Category Archives: 2016 election

the Democrats and religious Americans

In The Atlantic just before the New Year, Michael Wear–an evangelical who helped Barack Obama with “faith outreach”–offered a critical assessment of the Democrats’ relationships with Evangelicals, 81% of whom supported Trump in 2016. Wear argued that it is a civic obligation to strive to engage all sectors of the society, and it’s a political necessity to engage religious Christians, given their large numbers. Wear wouldn’t expect Democrats to compromise on the substance of abortion, but he suggested that they could acknowledge the moral motivations of abortion’s opponents and look for common ground where it exists. He also decried a certain tone-deafness or ignorance about religious values and traditions, which sometimes verges implicitly on contempt. For instance:

[Wear] once drafted a faith-outreach fact sheet describing Obama’s views on poverty, titling it “Economic Fairness and the Least of These,” a reference to a famous teaching from Jesus in the Bible. Another staffer repeatedly deleted “the least of these,” commenting, “Is this a typo? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Who/what are ‘these’?”

Wear’s remarks are a bit anecdotal and could give a misleading overall impression. However, in The New Republic, Sarah Jones responded in a way that I thought vindicated Wear’s point. She argued that the Democrats should “frame abortion access as a moral good”; women suffer from any wavering on that topic. (Note that an outright majority of women have been against abortion in several recent years.) She added, “The country is becoming increasingly secular and increasingly liberal on issues like marriage equality. The Democratic party won’t win by catering to social conservatives, and it shouldn’t try.”

Leaving aside Wear’s point that national leaders should always try to engage any significant group, Jones is also wrong empirically. It’s true that the proportion of Americans who do not believe in God has risen–to 10% in 2016. Still, 89% say they believe in God, 64% believe in Hell, 54% believe that “religion can answer all or most of today’s problems,” 53% say that religion is very important in their own lives, and 55% claim to belong to a church or synagogue. The secularization trend is subtle and modest. I also fail to see a trend in the pro-choice direction:

Ed Kilgore offers a more interesting response to the Wear interview. He notes that whenever Democrats become concerned about losing “religious” voters, the conversation turns to White Evangelicals (see the Wear interview) or to “cultural conservatives” (as in Jones’ reply), with sometimes a passing reference to Jews. The discussion overlooks Catholics of all backgrounds, Protestants of color, Mainline Protestants (who number 36 million, mostly Whites), Muslims, Hindus, and other religious minorities.

Many of these constituencies see politics through religious lenses, at least in part. They are prone to be alienated by an aggressive secularist agenda, and they are likely to see issues like abortion as morally complicated, wherever they land. Often enough they vote for reasons other than religious ones. For instance, a majority of Mainline Protestants supported Trump, which I would attribute mainly to their race and class rather than their faith. Still, there are powerful faith-based reasons that they might oppose not only Trump but also Paul Ryan’s economics. Meanwhile, religious congregations remain sources of social capital and bottom-up political power that progressives ignore at their peril.

See also the political advantages of organized religion.

why the global turn to authoritarian ethnonationalism?

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It seems impossible to explain why Donald Trump won the 2016 election. For one thing, he lost the popular vote. Besides, a single election is an “n” of one with numerous contingent circumstances, in this case including the FBI’s last-minute intervention, Hillary Clinton’s gender, and the behavior of cable news. We often think of a cause as something that would yield a different result if it were changed. In this case, changing any of a dozen or more factors might have put Clinton in the White House.

More valuable is to consider why authoritarian, illiberal nationalists either dominate or (like Trump) have narrowly missed winning majorities in many countries: at least in Austria, China, Hungary, India, Israel, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States–with England and France also looking at risk. Across the 34 OECD countries, true right-wing parties still capture only about 8 percent of total popular support, but that’s steadily up from five percent in the 1970s. This graph from Funke, Moritz & Schularick shows the recent shift in nine major European nations.

Vote Share for the Far Right Since 2004

At the global level, the “n” is much greater than one, and we can rule out certain explanations for the trends. For instance, in other counties, an authoritarian leader hasn’t replaced a person of color or defeated a female opponent.

I cannot estimate the relative impact of the following factors, but they seem plausible to me across the whole range of cases:

Oligarchy: Many of the authoritarian leaders are billionaires or closely associated with billionaires. Their supporters are personally wealthy individuals rather than multinational public companies, which are more comfortable with predictable centrists like Hillary Clinton. A billionaire can know political leaders personally, can trade wealth for influence, and can profit from disruptions in the larger economy. Several of the key billionaires are media personalities. I think some of them develop authoritarian expectations by being the barons of large private enterprises, within which their word is law. Billionaires have almost tripled their share of global GDP since 1996, and their inflation-adjusted total assets have risen by 7.5% annually over those two decades. They represent a global force that was absent in 1996.

A gap in the ideological landscape: For this purpose, let’s categorize ideologies along two dimensions. They are either pro-state or anti-state/pro-market. And they either favor a narrowly defined ethnocultural group or they support diversity and globalism. I’ll call the latter spectrum closed versus open.

Since the 1950s, the dominant parties and movements in the wealthy democracies were all fairly open, at least in principle; the debate was about how much the state should intervene. We often thought of the US ideological spectrum as one-dimensional, from pro-state to pro-market, with everyone giving lip-service to openness. Some conservatives claimed to be pro-market and nationalist, but it’s not clear that that was a coherent position. The whole structure ignored the possibility of a pro-state, explicitly closed position. Like entrepreneurs who have discovered a market niche, authoritarian nationalists have filled the corner previously occupied by fascism. To be sure, Trump may govern like a market libertarian if he turns things over to Paul Ryan and contents himself with symbolic nationalism, but that’s not what he promised to do.

You would think that nationalist authoritarians wouldn’t cooperate much across international borders, because they are xenophobic. But there was a short-lived Fascist International in the 1930s, and we definitely see some coordination today.

Al Qaeda/ISIS: Before explaining why I think these terrorist organizations share causal responsibility for the global turn to authoritarianism, I want to stipulate that we are morally responsible for how we have responded to them. We did not have to invade Iraq, pass the Patriot Act, or turn Guantanamo into a prison. Those stupid and harmful acts are our responsibility as American citizens. Still, it seems both naive and misleading to omit the intentional acts of Al Qaeda and ISIS from our causal theory. They sought to provoke antidemocratic reactions, and they succeeded. An admired friend of mine recently summarized her qualitative research with Muslim teenagers in suburban New Jersey over the past decade, explaining that they have moved from a comfortable feeling of being Americans to a sense of vulnerability and alienation. This is an injustice that is up to remedy. But it struck me as a mistake not even to mention Al Qaeda as a major cause of the change. Osama bin Laden got what he wanted when he sent those planes into the Trade Towers. Although the US leadership of 2001 (including H. Clinton) proved monumentally stupid, Al Qaeda found a vulnerability that would have been hard to defend.

The 2007-8 financial crisis: Funke, Moritz & Schularick show pretty compellingly that voters shift to the far right after financial crises. This has been a pattern across many nations for at least a century. The 2007-8 collapse was an especially terrible one. It hit the advanced economies particularly hard, thus giving their voters a sense that they were losing comparative advantage as well as absolute wealth. It was followed by fiscal austerity that punished ordinary people, while no elites were held accountable for the trillions of dollars of waste and disruption. My sense is that Barack Obama got a pass from a majority of Americans because he wasn’t responsible at the time of the crisis, and he has been seen as laboring to repair the damage. But Hillary Clinton was part of the governing elite that was on duty when the fateful decisions were made.

Cultural backlash: Pippa Norris proposes that cultural liberalization (marriage equality, improving sexual equality, growing racial diversity, etc.). have produced a backlash rooted in the White working class of OECD countries. She clearly favors the trend of cultural liberalization and abhors the backlash, but a different take is Nancy Fraser‘s: people are rightly rejecting a form of “progressive neoliberalism” that unites “new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights)” with the cultural agendas of “high-end ‘symbolic’ and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood).” That is the coalition that delivers diversity in schools and workplaces along with “the weakening of unions, the decline of real wages, the increasing precarity of work, and the rise of the two–earner family in place of the defunct family wage.”

A hollowing out of democracy: People have died or placed themselves in terrible danger in the name of democracy and liberal values, whether on Omaha Beach or the Edmund Pettus Bridge. But an inspiring vision of democracy means more than the right to choose among professional politicians every few years. Even a call for equality isn’t inspiring enough, because how much should each of us care whether our share of power is as great as everyone else’s? Democracy must mean working together to create a better world.

Instead, the US rightwing has abandoned the sometimes inspiring pro-democratic rhetoric of Ronald Reagan to claim that we are not a democracy at all, but a republic. Similar rhetorical shifts away from democracy are evident in other countries as well. Meanwhile, the technocratic center presents democracy as a system of regular elections along with transparent information. Even defenders of the EU admit that it demonstrates a severe “democracy deficit.” Democratically governed associations, such as unions and congregationalist churches, are in decline. And several strands of the left are reflexively critical of any pro-democratic project that emerges in the US or elsewhere in the wealthy global North. People seem increasingly sophisticated about democracy’s drawbacks (misinformation, majority tyranny, cultural bias, etc.) and decreasingly inspired by its promise. That leaves the field open for explicitly illiberal and antidemocratic movements.

winter break

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As friends know, I’ve been blogging almost daily here since Jan. 8, 2003 (with 3,313 posts so far). I usually try to rotate among political analysis, social theory, and some cultural commentary. While I expected Clinton to win the 2016 election, I looked forward to reducing the frequency of my topical political posts. Barack Obama is a leader for whom I feel unique regard and emotional commitment. I thought that once his eight years were over, I’d try to go a bit deeper into theory, while the US political system entered a period of–as I expected then–stalemate. Instead, on Nov. 8, we experienced the civic nightmare of a Trump victory. For the first time in nearly 14 years of blogging, I have focused essentially on one question every day: how to respond? Although this remains a comparatively low-traffic site, it saw enormous growth compared to any time in its history. Particularly popular posts (by my standards) have been:

We are about to take a family vacation, and I am also feeling the need for a mental break–not to retreat from political engagement (much as I would like to be able to consider that option), but to regroup and consider how to be most useful. Thus I am signing off until Jan. 2. Happy holidays!

the bright side of one-party government: accountability

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Here’s an excerpt of Sarah Kliff’s interview with Debbie Mills, a Trump voter:

Are you surprised how much Republicans are talking about repeal [of Obamacare]?

No.

Did you expect — do you think they’ll do it, or do you think it’ll be too hard?

I’m hoping that they don’t, ’cause, I mean, what would they do then? Would this go away?

Yes, possibly.

The insurance?

It will go, if they repeal it. I mean, that’s what they promised to do in so many elections.

Right … so … I don’t know. … [snip]

Our interview began to make her a bit nervous.

You’re scaring me now on the insurance part … I’m afraid now that the insurance is going to go away and we’re going to be up a creek.

How could this happen? Why would vulnerable people vote against their own essential interests when they are aware of the stakes and have no altruistic or principled objections to the policy that’s at risk?

Kliff proposes that it was reasonable to doubt that Obamacare really would be repealed, since many political experts also predicted that it would become untouchable, like Social Security. Even to this day, there is a chance that Republicans will leave it alone. But, if we assume that Debbie Mills should have voted for Clinton over Trump to preserve Obamacare, then here are two familiar explanations for her choice:

  1. Trust. Nobody really knows that political leaders will do in the future. Nobody even knows what any given policy will accomplish. We all rely on information, interpretation, predictions, and promises from sources that we trust. I think many Trump voters did not trust Trump to do anything specific that he said, but they did trust his general competence and alignment with their interests. Meanwhile, they distrusted Clinton’s motivations. I believe they were wrong in these judgments, but the difference is not my superior rationality. Rather, we made different assessments of trustworthiness.
  2. Salience: Joseph Schumpeter observed in 1942 that “the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again. His thinking becomes associative and affective.” This was true, Schumpeter said, of “educated people and of people who are successfully active in non-political walks of life.” The reason was basically that each vote hardly counted, so it was irrational to spend a lot of time sorting through the “masses of information” that were already available in 1942–not to mention the vast masses today–to make careful judgments. In the absence of “immediate responsibility, ignorance will persist.” And voting, although a responsibility, is too small to compel much attention. Schumpeter originated this way of thinking about politics, but much subsequent psychological research has reinforced it.

I would add a third explanation, and this one is significant because it is likely to change.

  1. Divided government. For 28 of the past 36 years, the elected branches of the federal government have been divided between Democrats and Republicans. Even during the remaining eight years (two each under Clinton and Obama and four under G.W. Bush), Senate filibusters, opposing state governments, and courts have checked the majority’s power. This is one reason that net government spending–federal plus state plus local–rose by nearly 50% under a conservative-sounding president (Bush) and leveled off under under a liberal-sounding president (Obama). As long as the ideology of our most prominent leader is largely unrelated to the actual policies in place, voters get poor feedback from their choices at the ballot box. That makes them unlikely to learn.

I am not saying that it’s a Good Thing that we now face unified Republican government in most of the country. Mills will probably lose her health insurance, which could shorten or wreck her life. Many others will pay a severe price as well. It’s relatively easy for me to see the bright side, since I am not nearly as vulnerable.

But there is a bright side. If you believe in electoral democracy at all, you must acknowledge that voters will make mistakes severe enough to cost lives. The argument for electoral democracy is that voters will learn from such mistakes. But we have frustrated such learning for more than a generation. The political system has performed very poorly at times–killing half a million Iraqis, incarcerating 2 million Americans, allowing our industrial cities to whither wither away–but few citizens have had to rethink their prior assumptions about which ideology is better for them. The signal has been lost in the noise.

The signal is now about to be heard pretty clearly. Democrats and other progressives should amplify it by constantly drawing connections between the reigning ideology and its outcomes, and by refusing to mitigate the short-term damage. Then Trump’s 2016 victory will be Pyrrhic.

prospects for civic media after 2016

Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice is a new book edited by Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis. I contributed the introductory chapter, “Democracy in the Digital Age.” On Nov. 16, I joined Eric, Paul, Ethan Zuckerman (MIT), Colin Rhinesmith (Simmons), Beth Coleman (University of Waterloo), and Ceasar McDowell (MIT) for a book-launch discussion that focused on the role of media in the 2016 election and the prospects for civic media in the near future. Here’s the video.