Photo: Todd-Trapani/Unsplash. Edited by Inroads.

I early on developed an acute interest in American politics, which led me to spend 1968–69 living in Washington, D.C., in a commune linked to a New Left think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies. It was an intense year. There were antiwar protests and rallies, teach-ins and many meetings. I was brought into contact with student and antiwar movement leaders, several of whom stayed with us when in D.C. A young Washington Post journalist, Carl Bernstein – later of Watergate fame – found us interesting enough for a long positive article.

My experience in the movement, seeing how much courage and commitment it took to challenge the powers-that-be from inside “the belly of the beast,” made me especially sympathetic to the American left. Over the years, I increasingly came to see the darker side of the United States: a people too easily susceptible to purveyors of “fake news.”

Sadly, I have lost touch with almost all of my confrères and consœurs from those heady days. One exception is Derek Shearer, who was much involved in local politics in “the People’s Republic of Santa Monica,” California, and who invited me to visit Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he taught. Our acquaintance was renewed when I was based in Stockholm, researching Nordic social democracy, and he was President Clinton’s Ambassador to Finland.

Conversations with Derek – such as a recent one about the characterization of Tom Hayden, with whom he had worked in Santa Monica, in Aaron Sorkin’s Trial of the Chicago 7 – continue to provide insight into American politics. Derek will bring us up to date with his reflections on current developments in an article in the Summer/Fall 2021 issue of Inroads.

Here he focuses on the racial dimension of American life, going back to his earliest experiences. I was acutely aware of this dimension when I lived in Washington. Just going ten blocks east from our comfortable setting in the city’s northwest, one entered an entirely different world. But I came to know it essentially as an outside observer. Not so for Derek, who begins this insightful article as follows: “Growing up in the United States after World War II, one could not escape the effects of systemic racism – no matter how liberal and well-intentioned a White person might be.”

Click to read Growing Up White by Derek Shearer.

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr

In late October, when I wrote the first draft of this editorial, the polls showed Joe Biden leading Donald Trump by 10 per cent. In that draft, I asked whether this result could lead the Republican Party to eschew Trumpism and return to an earlier, more consensual form of politics if invited to do so by the new President. I concluded that the Democrats could not expect this and should instead make reforming political institutions their priority.

The goal would be to undo the damage caused by the unabashed gerrymandering the Republicans had been doing. Since the 1980s, when the time came for the decennial reapportionment of districts based on population shifts revealed in the census, Republican state legislatures have been especially eager to carve out boundaries to favour their candidates. Typically, central city district boundaries were drawn to include the largest possible number of Democratic (often largely minority) voters and place the rest of the urban population in districts extending into the Republican hinterland, resulting in a false “red” majority in the House of Representatives as well as state legislatures. And with each state, large or small, having two senators, no gerrymandering is needed to ensure that small deindustrializing states are massively overrepresented in the Senate (as well as, to a lesser extent, in the Electoral College), their “red” voters persuaded that immigrants and minorities responsible for their plight run the Democratic Party.

In light of the election results, some rethinking is required. The Biden-Harris ticket’s popular vote margin was four percentage points – much lower than the eight-point margin the final polls predicted, primarily because of especially high turnout among Republicans. Thus Trump was defeated, but Trumpism was not marginalized, and Republicans did significantly better than expected at the congressional and state levels. My guess is that the main explanation for this lies in the GOP door-to-door and mass-rally “stop socialism” campaign, a level of campaigning the Democrats responsibly eschewed because of the pandemic.

What matters most of all, of course is that Trump, to the relief of the civilized world, is on his way out. For all his huffing and puffing, he cannot reverse his defeat in the courts, though most of his supporters will continue to believe his unfounded assertions that the election was stolen. Such an erosion of confidence in the legitimacy of the election process is dangerous in a democracy, at the core of which is losers accepting the results of an election.

Overall, despite concerns, the election went smoothly: American democratic institutions proved resilient. Joe Biden will be inaugurated as President, of a deeply divided country, in January. Still uncertain, as I write this, is what Trump will do in his remaining weeks in office. Once his groundless challenges are rejected, he will lose congressional support if he continues to obstruct the transition. His priority at that point will be to seek pardons and other unsavory deals to keep out of jail and stave off bankruptcy.

From the perspective of those of us focused on the United States from abroad, what matters is that in the most powerful country in the world, corrupt ideologues are giving way to competent professionals taking charge of U.S. foreign and environmental policy. Had Trump been reelected, the few remaining civil servants who could rein him in would have been replaced by ignorant hacks. As Ron Susskind wrote in the New York Times on October 30,

That guy you saw in the debate … bullying, ridiculing, manic, boasting, fabricating, relentlessly interrupting and talking over his opponent. That’s really him … He was all but un-briefable. He couldn’t seem to take in complex information about policy choices … in Oval Office meetings …. He’d switch subjects, go on crazy tangents, abuse and humiliate people, cut them off midsentence … In the middle of a briefing, turn away and … phone … Fox television hosts like Sean Hannity or Lou Dobbs … would instantly become the key voice in the debate … Senior officials … during briefings … would ask Trump friends, members of Congress, assorted notables — to call Mr. Trump not letting on who had put them up to it.

Out of office, will he remain in the political spotlight? Trump’s deciding to be a poor loser, going on TV to mouth outrageous lies about the voting process, weakened him before the court of public opinion and among the inner circles of the Republican Party, if not among the Trumpites. Had he accepted defeat gracefully, he would have been left in a stronger position to shape the future of his party and face his creditors as well as prosecutors, judges and juries. Whatever happens, he will be spending the rest of his life bemoaning how all this could have been avoided if others (not him, ever) had not made the mistakes that lost him the shield of the presidency, including (completely without foundation) conspiring to delay annoucement of the discovery of a vaccine against COVID-19.

But he and his admirers will be around to keep Republicans from acting responsibly. Given the unexpectedly close election results, there will be no second-guessing about their defeat or public repudiation of Trump. Instead they will focus on winning the 2022 midterms. In the interval, they will have to decide to what extent they will try to undermine Biden the way they undermined Obama under Mitch McConnell’s leadership. Much will depend on the outcome of the two Senate runoffs in Georgia, a state unexpectedly, but very narrowly, won by Biden. To have a chance of winning both, rather than fighting on local issues, the Democrats will effectively have to ask voters not to let McConnell once again thwart the agenda of the President they elected.

If that strategy proves successful, and as Trump gradually becomes further discredited with each revelation about his financial shenanigans and criminal activity, a door to some across-the-aisle congressional cooperation could open. Could, say, Susan Collins, who won her Senate seat in Maine while Biden won the state by an even greater margin, threaten to jump ship? I do not rule out such a scenario, but overall I remain pessimistic. Republicans know that, under American institutions, continued polarization assures their return to power down the road.

Among Democrats, soul-searching over the disappointing result is inevitable, but hopefully will not degenerate into a futile blame game between moderates and progressives. The incoming Biden Administration will have its hands full undoing the Trumpian damage at home and abroad, playing a constructive role in addressing climate change, migration, and antidemocratic developments around the world. Biden must be given the space to seek bipartisan support for such efforts, even if they lead nowhere.

So what should the forces mobilized by the Democratic Party against Trump do now? The immediate task is to win the Senate – if not in the Georgia runoffs then in the 2022 midterms. Priority should be placed on efforts to get enough states to inhibit gerrymandering and establish nonpartisan redistricting commissions. More states should adopt the rule that their Electoral College votes will go to the winner of the national popular vote. A second priority is to reduce the impact of money in politics by capping campaign contributions and spending, and by requiring campaigns to publicly disclose the amounts as well the identity of the people or entities that finance political advertising.

Should there be sufficient support for such efforts, the Democrats’ campaign should seek a mandate in 2024 for more sweeping institutional changes that would make it harder for a Trumpian minority to return to power. Such changes would give Republicans an incentive to turn their focus away from angry voters in small red states toward more moderate suburban voters in purple states.

Part of this process would entail making it possible for more candidates from third parties to get elected by eliminating the obstacles to their even getting on the ballot. As it stands, an outsider entering U.S. electoral politics, confronted by such obstacles, effectively has no choice but to enter the primary of a major party, usually the dominant one in the district. The pure two-party system is thus reinforced. This was less of a problem when there was room in the parties for a wide spectrum of views, but now, especially with a Republican Party that demands ideological purity and loyalty to the chief, it is pernicious. If these obstacles were removed, it would make it possible for Never Trump Republicans to win traditionally Republican suburban districts.

Unless and until the American party system becomes more open, the danger will persist. The content of populist demagogy in the United States is like that in old democracies elsewhere, but only in the United States has it come to dominate a major mainstream political party capable of winning a (false) majority. Until the institutions that facilitate this are changed, the way will remain open for an equally dangerous demagogue – one with fewer personality flaws than Trump – to usher in the next populist wave.

Modern liberal democracy is understood to combine majoritarian decision making, respect for the rights of minorities and freedom of expression. In the context of what is happening today, we need to add another dimension: the capacity to resolve disagreement through appeals to objective facts. This is new. In the lifetime of my boomer generation, we have assumed that while liberal democracies would always contain extremists living in their own realities, these would be kept to a politically ineffective minority and the great majority would accept that “you are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.”

More concretely, the willingness and ability of most citizens in liberal democracies to make decisions based on objective facts has been an unstated assumption in the academic literature assessing and comparing levels and effects of political knowledge, to which I have contributed for the last two decades. The generally low level of political knowledge detected in this research in the United States – and, typically to a lesser extent, elsewhere – has generally thus been understood as a manifestation of low political interest and attentiveness.

Usually, we found that the many respondents who lacked basic political knowledge were also politically passive. While we were concerned about the negative effect on the quality of democracy of a large and apparently growing proportion of citizens deficient in what I termed “civic literacy,” and the tendency of these citizens to become “political dropouts,” we did not see this as a threat to democracy per se. It was assumed that when circumstances warranted, they would become more attentive, seeking out missing information via mass communications media that could be counted on, as long as freedom of expression and the press was guaranteed, to adequately provide the needed facts.

These assumptions allowed us to treat a wrong answer to a political knowledge question as equivalent to “don’t know.” In other words, we assumed that being misinformed was, for research purposes, no different from being uninformed. Recent developments force us to question these assumptions, something we are just beginning to do. As I have been closely following developments in the contemporary United States, I have concluded that we can no longer count on the large number of politically misinformed Americans to be open to becoming informed.

The academic literature has not yet caught up with these developments, however. I could find only one research paper investigating the distinction between uninformed and misinformed, and it uses European data. Three U.K.-based political scientists, Stijn van Kessel, Javier Sajuria and Steven M. Van Hauwaert, test “to what extent misinformation, i.e. the possession of erroneous political information, stimulates populist party support. Survey data from nine European democracies populist party supporters differ from abstainers and non-populist party supporters in terms of their political information and misinformation, … political misinformation relates positively to support for right-wing populist parties.”¹

It’s time to build into our analysis and research the reality that for many Trump supporters, political ignorance is not a matter of being uninformed, but rather of being systematically misinformed. They are ignorant by the standards of our political knowledge tests, but they do not see themselves that way – quite the opposite. This reality requires rethinking the assumptions underlying an entire body of literature, addressing worrisome possibilities only now being perceived. As Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes put it in a 2017 Brookings Institution study:

The literature on voter ignorance is one of the oldest, best established, and most dismaying in all of political science … In recent years, however, a wave of research has shown ignorance and irrationality to be even bigger problems than previously believed … Neither theory nor practice supports the idea that in an environment dominated by extreme partisans and narrow interest groups.²

Recent findings substantiate these concerns. We begin with a 2018 online survey of 2,606 American adults online by Ian Anson of the University of Maryland as to their political knowledge.³ He found that those who performed worse were more likely to overestimate their performance. “When I asked partisans to ‘grade’ political knowledge quizzes filled out by fictional members of the other party, low-skilled respondents gave out scores that reflected party biases much more than actual knowledge.” This was especially the case among Republicans.

Similarly, in 2018, two political scientists at Brigham Young University, Michael Barber and Jeremy Pope, carried out online surveys of almost 1,600 respondents who completed a political knowledge quiz, which asked five questions. Group loyalty, they found, “is the stronger motivator of opinion than are any ideological principles.” Republicans use partisan cues to judge peers’ political knowledge to a greater extent than do Democrats, coinciding with the polarization in the American electorate: “Low-knowledge respondents, strong Republicans, Trump-approving respondents, and self-described conservatives are the most likely to behave like party loyalists by accepting the Trump cue.”⁴

Richard Fording of the University of Alabama and Sanford Schram of Hunter College in New York reported in 2017 on a study concluding that the Trump campaign exploited a void of facts and reasoning among “low information voters … that made them more vulnerable to relying on emotions about Mexican immigrants, Muslim refugees, and African-American citizens, as well as their disdain for the first African-American President, Barack Obama, … Trump supporters less in a position to want or be able to question Trump’s … campaign of misstatements, untruths, and lies.”⁵ They noted that in 2016 preference for Trump among those low in political knowledge was 20 per cent higher than among others, yet nothing similar had been found in 2012 about preferences for Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

What we are seeing thus is politically motivated ignorance: the misinformed not only assume that they are informed, but they dismiss anyone challenging their (mis)understanding as being politically motivated and, if anything, become even more convinced of the untruths they believe to be true. Hence Trump’s support has proven effectively unshakable despite revelations of the more than 17,000 false or misleading statements he has uttered in office at the time of this writing, according to fact-checkers (see box 1).

Hence the negative portrayal of Trump in the media has, if anything, bolstered his supporters in their views: the more strongly his statements – however distant from the facts – attack the “elitist liberals” or “the Democrats,” the more fervent their support appears to be. As one supporter told conservative commentator David Brooks, “This is war and he is our leader” – a war against, notably, the “lamestream” news organizations, the “enemies of the American people.”

Politically the priority for Trump is to mobilize his hard-core base, composed primarily of older, white, less educated, more rural males in the “red” states, which are overrepresented in the Senate and Electoral College. He seeks to train their attention away from his own policies and toward opposing an unpatriotic, overeducated, out-of-touch urban elite.

At this writing, this base remains large enough to effectively keep Republican legislators, who fear defeat in the primaries more than in the general election, in line. Hence the solid congressional support for Trump during impeachment, even though, as Alex Carp notes in the January 6 issue of New York magazine, “some of Trump’s most loyal supporters in Congress despise him in private.” Carp explains why with a quote from veteran Republican strategist Rick Wilson:

A friend of mine, a member of Congress, went home to a town-hall meeting, and a guy asks him, “Are you going to be with Mr. Trump 100 percent of the time?” And he goes, “Well, look, I support Donald Trump and I want to help him, and we agree on many things. But I represent this district. If there’s something the president wants to do and it’s good for us, we’re absolutely going to do it. If it’s something that’s bad for our district, I’m going to oppose it.” By the time he left the stage, his wife had death threats. His kids had death threats.

Most Republican elites who are appalled by Trump as a person are, it would appear, still more appalled by policies seeking to redistribute wealth. They continue to support him, just as their libertarian views have not impeded them from supporting social-conservative causes opposed to the rise of secularism and seeking to maintain traditional gender relations in order to attract votes to the Republican side.

Seeing the mainstream media as the enemy, the Trumpites look elsewhere for information. As a result, they seldom need to reject information contesting their understanding, since it doesn’t reach them in the first place. Indeed, less and less communication crosses the political divide. Here exceptional American institutions play a key part, beginning with the media environment. The Trumpites get their information from Fox News and other pro-Trump electronic media sources like Breitbart, Sinclair, Trinity Broadcasting Network and Nexstar.

One study analyzing millions of American news stories concluded that, unlike most news outlets that seek to adhere to facts and run corrections of false reports, conservative media are more concerned with confirming their audience’s biases, fearing angry reactions to exposures of falsehoods from core viewers.⁶ Moreover, as Jane Mayer noted in the New Yorker on March 11, 2019, on Fox News when falsehoods are exposed, core viewers often react angrily, noting that after Fox News anchor Shepard Smith contradicted Trump’s scaremongering about immigrants, viewers lashed out at him on social media.

Beneath the surface, added to the one-sided information Trumpites get from the pro-Trump media, are their links to social media that render them prey to “deep fakes.” Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower about Cambridge Analytica, has explained how this was done in an important new book (reviewed by Arthur Milner elsewhere in this issue).⁷ Box 2 gives a taste of Wylie’s revelations.

As Aaron Rupar reported on March 3,

According to data compiled by CrowdTangle, the most total interactions on Facebook came on a Fox News article about a federal judge granting a request from a right-wing group named Judicial Watch to make Clinton sit for a sworn deposition about her use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.

In fact, as this is written early Tuesday afternoon, stories from right-wing sources about Clinton’s emails represent three of the top 10 and five of the 20 top-performing news stories on Facebook over the past 24 hours …

What you won’t find in Facebook’s top 20 news stories, however, is Super Tuesday coverage, anything published by a left-of-center outlet, or anything that’s critical of President Donald Trump or his administration …

What explains the predominance of right-wing outlets on Facebook? According to Judd Legum, who reports extensively on Facebook in his Popular Information newsletter …

“Facebook is optimized for Trump supporters … It rewards engagement, which mostly reflects an emotional reaction to things. Support for Trump is largely emotional, not factual. So pro-Trump content does very very well.” …

Legum has detailed how Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire spreads its content around Facebook with help from “a clandestine network of 14 large Facebook pages that purport to be independent but exclusively promote content from The Daily Wire in a coordinated fashion.”⁸

As a result, conservatives’ voices are the loudest on Facebook. According to an investigation put together last year by David Uberti for Vice, the Fox News Facebook page had a higher engagement rate (the average number of engagements per post per follower) than that of any other major news organization over the same period, and some five times that of the New York Times.

Along with the uninformed and the misinformed, we thus have, among the latter, the disinformed – a word that should exist if it doesn’t yet. According to McKay Coppins in a recent article in the Atlantic,

In conversations with political strategists and other experts, a dystopian picture of the general election comes into view – one shaped by coordinated bot attacks, Potemkin local-news sites, micro-targeted fearmongering, and anonymous mass texting … The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history … The wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable.

In the academic literature, three concepts have emerged seeking to make sense of the Trumpite phenomenon. The most common is populism, which is in fact not an “ism,” since it has no programmatic content beyond seeking to keep outsiders out of the country and identifying with the interests of the native-born and against elites siding with outsiders against “the people.” There has been a significant recent increase in interest among academics in the spread of populism. Below is an excerpt from the call for papers to the September 2019 American Political Science Association meeting, a call which drew scores of papers, something inconceivable at earlier similar meetings:

No recent political development has been more striking than the rise to power of self-identified populist movements around the globe, whose main unifying trait is their claim to champion “the people” against entrenched selfish “elites.” These movements display differences that have sparked debates over which, if any, should be called “populist”; how they compare with past “populisms”; and what “populism” is. The current partisans, often labeled populist, have more often been on the right than the left, including anti-immigrant, anti-globalization, ardently nationalist parties such as Fidesz in Hungary; the Law and Justice Party in Poland; and the Trump Republicans in the United States.

While in most democratic countries populists have formed new parties, in the context of the rigid U.S. two-party system, they instead moved to take over the Republican Party, mobilizing enough registered Republicans to deny renomination to insufficiently loyal legislators.

The term populist does not fully capture this intensity of feeling and one-sided perception of reality. An alternative that has been suggested is tribalism. This is a form of emotional identification that transcends ideology, which the Trumpites have manifested in casually jettisoning Republican orthodoxy on trade, entitlements, international alliances, the FBI and other matters. The attitude of dedicated followers of sports teams, for whom all calls by the referee not favouring their team are evidence of bias, is often described as tribal. In such cases, tribalism is usually – though not always – harmless. Tribalism in politics, however, is not harmless. In a 2019 article, Jonathan Rauch analyzed the changing nature of American partisanship:

What we fear, we tend also to hate … Partisans are not so much rallying for a cause or party they believe in as banding together to fight a collective enemy — psychologically and politically a very different kind of proposition … Fans of opposing political parties perceive different facts and take different policy views depending on which party lines up on which side. Presenting people with facts that challenge an identity- or group-defining opinion does not work … Both academic research and real-world politics over the past few years suggest that a purely political or ideological account of polarization is incomplete. We are up against a kind of tribalism here that is deeper and tougher than we had imagined.⁹

Another relevant concept is that of cult. Congressman Joe Walsh was quoted by Guardian reporter David Smith at the Iowa caucuses on February 2:

My party is a cult. I’m a conservative Republican; Fox News won’t have me on. Conservative media will ignore me because they’re a cult with Trump. The Republican parties in each state: they are a cult for Trump … Every time I’m out there talking primarily to Republican voters, because that’s what I’m trying to do, there are a lot of Republicans that get angry at me and we get threats every day and it can get ugly.

Similarly, in a column on January 10 in the Los Angeles Times, Virginia Heffernan concluded that “the Trump cult will define American politics for decades to come, even after its dear leader is gone.” She cited “Steven Hassan, an expert in cults and an ex-Moonie published ‘The Cult of Trump’ … When polled, far too many Republicans come across as lost to paranoia and factually unmoored talking points, just the way Hassan was lost to Sun Myung Moon a ‘radical personal change.’” Heffernan added,

Journalists Luke O’Neil and Edwin Lyngar, as well as Jen Senko in “The Brainwashing of My Dad,” have compiled stories of Americans who have gone over. O’Neil summarized the transformation this way: “A loved one … sat down in front of Fox News, found some kind of deep, addictive comfort in the anger and paranoia, and became a different person.”

To sum up, there is something new and disquieting taking place in modern Western democratic societies, especially the United States. To what extent this is reminiscent of Germany, Italy and Spain in the 1930s, I will leave to historians. But having watched Republican legislators succumb to threats from the Trumpite cult, one needs to be concerned. It is fair to expect that were Trump to be reelected, he would use every bit of his power to wreak vengeance on his opponents, unleashing his supporters to report insufficiently loyal government employees and attack his critics in the media – hopefully only online.

As of this writing, the effective nomination of Joe Biden and the economic effects of the coronavirus have reduced the chances of Trump winning the presidency and Republicans controlling Congress. Yet this will be an election like no other. Trump knows that it is only the presidency that is keeping him from bankruptcy – his hotels no longer propped up by courtiers – and probably jail.

Yet nothing is certain. How, if one is used to waging a campaign against another party, does one wage a campaign against a cult?

The best prospect is that Trump will lose the election decisively and leave the scene without shouting too loud about having been cheated and thus giving rise to violent reactions among the Trumpites. But even so, given the skewed American political institutions and polarized media, the Trumpian world will remain after he is gone.

But the longer term is cloudier. While in the current medical emergency the populist attack on expertise has lost some of its appeal even in the United States, the Trumpite base isn’t going anywhere. In power, Democrats will be saddled with a huge national and international economic challenge, with levels of debt higher than anyone can remember. And they will have to make hard choices in the face of inevitable hardships. Unless the emerging generation has learned its lessons, we can expect that, probably sooner rather than later, the next wave of Trumpites will sweep our neighbours to the south.

Continue reading “Politically Motivated Ignorance and the Cult of Trump” →

The main theme of this issue is the Canadian election campaign and its results. It turns out that Canada is different from the other countries featured in this and the previous issue: the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Belgium, Italy, Turkey, Hungary, France and, as always, the United States. In each case, the focus is on the emergence of populist parties, themes and leaders. In Canada, as the reports from the different regions in this issue illustrate, regional differences still predominate. Just as they overshadowed class cleavages in the past, they now seem to inhibit the emergence of populist themes and parties. But this inhibiting effect could only be temporary if regional resentment grows, following the Flemish example described here by Ruth Dassonneville.

In the United States, we will be watching to see if Donald Trump’s populist base remains loyal and can be mobilized in his defence, as the impeachment process further exposes his efforts to pressure Ukraine and perhaps other countries to dig up dirt on his political opponents, ignore congressional subpoenas, refuse to turn over documents, and use his office to enrich his businesses. Trump, as Fareed Zakaria put it in the Washington Post on September 26, is “a particularly egregious example misbehavior fits a global trend.”¹ This trend includes British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey and Viktor Orbán of Hungary. Zakaria adds ominously that, as data compiled by Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk show,

Across the globe, enthusiasm for autocrats has grown. Between 1995 and 2014, there were large increases in the share of people who would like to see “a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections,” growing by nearly 10 percentage points in the United States, almost 20 points in Spain and South Korea, and around 25 points in Russia and South Africa …

Add to this the rising reality of tribal politics – the sense that each of us is on a team and that our team is always in the right. Tribalism is the enemy of institutions, norms and the rule of law … Political parties used to act as gatekeepers … forcing their members to adhere to certain rules. But parties are old-fashioned … Politicians can now raise money and gain a following through direct appeals to the public, using social media to exploit the very anger and emotion that parties often used to moderate. The key enabler of American populism has been the Republican Party.

I would add another dimension to this development. The old class-based cleavage that situates people on a left-right axis, still common in academic analysis and poll taking, is largely out of date. A more relevant axis is populist-liberal. The new cleavage sets urban dwellers, who welcome diversity, against people in rural and decaying industrial areas. While experts like political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, in their recent book about populism titled Cultural Backlash,² still depict populism in left-versus-right terms, the reality is not so simple. In a study summarized in the Social Europe Newsletter on September 26, Caroline Marie Lancaster cites data from the European Social Survey testing for “traditionalism” (whether women should be allowed to work outside the home and gay and lesbian people should be allowed to “live life as they wish”) and “authoritarianism” (the desire for strong government and belief that laws and rules should be respected), as well as attitudes toward immigration and whether European integration has “gone too far”:

I found three broad types of radical-right voters. The “conservative nativists” comprised about a quarter of my sample … They are older, less educated and more likely to be men. They prefer traditional family structures and strong government and are highly opposed to immigration and European integration. The second class are termed the “sexually-modern nativists.”  About a third of radical-right voters fall into this group … These voters are only slightly less nationalist than the conservatives. However, in other regards, they look like leftists: they’re younger, highly educated, more likely to be women, and are not opposed to gender egalitarianism and LGBT rights. A third group falls in between these two extremes, taking more moderate positions …

In 2004, only 12% were sexually-modern. However, in 2016, almost half – 45 per cent – fell into this category. Indeed, there is variation across the ten countries in my study – Austria and Switzerland have more conservative radical right voters, while other countries, like the Netherlands and Sweden, are less conservative – but the general trend remains.³

Her explanation for this trend has to do with opposition to immigration and, to a lesser extent, the European Union:

In the aftermath of the European sovereign-debt crisis of the late 2000s and the Syrian-refugee crisis of the mid-2010s, immigration policy … achieved unprecedented electoral importance. Because the radical right is believed to be the party family most capable of handling these issues, voters flocked to parties like the Alternative for Germany and the Sweden Democrats … No longer can we dismiss the radical right as the party family of angry old men, reacting against a changing society. Now, women and gay men are likely to be found within their ranks, alongside voters who, if not for their immigration attitudes, might be confused for leftists.

This dynamic applies to the U.K. and its cleavage over Brexit – which also does not fall along the traditional left-right, Labour-Tory axis – although not to the United States. When it comes to the Trumpites, who have at least temporarily driven most Never Trumpers out of the Republican Party, the proportion supporting gender egalitarianism and LGBT rights cannot be very high. Here another dimension must be brought into the explanation – knowledge, or rather lack of it. I have explored this dimension in my research comparing Western democracies. Americans turn out to have the largest proportion of adults deficient in basic civic literacy, making them easy prey for the distortions of Trump’s surrogates on Fox News, radio talk shows and social media.

I was in Scotland and England for a few days in September, where I watched the Brexit debate in Parliament with British friends. The apparent failure of the British with their heralded unwritten constitution to “muddle through” when faced with this divisive issue came as something of a shock. As in the United States, facts seem to have little effect: the country is split ideologically. Anecdotes abound. A friend told us of an organized group tour of Sicily in which the one pro-Leave couple was effectively isolated. Similarly, in one local pub, where you used to go in one door and out the other, thus greeting your neighbours on the way in or out, there is now, effectively, a Remain door and a Leave door, and the two groups have nothing to say to each other.

The very watchable, intense debate in the British House of Commons was ultimately frustrating. The Leavers didn’t bother trying to defend Leave on its merits; they repeated endlessly that it is a matter of democracy – the people have spoken. Nor would they talk concretely about what would happen without a deal. Boris Johnson evoked nonexistent negotiations in Brussels, arguing that only the prospect of an imminent no-deal Brexit would cause the EU to budge. A game of chicken with very high stakes.

The evolution of the British Conservatives parallels that of their American cousins. The Tories are no longer the party of Disraeli and Churchill: like the GOP, the Conservative Party is becoming a populist party, with the moderates – several of whom were leading, longstanding figures in the party, who publicly opposed Boris Johnson and supported the motion to ask the EU for more time – being forced out. In contrast, in the United States anti-Trump Republican legislators are, with very few exceptions, so far keeping their dissent private, held in line by the risk of being denied renomination in a primary.

Since my return to Canada, Johnson has put a little water in his wine and concocted a slightly modified version of Theresa May’s three-times-rejected Brexit deal. The EU has endorsed this new deal, and Johnson presented it to Parliament with expectation of quick passage. Parliament insisted on slowing down the process to enable review. At the time of writing (October 31), Parliament has voted in favour of the deal in principle, but intends to examine it clause by clause, forcing Johnson to obtain a further extension from Brussels on the U.K. leaving the EU. MPs may well amend the deal by, for example, stipulating that the U.K. remain in the EU customs union or attaching the requirement of ratification by a second referendum. Johnson and the hard Brexiteers want neither of these amendments.

The calling of an early election for December 12 has opened up a new chapter in the neverending Brexit melodrama. The struggle over Brexit, like most of the other struggles engendered by the rise of populism, remains resistant to easy resolution.

Continue reading “Can The British Muddle Through?” →

As a Canadian I shouldn’t be much concerned about the internal affairs of an American political party, the Democrats, as they go about nominating their candidate for president. But I am, and others like me should be too. The reason is that the nominee will, almost certainly, be taking on Donald Trump. From where I stand, writing in early May 2019, the best choice would be Joe Biden.

I am not a Joe Biden fan per se. Among the 20+ who are campaigning for the job, I am sure I could find a dozen whom I might prefer as the Democratic nominee over him. Were this an ordinary contest, were the Republican candidate William Weld, or John Kasich, or even Mitt Romney, I would urge Americans to look carefully at the programs of all the Democratic candidates, especially Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker.

But this no ordinary election. There is only one overriding issue for the United States and, indeed, for the democratic world, and that is getting Donald Trump out of office. The consequences of giving him another four years are simply too horrible to contemplate. It amounts to removing a cancer so as to restore the body to health. Admittedly, as is often the case, the cancer goes deeper than the visible lump that is Trump; there will be Trumpites after Trump in the American body politic. Nevertheless, leaving it in place is too risky an option.

In this context, the fundamental theme of the Democratic presidential campaign must be to restore normality. Biden put it eloquently in announcing his candidacy on April 25: “We are in the battle for the soul of this nation … History will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time. But if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation.”

Biden is wrong in the sense that Trump is a symptom as much as an aberration. But it is nevertheless this message that will find the most resonance in the key, largely white-working-class, states that got Trump over the top last time. Biden, with all his flaws, indeed because of them, constitutes the best expression of this message.

There are younger candidates – Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke come to mind – whose messages run along the same lines. But they do not incarnate this normality in who they are, as Biden does. Indeed, many of the other candidates have articulated useful policy proposals that will emerge in the primary debates. One thinks of Bernie Sanders here, but Sanders represents the greatest risk. His record makes him anything but a return to normality, reminiscent – in only this sense – of Trump.

If Democrats insist on choosing a candidate from a different generation, they will have no shortage to choose from. And someone may emerge in the process, especially if Biden runs a poor campaign. Still, it is riskier, since Biden’s long public record means that with all their resources, the Republicans won’t be able to paint him as other than he is. Can we be sure of the same about the other candidates?

As David Brooks of the New York Times, who has covered Biden for years, put it, “He came from a principled family, and he and his wife have nurtured a principled family.” The contrast with Trump could not be more apparent. Moreover, any attempt to draw attention to his faults, typical of a male of an earlier generation, will only draw attention to the same faults, magnified 10 times, in Trump.

Hence, from my perspective, the best outcome in 2020 would be four years of Joe Biden working with a Democratic Congress to explore and, where appropriate, to apply the best ideas emerging from the campaign. I only hope Democratic activists will show the needed patience to accept such a scenario.