Salena Zito is proving herself the most insightful political analyst on the scene today. I recommend that you read her most recent New York Post column in full. Her message: the 2016 presidential election was no fluke.
America’s political experts got it wrong in 2016 — not because they took too few polls, but because they made the false assumption that American elections are immune to societal change.
They are, in large part, still getting things wrong, not only by failing to understand a new group of voters who put President Donald Trump in the White House but also by ignoring why they voted the way they did.
When explaining the Trump voter, the media usually offers portraits of isolated, uneducated, working-class rubes who are driven by anger, race and nationalism. To the experts and those who didn’t support Trump, it’s hard for them to see it any other way.
And while the media obsesses over the future demise of the president, they aren’t pausing to consider the strength and durability of the coalition that swept him into office.
They aren’t asking why people in the Rust Belt counties who voted for former President Barack Obama twice suddenly switched to Trump.
A broad swath of Americans have voted for change in three consecutive presidential elections, twice for Barack Obama and the third time for Donald Trump. They aren’t pulling back from that. They’re becoming more vehement. I don’t believe that Americans are going to start voting for a “return to normalcy” any time soon.
To my mind the only real question is the directionality of the change they’ll vote for. I’d like to see more people voting for change that has a chance of working. I think it’s possible for the Democrats to recapture the White House in 2020 but if they position themselves as the party of the federal bureaucracy, they’ll lose.
Just as a thought experiment take any given issue. Will that problem be solved by higher federal taxes, more concentration of power in Washington, or more federal regulations? How about by buying more goods from China? How about unrestricted immigration?
“A broad swath of Americans have voted for change in three consecutive presidential elections, ”
And in Congressional, State, Municipal and animal control (dog catcher) elections. The change is right on schedule. See: https://tinyurl.com/yauobjt8
“Just as a thought experiment take any given issue. Will that problem be solved by higher federal taxes, more …”
The next election will depend, as always, on the question “are you better off now than you were four years ago?”. The biggest political mistake is to assume that “better off” is strictly an economic matter.
I quote Russell Kirk:
“The great line of demarcation in modern politics, Eric Voegelin used to point out, is not a division between liberals on one side and totalitarians on the other. No, on one side of that line are all those men and women who fancy that the temporal order is the only order, and that material needs are their only needs, and that they may do as they like with the human patrimony. On the other side of that line are all those people who recognize an enduring moral order in the universe, a constant human nature, and high duties toward the order spiritual and the order temporal.”
The alternative questions, some of them, would be…
Will those problems be made better by cutting taxes mostly for rich people? By poor and lower middle class people not having health insurance? By extending the wars in the ME? By going to war with Iran while catering to KSA? With an Israel first policy? By getting rid of our top tier univesities? By favoring one religion over others?
Steve
I don’t think so (although the only way that everybody can get all of the health care they may want is by cutting the pay of providers substantially and probably not even then). All of that is why people are voting for change. Neither political party is offering it.
Is anyone in any political party advocating that? I haven’t heard of it.
Religion is a bit of a sticky wicket. Islamism is not equivalent to Islam even though some including some Muslims think it is. I think that Islamism is a political belief that should not be accorded the status of a religion and we’re entitled to oppose it and disfavor it.
Almost no one directly advocates getting rid of our top tier schools, but then almost no one really advocates for unrestricted immigration. There were plans for special taxes that would affect only the top tier places, and the tax changes in the “tax cuts” will make it harder to fund them.
Neither party presents us with very good choices.
Steve
If you don’t believe that anyone should be excluded, you believe in unrestricted immigration. That covers almost every Congressional Democrat and a lot of the Republicans, too.
Trying to extend the analogy to top tier schools is tough but I guess the analogy would be federal funding. I don’t think a single top tier university would close if federal funding for them were ended although it might hurt many of the lower tier schools.
“Just as a thought experiment take any given issue. Will that problem be solved by higher federal taxes, more concentration of power in Washington, or more federal regulations? How about by buying more goods from China? How about unrestricted immigration?”
No, but the problem is it also won’t be solved by the “conservative” measures favored by the GoP.
I still think there is something to the argument that 2016 was more about anti-establishment than the same old elite partisan divide. I don’t know how that is going to play out in the future.
No, but the problem is it also won’t be solved by the “conservative†measures favored by the GoP.
I mostly agree with this but it misses the point. Conservatism (at least in theory) favors limitation of the federal government not because of a belief that this will solve problems, but rather to avoid the creation of secondary problems where the solution is worse than the original problem. It’s a “first, do no harm” philosophy.
CStanley,
I don’t think that kind of conservatism exists anymore. The “do no harm” principle is violated constantly by modern conservatives, who are more accurately described as right-wing activists.
That’s like saying that Leninism (in theory) favors the dictatorship of the proletariat. Somehow it always works out as more dictatorship, less proletariat.
I prefer “Right Bolsheviks”.