Tag: Donald Trump
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Is Nikki Haley the Next Hillary Clinton?
The contemporary GOP base is increasingly comprised of Americans who perceive themselves to be the “losers” in the knowledge economy and who seem to feel distant and mistrustful of mainstream institutions. The party, and especially its insurgent movements – from the Obama-era tea party through the present day – are increasingly backed by small businesses…
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On Populism, Labor and Partisan Politics
On September 27th, the Republican Party will hold the second debate in their primary contest. The decisive frontrunner for the nomination, Donald Trump, has once again declined to participate. Instead, the former president will deliver a primetime campaign speech in Detroit to a purported audience of current and former members of the United Auto Workers…
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The 2022 Midterms Results Should (But Won’t) Definitively Kill Disparaging Narratives About U.S. Voters
In the run-up to the 2022 midterms, a dominant narrative in mainstream media spaces was that Americans were on the cusp of throwing away democracy in order to save a few dollars on gas. Should Republicans lose, they would refuse to concede defeat. The legitimacy of the electoral results would be undermined by widespread conspiracy…
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The Media’s ‘Great Awokening’ Preceded Trump and has Continued Uninterrupted Since He Was Deposed
Over the last five years, poll after poll has found that the GOP base has grown warmer towards Blacks, Hispanics, immigrants and Muslims. They’ve simultaneously become more skeptical of Christian nationalism. They’re now significantly more accepting of same sex marriage and non-discrimination protections for LGBTQ Americans. The rest of America has shifted even further in…
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On the January 6 Capitol Riots and ‘Teaching to the Moment’
In the aftermath of the January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol, which left five people dead, and nearly derailed Congressional certification of the 2020 election results, many in higher ed have been wrestling with questions around what they can do to help mitigate the cultural and political crisis we find ourselves in, and how…
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Are Democrats Actually Capable of Learning from 2020?
The U.S. presidential races in 2000 and 2004 went for Republicans. In 2008 and 2012 went for Democrats. In 2016, for Republicans. In 2020, for Democrats again. Despite Democrats winning the presidential elections in 2008 and 2012, they saw historic losses in the midterms for 2010 and 2014. If we want to understand how we…
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Whatever Happened to the Obama Coalition?
In 2008, Barack Obama was widely described as having built a game-changing political coalition: young people, racial and ethnic minorities, educated professionals, urban and suburban voters. He was held to have built an innovative campaign infrastructure, leveraging big data and social media in an unprecedented way, increasing turnout and Democratic vote share with constituencies that…
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Religion and Politics in the Age of Trump
In a previous essay I demonstrated that Democrats have been consistently losing ground with both people of color and people of faith in virtually every midterm and general election cycle after 2008. Republicans, meanwhile, have seen consistent gains with many constituencies. What occurred in 2016, therefore, was not an aberration – but the culmination of…
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The Biden Administration Has a Weak Mandate
In his masterful book Tides of Consent,” political scientist James Stimson explains that voters usually put a party in power in order to realize moderate change in a particular direction. However, once in office, parties regularly overstep their mandate, going farther than the public wanted. Other times, parties fail to realize the reforms they were…
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Trump is Doing Surprisingly Well with Minority Voters. It Might Not Matter.
In 2016, Donald Trump got a lower share of the white vote than the previous Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, and white turnout was stagnant as compared to 2012. Trump was able to win nonetheless because he got a higher share of Black and Hispanic voters than his predecessor — up roughly 3 percentage points with…
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Trump Voters Have Been Misunderstood All Along (Including By Trump)
Unprecedented numbers of Americans — including a growing share of Republicans and independents — recognize racial injustice as pervasive, support police reform and back the protests against police brutality. Apparently oblivious to this emerging consensus, Trump is trying to run a Nixon-style “law-and-order” campaign for the 2020 election. And it is killing him politically. Trump has seen a dramatic and…
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Bloomberg Won’t Win. Sanders Could.
Joe Biden seems to think that Democrats are really well positioned for 2020, recently arguing “We could run Mickey Mouse against this president and have a shot.” The rest of us aren’t so sure: According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, a plurality (48%) of Americans want Trump to be unseated in 2020. Yet…
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The Media Really Is Obsessed With Donald Trump
Trump has an unhealthy fixation with the media. He seems to get most of his information about the world from newspapers and cable news, over and above the experts tasked with advising him. He obsesses over how he is portrayed in mainstream outlets, and regularly takes to social media to whine about the coverage in…
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Pelosi’s Impeachment Bid Will Fail
On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that a formal impeachment inquiry is going to be launched, looking into President Trump’s alleged attempts to get dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden from the Ukrainian government, among other accusations levelled against the president by a whistleblower from the U.S. intelligence community. Trump will definitely get impeached…
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Trump’s Executive Order on Campus Speech is a Raw Deal for Conservatives
“The political world is playing a very different game, and it’s a game that almost always damages our work in universities.” Jonathan Haidt, Chronicle of Higher Education One year ago, almost to the day, President Trump declared that the campus free speech crisis was ‘overblown.’ Since then, the trends have actually moved in an even…
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How the Media Could Get the Last Laugh on Trump
“Behind every image, something has disappeared. And that is the source of its fascination.” Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared (p. 32). According to a New York Times report, “At the midpoint of his term, Mr. Trump has grown more sure of his own judgment and more cut off from anyone else’s than at…
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Securitization Vs. Social Justice
It must have felt fresh the first time a political figure equated civil rights with national-security crises. Perhaps it was when Frederick Douglass told Abraham Lincoln that by keeping the Union Army all white, he was “fighting rebels with only one arm,” or more recently when advocates for women’s rights competed for who was quicker…
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The Radical Black Liberation Theology of Kanye West
Kanye West has always had a streak of what one might call conservatism. He defiantly included “Jesus Walks” on his 2004 debut album, despite repeated urging from record execs to drop it, and predictions that it would never get play. Instead, the single helped make his career. The track begins with Kanye revealing, “We at…
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Democrats Should be Very Alarmed by the 2018 Midterm Results
After flipping dozens of seats in the midterm elections, Democrats are set to take control of the House of Representatives. Many pundits and analysts have attempted to frame the race as a referendum on President Trump. Among these, there seems to be a consensus that the president has somehow been “repudiated.” Not so fast. To…
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What Was Elizabeth Warren Thinking?
Elizabeth Warren has repeatedly identified herself as Cherokee. For most of her early career, while she worked at the University of Texas, this was not the case. However, beginning in the mid 1980s, as she was aspiring to move from University of Texas to the Ivy Leagues, she also began identifying herself as ‘Native American’…
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Abandoning the Iran Deal is a Grave Miscalculation
Many people understand credibility to mean something like, “sticking to one’s word” or “following through on one’s commitments.” By this standard, President Trump’s Tuesday decision to withdraw the United States from the Iran Deal (formally, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) would bolster Trump’s cred. After all, during his campaign he claimed it…
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Rethinking the Role of Race/Racism in the 2016 Election
I am pleased to announce a publication in the peer-reviewed journal, The American Sociologist: “Race and the Race for the White House: On Social Research in the Age of Trump” (non-paywalled link). The essay demonstrates that a good deal of the social science research “proving” that race / racism was one of the primary drivers of…
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First the Farce, then the Tragedy
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Karl Marx, ‘The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ (Chapter 1) “Be careful how you move, the traps are covered in the lights. Landmines…
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Charlottesville and Americans’ Increasingly Polarized Response to Terrorism, Political Violence
On the night of August 11th, white nationalists held a torch-lit pride parade through the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. They were met with counter-protests, and the demonstrations descended into a melee. The next morning, these same organizers held a “Unite the Right” rally in Emancipation Park, centered on a statue of Confederate General Robert…
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Want to shake up the status quo? Account for the default effect.
Observers typically assume that if people are dissatisfied with a state of affairs, they will work to change it. Cognitive and behavioral scientists know that this assumption frequently fails as a result of the “default effect” For instance, Americans have widespread concerns about how software and entertainment companies are collecting and using their data or…
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Historical Patterns Suggest Trump Will Probably Win a Second Term in 2020
6/30/2020 Update: I have been bullish about Trump’s prospects from 2016, through the midterms, his impeachment, and even through the COVID-19 outbreak. In the early stages of the pandemic, Trump’s approval ticked up. And indeed, even today Trump continues to receive high marks for his handling of the economy, despite many Americans being out of…
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Trump’s Opponents Need to Stop Playing into His Hands
What gives terrorists power are the reactions they are able to elicit from their intended targets: hysteria leads to poorly-calibrated reactions that can be exploited to the insurgents’ advantage. For instance, it is beyond the capacity of Islamic terror groups like ISIS to, themselves, meaningfully challenge the prevailing global order. However, they have been able…
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In the Trump Administration, Principled Civil Servants Like James Comey Are Critical
Let’s be clear about one thing straightaway: James Comey did not sabotage Hillary Clinton. If that had been his intention, it was well within his power to outright destroy her candidacy. In the wake of Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s improper meeting with former President Bill Clinton, the Department of Justice was scandalized. Under pressure, Lynch…
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An Emerging Democratic Majority? Don’t Count on It.
“What is at stake in the conflict over representations of the future is nothing other than the attitude of the declining classes to their decline—either demoralization, which leads to a rout….or mobilization, which leads to the collective search for a collective solution to the crisis.What can make the difference is, fundamentally, the possession of…
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Trump’s 2016 Victory Should Not Have Been Surprising
As an epistemologist, I generally avoid predictions in favor of trying to determine what is known and how to build upon or utilize knowledge. But when I do feel compelled to go on record with predictions, it is generally with a sense of urgency–to draw public attention to an approaching black swan. Black swans are…
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Why Conservatives Must Reject Trump’s Homonationalism
In a RNC nomination acceptance speech widely maligned as dystopian, Donald Trump received rare mainstream media praise for asserting: “Only weeks ago, in Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist. This time, the terrorist targeted LGBTQ community. No good. And we’re going to stop it. As your president, I will…
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Racially Profiling “Jihadists” Sounds Like Common Sense. Here’s Why It Doesn’t Work
Over the weekend there was a series of bombings, and attempted bombings, in New Jersey and Manhattan (where I live). Authorities have identified and arrested one Ahmed Khan in connection with the attacks, which injured dozens of people in the New York area. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was quick to seize on this incident…
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Who Cares About Bernie Sanders’ Historic Candidacy?
In March 2016, the Green Party nominated Dr. Jill Stein as their candidate for President of the United States. They have had female vice-presidential nominees on every single ticket since 1996, and ran all-female tickets in 2008 and 2012. But unfortunately, the highest the Green Party has ever performed in a general election was in…
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One Thing Trump Gets Right About Muslims, Terrorism (Kind of)
Let’s start with all the usual caveats: Trump is a demagogue. He and his advisory team are painfully ignorant about Islam—and as a result, most of his policy proposals and rhetoric about Islamic terrorism have been ill-informed and counter-productive. But for all that, Trump has repeatedly emphasized a point which many of his rivals and…
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Why 2016 May Be Donald Trump’s Race to Lose
As the 2016 presidential primaries got underway, there seemed to be a couple incontrovertible truths: Hillary Clinton’s nomination was inevitable, and Trump stood no chance (it was going to be Jeb or Rubio). Yet, here we are six months before the election, and Trump has seized the Republican nomination while Clinton is still working to…
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Bernie Sanders is more electable than Hillary Clinton
Donald Trump is going to be the next president of the United States, and he will have the Democratic National Committee to thank for it. Much has been made of the “math” of the Democratic nomination, and how it favors Hillary Clinton—in large part due to her huge lead in unpledged “superdelegates” (whose decision will determine…