Thursday, July 12, 2018

Libertarians

Libertarians
American Political Issues by Tech Resist (@TecSiGuy), 2016 Dem! - was independent – used to lean “right”


Libertarian lies and hoaxes yield abject poverty.
1. Here’s a libertarian hoax. Decentralization is a macroeconomic tenant.
2. “Americans for Prosperity = prosperity for the 1%.
3. Gops are turning workers into serfs/slaves.  They promote: “Economic freedom” for their donor class.



Blame is the key to Gop propaganda, so believers can feel superior. Paint a gloomy picture of “others” to detest.
How to justify meanness?

It's not easy to be cruel to someone who is down and out. After all, most of us feel ashamed when walking by a homeless person or watching kids crammed into over-crowded classrooms. It requires several psychological twists and turns to make life even harder for low-income Americans.

1. You have to blame low-income parents for their own economic problems. Even if the unemployment rate is sky-high it must be the poor person’s fault.

2. You need to feel superior — that somehow you got to where you are today not by an accident of birth but rather by your own hard labors. Anyone not as successful as you, by definition, is inferior.

3. You have to believe that meanness really is tough love — that by taking benefits away from the poor you are actually helping them on the road to self-sufficiency.

4. It’s helpful to have access to the broader Randian/libertarian philosophy that argues all forms of collective government action are an attack on freedom. In this view, altruism is seen as a curse that justifies collective government programs which essentially steal money from the makers and to waste on the takers. All collective caring by the state, therefore, is evil, so that all support for the poor via government is evil as well.

5. It’s psychologically crucial to have your prejudices confirmed by charismatic alchemists like Ayn Rand, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan who peddle selfishness as the highest form of morality (although only Ayn Rand had the guts to say it so bluntly).


“THE THEORISTS OF THE MOOCHER CLASS: VERONIQUE DE RUGY AND PAUL RYAN
Now politicians like Paul Ryan who used to say things like:
Right now, about 60 percent of the American people get more benefits in dollar value from the federal government than they pay back in taxes. So, we're going to a majority of takers versus makers...
are saying, instead:
No one is suggesting that what we call our earned entitlements – entitlements you pay for, like payroll taxes for Medicare and Social Security – are putting you in a 'taker' category. No one would suggest that whatsoever."
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/01/the-theorists-of-the-moocher-class.html

FACT CHECK: "Learn Liberty" is maintained by "Institute for Humane Studies". The Institute for Humane Studies is a libertarian opinionated fact mill whose donors include: Sarah Scaife Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the F.M. Kirby Foundation, the Marcus Foundation, the John William Pope Foundation, the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, the Ralph Smeed Private Memorial Foundation, the Koch Family Foundations, the Searle Freedom Trust, the E.L. Craig Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Sources:

Libertarian Promoted, 5 Equality Myths – It skews perspective. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jtxuy-GJwCo
5 Inequality MythsLibertarian Excuses for Unbridle Capitalism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jtxuy-GJwCo

The Poor Pay Taxes:


The “right” attacks, degrades, detests, demonizes and demoralizes the poor. Why should they have more children? To be more miserable? To have them starve or make them obsess with inadequate food assistance – because wages are too low? Why are people allowed to starve in the U.S.

Mitt Romney’s secretly recorded comment that 47 percent of Americans are “dependent on the government” and “believe they are victims” isn’t the only reason he lost the presidential campaign. But the candidate himself acknowledged after the election that the comments were “very harmful.” 

“Takers, freeloaders, moochers etc. are ALWAYS BROKE & looking for a handout! The secret to wealth can be found in giving wisely!” https://twitter.com/iamcolettarenee/status/281181159596105728


Billionaire Koch brothers network lays siege to Florida to push policy initiatives as midterms loom


  










Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Anti-tRump Strategy

Anti-tRump Strategy

American Political Issues by Tech Resist (@TecSiGuy)2016 Dem! - was independent – used to lean “right” 

These memes are a compilation of major points from the following 6 articles or perspective or analysis. We have in place an authoritarian leadership that fits with Gop beliefs and needs, but is counter to our democratic principles.

Following the memes are cited, research articles, where I got perspective - besides from Digital Demagogue - Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Trump and Twitter by Christian Fuchs.

 










The Contract with Authoritarianism


Protesters both for and against President Trump in Washington.Credit Shawn Thew/European Press photo Agency 

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality. April 5, 2018

In 1994, Newt Gingrich, brandishing his Contract with America, led a Republican revolution that swept aside Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate, initiating an epoch of conservative ascendancy that lingers on. Don Sipple, a Republican campaign consultant, declared at the time that the 1994 midterms pitted a Republican Party calling for “discipline” against a Democratic Party focused on “therapy.”

Two years later, George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at Berkeley, published “Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think,” which argued that deeply embedded in conservative and liberal politics are two different models of the family. Conservatism is based on a Strict Father model, while liberalism is centered on a Nurturant Parent model. These two models of the family give rise to different moral systems.

Several approaches to contemporary politics echo the insights of Sipple and Lakoff. The crucial word now, however, is authoritarianism.

The election of Donald Trump — built as it was on several long-term trends that converged in 2016 — has created an authoritarian moment. This somewhat surprising development is the subject of “Remaking Partisan Politics through Authoritarian Sorting,” a forthcoming book by the political scientists Christopher FedericoStanley Feldman and Christopher Weber, who argue that Three trends — polarization, media change, and the rise of what many people see as threats to the traditional social order — have contributed to a growing divide within American politics. It is a divide between those who place heavy value on social order and cohesion relative to those who value personal autonomy and independence.

The three authors use a long-established authoritarian scale — based on four survey questions about which childhood traits parents would like to see in their offspring — that asks voters to choose between independence or respect for their elders; curiosity or good manners; self-reliance or obedience; and being considerate or well-behaved. Those respondents who choose respect for elders, good manners, obedience and being well-behaved are rated more authoritarian.

The authors found that in 1992, 62 percent of white voters who ranked highest on the authoritarian scale supported George H.W. Bush. In 2016, 86 percent of the most authoritarian white voters backed Trump, an increase of 24 percentage points. Federico, Feldman and Weber conclude that Authoritarianism is now more deeply bound up with partisan identities. It has become part and parcel of Republican identity among non-Hispanic white Americans.

Last year, Federico, writing with Christopher Johnston of Duke and Howard G. Lavine of the University of Minnesota, published “Open versus Closed: Personality, Identity, and the Politics of Redistribution,” which also explores the concept of authoritarian voting.

In an email, Johnston summarized some of their findings:
Over the last few decades, party allegiances have become increasingly tied to a core dimension of personality we call “openness.” Citizens high in openness value independence, self-direction, and novelty, while those low in openness value social cohesion, certainty, and security. Individual differences in openness seem to underpin many social and cultural disputes, including debates over the value of racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity, law and order, and traditional values and social norms.

Johnston notes that personality traits like closed mindedness, along with aversion to change and discomfort with diversity, are linked to authoritarianism:
As these social and cultural conflicts have become a bigger part of our political debates, citizens have sorted into different parties based on personality, with citizens high in openness much more likely to be liberals and Democrats than those low in openness. This psychological sorting process does not line up perfectly with older partisan differences based on class, because those higher in income and education also tend to be higher in openness.

Johnston addresses class differences in voting patterns and also differences stemming from the level of a voter’s interest in politics:

An important caveat is that individuals who take a stronger interest in politics and know more about it are more likely to be sorted on the basis of openness. So, it’s really among those most “politically engaged” Democrats and Republicans where we see members of different parties diverge in openness. Moreover, sorting into different parties on the basis of openness appears to be much stronger among non-Hispanic whites than other racial and ethnic groups.

In their book, Johnston, Lavine and Federico reinforce this point:
With the rise of cultural and lifestyle politics, Democrats and Republicans are now sharply distinguished by a set of psychological dispositions related to experiential openness — a general dimension of personality tapping tolerance for threat and uncertainty in one’s environment.

The revived interest in authoritarianism in politics began well before anyone seriously considered the possibility of a Trump candidacy — except, apparently, Trump himself.

In 2009, Marc J. Hetherington of Vanderbilt and Jonathan D. Weiler of the University of North Carolina, wrote one of the fundamental texts on this topic, “Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics.

In it, Hetherington and Weiler argue that preferences about many of the new issues on the American political agenda, such as gay rights, the war in Iraq, the proper response to terrorism, and immigration are likely structured by authoritarianism.

There are “colliding conceptions of right and wrong,” they write, between those on the high and low ends of the authoritarian scale. That, in turn, makes it difficult “for one side of the political debate to understand (perhaps, in the extreme, even respect) how the other side thinks and feels.”

This October, Hetherington and Weiler will publish an elaboration on their argument, “Prius or Pickup? How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America’s Great Divide.” They are abandoning the use of the word authoritarian because of its negative connotations and its association with fascism.

In an email to me, Hetherington said that in their book he and Weiler will describe “people on opposite sides of the divide as having a fixed or fluid worldview:”
Those with a fixed worldview tend to see “American Carnage,” while those with fluid worldviews see the world as a big, beautiful place that is safe to explore. The fixed tend to be wary of what they perceive as constant threats to their
physical security specifically and of social change in general. The fluid are much more open to change and, indeed, see it as a strength. For them, anger lies in holding on to old ideas and rejecting diversity.

Hetherington and Weiler argue that the answers to questions about the four childhood traits reveal “how worldview guides a person in navigating the world,” as Hetherington put it in his email:

Not only do the answers to these questions explain preferences about race, immigration, sexual orientation, gender attitudes, the projection of military force, gun control, and just about every “culture war” issue, people’s worldviews also undergird people’s life choices. Because ‘the fixed’ are wary about the dangers around them, they prefer the country over the city. ‘The fluid’ prefer the reverse.

Political analysts have become more and more aware of how voters’ sense of themselves as liberals or conservatives, Democrats or Republicans, has taken on heightened importance. Affirming one’s political tribe or community has in many respects become more important in deciding whom to vote for than the stands candidates take on issues.

In a March paper, “Ideologues Without Issues,” Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, wrote:
The power behind the labels “liberal” and “conservative” to predict strong preferences for the ideological in-group is based largely in the social identification with those groups, not in the organization of attitudes associated with the labels. That is, even when we are discussing ideology — a presumably issue-based concept — we are not entirely discussing issues.

Mason continued:
Identity-based ideology can drive affective ideological polarization even when individuals are naïve about policy. The passion and prejudice with which we approach politics is driven not only by what we think, but also powerfully by who we think we are.

Matt Grossmann and Daniel Thaler of Michigan State University further expand on the role of psychological traits in voter decision-making in their forthcoming paper, “Mass-Elite Divides in Aversion to Social Change and Support for Donald Trump.” They found that aversion to change “is strongly predictive of support for Trump” among regular voters, but much less so among Republican political elites.

They measure aversion to change by the answers to two polling questions: “Our country is changing too fast, undermining traditional American values” and “By accepting diverse cultures and lifestyles, our country is steadily improving.”
The accompanying graphic shows how those who think that the country is changing too fast and who disagree with the notion that diverse cultures and lifestyles improve the United States voted decisively for Trump.

Leonie Huddy, a political scientist at Stony Brook, sent me her analysis of how political conflict has shifted from economic to psychological factors.

The groups that have come to define partisanship in recent years, she wrote,
are far more grounded in social and moral values, geographic choice, and identity politics than the influential groups of yesteryear (especially unions) that maintained a focus on group economic interests. African-Americans may be an exception, but there is even a trend among young blacks to move away from the Democratic Party because they see the party as insufficiently focused on police brutality and other issues.

The result, in her words, is a political environment in which
the new affinities that shape partisanship are more a matter of choice than something one is born into or passed on by parents. That gives partisanship a more fluid nature than in the past and opens it to the formation of affinities grounded in personality, values, religion, and lifestyle choices.

In her 2005 book, “The Authoritarian Dynamic,” Karen Stenner — a former member of the political science departments at Princeton and Duke and now a behavioral economist in Australia — described politics as a clash of conflicting personal beliefs or moral value systems.

Stenner demonstrated, first, that levels of authoritarianism rise and fall in proportion to the experience of “normative threat,” and second that over the past generation authoritarianism has been predictive of Republican voting.

Stenner developed a universal theory about what causes intolerance of difference in general, which includes racism, political intolerance (e.g. restriction of free speech), moral intolerance (e.g. homophobia, supporting censorship, opposing abortion) and punitiveness. It demonstrates that all these seemingly disparate attitudes are principally caused by just two factors: individuals’ innate psychological predispositions to intolerance (“authoritarianism”) interacting with changing conditions of societal threat.

Looked at this way, recent developments experienced by many voters as alarming — including the financial collapse of 2008, the surge of third-world immigration in the United States and Europe and continuing fears among traditionalists that the social order is under assault — have fueled authoritarianism:
The threatening conditions, resonant particularly in the present political climate, that exacerbate authoritarian attitudes include at least the perception of civil dissent and unrest, loss of confidence in social institutions, unpopularity of leaders on both sides of politics, divisive presidential campaigns, internal or external crises that undermine national pride or confidence, national economic downturn and rapidly rising crime rates.

In an email, Stenner provided figures from a recent Euro Pulse survey showing that authoritarianism is stronger in the United States than it is in the European Union: In the E.U., 33 percent of the electorate can be described as authoritarian, while in the United States, it’s 45 percent.

The animosity between authoritarians and non-authoritarians has helped establish what Johnston, Lavine and Federico describe as the “expressive dimension” of policy choices:
In this view, the influence of personality on economic opinion arises not because the expected outcomes of a policy match an individual’s traits, but because those traits resonate with the social meaning a policy has acquired.

They explain further:
Citizens care less about the outcomes a policy produces and more about the groups and symbols with which a policy is associated.

Mason enlarged on this argument in her 2015 paper, “‘I Disrespectfully Agree’: The Differential Effects of Partisan Sorting on Behavioral and Issue Polarization.” Her argument is a direct challenge to those who take, as she puts it, an instrumental view of politics, in which people choose a party and decide how strongly to support it based solely on each party’s stated positions and whether the party shares interests with them.

Instead, she writes, Contrary to an issue-focused view of political decision making and behavior, the results presented here suggest that political thought, behavior, and emotion are powerfully driven by political identities. The strength of a person’s identification with his or her party affects how biased, active, and angry that person is, even if that person’s issue positions are moderate.

While much of this research uses the “preferred traits in child-rearing” questions to measure authoritarianism, two sociologists at the University of Kansas, David Norman Smith and Eric Hanley, observe in “The Anger Games: Who Voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 Election, and Why?” that those questions do not capture the full scope of authoritarianism, especially the more aggressive authoritarianism that they believe drives voters to Trump.

Smith and Hanley used what they call a “domineering leader scale” to measure the wish for a strong leader who will force others to submit. The premise is that evil is afoot; that money, the media and government authority — and even “politically correct” moral authorityhave been usurped by undeserving interlopers. The desire for a domineering leader is the desire to see this evil crushed.

The domineering leader scale is based on responses to two statements: “Our country will be great if we honor the ways of our forefathers, do what the authorities tell us to do, and get rid of the ‘rotten apples’ who are ruining everything” and “What our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush evil and take us back to our true path.”

If an aggressive, domineering authoritarianism is a prime motivator for many Trump supporters, as Smith and Hanley contend, the clash between Republicans and Democrats is likely to become more hostile and warlike.

Federico, Feldman and Weber note that since the early 2000s, many especially acrimonious political debates have focused on threats to social stability and order — debates surrounding abortion, transgender rights, immigration, and the role of the federal government in protecting the rights of marginalized social groups.

The rising “salience of these debates,” they write, “has contributed to a growing ‘authoritarian divide’ within the United States, at least among White Americans.”
Trump has purposefully exacerbated the “many especially acrimonious political debates” now dominating public discourse, deepening not only the authoritarian divide, but the divide between open and closed mindedness, between acceptance and racial resentment, and between toleration of and aversion to change. He evidently believes that this is the best political strategy for presiding in the White House and winning re-election, but it is an extraordinarily destructive strategy for governing the country and for safeguarding America’s interests in the world.


OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Right Way to Resist Trump, By Luigi Zingales, Nov. 18, 2016
Five years ago, I warned about the risk of a Donald J. Trump presidency. Most people laughed. They thought it inconceivable.

I was not particularly prescient; I come from Italy, and I had already seen this movie, starring Silvio Berlusconi, who led the Italian government as prime minister for a total of nine years between 1994 and 2011. I knew how it could unfold.
Now that Mr. Trump has been elected president, the Berlusconi parallel could offer an important lesson in how to avoid transforming a razor-thin victory into a two-decade affair. If you think presidential term limits and Mr. Trump’s age could save the country from that fate, think again. His tenure could easily turn into a Trump dynasty.

Mr. Berlusconi was able to govern Italy for as long as he did mostly thanks to the incompetence of his opposition. It was so rabidly obsessed with his personality that any substantive political debate disappeared; it focused only on personal attacks, the effect of which was to increase Mr. Berlusconi’s popularity. His secret was an ability to set off a Pavlovian reaction among his leftist opponents, which engendered instantaneous sympathy in most moderate voters. Mr. Trump is no different.

We saw this dynamic during the presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton was so focused on explaining how bad Mr. Trump was that she too often didn’t promote her own ideas, to make the positive case for voting for her. The news media was so intent on ridiculing Mr. Trump’s behavior that it ended up providing him with free advertising.

Unfortunately, the dynamic has not ended with the election. Shortly after Mr. Trump gave his acceptance speech, protests sprang up all over America. What are these people protesting against? Whether we like it or not, Mr. Trump won legitimately. Denying that only feeds the perception that there are “legitimate” candidates and “illegitimate” ones, and a small elite decides which is which. If that’s true, elections are just a beauty contest among candidates blessed by the Guardian Council of clerics, just like in Iran.

Silvio Berlusconi in Milan last year. CreditFlavio Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto Agency 

These protests are also counterproductive. There will be plenty of reasons to complain during the Trump presidency, when really awful decisions are made. Why complain now, when no decision has been made? It delegitimizes the future protests and exposes the bias of the opposition.

Even the petition calling for members of the Electoral College to violate their mandate and not vote for Mr. Trump could play into the president-elect’s hands. This idea is misguided. What ground would we then have to stand on when Mr. Trump tricks the system to obtain what he wants?

The Italian experience provides a blueprint for how to defeat Mr. Trump. Only two men in Italy have won an electoral competition against Mr. Berlusconi: Romano Prodi and the current prime minister, Matteo Renzi (albeit only in a 2014 European election). Both of them treated Mr. Berlusconi as an ordinary opponent. They focused on the issues, not on his character. In different ways, both of them are seen as outsiders, not as members of what in Italy is defined as the political caste.
The Democratic Party should learn this lesson. It should not do as the Republicans did after President Obama was elected. Their preconceived opposition to any of his initiatives poisoned the Washington well, fueling the anti-establishment reaction (even if it was a successful electoral strategy for the party). There are plenty of Trump proposals that Democrats can agree with, like new infrastructure investments. Most Democrats, including politicians like Mrs. Clinton and Bernie Sanders and economists like Lawrence Summers and Paul Krugman, have pushed the idea of infrastructure as a way to increase demand and to expand employment among non-college-educated workers. Some details might be different from a Republican plan, but it will add credibility to the Democratic opposition if it tries to find the points in common, not just differences.

And an opposition focused on personality would crown Mr. Trump as the people’s leader of the fight against the Washington caste. It would also weaken the opposition voice on the issues, where it is important to conduct a battle of principles.

Democrats should also offer Mr. Trump help against the Republican establishment, an offer that would reveal whether his populism is empty language or a real position. For example, with Mr. Trump’s encouragement, the Republican platform called for reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act, which would separate investment and commercial banking. The Democrats should declare their support of this separation, a policy that many Republicans oppose. The last thing they should want is for Mr. Trump to use the Republican establishment as a fig leaf for his own failure, dumping on it the responsibility for blocking the popular reforms that he promised during the campaign and probably never intended to pass. That will only enlarge his image as a hero of the people shackled by the elites.

Finally, the Democratic Party should also find a credible candidate among young leaders, one outside the party’s Brahmins. The news that Chelsea Clinton is considering running for office is the worst possible. If the Democratic Party is turning into a monarchy, how can it fight the autocratic tendencies in Mr. Trump?

Luigi Zingales, a professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, is the author of “A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity.”


Dodging the Trump Bullet, Americans—and Republicans—are lucky that the Donald has bowed out. Luigi Zingales, May 19, 2011 
Donald Trump’s announcement that he will not run in the Republican presidential primaries after all is great news for the Republican Party and for the country. The only thing more frightening than Trump’s running for president would be Trump’s getting elected president. From a party perspective, while losing an election is bad, winning one with the wrong candidate for the party and for the country is worse. I know something about this: I come from Italy, a country that has elected as prime minister the Trump-like Silvio Berlusconi.

Trump and Berlusconi are remarkably alike. They are both billionaire businessmen who claim that the government should be run like a business. They are both gifted salesmen, able to appeal to the emotions of their fellow citizens. They are both obsessed with their looks, with their hair (or what remains of it), and with sexy women. Their gross manners make them popular, perhaps because people think that if these guys could become billionaires, anyone could. Most important is that both Trump and Berlusconi made their initial fortunes in real estate, an industry where connections and corruption often matter as much as, or more than, talent and hard work. Indeed, while both pretend to stand for free markets, what they really believe in is what most of us would label crony capitalism.
Berlusconi’s policies have been devastating to Italy. He has been prime minister for eight of the last ten years, during which time the Italian per-capita GDP has dropped 4 percent, the debt-to-GDP ratio has increased from 109 percent to 120 percent, and taxes have increased from 41.2 percent to 43.4 percent. Italy’s score in the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom has dropped from 63 to 60.3, and in the World Economic Forum Index of Competitiveness from 4.9 to 4.37. Berlusconi’s tenure has also been devastating for free-market ideas, which now are identified with corruption.
How can such a pro-business prime minister wreak havoc on the economy and on the idea of free markets? Because “pro-business” doesn’t necessarily mean “pro-market.” While the two agendas sometimes coincide—as in the case of protecting property rights—they’re often at odds. Market competition threatens established firms, which often use their political muscle to restrict new entries into their industry, strengthening their positions but putting customers at a disadvantage. A pro-market strategy, by contrast, aims to encourage the best business conditions for everyone. That’s in fact the opposite of what a real-estate tycoon wants: to keep competitors out and enhance the value of his own properties. By capturing (or more precisely, purchasing) the free-market flag in the same way one might acquire a business brand, Berlusconi likely has destroyed the appeal of the free-market ideal in Italy for a generation.
How, then, did Berlusconi get elected and reelected? He created an unlikely coalition between the business elite, which supports him for fear of the alternative, and the poor, who identify with him because he appeals to their aspirations. In a country where corruption and lack of meritocracy has all but killed the hope of intra-generational mobility, citizens chose to escape from reality and find consolation in dreams. Berlusconi adeptly fosters the illusion that he can turn everyone else into billionaires. His political career is something like Trump’s Apprentice program, only on a national scale.
Unfortunately, some of the same factors that sparked Berlusconi’s success in Italy have begun to show up in the United States. Social mobility has dropped. Income for 95 percent of the population has stagnated. The financial crisis has uncovered a dangerous connection between government and the financial establishment. Losing hope that they can rise from rags to riches the old-fashioned way, Americans are taking refuge in fantasy, from American Idol to The Apprentice. In such a climate, Donald Trump, whose own career has exemplified crony capitalism—from government subsidies for his developments to abuse of eminent domain—could have potentially won not just the GOP nomination, but even the presidency. That would have been a catastrophe for the Republican Party, for free-market capitalism, and for America.

The Failures of Anti-Trumpism
By David Brooks, Opinion Columnist, April 9, 2018

President Trump has defied never-Trumpers’ best efforts. CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
WACO, Tex. — Over the past year, those of us in the anti-Trump camp have churned out billions of words critiquing the president. The point of this work is to expose the harm President Trump is doing, weaken his support and prevent him from doing worse. And by that standard, the anti-Trump movement is a failure.

We have persuaded no one. Trump’s approval rating is around 40 percent, which is basically unchanged from where it’s been all along.

We have not hindered him. Trump has more power than he did a year ago, not less. With more mainstream figures like H. R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson and Gary Cohn gone, the administration is growing more nationalist, not less.

We have not dislodged him. For all the hype, the Mueller investigation looks less and less likely to fundamentally alter the course of the administration.

We have not contained him. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party is complete. Eighty-nine percent of Republicans now have a positive impression of the man. According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 59 percent of Republicans consider themselves more a supporter of Trump than of the Republican Party.
On trade, immigration, entitlement reform, spending, foreign policy, race relations and personal morality, this is Trump’s party, not Reagan’s or anyone else’s.

A lot of us never-Trumpers assumed momentum would be on our side as his scandals and incompetences mounted. It hasn’t turned out that way. I almost never meet a Trump supporter who has become disillusioned. I often meet Republicans who were once ambivalent but who have now joined the Trump train.
National Review was once staunchly anti-Trump, and many of its writers remain so, but, tellingly, N.R. editor Rich Lowry just had a column in Politico called “The Never Trump Delusion” arguing that Trump is not that big a departure from the Republican mainstream.

The surest evidence of Trump’s dominance is on the campaign trail. As The Times’s Jonathan Martin reported, many Republicans, including Ted Cruz, are making the argument that if Democrats take over Congress, they will impeach the president. In other words, far from ignoring Trump, these Republicans are making defending him the center of their campaigns.
In red states, as Josh Kraushaar of the National Journal noted, Republicans compete to see who is the most Trumpish. In Indiana, the men vying for the Republican Senate nomination underline their support for the trade war. One candidate has a slogan, “Defeat the elite,” while another promises to “Make America Great.”
Even in blue states, Republicans refuse to criticize the man. In districts across Southern California, 11 Republican House candidates were asked about their positions on various issues. Seven of them refused to answer any question concerning Trump, and the four who did were strongly supportive.

Democratic anti-Trumpers had better hope they win in 2020, because their attacks have only served to entrench Trumpism on the right. Meanwhile, if Republican never-Trumpers were an army, they’d be freezing their buns off in Valley Forge tweeting over and over again that these are the times that try men’s souls.
Why has Trump dominated? Part of it is tribalism. In any tribal war people tend to bury individual concerns and rally to their leader and the party line. As late as 2015, Republican voters overwhelmingly supported free trade. Now they overwhelmingly oppose it. The shift didn’t happen because of some mass reappraisal of the evidence; it’s just that tribal orthodoxy shifted and everyone followed.

Part of the problem is that anti-Trumpism has a tendency to be insufferably condescending. For example, my colleague Thomas B. Edsall beautifully summarized the recent academic analyses of what personality traits supposedly determine Trump support.

Trump opponents, the academics say, are open-minded and value independence and novelty. Trump supporters, they continue, are closed-minded, change-averse and desperate for security.

This analysis strikes me as psychologically wrong (every human being requires both a secure base and an open field — we can’t be divided into opposing camps), journalistically wrong (Trump supporters voted for the man precisely because they wanted transformational change) and an epic attempt to offend 40 percent of our fellow citizens by reducing them to psychological inferiors.

The main reason Trump won the presidency is that tens of millions of Americans rightly feel that their local economies are under attack, their communities are dissolving and their religious liberties are under threat. Trump understood the problems of large parts of America better than anyone else. He has been able to strengthen his grip on power over the past year because he has governed as he campaigned.

Until somebody comes up with a better defense strategy, Trump and Trumpism will dominate. Voters are willing to put up with a lot of nonsense for a president they think is basically on their side.

Just after the election, Luigi Zingales wrote a Times op-ed on how not to fight Trump, based on the Italian experience fighting Silvio Berlusconi. Don’t focus on personality or the man, Zingales advised. That will just make Trump the people’s hero against the Washington caste. Focus instead on the social problems that gave rise to Trumpism.

That is the advice we anti-Trumpers still need to learn.


The Never Trump Delusion, By RICH LOWRY, March 28, 2018
Donald Trump is a dominant presence in our public life, although one that his adversaries have trouble accepting and processing.

The Left is still looking for scapegoats for his 2016 election victory, and the coterie of his critics among writers and activists on the Right—loosely referred to as Never Trump—often sound like they are in denial.
I’m friends with many of these Never Trumpers, admire most of them, and have often been numbered among them.

It’s true—obviously—that Trump has significant downsides. It’d be nice in a he said/she said between a porn star and the president to be able to believe the president. It’d be good if the president weren’t repellent to suburban women and millennials, perhaps doing long-term damage to the GOP. It’d be much better if the president didn’t run his administration like a reality TV show run by a mercurial and cruel executive producer. A cult of personality is especially problematic when the personality is that of Donald J. Trump.

Indeed, most of the fears of how Trump would conduct himself in office have been realized (everyone would have thought Jeb Bush was crazy if he had predicted a President Trump would fire a high-level Cabinet official via Twitter, and not even using direct message). Yet it doesn’t follow that we should buy into the fantasy either that Trump is going to disappear into thin air, or that Trumpism can be blithely dismissed so the party can return to what some Never Trumpers believe constituted the status quo ante.

A serious primary challenge is not in the offing, if anything like the current situation obtains. Trump has an 80 percent approval among Republicans and an ironclad hold on the base. For that to change, it would probably take a smoking gun revelation in the Mueller probe or some other jaw-dropping scandal, plus a significant political betrayal (say, nominating a moderate Supreme Court justice).

And if Trump crashes and burns, it is doubtful the 2020 nomination would be worth having. If he somehow left office before January 2021, it would have meant there was some disaster that fractured and dispirited the party. If he were beaten in a primary, the GOP would likely be in a similar state and festooned with a deeply wounded incumbent president. Neither would bode well.
By MICHAEL KRUSE                                          

NEW YORK—“Ma’am,” said the soldier in suit slacks and a collar-popped pea coat, “my name is Max Rose, and I’m running for Congress as a Democrat.”

The woman behind the glass front door in the semi-suburban neighborhood on Staten Island in this state’s Republican-leaning 11th Congressional District looked him over. She asked what he was “all about.”

“Sure, sure—here’s a little information,” he said, showing her his “walk card.” On one side was a picture of Rose smiling while sitting at a table wearing a tie. “A Healthcare Expert with Solutions,” it said. “An Economic Champion.” On the other, though, was an image of him in his military fatigues, a long, black M4 carbine assault rifle hanging off his shoulder. This side had different language: “Combat Infantry Captain in the U.S. Army,” “the courage to lead.” This was the side Rose presented to her first.

The door opened a little.

“I’m the first post-9/11 combat veteran to run for office in New York City history,” Rose said.

The door opened a little more.

“I’m a Staten Islander,” he continued. “I deployed to Afghanistan about five years ago. I was an infantry platoon leader.” He said he was a Purple Heart recipient. Bronze Star, too. “And now we’re fighting this fight,” Rose said.

The door opened all the way.

Rose, a 5-foot-6 power pack with an upbeat, shoulders-back gait, is near the forefront of a surge of a certain sort of candidate in the 2018 election cycle. Veterans who are Democrats are vying for Congress in numbers not seen in decades. With Honor, a “cross-partisan” organization that aims to “help elect principled next-generation veterans in order to solve our biggest problems and fix a Congress that is dysfunctional,” counts approximately 300 veterans who have run for Congress during this cycle—roughly half of whom chose to serve after, and in many cases because of, September 11, 2001. Although specific numbers are hard to come by, the spike is stark—“a substantial increase,” With Honor co-founder and CEO Rye Barcott told me, “from any prior cycle” in modern memory. While the perception might exist that most veterans lean Republican, some 51 percent of the veterans who are or have been 2018 candidates, based on With Honor’s tally, are actually Democrats. And some are proving to be competitive in places once considered safe GOP districts. Witness Conor Lamb’s win in western Pennsylvania earlier this month. Polling suggests former Army Ranger Jason Crow could do the same in Colorado’s 6th District in the suburbs of Denver. Backed by members of Congress like Representative Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) and organizations like VoteVets and New Politics, this roster of aspirants is a key to Democrats reclaiming control of the House of Representatives in November’s midterms, party strategists believe.

It is not a coincidence that this wave of veterans is hitting at a moment when a five-time draft-deferring president occupies the White House and toxic partisanship has ground Capitol Hill to a virtual halt. The candidates are presenting themselves both as a moral rebuke to what they see as Donald Trump’s self-promoting divisiveness and also as a practical solution to the failure of the nation’s highest legislative body to get anything done. In short, the reputation of the national institution with by far the highest approval rating, the military, is being offered as an antidote to the woes of a schismatic president and a Congress whose approval ratings have never been worse.

“They’re all people who served the country without worrying about who’s a Democrat and who’s a Republican—let’s just get the damn thing done,” longtime national Democratic strategist Joe Trippi said in an interview. “In this Washington, in this divisive, chaotic cycle, you have these people who’ve proven they can rise above party and actually accomplish a mission.”

And out on the campaign trail, many of them have versions of Max Rose’s experience with opening doors, I heard in conversations with a dozen of these kinds of candidates.

Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy pilot and federal prosecutor running in New Jersey’s Republican-leaning but open 11th District, sees it when she stops in at diners. It usually happens with older men. “I’ll go up and say, ‘Hi, my name’s Mikie Sherrill and I’m running for Congress,‘” she told me, and she’ll gauge mostly disinterest. “And I’ll say, ‘Yeah, you know, I was a Navy helicopter pilot and a federal prosecutor,’ and then I kind of start to walk away—and they go, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute …’”

In California’s 50th District, made up mostly of San Diego suburbs and held by embattled GOP Representative Duncan Hunter, Josh Butner gets it when he introduces himself as a former Navy SEAL—who’s a Democrat. “That usually gets the conversation started,” he said. “They say something to the effect of, ‘Yeah, we need more Democrats like you.’ We need more people willing to put the country ahead of political parties. We need more folks willing to work with the other side.’”

Here in New York’s 11th, Rose is running in the most concentrated pocket of Trump Country in a very blue city. All of Staten Island and a slice of southern Brooklyn, it’s the only congressional district in the president’s hometown that voted for him. On Staten Island, voting rolls show five Democrats for every three Republicans, but its elected officials (state and local) are split in favor of the GOP. Whiter and more socially conservative than the rest of the city, Staten Island is home to firefighters, police officers, teachers and people who take the ferry to Manhattan. Five miles from the heart of the city, the people here have a chip-on-the-shoulder attitude, according to Kevin Elkins, a lifelong Staten Islander and Rose’s campaign manager, boiling down to: “Screw the system, because they screwed us.” In that way, it resembles the country as a whole—and explains why 56.9 percent of Staten Island voters picked Trump.

“Thank you for your service,” this woman said.

We gotta change politics!” Rose told her. “It’s a mess in D.C.”

And now, finally, it was warm, in a house for an evening fundraiser. “Tired yet?” I asked him. He gave me a look, New York for c’mon. On tables were finger sandwiches and mixed nuts and shrimp, Heinekens and Perrier and pinot noir. On the wall was a picture of the hosts with Bill Clinton. On the shelves were books by James Carville (Had Enough?) and Ta-Nehisi Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power). A woman rang a little bell. It was time for Rose to talk. He still had on his combat boots.

“I’ve been a politician for 176 days,” Rose said.

People laughed.

“But I’ve been a soldier for eight years,” he continued. And the mood was serious again. “I led a combat outpost in Afghanistan. And when I tell people that, they imagine Fort Knox or something. It was just some sandbags, 30 U.S. soldiers, about 60 Afghan National Army soldiers, and a mission. And those soldiers came from everywhere—all across the country, gay, straight, Hispanic, African-American, white. Dreamers. Citizens. None of that mattered, though, because we had a mission to accomplish. And when my vehicle hit an IED in Afghanistan, they got to work. They called the nine-line medevac. They pulled 360-degree security. They got me out of there. I’ll owe them for the rest of my life. You know, a fascinating thing happened to me when I was medevacced to Kandahar Air Force Base. A two-star general comes up to my hospital bed, he looks down at me, and he says, ‘Son, five years ago, you’d be dead.’ And then he walks away.”

More laughter.

“You can laugh at that,” Rose said with a smile. “I was pretty shocked—that’s how generals comfort you. But you know what? He was right. For too long, Strykers had been called Kevlar coffins. … And after far too many soldiers died, Congress finally got their act together. They put the right people in a room, they gave them resources, they put partisanship aside, and they said, ‘Solve the damn problem!’ That used to be the story of this country. I am only alive today because that’s what Congress is actually capable of.”

He let that thought sit for a bit.

“So,” Rose said, “I think that we need to go back to that.”

How to Primary Trump in 2020: Elected Republican officials keep asking me if it’s possible. It won’t be easy. We should try anyway. By MIKE MURPHY, March 28, 2018

“Could Donald Trump be, um, primaried?” That’s the whispered question I hear more often than you might think from plenty of exhausted Republican elected officials, particularly after a long week of dodging reporters looking for comment on the president’s latest antics. “I mean, he’s just killing us!” they say, before hustling away to safety.

Could the president be beaten in a primary? The short and easy CW is, lots of luck! Only two incumbent presidents have faced serious primary opposition in the past 50 years: Ronald Reagan challenged Gerald Ford in 1976, and Ted Kennedy took on Jimmy Carter in 1980. Both lost after spirited contests. Two others faced less serious opposition; George H.W. Bush dispatched Pat Buchanan in 1992, and Richard Nixon crushed the two Republican congressmen — one from the left and the other from the right — who challenged him in 1972. The sole president in memory knocked out of office by the primary process was Lyndon Johnson, who abandoned his reelection campaign after Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy stunned observers by finishing a close second — 7 points behind LBJ — in the New Hampshire primary.

Could such an early state stumble happen again? (I suspect Ohio Governor John Kasich is particularly curious, having run second to Trump in 2016’s contest in New Hampshire). Doubtful. While such a sign of political weakness might once have driven an honor-bound president to resign, shame is a nonfactor to Trump. To defeat him, you would have to actually win early and often in the primary states and assemble a majority of convention delegates. That’s the simplest way and the hardest.

So how would a Trump opponent plot out such an audacious caper? Polling today looks grim. Despite Trump’s toxic numbers — the worst of any president at day 433 in the history of polling — his strength among rank-and-file Republicans is formidable. Recent Marist data show a Trump favorable rating among Republicans of 78 percent and a job approval rating of 87 percent. If any GOP primary contests were held today, Trump would slaughter any opponent.
So it’s hopeless, correct?

Maybe not. Any Trump primary isn’t about polling data today, it’s about polling data in late 2019. What could make those 2019 numbers far different than today’s? A Republican wipeout in the 2018 midterms. Such a disaster, which is certainly now possible, would destroy Trump’s brand as a “winner” and smash the GOP’s D.C. apparat. We conservatives would lose control over the House appropriations process and watch the Democrats gleefully torment both the White House and our political allies with endless investigations and subpoenas. Even if we hold the Senate in November, a very nervous group of Republican senators would eye their own loss of majority when they face 2020’s dire Senate map, chock-full as it is of Democratic leaning states. None of this is a recipe for Republicans to stagger home from what could be a very long election night this November and immediately snuggle up to the president. Instead, Trump will slide across on GOP balance sheets from very imperfect asset to huge scary liability.

Trump will sense all this and boil with resentment. He might even compound his troubles by bringing back his old 2016 campaign message and snarl that House and Senate Republicans caused their own demise and are just another big swampy part of the D.C. problem. I can even imagine him musing aloud about running for reelection as a third-party candidate, damning both parties.

Also threatening to upend 2018 and beyond is the grim parade of Rumsfeldian “known unknowns” that loom over the president’s future. Will the Mueller investigation drive Trump out of office or into real legal jeopardy? Could there be a hurricane of future Stormys, or an “et tu Trumpus” moment from the long-suffering Melania? Will the stock market cave, ruining the Republicans’ economic success message? Will a trade war break out, with China acting on its threats to crush American exports—from GOP farm states—of pork and soybeans? Will there be a military crisis with North Korea or Iran, and will it hurt or help Commander in Chief Trump?

We simply don’t know, but if major political defeat, legal scandal, internal party warfare and growing economic distress does erupt, the 2019 primary soil could become far more fertile. How might a Trump challenger best take advantage of it?

Three key elements must come together. First, the field must quickly narrow to one major Trump opponent after the winnowing of Iowa and New Hampshire. As we’ve seen before, a large flock of candidates only helps Trump. This is easier said than done, since the weaker Trump looks, the more opponents he is likely to attract.

Second, it sure helps to be famous. Trump was what Hollywood calls a “pre-aware title.” He was well-known from “The Apprentice” as a can-do outsider — amazing what firing Gilbert Gottfried in a fake boardroom on a product-placement TV show can do for you—and he put that image to work. Challenging Trump is no job for an unknown ham-and-egger.

Finally, message is everything. Political organization has always been overrated by the news media. But in this era of smartphones and social media, a resonant message by a prominent political (or nonpolitical) “brand” can spread quickly, powerfully and cheaply. Organizations can be built upon that excitement and energy. The best political tactics to beat Trump are his own.

If 2020’s Republican voters are worn out by drama, defeat and despair, the message that wins 50 percent of them will be clear: It’s time to change the channel on the Trump show to his opposite. It is a reliable truism that voters weighing candidates often look for what they perceive they didn’t get the last time. If Trump in year three stands for wild Keystone Kops disorder and endless legal, ethical and porn-star drama while Republicans lose election after election, any alternative candidate should be all about competence, winning and nice, boring conservative normalcy.

Who could run? It’s far too early to name names, but for a tested, highly competent potential contender with immaculate conservative credentials, I’d keep an eye on political developments in Utah. Another potential archetype would be a candidate promising a return to conservative ideological purity after three big-spending years of braying populism. There is no shortage of potential “real conservatives”—many promising generational change as well—itching to run for president.

My bet? I’m far from sure the president will even run again, but if he does I think he’ll be in bad enough shape to catch a primary, just like Carter and Ford did. As a Day One Never Trumper, I might be underestimating his long-term hold on the Republican base, but after 30 years in politics I’ve seen how fast support can crumble when a party sees its very survival at stake. While defeating an incumbent president in a primary is the longest of political long shots, if 2018 goes badly it is a shot worth taking.

Rose, 31, has a handful of opponents in the Democratic primary in June, but he’s the well-funded favorite. Come November, he would face Dan Donovan, the current Republican representative, or GOP challenger Michael Grimm, the former representative who is coming off seven months in prison for tax evasion but who retains local support—if not Washington’s blessing. With endorsements from the Working Families Party, the Women’s Equality Party and NARAL Pro-Choice America, plus Moulton, retired Air Force colonel and California Representative Ted Lieu and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, Rose is on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “Red to Blue” list of Democrats considered to have a chance at flipping a red district. Even so, Roll Call still labels the 11th as “likely Republican.” So does University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato. And the Cook Political Report calls it a Republican “lean.”

Rose was born and raised in Brooklyn, the son of a medical laboratory executive and a professor of social work. He went to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where he wrestled briefly and was a history major with a favorite professor who specialized in the psychology of political leaders. After Wesleyan, he went to the London School of Economics, where he earned a master’s degree in philosophy and public policy. And after LSE … he enlisted in the Army. Why? I asked him this over a late steak dinner at a Staten Island tavern called Jody’s Club Forest. We were drinking Bud Light poured out of a plastic pitcher into half-pint juice glasses. He answered my question by asking another. “If not me,” he said, “who?” In April 2013, the Stryker he was riding in got blown up by an IED. The first words he says in his first campaign video: “I don’t remember the bomb going off …”

There used to be far more Max Roses in Congress. In the 1970s, according to Jeremy Teigen, a political scientist at Ramapo College in New Jersey and the author of Why Veterans Run, approximately three-quarters of the members of Congress were veterans—led by the “Greatest Generation” of World War II. But the number of veterans in Congress has been going down basically ever since. The percentage of veterans in Congress is now 19—near a historic low. This downward trend has been evident as well in other prominent political arenas. The 2012 presidential election, for instance, was the first since World War II in which neither major party nominee was a veteran. The 2016 presidential election was the second.

Whether it’s causation or correlation, many of the candidates I talked to for this story pointed to the reality that the extent of the partisanship in Washington has gotten worse as veterans on the Hill have disappeared.
Available data suggest that being a veteran in fact doesn’t help win elections. “If you think about it,” Teigen told me, “if that were true, we’d have 535 veterans on Capitol Hill. Parties would nominate no one else.” A comprehensive study of congressional races from 2000 to 2014 showed a military background has no “systematic, measurable effect,” Teigen notes in his book. Furthermore, he writes, “Democratic veterans actually do a little worse than comparable nonveteran Democrats”—a function, perhaps, of Democratic veterans seeming to run more in longer-shot districts.

But this year’s candidates say this time’s different, because so much else is so different, too.

Trump is the president, and this new generation of service members has emerged from the battlefield with deep reservations about the direction the country is heading. They might be frustrated by the (ongoing) outcomes of the conflicts of Iraq and Afghanistan, but they are not embarrassed by their service. On the contrary, they believe, it’s what distinguishes them, and what has prepared them for this moment. From the victories of Tammy Duckworth and Tulsi Gabbard in 2012 to Seth Moulton’s surprising triumph on the North Shore of Massachusetts in 2014 to his handpicked current class of endorsees—“Seth Moulton’s kind of a North Star for a lot of these guys,” said Anson Kaye, a prominent media strategist who’s working for Rose—these young veterans are hammering home their message of service above self, country above party, concluding their résumés and experiences hold special appeal for voters who have grown exasperated with scorched-earth, hyperpartisan politicking. Rose isn’t the only candidate who’s used his or her time in the service as a campaign pillar and as a cornerstone in a video pitch. Amy McGrath, a retired F-18 pilot in the Marines and a Democratic candidate in Kentucky’s 6th District, created buzz with hers last summer. Butner released one just a couple of weeks back. “Out here,” he says at the start, “there’s no time for bickering or special-interest politics. Working together is a matter of life and death.” Says Moulton in one of his own on behalf of his Serve America PAC: “For a new politics, we need to elect new leaders.”

“What we’re hearing from a lot of the candidates who are veterans who are running for office this year is that they are answering the call to continue to serve their communities in a different way because of concerns that they have—some of which include the president’s actions and all the dysfunction that they see in our nation’s capital,” said Ben Ray Lujan, the New Mexico congressman and DCCC chair.

Talking to them, I heard some altruism. I also heard no small amount of irritation.

“I am so angry at what the politicians are doing to our country up there,” said Dan McCready, 34, who’s running in North Carolina’s 9th District, held by a Republican since 1963. “The lack of courage, the lack of American values up there …”

Our current political system—and certainly Donald Trump and what he’s doing—doesn’t really represent the country that we fought for,” Crow told me from Colorado.

Dan Feehan was in college at Georgetown on September 11. He could see the smoke coming from the Pentagon. “Because of that, I made the decision to serve,” he explained. “That certainly drove the urgency of that moment.” Now he’s running in Minnesota’s 1st, in the southern part of the state—in a bid to replace Democrat Tim Walz, who’s running for governor. “The feeling of uncertainty, the feeling of what’s going to happen next—there’s a similarity there.”

“By the very nature of what we were taught to do in the military, which is to solve problems, act quickly, build teams, engage in chaotic environments, sort out problems, understand what you can fix—I mean, that’s what we do,” said Joseph Kopser, an Army veteran running in the 21st district in Texas, which stretches from Austin to San Antonio and has been in Republican hands since 1979. “No kidding it takes veterans to step forward.”

Based on research done by the Lugar Center and by West Point scholar and New America fellow Isaiah Wilson III, there is evidence that veterans in Congress actually do act in a more bipartisan way. Barcott and fellow Marine Jake Wood wrote last fall in Time that “lawmakers who have served in the military often have a special sense of duty and an uncommon ability to reach across party lines and get things done.” Retired U.S. Senators Richard Lugar and Tom Daschle, a Republican from Indiana and a Democrat from South Dakota, respectively, expressed similar sentiments in U.S. News & World Report: “We have come to believe that one solution to the partisan crisis in national security policy is to elect to Congress more veterans committed to bipartisanship.”

McCready agrees. “I led a platoon of 65 Marines in Iraq during the surge of 2007 and 2008,” the North Carolina candidate told me. “And I had folks in my platoon from all over the country. We never cared where you came from. We never cared about who your parents were or the color of your skin. The last thing we cared about, actually, was whether you were a Republican or a Democrat. Because we all wore the same color of uniform. And that’s really what the military teaches you. It’s that we’re all on the same team, you don’t leave a person behind, and we all have a job to do that’s bigger than ourselves. That’s what’s missing right now in Washington.”

Rose, for his part, in the two days we spent together on Staten Island and in Brooklyn, was a nonpartisan turret-turner with his frank talk.
The Republican Party as a whole, he said, “has wholly abandoned the middle class and the working class,” with “this fallacy, this laughingstock, of trickle-down economics, which they have bought into yet again.”

Rose, though, chastised his own party as well—for abandoning the working class, too, and for taking for granted other segments of its traditional coalition.
“The African-American population is a great example,” he told me at Jody’s. “You raise money, you raise money, you raise money—and then you show up about 30 days prior to an election and you say, ‘Well, let’s talk about turning out the vote.’ There’s zero trust. There’s zero relationships. If anyone’s sick and tired of it, it’s many, many leaders in that community.”

Still, he said, “you’ve got to choose a side in this game, and I’m a proud Democrat. But I want Democrats to be Democrats again.” Which means? “It means that if you’re telling me you think government has a role for this country, then say it. … Be bold about it. If you think that the working class has been gypped, then say it. And tell me how you’re going to fix it.”

He ticked off his list: Massive public works initiatives like the interstate projects of the past. Twenty-first-century smart grids. A widespread national effort to address the opioid scourge—a pressing issue in Staten Island, as in so many places around the country—a la the response to the HIV and AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Something akin to the Apollo project in the tech and health care spaces.

“And that active role for government is not just tax cuts for rich people and corporations,” Rose said. “It’s not just cutting Social Security and Medicaid and figuring out ways we can restrict legal immigration. There’s far more of a role for government. And that’s why I’m a Democrat.”

The night before, Rose had been at a fundraiser in Manhattan, late. He was on the ferry as the clock approached 1 a.m. I met him in the lobby of his Staten Island apartment building at 6:15. Then, in a near-zero-visibility mixture of icy rain and fat flakes of snow, we crossed the Verrazano Bridge to Brooklyn to a subway station, where he shook scores of hands and at one point helped a woman with a toddler in a stroller descend a set of stairs, and then we went to a breakfast back on Staten Island for an organization for people with disabilities, where he worked the room, from table to table. Later, he laced up his sand-tan combat boots to do a round of door-knocking in a nor’easter.

“I’m the guy that showed up in the snow. I can’t be all bad,” he said through another glass door, showing his card.


This means that Trump’s welfare is inextricably caught up with the party’s. Every point his approval rating ticks up means fewer House seats lost in the midterms. It’s quite possible that in 2020 his prospects will be the difference between Republicans controlling one or more of the elected branches in Washington, or unified Democratic control.

The hold Trump has on the party has a lot to do with his mesmerizing circus act and having the right enemies. But it’s more than that.

Surprisingly, he’s been loyal to the constituent parts of his coalition. On judges, social conservative and anti-abortion causes, and gun rights (with the occasional rhetorical wobble), he’s been solid. His desperation to get anything he can call a wall on the southern border speaks to his genuine desire to deliver on one of his signature promises. The same is true of his bout of tariffs this year.

The last two items speak to Trump’s heterodoxy, although the president isn’t as ideologically aberrant as Never Trumpers would have it.

Republicans have never won on the strength of a textbook libertarian economics denuded of any populist appeal, or an idealistic foreign policy devoid of a hard-headed focus on the national interest and a Jacksonian element (if the Iraq War had been sold at the inception as entirely a democratizing enterprise, it would never have gained sufficient political support).

In his 1965 New York mayoral campaign, Bill Buckley found his constituency among outer borough Archie Bunker-type voters, a preview of Reagan Democrats; if Donald Trump’s father, Fred, voted in that race it’s easy to imagine him pulling the lever for Buckley.

Ronald Reagan wouldn’t have been the powerful conservative figure he was in the late-1970s if he hadn’t pounded away at the premier populist-nationalism issue of the time, resistance to giving back the Panama Canal to Panama. “We bought it. We built it. We paid for it. It’s ours.”

Even George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis in 1992 not as a WASPy establishmentarian, but on the strength of the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance and crime, especially the emotive Willie Horton case.

We can argue about what role populism and nationalism should have in conservative politics, but that they have a place, and always have, is undeniable.
With Trump, the danger was that the populism would overwhelm the conservatism. But there have been no populist judges, regulation or tax policy. His presidency has been a crude shotgun marriage between the off-the-shelf GOP agenda and his own impulses on immigration and trade, when, ideally, there would have been a more fully thought-out and integrated conservative populism.

Trump is not seriously engaged enough to drive this himself, while congressional Republicans lack interest in immigration restriction and are opposed to Trump on trade. But make no mistake: On immigration and China trade, Trump is closer to the national Republican consensus than his conservative detractors.

A realistic attitude to Trump involves acknowledging both his flaws and how he usefully points the way beyond a tired Reagan nostalgia. By all means, criticize him when he’s wrong. But don’t pretend that he’s just going away, or that he’s a wild outlier in the contemporary GOP.
 Please, use this and my other blogs as references to prove points; they’re well cited.(Citations are present through blue links.)