Fear is spiking, but is it spiking in part because of politics. Am I afraid? Yes, I am definitely fucking afraid. But not because of the world. It will be an incredible irony if Trump, the deal-breaker who could shake up the system, was actually a reaction to Mitch McConnell and the obstructionism in the House and Senate and the inability of the two parties to work together. But then you have a candidate standing for normalcy and stability and an America that is doing pretty well and is comfortable with our increasingly diverse and pluralistic society.
That is the clash that is being had. Hillary, I think, is running as the representative of the political system. This is not an election about policy. When I want to explain what Trump did, that was a lot of it.
There has been an attempt to turn this into a platform and remake the Republican Party as the ethno-nationalist right-wing party you see in Europe. The bigger idea of Trump is a worldview idea.
There has been, for decades in America, an agreement on both sides to subscribe to the polite fiction we can lift up everybody at once. Do you want to be with the winners? It may not be that they are upset about other people doing better, but they feel they are losing something.
One problem is it keeps getting coded as a conversation about racism. I mean that from both sides. But what comes after him? Liberal was once a dirty word. Today, Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, is going toe to toe with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Polls suggest that young people in particular are not scared of socialism, Klein said. For every couple million dollars he spent, Klein said, he fell three points in the poll. Trump and Sanders—neither of whom have a dedicated super PAC—are running on populist premises suggesting that freedom from significant special interest funding leaves them free to pursue policies that benefit the vast majority of Americans.
The role of money in politics is perhaps overrated, Klein suggested. The candidates who are raising the most are not leading the polls. Trump hasn't done much fundraising at all. Earned media, free media, and social networks might drive down the utility of traditional advertising, Klein said.
A record number of voters identify as Independents. The phenomenon of negative partisanship, or voting against the opposing party, but not feeling loyalty to the other, is one theory.
There was no anti-abortion plank in the GOP platform until It's easy to see how a voter in the s might think Republicans were open to something like Medicare or reproductive choice — particularly if they lived in a liberal area represented by a liberal Republican who actually was open to those policies. Today, however, the choice between the two parties is much, much clearer. You may not like Donald Trump, but you fear Hillary Clinton. As the parties diverge from each other ideologically and culturally, the other side becomes more of a threat — and that makes it easier to justify voting for your side, no matter who the nominee is.
Polling backs this up. Since , the American National Election Studies have been asking Republicans and Democrats to describe their feelings toward the other party on a scale that runs from cold and negative to warm and positive.
In , 31 percent of Republicans had cold, negative feelings toward the Democratic Party, and 32 percent of Democrats had cold, negative feelings toward the Republican Party.
By , that had risen to 77 percent of Republicans and 78 percent of Democrats. But policy does not account for the entirety of the rise in political tribalism. Everyone has multiple identities: racial, religious, professional, ideological and more.
A white conservative who lives in a rural area and is an evangelical Christian is likely to feel that the Republican Party is the best representative of all of those separate identities, for instance.
An African-American liberal who lives in a city and works in a professional job is likely to feel the same way about the Democratic Party. Identity amplification makes Republican and Democratic identities overwhelmingly powerful, and perhaps even inescapable, in modern politics — and modern life.
In , Americans were asked whether they would be pleased, displeased, or unmoved if their son or daughter married a member of the other political party.
Then, only 5 percent of Republicans, and only 4 percent of Democrats, said they would be upset by the cross-party union. Fast-forward to The polling firm YouGov asked Democrats and Republicans the same question — and got very different results. This time, 27 percent of Republicans, and 20 percent of Democrats, said they would be upset if their son or daughter married a member of the opposite party. In , YouGov asked the question again; this time, 49 percent of Republicans, and 33 percent of Democrats, professed concern at interparty marriage.
Today, studies find that people are more willing to discriminate against someone of the other party than of another race, at least in experimental settings. Gender identity is not. You cannot express negative sentiments about social groups in this day and age. But political identities are not protected by these constraints. A Republican is someone who chooses to be Republican, so I can say whatever I want about them. He routinely contradicted or dismissed longtime Republican ideas, but what he never, ever did was disrespect Republican identities.
His extemporaneous, rambling, quasi-factual speeches confuse pundits — including me — who are used to hearing politicians make careful arguments. There was a Supreme Court seat up for grabs, after all, and conservatives reasonably feared whom Clinton would appoint.
This is one way polarization amplifies identity: The two parties are now so far apart ideologically that even an unusual nominee like Trump is a safer bet than the Democrat.
Many Trump voters appear to have made this calculation. If the U. Regardless of the number of states or the formula used to allocate legislative seats and Electoral College votes, some state will complain that it was shortchanged.
In my view, this is the cost of operating as a nation that is composed of states, provinces or other smaller groups.
Canada has a similar disparity of voting power between the larger provinces of Ontario and Quebec — which each has more than , people per member of Parliament — and smaller ones such as Nunavut or the Yukon, with barely 35, people per member of Parliament.
Albertans have the least voting power per capita, with nearly , residents per member of Parliament. In Spain, too, power is unevenly allocated. With nearly , people per representative in the Congress, people in Madrid and Barcelona have much less voting power per capita than the denizens of less-populated provinces such as Soria.
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