Tag: Ruy Teixeira

In a place that is more than 80 percent white, Mr. Trump’s Democrats share “pretty powerful feelings about race, foreignness and Islam that lead them to see white people as victims in a country feeling increasingly foreign to many of them,” the study noted. Whether Mr. Trump’s proposed barriers against imports and immigrants found support because of a sense of racial threat or out of distress over the loss of manufacturing jobs to China and other countries, ethnic unease is clearly shaping American politics and policy. “No other factor predicted changes in white partisanship during Obama’s presidency as powerfully and as consistently as racial attitudes,” noted John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University. With whites insecure about their hold on power, be it because of China’s rise or increasing racial diversity, their support for globalization has wavered. “For white Americans, the political consequences of racial and global status threat seem to point in similar directions with respect to issue positions: opposition to immigration, rejection of international trade relationships and perceptions of China as a threat to American well-being,” Ms. Mutz wrote. Demographic change does not threaten minorities as it does white Americans. They never held whites’ position of power. Ms. Mutz detects an increase in white Americans’ sense of threat between 2012 and 2016, probably linked to the presence of a black president. Mr. Greenberg’s pollsters visited Macomb County in 2008, too. “I’m sure their racial identity was just as strong in 2008 and 2012, but despite those attitudes they voted for Obama twice.” But though Macomb’s voters may prove that race does not necessarily beat every other card, their evolution suggests that voting based on racial fears is not going to disappear soon.

And according to a recent YouGov-Times poll, Corbyn’s Labour Party is one point behind the Conservatives in voting intention. There is no immediate election on the horizon in the United Kingdom. But there is little doubt that Corbyn’s forces have consolidated their hold on the Labour Party, that the party did better than expected in the 2017 election and that Corbyn is no longer unthinkable as a future prime minister. Corbyn supporters regard themselves as part of a people-powered social movement — dedicated to economic equality and environmental protection, opposed to militarism and in revolt against a compromised establishment. In the United States, this tendency on the left is reinforced by President Trump’s consolidation of power in the Republican Party. His vulnerability is taken not as an opportunity to build a broad political coalition against Trumpism — but as a chance to win without compromise. So this trend on the left is not found everywhere equally. We demand passion, not patience.” Some progressives talk of California — with its political argument between left and lefter — as a model for the nation. Describing our politics as a new civil war, they argue: “At some point, one side or the other must win — and win big. On the left, the same is increasingly true.