two new national groups created specifically for the 2004 presidential election — Americans Coming Together ($79,795,487) and the Joint Victory Committee ($71,811,666).
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Despite the investment, the Democratic nominee, John Kerry, lost. At that point, the liberal donor community came to general agreement that the left needed a secure a permanent infrastructure at the national level to compete with such conservative institutions as the Chamber of Commerce, the American Enterprise Institute, Americans for Tax Reform and Heritage.
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A year later, Democracy Alliance established its goal of building a “progressive infrastructure that could help counter the well-funded and sophisticated conservative apparatus in the areas of civic engagement, leadership, media, and ideas.”At a national level, the alliance has played a significant role in the development of such groups as the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank; Catalist, which builds and maintains voter lists; and Media Matters, which seeks to document and discredit “conservative misinformation throughout the media.”
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It has begun to appear that the twenty-first century progressive brain is not as interested in clubs, communities and cultural sharing as the conservative brain is.
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How, Stein asked, “could we have lost that? How does a communitarian world view lose its communitarian sense of self?”
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the nature of political liberalism has changed.
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The liberalism of the 1930s and 1940s was shaped by the Great Depression, and the response was, in many respects, communitarian: the strengthening of unions, the provision of jobs and government benefits to the poor and unemployed and the creation of a safety net to provide a modicum of security.
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The left has, in part, shifted focus, with more stress on the values of self-expression and self-fulfillment, on individual liberation from the constraints of traditional morality, especially sexual morality — what my colleague Ross Douthat calls “The Liberalism of Adult Autonomy” or “the morality of rights.” Economic liberalism – despite progress on the minimum wage - has lost salience.
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Instead of communitarian principles, the contemporary progressive movement — despite its advocacy of local issues like community policing — has produced a counterpart to conservative advocacy of free markets: the advocacy of personal freedom.
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Insofar as liberals continue to leave the state-level organization to conservatives, they are conceding the most productive policy arenas in the country.
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As left interests are being cut out of this process, the groundbreaking work is being done on the right. The losses for the Democratic Party and its allies include broken unions, defunded Planned Parenthood, lost wetlands and forests, restrictive abortion regulations and the proliferation of open-carry gun laws.
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conservatives have overseen the drawing of legislative and congressional districts that will keep Republicans in power over the next decade. In this way, through the most effective gerrymandering of legislative and congressional districts in the nation’s history, the right has institutionalized a dangerous power vacuum on the left.
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An Independent Candidacy Will Change the Republican Party Forever - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...473499

party gop crisis demagogue conservatism

shared by Javier E on 14 Mar 16 - No Cached

The most likely consequence of a Trump nomination is a severe Republican defeat in November, and not a defeat for Trump alone. Some significant number of Republicans just won’t vote for Trump. When people don’t want to vote for the top of a ticket, they often stay home altogether, dooming every close race lower down on the ticket.
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Trump is most objectionable to the most reliable and loyal Republican voters, exactly the kind of people who vote Republican for every office all the way down to county commissioner. Perhaps the very most reliable and most loyal will show up no matter what, skip the top line, and otherwise vote the straight ticket. Or perhaps not.
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So talk is rising in the Republican world of some kind of independent candidacy, using some minor-party ballot line
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But the third-party solution has risks, too, bigger risks than anyone is calculating right now.
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When people bolt their party, the party changes behind th
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Take, for example, the Progressive Republicans. When they bolted the party to follow Teddy Roosevelt’s independent campaign in 1912, they left conservatives in control of the Republican apparatus
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. Wallace accelerated the great political realignment of the 1970s: minorities and highly educated whites moving into the Democratic party; downscale whites leaving it, especially in the South.
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in 1992, Perot smashed the old Nixon-Reagan coalition. He won over 20 percent of the vote in the state of California—a solid Republican state before 1992, and never again thereafter. His very best state—Maine—had likewise been a Republican stronghold before 1992, and would never vote Republican again.
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The white voters most resistant to the Perot message were those who attended church most often. Post-1992, the GOP redefined its base vote in religious rather than economic terms. And while that redefinition reestablished the party’s competitiveness, it also denied it the majority support it had enjoyed pre-Perot.
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What happens if that coalition does not run strongly in 2016? If it picks up something more like John Anderson’s 1980 6.6 percent of the vote, rather than Ross Perot’s nearly 20 percent? John Anderson ran as a liberal Republican who could not accept Ronald Reagan’s leadership—a group we have not heard much from since 1980. That’s the risk of political tests of strength: Sometimes you lose, and afterward nobody fears you ever again.
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A “true conservative” independent race for president may offer anti-Trump Republicans a way to vote their consciences without endorsing Hillary Clinton. But it may also expose “true conservatism” as a smaller factor in U.S. presidential politics than it’s been regarded as since the advent of the Tea Party. And it will leave the instrumentalities of the GOP in the hands of people who were willing to work with Trump
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Which is not to argue against it. Sometimes a political movement must and should go down fighting
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whatever is decided by conservatives who refuse to board the Trump train, that decision is best made without illusions and false hopes. This election closes a long period in American politics. Whatever comes next, that period will not return.
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