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alexdeltufo

Seven pols who could be Donald Trump's VP pick (and two who won't) - The Boston Globe - 0 views

www.bostonglobe.com/...story.html

shared by alexdeltufo on 08 May 16 - No Cached
  • “I have the business, let’s call them talents, and I think I’ll probably go the political route,”
  • He has been one of the most visible Trump supporters on Fox News and reportedly met privately with Trump for 90 minutes last week.
  • Haley has publicly criticized Trump; Capito has not. The latter has more than 14 years of experience on Capitol Hill and hails from an economically depressed state that’s been receptive to Trump’s populist message.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Inside Washington, D.C., Corker is seen as a serious policy pro. Most importantly for Trump, perhaps, he’s been one of the few Republicans in Washington who has said he would be fine with supporting Trump.
  • She didn’t endorse anyone ahead of the Iowa caucuses — although she introduced US Senator Marco Rubio at an event. Ernst was also quite critical of Trump’s comments about women, but that might actually be an asset as he seeks to make up ground with female voters.
  • No matter what words have been said during the primary, a Kasich pick would makes sense for both Kasich and Trump.
  • Consider this math: If the Democratic nominee wins all the states the party won in the last six presidential elections, and then wins Florida, Trump will lose in the Electoral College.
  • It does make some sense politically: Christie was the first establishment politician to endorse Trump, and he took a lot of heat for it.
  • Trump doesn’t need Christie anymore.
  • here is no indication that Ryan would ever accept another ride on the national ticket as a vice presidential candidate, let alone for Trump.
alexdeltufo

The year of the hated: Clinton and Trump, two intensely disliked candidates, begin their face-off - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-8967-7ac733c56f12_story.html

shared by alexdeltufo on 08 May 16 - No Cached
  • If the rise of Trump has no obvious precedent, neither does an election like this. Clinton, whose buoyant favorable ratings in the State Department convinced some Democrats that she could
  • “In the history of polling, we’ve basically never had a candidate viewed negatively by half of the electorate,” wrote Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) in a widely shared note that asked someone, anyone, to mount a third-party run.
  • “Everybody likes her,” said Pamela Hatwood, 51, a nurse on disability leave who was fanning herself with an extra Clinton sign in a sweltering gym in Indianapolis last week
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • “I’m not worried about the polls. They’re good one week; they’re bad the next week. I
  • “You see it on TV, and you assume it’s some place far away, don’t you?” she said. “You hear this hateful talk about women, and you want to say: Enough, enough! That’s not who we are.”
  • “When he first announced, I kind of rolled my eyes, too,” Fuller said about Trump. “But I got it soon enough.
  • Trump meandered his way toward a discussion of why he could win. He has spoken more about poll numbers, in his set speeches, than any candidate in the same position. He tends to focus on the numbers that show him competitive
  • ‘Well, that is his plateau. He won’t go higher.’ ”
  • Another theory is that his support could be so robust from white voters — who have steadily trended Republican — that he could capi­tal­ize on Clinton’s unfavorable numbers and win.
  • Clinton’s strategy assumes she has lost voters’ esteem since then. Even before the unexpectedly stiff challenge of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont
  • Eight years ago, both she and Obama campaigned on “clean coal.” This year, she has said that “we’ve got to move away from coal” and put “a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” as the economy gets greener. (Sanders has roughly the same position but has not received the same backlash.)
  • Indiana ended the campaign of Trump’s last serious rival, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), another candidate who was navigating soaring unfavorable ratings. In his final days, Cruz regularly made four or five campaign stops, o
  • “Maybe in the Hillary Clinton camp, he’s unpopular. Maybe among some of these other Republicans like John Boehner
  • “Look at what went on at the Trump rallies just this week. They were the socialists, the communists, NARAL, Occupy Wall Street. Those people are going to exist, and a lot of them are paid protesters.”
  • Sanders said.
Javier E

Unusual Flavor of G.O.P. Primary Illustrates a Famous Paradox - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ustrates-a-famous-paradox.html

social choice theory politics paradox political choice economics theory

shared by Javier E on 09 May 16 - No Cached
  • The failure of democracy to provide a coherent ranking of political hopefuls is a central insight of the sub-field of economics and political science known as social choice theory.
  • The issue is neatly illustrated by Condorcet’s paradox, which shows that a shifting set of coalitions can make a collective body appear that it has no idea what it wants.
  • The first possible defect is the problem the marquis illustrated — the problem of preference cycles.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The problem is not that individual voters are clueless; in this story, they’re not. Even if each individual voter is rational and knows what he or she wants, the electorate as a whole can act as if it were clueless and can’t decide. Individually rational choices don’t necessarily add up to collectively rational choices.
  • The Marquis Condorcet, a French mathematician of the second half of the 18th century, showed how a majority-rule vote can lead to incoherent collective choices.
  • But Kenneth Arrow, the economics Nobel laureate, showed in his 1951 doctoral thesis that the problem runs far deeper than anyone had imagined. Mr. Arrow’s famous “impossibility theorem” says that there is no mechanism that can coherently speak for the will of the people.
  • Loosely speaking, this extraordinary result says that any mechanism that aims to speak for the will of the people — that is not a dictatorship — will be susceptible to at least one of three defects.
  • the will of the people is an incoherent concept
  • The second possible defect is that voters will make choices that suggest that the addition of irrelevant alternatives leads them to change their mind
  • The third possibility is that even when each voter individually prefers chocolate ice cream to vanilla, that somehow collectively the voters will choose vanilla instead.
  • Mr. Arrow’s impossibility theorem suggests that maybe the Republican primary results say less about the desires of Republican voters than they do about tensions inherent in groups of people collectively deciding what to do
  • Economic theorists have also pointed to a reason that the modern G.O.P. may be particularly susceptible to making strange choices. If disagreements between voters are simple enough — such as when some want more liberal policies and others more conservative policies — simple majority rule won’t suffer any of the defects that concerned Mr. Arrow
  • Republicans disagree both about the desirability of conservative versus moderate policies and on the need for an outsider or an establishment leader. This extra complexity is too much for democracy to bear, again raising the possibility of collective madness even in the face of individual rationality.
  • The point isn’t that democracy is bad; merely that it’s imperfect. And so even if this theorem points to the impossibility of a truly rational democracy, it doesn’t mean that the alternatives are any better. As Winston Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
Javier E

How GOP Leaders Must Manage Their Political Lives in the Era of Donald Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...483354

politics politician compromise hypocrisy

shared by Javier E on 19 May 16 - No Cached
  • The day-in, day-out work of the politician is the management of electoral coalitions: coaxing, cajoling, compelling people to work together who—in the more natural course of things—might have nothing in common
  • Unlike writers and intellectuals, politicians don’t have the freedom to work only with people they like and admire. Unlike writers and intellectuals, they have no duty to speak aloud their inner convictions—their work would become impossible if they did.
  • More F.S. Oliver: Nothing in politics is sadder than: the man of sterling character whose genius is so antipathetic to the particular emergency in which he finds himself as to stupefy his thoughts and paralyze his actions. He drifts to disaster, grappling blindfolded which are beyond his comprehension, failing without really fighting.
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  • Politics unfortunately abounds in shams that must be treated reverentially for every politician who would succeed. If you are the sort of man whose stomach revolts against treating shams reverentially, you will be well advised to stay out of politics altogether and set up as a prophet; your prophecies may perhaps sow good seed for some future harvest. But as a politician you would be impotent. For at any given time the bulk of your countrymen believe firmly and devoutly, not only in various things that are worthy of belief, but also in illusions of one kind and another; and they will never submit to have their affairs managed for them by one who appears not to share in their credulity.
  • Trump’s taught Republican politicians that they’ve neglected the interests and values of their core supporters. He’s demonstrated that much of their party ideology is obsolete, and that their language no longer moves their voters. He’s proven that their party is less culturally conservative than they believed, less hostile to social insurance than they imagined, and more worried about the economic and social costs of mass migration than they realized. Those are valuable lessons that need to be absorbed and pondered.
  • Their task ahead, in the Biblical phrase, is to pluck the brands from the fire—rescue as much of their party as can be rescued—while simultaneously minimizing the damage to party and country by the nominee their rank-and-file has imposed on them. They need to maneuver so that Trump’s defeat is as solitary as possible, and so that he cannot shift the blame for the failure he has earned onto the heads of others
  • Bad choices over the past decade by Republican political leaders opened the way to Donald Trump, yes.  For a decade, Republican voters have signaled they wanted to protect Medicare, cut immigration, fight fewer wars, and nominate no more Bushes. Their party leaders interpreted those signals as demands to cut Medicare, increase immigration, put boots on the ground in Syria, and nominate another Bush.
  • He’s also demonstrated that he himself is a dangerous person
  • To save themselves and their country, Republican politicians will have to rediscover the politician’s arts of deftness, flexibility, and self-preservation—while stealthily hastening Trump toward the defeat that almost certainly awaits him in November.
  • That’s a big job and a hard job, all the harder because they cannot acknowledge what they are doing. They will seem to help Trump win, while actually working to ensure he fail
  • What Walter Lippman said of presidents is really true of all politicians: They are not “working through noble institutions to dear ends … but trying to grind out a few crude results from a decadent political machine.”
  • The harms they stop are more important than the good they cannot achieve. What they’re called upon to do is to practice statesmanship without fine phrases; to protect the republic without receiving any credit for it
Javier E

How Missouri's 'Bosnian vote​' could cost Donald Trump - and turn the state blue | US news | The Guardian - 5 views

www.theguardian.com/...ssouri-republican-donald-trump

ethnic muslim missouri bosnia election 2016 immigration

shared by Javier E on 05 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • Historically, Missouri has been a swing state, though is often assumed by pundits to be a Republican giveaway. In 2008, Republican John McCain won the state’s electoral votes by a margin of less than 1% – mere thousands of votes. In 2012, Republican Mitt Romney won the state by 10%, but liberal Democrat Claire McCaskill also kept her seat in the US Senate by more than 15%. The state also has a Democrat governor.
  • During 2014’s high-profile race for St Louis County executive following the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, Democratic candidate Steve Stenger – who visited Bosnian mosques and distributed Bosnian-language campaign literature while his Republican opponent did not – won, but by fewer than 2,000 votes. Had Bosnian voters stayed home, he probably would have lost.
  • St Louis is home to one of the largest populations of Bosnian Muslims in the world outside Bosnia-Herzegovina itself. The community has its origins in the Balkan refugee crisis in the 1990s, when Yugoslavia was ripped apart at its seams, displacing millions. Bosnian refugees were resettled in St Louis by the thousands, and eventually the city became the anchor of the United States’ Bosnian diaspora
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • While never a monolith, Bosnian Americans in St Louis – which is home to an estimated 50,000 to 70,000 Bosnian Muslims – have near-universally been put off by Trump’s anti-Muslim, anti-refugee rhetoric and are wary of the Republican candidate’s popularity among Serbian nationalists.
  • Serbian nationalists’ support of Trump has also raised red flags. During the Republican national convention, a man wearing a “Make Serbia Great Again” hat was photographed several times. When Vice-President Joe Biden visited Belgrade earlier in August, hundreds of Serbian nationalists gathered to chant, “Vote for Trump!” The group was led by rightwing Serbian politician Vojislav Seselj, who was accused of helping to orchestrate the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and other non-Serbs from “greater Serbia” in the 1990s.
Javier E

After Trump, conservatives should stop longing for the past - and learn a little humility - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...st-and-learn-a-little-humility

conservatism reform history culture crisis interpretation subsidiarity individualism nostalgia

shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • He explains the illusory appeal of nostalgia-driven politics in the United States, the kind that Trump stokes in coarse, simplistic terms.
  • he offers a path forward for the American right after this campaign, whether it is adjusting to life in Trump’s America or coping again with another electoral setback.
  • Levin wants a humbler, more local conservatism, one less concerned with tearing down Washington or promoting hyper-individualism than with creating space for America’s “mediating institutions” of family and community to blossom
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  • This vision involves “a mix of dependence on others and obligations to them,” Levin writes, “and so a connection with specific people with whom you share some meaningful portion of the actual experience of life.”
  • Levin understands the allure of nostalgia; indeed, he believes that almost all contemporary politics is based on it
  • These competing nostalgias, though more sophisticated than Trump’s, are no less misguided, and lead to bad politics and policy.
  • Sure, there is plenty to long for, Levin says. In the early decades of the post-World War II era, the United States enjoyed “relative cultural cohesion, low economic inequality, high confidence in national institutions, and widespread optimism about the nation’s prospects” (especially if you were white and male). But that was a unique pivot point in U.S. history, a time when the country was straddling two opposing forces that would define the American century: consolidation and diffusion.
  • The first half of the 20th century, Levin contends, was an age of consolidation, with a peerless industrial economy, a strong centralized government and a relatively uniform cultural identity shaped by a powerful mass media.
  • In the century’s second half, by contrast, the U.S. economy became more diversified and deregulated, while cultural conformity broke down in favor of individualism and the politics of personal identity.
  • for a fleeting moment at midcentury, it enjoyed the best of both. “The social, political, and economic forms of American life at midcentury made possible a degree of prosperity and cohesion that in turn enabled many Americans to flourish,”
  • “Democrats talk about public policy as though it were always 1965 and the model of the Great Society welfare state will answer our every concern,”
  • Republicans talk as though it were always 1981 and a repetition of the Reagan Revolution is the cure for what ails us.”
  • This stale — and stalemated — debate leaves people discouraged with politicians who don’t seem engaged with their current struggles. “In the absence of relief from their own resulting frustration, a growing number of voters opt for leaders who simply embody or articulate that frustration,”
  • the nostalgia of the traditional political class is also pernicious and “blinding,” Levin argues, because it keeps us from grappling with the real problems assaulting us in the age of diffusion
  • “In liberating many individuals from oppressive social constraints, we have also estranged many from their families and unmoored them from their communities, work, and faith,”
  • “Rather than decrying the collapse of moral order, we must draw people’s eyes and hearts to the alternative.” Their incessant focus on religious liberty, for example, while important, may be counterproductive, “a fundamentally plaintive and inward-looking minority asking to protect what it has and in essence to be left alone,”
  • In unleashing markets to meet the needs and wants of consumers, we have freed them also to treat workers as dispensable and interchangeable.
  • In pursuing meritocracy, we have magnified inequality.”
  • “In loosening the reins of cultural conformity and national identity we have weakened the roots of mutual trust.
  • he worries that the price of this new freedom has been high. “We have set loose a scourge of loneliness and isolation that we are still afraid to acknowledge as the distinct social dysfunction of our age of individualism, just as crushing conformity was the characteristic scourge of an era of cohesion and national unity,”
  • The answer to all this is the pursuit of what Levin describes as a “modernized politics of subsidiarity — that is, of putting power, authority and significance as close to the level of interpersonal community as reasonably possible.”
  • He is most concerned with the thicket of institutions in the middle — families, schools, religious organizations, all the things usually lumped together as civil society.
  • “we should see it as an effort to open up the space between them — the space where a free society can genuinely thrive.” Our objective should be to “channel power and resources to the mediating institutions of society and allow for bottom-up problem solving that takes a variety of specialized, adapted forms.”
  • It is a very Tocquevillian vision, with a dash of Catholic social teaching thrown in. No doubt, to yearn for the renewal of these traditional institutions is its own kind of nostalgia.
  • So how do we go about strengthening families, religious organizations, schools and all those mediating institutions?
  • He calls for a “mobility agenda,” with economic growth spurred by tax and regulatory reform
  • a more competitive and low-cost health-care system, lower budget deficits — all part of a standard conservative recipe.
  • He proposes education reform that includes more professional certificates, apprenticeships “and other ways of gaining the skills for well-paid employment that do not require a college degree.”
  • Levin’s intention here is less to offer detailed proposals than to shift the locus of policymaking itself — and to infuse it with greater humility. “There is not much that public policy can do,” he admits, “to create communities that do a better job of encouraging constructive behavior: it could, however, do less harm, and it could leave room for such communities to form, and protect the space in which they take root and grow.”
  • The result is a bifurcated America, torn between wealth and poverty, order and disorder. “Increasingly, society consists of individuals and a national state, while the mediating institutions — family, community, church, unions, and others — fade and falter.”
  • Instead, social and religious conservatives should “assert themselves by offering living models of their alternative to the moral culture of our hyper-individualist age.”
  • In other words, less hectoring and lecturing, less trying to remake the culture at large, and more strengthening one’s “near-at-hand community,” Levin writes. He calls this approach “subcultural traditionalism
  • he sees it in “civic groups that channel their energies into making neighborhoods safe and attractive, or into helping the poor, or protecting the vulnerable, or assimilating immigrants, or helping fight addiction
  • in schools that build character and inculcate the values parents think are most important; in religious congregations that mold themselves into living communities of like-minded families, and that turn their faiths into works to improve the lives of others;
  • in the work of teachers and students who are committed to liberal learning and engagement with the deepest questions.”
  • Such a localized focus, Levin maintains, is not “an alternative to fighting for the soul of the larger society, but a most effective means of doing so.”
  • I suspect the fulfillment of Levin’s vision would require a party and a movement that grasp the exhaustion of their current approach. A November defeat, especially a landslide, might accomplish that
Javier E

No matter who wins the presidential election, Nate Silver was right - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-ba59-a7d93165c6d4_story.html

prediction election president

shared by Javier E on 09 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • I don’t fault Silver for his caution. It’s honest. What it really says is he doesn’t know with much confidence what’s going to happen
  • That’s because there’s a lot of human caprice and whim in electoral behavior that can’t always be explained or predicted with scientific precision. Politics ain’t moneyball. Good-quality polls give an accurate sense of where a political race is at a point in time, but they don’t predict the future.
  • Predictive models, generally based on historical patterns, work until they don’t.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In his hedged forecasts this time, Silver appears to be acknowledging that polling and historical patterns don’t always capture what John Maynard Keynes, in his classic 1936 economic General Theory, described as “animal spirits.”
  • There is, Keynes wrote, “the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as a result of animal spirits — of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.”
Javier E

Even If He Loses, Donald Trump's Supporters Aren't Going Away - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...504032

trump consequences election

shared by Javier E on 15 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • This is what Trump has done over the last year: He’s whipped up the darkest, angriest demons in the electorate. He has not simply given people permission to indulge any racist, sexist, xenophobic, or religiously intolerant tendencies they may harbor. He has insisted—loudly—that such bigotry is only common sense and mocked anyone who refuses to see the danger presented by “the other” as a blind idiot. Those not sharing Trump’s grim vision are, by definition, suckers being taken for a ride.
  • If anything, Trumpism has, in part, made the rest of the nation all the more eager to ignore the millions of white voters living on the edges of the economy. Many may now be written off without guilt, because they have shown themselves to be not just unfortunates but undesirables—irredeemable hate-mongers itching to reassert their cultural dominance.
  • No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, this is a tragic outcome. It leaves Americans that much more segregated and alienated from one another. It’s exactly this kind of cross-cultural suspicion and mistrust that has enabled Trump to come within spitting distance of the presidency.
Javier E

Facebook, in Cross Hairs After Election, Is Said to Question Its Influence - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...its-influence-in-election.html

facebook election influence culture

shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Facebook has been in the eye of a postelection storm for the last few days, embroiled in accusations that it helped spread misinformation and fake news stories that influenced how the American electorate voted.
  • — many company executives and employees have been asking one another if, or how, they shaped the minds, opinions and votes of Americans.
  • Some employees are worried about the spread of racist and so-called alt-right memes across the network, according to interviews with 10 current and former Facebook employees. Others are asking whether they contributed to a “filter bubble” among users who largely interact with people who share the same beliefs.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • “A fake story claiming Pope Francis — actually a refugee advocate — endorsed Mr. Trump was shared almost a million times, likely visible to tens of millions,” Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina who studies the social impact of technology, said of a recent post on Facebook. “Its correction was barely heard. Of course Facebook had significant influence in this last election’s outcome.”
  • More recently, issues with fake news on the site have mushroomed. Multiple Facebook employees were particularly disturbed last week when a fake news site called The Denver Guardian spread across the social network with negative and false messages about Mrs. Clinton, including a claim that an F.B.I. agent connected to Mrs. Clinton’s email disclosures had murdered his wife and shot himself.
  • “Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote. “Overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.”
  • Almost half of American adults rely on Facebook as a source of news, according to a study by the Pew Research Center. And Facebook often emphasizes its ability to sway its users with advertisers, portraying itself as an effective mechanism to help promote their products.
  • Chris Cox, a senior vice president of product and one of Mr. Zuckerberg’s top lieutenants, has long described Facebook as an unbiased and blank canvas to give people a voice.
  • Even in private, Mr. Zuckerberg has continued to resist the notion that Facebook can unduly affect how people think and behave. In a Facebook post circulated on Wednesday to a small group of his friends, which was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Zuckerberg challenged the idea that Facebook had a direct effect on the way people voted.
marleymorton

Bernie Sanders would have beaten Donald Trump? Not so fast - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-sanders-donald-trump-election

politics US

shared by marleymorton on 15 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • marleymorton on 15 Nov 16
     
    It has been a week since Donald Trump won the majority of electoral college votes and became president-elect of the US (and a week since he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton). It has been a week of endless questions and limited answers - how? why?
Javier E

The triumphant GOP is mired in crisis after crisis - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-977a-1030f822fc35_story.html

crisis gop trump presidency politics

shared by Javier E on 16 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • There is a crisis of identity. Donald Trump now leads a coalition including the Republican establishment — and people who despise the Republican establishment. The insurgent president-elect — lacking relevant experience, adequate personnel and actual policy proposals — cannot exercise power without the help of those he ridiculed.
  • Trump has chosen to incorporate this conflict into the structure of the West Wing.
  • This is less a team of rivals than an ideological cage fight.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The biggest frustration reported by Republicans who have met with Trump is his inability to focus for any period of time. He is impatient with facts and charts and he changes the subject every few minutes. Republican leaders need policy leadership — or permission to provide it themselves.
  • this is also a governing crisis. Trump won office promising to undo globalization, bring back manufacturing jobs and fulfill “every dream you ever dreamed.” So expectations are pretty high. But Trumpism, for the most part, consists of cultural signals and symbolic goals, not a set of developed proposals.
  • Not everyone who helps a president become president is fit to help him govern. Bannon — whose Breitbart News invited the alt-right into the conservative mainstream and who has made a business model out of spreading conspiratorial nonsense — belongs in this category, along with Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani, Corey Lewandowski and the rest of the distracting campaign sideshow.
  • The final crisis faced by the GOP — and just about everyone else — relates to the quality of our political culture. Trump won office in a way that damaged our democracy. He fed resentment against minorities, promised to jail his opponent and turned shallow invective into an art form. If he governs as he campaigned, Trump will smash the unity of our country into a thousand shards of bitterness.
  • the long-term political crisis faced by the triumphant GOP. Trump won the presidency in a manner that undermines the GOP’s electoral future. He demonstrated that the “coalition of the ascendant” — including minorities, millennials and the college-educated — is not yet ascendant. But in a nation where over half of children under 5 years old are racial or ethnic minorities, it eventually will be.
  • Republicans may end up depending on a younger generation of leaders — Ryan, Ben Sasse, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Jeff Flake, Marco Rubio — to demonstrate the possibility of unifying aspiration and civil disagreement.
Javier E

The Democrats aren't dead yet - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-977a-1030f822fc35_story.html

election 2016 statistics history

shared by Javier E on 16 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • One standard measure of political interest is whether people voted; fewer did, proportionally, than in 2012.
  • , the voting-eligible population grew 9 million to 232 million, according to the nonpartisan U.S. Election Project. But actual voting increased only by 4 million. Voter turnout was 58.1 percent, down from 58.6 percent, reports the Election Project.
  • Romney was criticized as a poor campaigner, but his popular-vote total and Trump’s were roughly equal (60.9 million), even though there were more eligible voters in 2016.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • If Clinton had simply matched Obama, she almost certainly would have captured the electoral college and become president-elect.
  • In 2012, President Obama won with almost 66 million votes; Clinton’s total was just over 62 million.
  • Voting patterns are remarkably stable. Consider the share of white voters who supported the Republican candidate in the past four presidential elections (2004-2016): 58 percent, 55, 59, 58
  • Similarly, here’s the share of African American voters who backed the Democratic candidate: 88, 95, 93, 88.
  • Campaigning concentrates on a small sliver of voters whose minds aren’t made up or who are open to change.
  • With some exceptions (Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, Lyndon Johnson in 1964 are examples), elections do not signal upheavals in American life. The commentariat — scholars, pundits, columnists, bloggers — have an interest in saying otherwise.
rachelramirez

Hillary Clinton's Defeat Could Set Back Women In Politics - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...508340

clinton politics

shared by rachelramirez on 27 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Will Hillary Clinton's Defeat Set Back Women In Politics?
  • Clinton may serve as a political role model for some young women, while others may feel alienated by her brand of liberal feminism.
  • “I think the defeat has the potential to set back female candidates’ emergence,” said Jennifer Lawless, the director of American University’s Women and Politics Institute. "Women are less likely to think they have thick enough skin to endure the rigors of the campaign trail
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The attacks Clinton faced may prompt other women to think twice about a run for public office, especially if her experience convinces them the political arena is not a level playing field for men and women.
  • “If the likelihood of winning now seems even lower, women may reach a point where they believe the costs do not balance out the rewards.”
  • The fact that Clinton has amassed a considerable lead in the popular vote may also serve as a source of hope for women with political aspirations. At the very least, that suggests she was not repudiated by the electorate.
  • Research from Christina Wolbrecht and David Campbell of the University of Notre Dame suggests that young women are more likely to express interest in political activism when they see other women running for office.
  • The extent to which Clinton’s unsuccessful bid for the presidency dissuades or encourages other women to run for office, or engage in politics in other ways, may ultimately depend on the way her candidacy is mythologized.
Javier E

The End of Identity Liberalism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nd-of-identity-liberalism.html

identity liberalism political correctness whitelash diversity multiculturalism politics history

shared by Javier E on 24 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of and “celebrate” our differences.
  • Which is a splendid principle of moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age
  • In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end
  • If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.
  • the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life
  • our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good
  • In large part this is because of high school history curriculums, which anachronistically project the identity politics of today back onto the past, creating a distorted picture of the major forces and individuals that shaped our country
  • When young people arrive at college they are encouraged to keep this focus on themselves by student groups, faculty members and also administrators whose full-time job is to deal with — and heighten the significance of — “diversity issues.”
  • How to explain to the average voter the supposed moral urgency of giving college students the right to choose the designated gender pronouns to be used when addressing them?
  • Fascination with the identity drama has even affected foreign reporting, which is in distressingly short supply. However interesting it may be to read, say, about the fate of transgender people in Egypt, it contributes nothing to educating Americans about the powerful political and religious currents that will determine Egypt’s future, and indirectly, our own.
  • it is at the level of electoral politics that identity liberalism has failed most spectacularly, as we have just seen. National politics in healthy periods is not about “difference,” it is about commonality. And it will be dominated by whoever best captures Americans’ imaginations about our shared destiny
  • Ronald Reagan did that very skillfully, whatever one may think of his vision. So did Bill Clinton
  • A convenient liberal interpretation of the recent presidential election would have it that Mr. Trump won in large part because he managed to transform economic disadvantage into racial rage — the “whitelash” thesis
  • This is convenient because it sanctions a conviction of moral superiority and allows liberals to ignore what those voters said were their overriding concerns
  • It also encourages the fantasy that the Republican right is doomed to demographic extinction in the long run — which means liberals have only to wait for the country to fall into their laps. The surprisingly high percentage of the Latino vote that went to Mr. Trump should remind us that the longer ethnic groups are here in this country, the more politically diverse they become.
  • Finally, the whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored.
  • they are reacting against the omnipresent rhetoric of identity, which is what they mean by “political correctness.”
  • the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan, which still exists. Those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.
  • We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them
  • As for narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away, especially those touching on sexuality and religion, such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. (To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.)
  • Teachers committed to such a liberalism would refocus attention on their main political responsibility in a democracy: to form committed citizens aware of their system of government and the major forces and events in our history.
  • A post-identity liberalism would also emphasize that democracy is not only about rights; it also confers duties on its citizens, such as the duties to keep informed and vote
  • A post-identity liberal press would begin educating itself about parts of the country that have been ignored, and about what matters there, especially religion
  • it would take seriously its responsibility to educate Americans about the major forces shaping world politics, especially their historical dimension.
Javier E

Richard Rorty's 1998 Book Suggested Election 2016 Was Coming - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-election-2016-was-coming.html

election 2016 leftist Democratic party working class redistribution globalization justice rorty

shared by Javier E on 24 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Three days after the presidential election, an astute law professor tweeted a picture of three paragraphs, very slightly condensed, from Richard Rorty’s “Achieving Our Country,” published in 1998. It was retweeted thousands of times, generating a run on the book
  • It’s worth rereading those tweeted paragraphs:[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. … One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
  • His basic contention is that the left once upon a time believed that our country, for all its flaws, was both perfectible and worth perfecting.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • But during the 1960s, shame — over Vietnam, over the serial humiliation of African-Americans — transformed a good portion of the left, at least the academic left, into a disaffected gang of spectators, rather than agitators for change
  • . A formalized despair became its philosophy. The system was beyond reform. The best one could do was focus on its victims.
  • The result was disastrous. The alliance between the unions and intellectuals, so vital to passing legislation in the Progressive Era, broke down. In universities, cultural and identity politics replaced the politics of change and economic justice.
  • at the very moment “socially accepted sadism” — good phrase, that — was diminishing, economic instability and inequality were increasing, thanks to globalization.
  • “This world economy will soon be owned by a cosmopolitan upper class which has no more sense of community with any workers anywhere than the great American capitalists of the year 1900.”
  • This group included intellectuals, by the way, who, he wrote, are “ourselves quite well insulated, at least in the short run, from the effects of globalization.”
  • Which left the white working-class guy and gal up for grabs — open to right-wing populists, maybe even strongmen.
  • “Outside the academy,” he wrote, “Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place.”
  • “Why could not the left,” he asked, “channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed?”
  • Right through the ’90s and into the 2000s, we had left-of-center politicians singing the praises of hope, rather than the hopelessness that Mr. Rorty decries. Bill Clinton explicitly campaigned as the “man from Hope,” and Barack Obama would later campaign on a platform of “hope” and “change.” In passing health care reform, Mr. Obama genuinely did something for the immiserated underclass, and both men, in their ways, rejected identity politics.
  • But it wasn’t enough, obviously. “Under Presidents Carter and Clinton,” Mr. Rorty wrote, “the Democratic Party has survived by distancing itself from the unions and from any mention of redistribution.” Mr. Clinton was particularly guilty of this charge, passing Nafta, appointing Robert Rubin as his Treasury secretary and enthusiastically embracing financial deregulation. Mr. Obama pushed the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And he was one of those fancy elites.
  • People are furiously arguing about what played a key role in this election — whether it was white working-class despair, a racist backlash or terror about the pace of cultural change. It seems reasonable to think that all three played a part.
  • What’s so striking about “Achieving Our Country” is that it blends these theories into a common argument: The left, both cultural and political, eventually abandoned economic justice in favor of identity politics, leaving too many people feeling freaked out or ignored.
  • “It is as if the American Left could not handle more than one initiative at a time,” Mr. Rorty wrote. “As if it either had to ignore stigma in order to concentrate on money, or vice versa.”
abbykleman

Trump starts 'thank you' tour - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...94688780

shared by abbykleman on 01 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • abbykleman on 01 Dec 16
     
    Presidential candidate Donald Trump loved the raucous political rallies that marked his campaign - loved them so much he's doing them again as president-elect. After a pit stop in Indianapolis to tout a new jobs agreement with the Carrier heating and air conditioning company, Trump heads to Cincinnati on Thursday to open a "Thank You Tour" of swing states that put him over the top in the Electoral College.
davisem

How populism could shake up Europe: A visual guide - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by davisem on 05 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Europe's populist movements are on the cusp of sweeping far-right, nationalist and euroskeptic parties into power across the continent in a series of upcoming elections
  • he revolving door swung against current Prime Minister Matteo Renzi Sunday, when voters rejected his proposed changes to the country's constitution
  • Experts say that if Grillo comes to power, he'll likely follow through on promises to call a referendum to scrap the euro, reintroduce the Italian lira, and perhaps even follow Britain out of the European Union
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) had ridden a populist wave to challenge for presidential power (albeit in a largely ceremonial role). The race had appeared close, but on Sunday Hofer conceded to left-wing independent Alexander Van der Bellen when early returns ran against him
  • Marine Le Pen, leader since 2011, has tried to "detoxify" the party founded by her father Jean-Marie of its reputation for racism and xenophobia -- and has seen its share of the vote rise to 27% in last year's regional elections
  • Formed in 2013, the anti-immigrant party Alternative for Germany (AfD) was initially galvanized into action by what it saw as Merkel's bungled handling of the eurozone crisis -- specifically the multiple Greek bailouts
  • The National Front leader has utilized similar tactics to the US President-elect by tapping into frustrations of the French electorate and focusing on a more nationalistic agenda to sway voters to her corner.
  • Farage was one of the chief architects of the Brexit campaign for Britain to leave the European Union
  • since the 2008 economic crisis unemployment has risen from 7.1% to around 10%, while almost a quarter of the nation's youth is now out of work.
  • Voters in the Netherlands are set to elect a new parliament in March 2017, when the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant Party for Freedom (PVV) hopes to build on its strong showing in the past two elections
  • Wilders has run on a party manifesto focused on a so-called "de-Islamification" of the Netherlands
  • davisem on 05 Dec 16
     
    Europe is one the peak of sweeping right, nationalist and eurosceptic parties come into power in following elections, and we see some examples of countries and how the GPA, Unemployment, and others were effected.
Javier E

The Dangers of Disruption - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-dangers-of-disruption.html

disruption nativism protectionism illiberal democracy liberalism politics culture crisis

shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • In Silicon Valley, where I live, the word “disruption” has an overwhelmingly positive valence: Thousands of smart, young people arrive here every year hoping to disrupt established ways of doing business — and become very rich in the process.
  • For almost everyone else, however, disruption is a bad thing. By nature, human beings prize stability and order. We learn to be adults by accumulating predictable habits, and we bond by memorializing our ancestors and traditions.
  • So it should not be surprising that in today’s globalized world, many people are upset that vast technological and social forces constantly disrupt established social practices, even if they are better off materially.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • globalization has produced enormous benefits. From 1970 to the 2008 financial crisis, global output quadrupled, and the benefits did not flow exclusively to the rich. According to the economist Steven Radelet, the number of people living in extreme poverty in developing countries fell from 42 percent in 1993 to 17 percent in 2011, while the percentage of children born in developing countries who died before their fifth birthday declined from 22 percent in 1960 to less than 5 percent by 2016.
  • statistics like these do not reflect the lived experience of many people. The shift of manufacturing from the West to low labor-cost regions has meant that Asia’s rising middle classes have grown at the expense of rich countries’ working-class communities
  • from a cultural standpoint, the huge movement of ideas, people and goods across national borders has disrupted traditional communities and ways of doing business. For some this has presented tremendous opportunity, but for others it is a threat.
  • This disruption has been closely associated with the growth of American power and the liberal world order that the United States has shaped since the end of World War II. Understandably, there has been blowback, both against the United States and within the nation.
  • Liberalism is based on a rule of law that maintains a level playing field for all citizens, particularly the right to private property
  • The democratic part, political choice, is the enforcer of communal choices and accountable to the citizenry as a whole
  • Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed revolts around the world of the democratic part of this equation against the liberal one
  • Vladimir Putin, perhaps the world’s chief practitioner of illiberal democracy. Mr. Putin has become very popular in Russia, particularly since his annexation of Crimea in 2014. He does not feel bound by law: Mr. Putin and his cronies use political power to enrich themselves and business wealth to guarantee their hold on power.
  • The citizens of India and Japan have elected nationalist leaders who many say they believe champion a more closed form of identity than their predecessors
  • Mr. Trump’s ascent poses a unique challenge to the American system because he fits comfortably into the trend toward illiberal democracy.
  • Like Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump seemsto want to use a democratic mandate to undermine the checks and balances that characterize a genuine liberal democracy. He will be an oligarch in the Russian mold: a rich man who used his wealth to gain political power and who would use political power to enrich himself once in office
  • Mr. Orbán, Mr. Putin and Mr. Erdogan all came to power in countries with an electorate polarized between a more liberal, cosmopolitan urban elite — whether in Budapest, Moscow or Istanbul — and a less-educated rural voter base. This social division is similar to the one that drove the Brexit vote in Britain and Donald Trump’s rise in the United States..
  • How far will this trend toward illiberal democracy go? Are we headed for a period like that of the early 20th century, in which global politics sank into conflict over closed and aggressive nationalism?
  • The outcome will depend on several critical factors, particularly the way global elites respond to the backlash they have engendered.
  • In America and Europe, elites made huge policy blunders in recent years that hurt ordinary people more than themselves.
  • Deregulation of financial markets laid the groundwork for the subprime crisis in the United States, while a badly designed euro contributed to the debt crisis in Greece, and the Schengen system of open borders made it difficult to control the flood of refugees in Europe. Elites must acknowledge their roles in creating these situations.
  • Now it’s up to the elites to fix damaged institutions and to better buffer those segments of their own societies that have not benefited from globalization to the same extent.
  • Above all, it is important to keep in mind that reversing the existing liberal world order would likely make things worse for everyone, including those left behind by globalization. The fundamental driver of job loss in the developed world, after all, is not immigration or trade, but technological change.
  • We need better systems for buffering people against disruption, even as we recognize that disruption is inevitable. The alternative is to end up with the worst of both worlds, in which a closed and collapsing system of global trade breeds even more inequality.
abbykleman

Trump cites Kremlin statement to deny reports of Russia ties, asks if 'we are living in Nazi Germany' - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-b8b2-cb5164beba6b_story.html

shared by abbykleman on 11 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • abbykleman on 11 Jan 17
     
    Donald Trump on Wednesday morning angrily denounced news reports about potentially compromising information Russia has allegedly gathered about him, citing denials from the Kremlin that it has collected any such intelligence material. Trump, on his Twitter account, also charged that his "crooked opponents" are trying to undermine his electoral victory and accused the intelligence community of leaking the information to get in "one last shot at me.
Javier E

Trump is already antagonizing the intelligence community, and that's a problem - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-897f-918837dae0ae_story.html

intelligence trump cia truth

shared by Javier E on 13 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • On Sunday, the president-elect again rejected the Russian role, adding that he was smart enough that he didn’t want or need a daily briefing.
  • If what is gained is not used or wanted or is labeled as suspect or corrupt — by what moral authority does a director put his people at risk?
  • Then there is the ethic of the intelligence profession, captured by the gospel of John’s dictum in the agency’s headquarters lobby — that the truth will set you free.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • What happens if the incoming administration directs that the “Russia did it” file be closed? Would standing intelligence requirements to learn more about this be eliminated? And if they were, what would the agency do with relevant data that would inevitably come through its collection network?
  • And what about the statute that requires the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community to keep Congress “fully and currently informed” about all significant intelligence activities? Data on a foreign power manipulating the federal electoral process would certainly qualify. What will the White House position be when the agency is asked by Congress if it has learned anything more on the issue?
  • His future workforce will be looking for clues about his willingness to defend them against charges of incompetence and politicization simply for saying what their craft tells them to be true.
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