(03-10-2017, 09:17 PM)Odin Wrote:

(03-10-2017, 09:11 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: Finally Odin if you want a group that hasn't assimilated within three generations of arrival....Blacks.  Some of our families have been on this continent or over 400 years.  We aren't assimilated into American culture by and large, we are a culture parallel to it.  I'm an exception that proves the rule.

If you don't like that group Chicanos.  But in their case they didn't cross a boarder the boarder crossed them.

I consider black Americans to have a sub-culture within a greater American culture, not a separate culture. There are a lot of parts of American culture that are the creation of black Americans.

(03-10-2017, 09:17 PM)Odin Wrote:

(03-10-2017, 09:11 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: Finally Odin if you want a group that hasn't assimilated within three generations of arrival....Blacks.  Some of our families have been on this continent or over 400 years.  We aren't assimilated into American culture by and large, we are a culture parallel to it.  I'm an exception that proves the rule.

If you don't like that group Chicanos.  But in their case they didn't cross a boarder the boarder crossed them.

I consider black Americans to have a sub-culture within a greater American culture, not a separate culture. There are a lot of parts of American culture that are the creation of black Americans.

(03-10-2017, 09:27 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:

(03-10-2017, 09:17 PM)Odin Wrote:

(03-10-2017, 09:11 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: Finally Odin if you want a group that hasn't assimilated within three generations of arrival....Blacks.  Some of our families have been on this continent or over 400 years.  We aren't assimilated into American culture by and large, we are a culture parallel to it.  I'm an exception that proves the rule.

If you don't like that group Chicanos.  But in their case they didn't cross a boarder the boarder crossed them.

I consider black Americans to have a sub-culture within a greater American culture, not a separate culture. There are a lot of parts of American culture that are the creation of black Americans.

And yet they are not actually fully assimilated, as a population (though many are as individuals).  A lot of Native American populations aren't either.

(03-10-2017, 09:33 PM)Kinser79 Wrote:

(03-10-2017, 09:27 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:

(03-10-2017, 09:17 PM)Odin Wrote:

(03-10-2017, 09:11 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: Finally Odin if you want a group that hasn't assimilated within three generations of arrival....Blacks.  Some of our families have been on this continent or over 400 years.  We aren't assimilated into American culture by and large, we are a culture parallel to it.  I'm an exception that proves the rule.

If you don't like that group Chicanos.  But in their case they didn't cross a boarder the boarder crossed them.

I consider black Americans to have a sub-culture within a greater American culture, not a separate culture. There are a lot of parts of American culture that are the creation of black Americans.

And yet they are not actually fully assimilated, as a population (though many are as individuals).  A lot of Native American populations aren't either.

Indeed.  I've argued before that the main reason I'm as assimilated as I am is based on two factors.  First my Grandparents and Parents are part of the Black petty-bourgeoisie, and second I'm gay (so I really don't have a place in Black culture which is incredibly conservative in the religious sense).  Even though I hang out with a disproportionate amount of whites I'm still culturally different to them so even I'm not fully assimilated.

(03-10-2017, 09:25 PM)Kinser79 Wrote:

(03-10-2017, 09:17 PM)Odin Wrote:

(03-10-2017, 09:11 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: Finally Odin if you want a group that hasn't assimilated within three generations of arrival....Blacks.  Some of our families have been on this continent or over 400 years.  We aren't assimilated into American culture by and large, we are a culture parallel to it.  I'm an exception that proves the rule.

If you don't like that group Chicanos.  But in their case they didn't cross a boarder the boarder crossed them.

I consider black Americans to have a sub-culture within a greater American culture, not a separate culture. There are a lot of parts of American culture that are the creation of black Americans.

Black Americans disagree with you. Being Black myself I know that I'm culturally different from my White BF and my White Son, just as I'm culturally different from my Jewish neighbor and the Korean Family down the street.

As for those artifacts of American culture derived from Black American culture you'll find that in almost every case it was bleached at least a little bit.

(03-10-2017, 09:48 PM)Odin Wrote:

(03-10-2017, 09:25 PM)Kinser79 Wrote:

(03-10-2017, 09:17 PM)Odin Wrote:

(03-10-2017, 09:11 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: Finally Odin if you want a group that hasn't assimilated within three generations of arrival....Blacks.  Some of our families have been on this continent or over 400 years.  We aren't assimilated into American culture by and large, we are a culture parallel to it.  I'm an exception that proves the rule.

If you don't like that group Chicanos.  But in their case they didn't cross a boarder the boarder crossed them.

I consider black Americans to have a sub-culture within a greater American culture, not a separate culture. There are a lot of parts of American culture that are the creation of black Americans.

Black Americans disagree with you. Being Black myself I know that I'm culturally different from my White BF and my White Son, just as I'm culturally different from my Jewish neighbor and the Korean Family down the street.

As for those artifacts of American culture derived from Black American culture you'll find that in almost every case it was bleached at least a little bit.

Black Americans were for a long time a separate racial CASTE, which is why I call them a sub-culture, but saying that they are a completely separate culture is just going too far. I guess we are meaning different things by "culture".

(03-10-2017, 12:47 PM)Kinser79 Wrote:

(03-10-2017, 11:42 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: The "alternative right" really is fascist. You know... White Power! Sieg heil! Duce! Duce! Duce! The KKK forever!

Actually this proves only that you've not listened to Richard Spencer or Jared Taylor amongst others.  They are certainly white identitarians but they are hardly fascists as they also make the case for less state power and not more.  Fascism has a meaning, it is an ideology and it has various forms that are universal.  Don't be confused by the absence of of swastikas and hoods--if you want American Fascism it will come wrapped in the disguise of anti-racism and social justice.

Quote:

Quote:Fascism remains an evil cause, and the only reason to accept a certain fascism is that another is even worse... Schuschnigg over Hitler, which is like saying "Better Kadar than Pol Pot".

PBR let us suppose for a second you're right--you aren't of course but just for the sake of argument--if the entirety of the Right is fascist then you should be glad that Donald Trump is in charge and I'm not.

Quote:

Quote:There has been a predictable pattern in every midterm election beginning in 2006: that when the President has approval ratings below 50%, his Party loses seats in the House If you want to believe that Donald Trump will turn his popularity around and have approval ratings in the high 50s by the autumn of 2018 then such is your prerogative. Maybe because I am a partisan Democrat I can't ever catch on to what a wonderful President we have and need a stint in some labor camp in which I learn how great the Leader is or die for my failure.

Firstly, during the election, and for the past several years the poll organizations have made it clear that they are over sampling Democrats--and likely partisan Democrats at that (we're not talking about people merely registered to the Dems, like myself though that is likely to change I have to renew my voter stuff before 2018).  They were doing this to the tune of 20% during the election, and HRC was still losing!

Quote:Secondly, because of this over sampling it makes the polls suspect.  That being said, I think it will matter if most people think the Prez is doing a good job or not.  And if he is not doing a good job, how does one get Congress to play ball with him.  Bear in mind as I said previously to Odin Daddy isn't picking fights with the Democrats (they've made themselves irrelevant) rather it is with the Globalist wing of the GOP.  

I expect that GOP losses in the House and Senate will be largely Nationalist GOP victories over Globalist GOP candidates.  That is to say, the war will be fought out in the primaries rather than the General.  

Quote:

Quote:The polls show Americans getting accustomed to the reality of Donald Trump... but they remain very low. Out President is far better at creating ideological walls than in building pragmatic bridges. If the Republicans have an economic meltdown or an international calamity  to deal with, then they would be hard-pressed to win the sorts of districts that they won 57-43 in 2016.

Polls also showed HRC having a 98% chance of taking the electoral college, but she was trounced instead.  I think we can put polls to bed now.

Quote:

Quote:Yes, it is true that far more Democratic seats in the Senate are up than are Republican seats in the Senate, and the Republicans have only two in non-swing states. I have little cause top believe that Democrats can make Senate gains. But they can make big gains in State houses. There will be open gubernatorial seats in Michigan and Florida, and should Democrats win those two, Donald Trump will have no help in the form of voter suppression in those states. Gubernatorial races could be even more important than the Senate races for the upcoming general election of 2020.

Unlikely.  Dem leadership nation wide is largely in their 60s and 70s.  The participation of younger people in the Democratic Party is waning as it dawns on them that "Free Shit" has to be paid for by someone, so even the Sanders wing is collapsing.  On top of that Conservatives are making strong inroads into culture--which has shifted from Hollyweird and the Tee-Vee to the internet.  Let me tell you, conservative youtubers outnumber liberal ones 5 to 1.  And this doesn't count defections.

Quote:

Quote:

Quote:The only wishful thinking on my part is that patterns that have been true under Barack Obama operate just as hard with Donald Trump,which is no more unreasonable than an Iowa corn farmer ordering  seed corn in February despite the raging blizzard that on its own terms suggests a return to the Ice Age.

It is good to see you understand nothing about farming, this despite living in a 'hick town'.  An Iowa corn farmer ordering seed in February is ordering it far too late--typically they do that in January and even December.  Seed companies have to process the order, pick the seeds, load them on to a truck and then it has to be hauled to the farmer--a process that can take months, and corn is typically planted in March or April, baring a late thaw or wet early spring.  Secondly a blizzard no more indicates an ice age than a really hot summer indicates global warming.  It is called weather, and sometimes it is random.

Quote:And speaking of global warming I find it intriguing that NASA has recently discovered that Venus, Mars and Jupiter are all having global warming issues too.  I bet it is caused by all the Martian coal fired power plants, and Venusian SUVs.

PBR Wrote:I have seen enough about Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer to recognize that I don't want any part of them. It's about like seeing sulfuric acid attack sugar or cellulose. You do not want to touch sulfuric acid. 

PBR Wrote:Fascists are generally on the Right, but not everyone on the Right is fascist.

PBR Wrote:That applied to Dubya and to Obama. What causes you to believe that it won't happen this time? Note well that even if the pattern allows Democrats to pick up ten House seats (far from enough to give the Democrats a majority in the House)  the pattern still holds.

PBR Wrote:For Trump to get Republican gains in the House he will need to become very well perceived. When you consider that the economy is still in the Obama bull market and there haven't been any overt calamities in foreign policy... it's only a matter of time before something goes wrong, and the strength and appropriateness of his problem-solving skills get tested.

PBR Wrote:Survivors of primary challenges find that the Other Side then throws the dirt left over from the primary challenge. Think at the extreme of Blanche Lincoln.

Quote:Hillary  Clinton won the popular vote

PBR Wrote:Should the economy collapse under Trump or should we get drawn into a War for Profits that bloats the debt and sends lots of American youth back in body bags, then we almost all lose.

PBR Wrote:Horse racing wouldn't be so interesting if 50-1 long-shots didn't win on occasion, like about one time in 50.  Unfortunately for us we Americans had far more running on the 2016  election than whether our $5 bets might pay off $250.  With a really-bad President, and I already see Donald Trump making Dubya look like a wise, principled, benevolent, and flexible leader by contrast.

PBR Wrote:Free $#!+? No thanks. I am at the point in which I will need to downsize my possessions.

PBR Wrote:Part of the economic mess is that the productivity of the world is high enough that we can no longer rely upon greater output of manufactures to make people happier. I know one way to live much more frugally than many others -- be what demographers call a "late adapter".

PBR Wrote:(OK, if I had a job in which being technologically up-to-date made me better at the job, I would be an early-adapter. But I am not buying a K-Cup coffee maker, and I know the inevitable direction of most electronic devices. My new jo0b will require a smart phone, but not one of the $600 models. More like $60).

PBR Wrote:The 5-to-1 ratio of conservatives to liberals on YouTube are on politics... and four of the five 'conservatives' are right-wing trolls.

PBR Wrote:On culture and science the ratio is more like even.

PBR Wrote:There's much garbage emanating from Hollywood, and TV has never been a patrician medium. Does it say something that one of my favorite cable channels is Turner Classic Movies?

PBR Wrote:Nitpick.

PBR Wrote:OK, smarty-pants. Venus is as hot as it is because of the high atmospheric pressure; Mars is cold because of the low atmospheric pressure.

Daily Mail Wrote:What the Democrats don't want you to know: Party lost more than 1,030 seats in state legislatures, governor's mansions and Congress during Barack Obama's presidency

Statistic reveals how Obama's leadership was rough on the party's grassroots
Democrats now hold the governor's office and both legislative chambers in just five coastal states
Obama's tenure has marked the greatest number of losses under any president in decades, according to experts
He's indicated he intends to make partisan politics a bigger piece of his post-presidential life

President Barack Obama often cites numbers like these while boasting about his tenure in the White House: 15 million new jobs, a 4.9 per cent unemployment rate and 74 months of consecutive job growth.

But one number almost always goes unheard: more than 1,030 seats.

That's the number of spots in state legislatures, governor's mansions and Congress lost by Democrats during Obama's presidency.

The statistic reveals an unexpected twist of the Obama years: the leadership of the former community organizer was rough on the grassroots of his own party.

The Democratic Party has languished in Obama's shadow for years and is now searching for itself.

'What's happened on the ground is that voters have been punishing Democrats for eight solid years — it's been exhausting,' South Carolina state Senator Vincent Sheheen said. He lost two gubernatorial campaigns to Nikki Haley, President-elect Donald Trump's pick for ambassador to the UN.

'If I was talking about a local or state issue, voters would always lapse back into a national topic: Barack Obama.'

Obama's election was heralded as a moment of Democratic dominance — the crashing of a conservative wave that had swept the country since the dawn of the Reagan era.

Democrats believed that the coalition of young, minority and female voters who swept Obama into the White House would usher in something new: an ascendant Democratic majority that would ensure party gains for decades to come.

The coalition, it turns out, was Obama's alone.

After this year's elections, Democrats hold the governor's office and both legislative chambers in just five coastal states: Oregon, California, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware. Republicans have the trifecta in 25, giving them control of a broad swath of the middle of the country.

The defeats have all but wiped out a generation of young Democrats, leaving the party with limited power in statehouses and a thin bench to challenge an ascendant GOP majority eager to undo many of the president's policies.

To be sure, the president's party almost always loses seats in midterm elections. But, according to experts, Obama's tenure has marked the greatest number of losses under any president in decades.

'Obama just figured his important actions on policies like immigration and health care would solidify support, but that hasn't really materialized,' said Daniel Galvin, a political science professor at Northwestern University and the author of a book on presidential party building.

'He's done basically the minimal amount of party building, and it's been insufficient to help the party.'

Obama has acknowledged this publicly only after his party's devastating November losses. He's admitted he failed to create 'a sustaining organization' around the political force that twice elected him to office.

'That's something I would have liked to have done more of, but it's kind of hard to do when you're also dealing with a whole bunch of issues here in the White House,' he said at his year-end press conference.

It is perhaps not surprising that Obama — a politician who promised a post-party era — turned out not to be a party stalwart.

Obama and his aides came into office neither beholden to his party's establishment, nor particularly interested in reinforcing his party's weak spots.

He electrified the 2004 Democratic National Convention with a speech seeking common cause over party differences. Four years later, he defeated Hillary Clinton, the pick of the party insiders, to win the Democratic presidential nomination.

In the White House, Obama's failure to do the typical Washington schmoozing was a constant source of complaint among congressional Democrats. The same was true for his reluctance to endorse down-ballot candidates and inability to parlay Organizing for Action, his grassroots organization, into a significant force.

State parties languished and the Democratic National Committee struggled with dysfunction and debt.

'We built this beautiful house, but the foundation is rotten,' said South Carolina Democratic Chairman Jaime Harrison, a candidate to lead the Democratic National Committee. 'In hindsight we should have looked at this and said, 'Maybe the state parties should be strong.''

Toward the end of his presidency, Obama began doing more, stepping in to assist more than 150 state legislative candidates in October and campaigning across the country for Clinton.

He's indicated he intends to make partisan politics a bigger piece of his post-presidential life. Aides say Obama will be closely involved in an effort to focus on drawing district lines more in the favor of Democrats.

The president's advisers blame the losses on such structural trends. They point to a flood of Republican super PAC dollars and a resurgence of Republican political power in statehouses. That state-level dominance has given Republicans the ability to redraw district lines and created voting rules that could benefit their party for years to come.

The refusal by many Democrats to accept help from Obama in the 2010 and 2014 midterms was also a strategic mistake, they argue.

'Frankly, when people have asked, the president has been more than willing to engage,' Obama's political director David Simas said.

Some Democrats blame Obama for an executive agenda that highlighted social issues — such as transgender rights and access to birth control — over the economic anxiety still felt by many voters.

'The backlash to the Obama presidency was perhaps bigger than any of us really realized,' said Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democratic Network, a Democratic think tank.

A lot of the story of this election was people feeling like the culture was evolving in a way that made it feel like they were no longer living in the country they grew up in.'

Others are focusing on the one clear truth of the November defeats: what worked for Obama just did not work for this party.

Perhaps the most remarkable twist of a shocking political season? Even as voters chose to elect a successor who vows to undo most of Obama's legacy, his approval rating remains the highest it's been since the spring of 2009.

(03-11-2017, 10:12 AM)Kinser79 Wrote: And I didn't even have to resort to the Torygraph or Breitbart.

(03-11-2017, 10:21 AM)Galen Wrote:

(03-11-2017, 10:12 AM)Kinser79 Wrote: And I didn't even have to resort to the Torygraph or Breitbart.

Yes, but the lefties tend to consider reality to be  optional.

(03-11-2017, 10:57 AM)Odin Wrote: The Daily Hate Mail?

(03-10-2017, 12:47 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: And speaking of global warming I find it intreguing that NASA has recently discovered that Venus, Mars and Jupiter are all having global warming issues too.

(03-11-2017, 02:21 PM)Mikebert Wrote:

(03-10-2017, 12:47 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: And speaking of global warming I find it intreguing that NASA has recently discovered that Venus, Mars and Jupiter are all having global warming issues too.

Yeah right.

Quote:The anti-Trump resistance is not like the Tea Party, to which it is frequently compared. It’s much more serious, despite repeated denials in the mainstream media. True, it lacks a misleading, self-important moniker, and it’s only been around a few weeks or months, rather than years. But the Women’s March brought out more than 4 million people to more than 900 events on all seven continents. Tea Party protests on Tax Day in 2009 were an order of magnitude smaller in total, with the largest of them in the 10,000 range. Tea Party town halls didn’t gain steam until the August 2009 congressional recess, followed by the 9-12 rally that September, relentlessly hyped by Glenn Beck on Fox News, and falsely touted to have drawn 2 million people. It was really more like 70,000, as Nate Silver explained.  

Beyond all those particulars, the Tea Party was far more driven by outside money, organization and media promotion than the anti-Trump protests today. The Tea Party grew from more than 20 years of Astroturf organizing, financed largely by Big Tobacco, as well as Koch Brothers organizing, specifically employing the “Tea Party” brand since at least 2002. What’s more, its level of popular support was always more limited as well, rarely rising above 30 percent. It never represented a majoritarian point of view.  

Even within the GOP itself, non-Tea Party Republicans opposed Tea Party ideas on some of its core economic thinking, as Greg Sargent highlighted in January 2014 (“The Tea Party and the Hammock Theory of Poverty”). Most tellingly, Tea Party Republicans (and GOP leaners) overwhelmingly opposed raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 65 percent to 33 percent, while non-Tea Party Republicans and leaners overwhelmingly supported it by precisely the opposite ratio. The Tea Party represented an isolated minority that was wildly out of step with the rest of the country but wielded extraordinary power within a severely dysfunctional party and political system. There has been no comparable polling on the anti-Trump protests, but President Trump’s approval ratings remain well below 50 percent, so opposing him is clearly a majoritarian position.

The Tea Party’s power came from the ability of an organized anti-government minority to wreak havoc in an already long-gridlocked system. They basically don’t believe in governance, and our democracy is fragile enough that they have been able to start dismantling it, though nowhere near as rapidly or radically as they’d like. Anti-Trump protesters want to block the president’s agenda, clearly. But they’re definitely not anti-governance. To the contrary, they support significant enhancements in the effectiveness, responsiveness and scope of government to meet the challenges of the 21st century. They also embrace a much more diverse range of identities and confluence of movements.

It’s harder to build than to destroy, so the anti-Trump movement has a more difficult job before it, made even harder by the structures of American governance, the many veto points, and the enormous money power of the 1 percent. Facile comparisons that ignore these asymmetries misrepresent political reality, and serve to make the anti-Trump movement’s work even harder than it already is.  

While many mainstream pundits have equated the two movements, conservatives muddle things even more. A typical example is Rep. Raúl Labrador of Idaho, a House Freedom Caucus leader, who recently described the Tea Party as “a large group of people that organically got together eight years ago,” because they were upset with the Republican establishment as well as with President Obama. As Jane Mayer made clear in her book “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” there was nothing organic about it:

Quote:Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”, had stopped by to see an early Tea Party rally in Lafayette Square, across from the White House, in February 2009. “It was very much a put-up job,” he concluded. “All the usual suspects were there, like Freedom Works, ‘Joe the Plumber’, and The American Spectator magazine. There were also some people who had Revolutionary War costumes and ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flags, actual activists, and a few ordinary people,” he said. “But it was very well organized by the conservative groups. Back then, it was really obvious that it was put on, and they’d set it up. But then it caught on.” Frank argues that “the Tea Party wasn’t subverted,” as some have suggested. “It was born subverted.” Still, he said, “it’s a major accomplishment for sponsors like the Kochs that they’ve turned corporate self-interest into a movement among people on the streets.”

Make no mistake, it was a remarkable accomplishment, if one that also cost a lot of money. But it took the disastrous failures of the Bush administration, which destroyed the broader conservative brand, to provide an opening for the more radical Tea Party brand to catch on. The Democratic establishment has failed as well — though not as spectacularly, and not around a clearly articulated and agreed-upon ideological identity. But that failure reached a new crisis point with the election of Donald Trump, which in turn led to the anti-Trump movement. Here we can see one true point in common: Like the Tea Party, the anti-Trump resistance is a response to the failures of both parties.

Another symmetry is the influx of new activism and newly created organizations, alongside older, more established ones. Writing for the Hill recently, Heath Brown, author of a book about the Tea Party, argued that the Tea Party displayed “two important dimensions,” which he claimed the anti-Trump movement lacked: First, “bold imagery and clear symbolism,” and second, “the formation of a vast network of new organizations,” numbering around 1,000, citing the work of Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson. Brown’s first point is valid, though it actually illustrates my thesis about how deeply asymmetrical the two movements are. The Koch brothers’ organizations have been fooling around with that imagery, symbolism and faux history since at least 2002, and even before that in embryonic form.

But the second point is simply false. First of all, by 2012, the number of Tea Party groups had declined to 600, Skocpol said, though she considered that “a very good survival rate.” In contrast, today new anti-Trump groups are quickly growing. The Indivisible Guide website has a geographically organized directory of groups, that “are wholly independent; they are listed provided they agree to resist Trump’s agenda, focus on local, defensive congressional advocacy, and embrace progressive values.” Within 50 miles of my home in Los Angeles, there are 238 groups listed, of which 66 begin with “Indivisible” in their names — the bare minimum of new organizations. But that’s just L.A., what do you expect? Well, there are at least eight identifiably new groups within 50 miles of Omaha, six in and around Boise, Idaho, and 19 within 50 miles of Paul Ryan’s home district in Janesville, Wisconsin. And that’s just groups affiliated under one umbrella. There is no doubt that the Trump resistance is forming new organizations at a high rate, just as the Tea Party did — only much faster.

But the similarities are not as important as the differences, which can only be fully appreciated in terms of the much broader, long-standing asymmetry of American politics, laid out in detail by Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins in their book “Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats“ (my Salon story here). In a nutshell, the Tea Party represented a re-visioning of conservative politics in the wake of George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, in line with the traditional ideological nature of the GOP, with its historical emphasis on who is a “true conservative,” who is most pure, most “principled,” most extreme, etc. Given how thoroughly Bush’s conservative project had failed, a complete makeover was imperative.

In contrast, the anti-Trump protests reflect the diverse nature of groups particularly interested in specific sorts of policies, rather than the ideologies used to justify or explain them. That diversity plays a much more significant role in the Democratic Party, and the broader political culture around and beyond it. The fragmentary nature of the Democratic coalition — as well as inherent tensions with its affluent funders — has created a very different history of relations between the party establishment and its activist base and the larger populations they represent. At the same time, the core policies that these activists push for have much broader support than the policies that conservative activists push. It is only in the realm of broad ideology, and the rhetoric spread around it, that conservatives can hope to gain majority support.

For example, as I pointed out in July 2015, Bernie Sanders embraced a full-throated progressive agenda that had very high levels of popular support. The “Big Ideas” poll commissioned by the Progressive Change Institute generated a long list of policies supported by 70 percent of the public or more, all of which were generally in line with Sanders’ agenda. They ranged from universal pre-K (77 percent) to an end to gerrymandering (73 percent), to debt-free college at public universities, a $400 billion annual infrastructure jobs program and Medicare buy-in for all (71 percent each).  

This magnitude of support for progressive policies is one side of the fundamental asymmetry of American politics, and a clear source of strength for progressives courageous enough to rally behind them. One root cause of this asymmetry was first uncovered by Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril in their landmark 1967 book, “The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion,” which found that half the population qualified as ideological conservatives, based on questions about government interference and individual initiative, while two-thirds of the population were operationally liberal, supporting an activist federal government when asked about specific programs or responsibilities — stable or increased federal government spending on education, housing and urban renewal, adoption of Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare proposal, and the government’s responsibility to fight poverty.

In the last section of their book, titled “The Need for a Restatement of American Ideology,” Free and Cantril wrote:

Quote:The paradox of a large majority of Americans qualifying as operational liberals while at the same time a majority hold to a conservative ideology has been repeatedly emphasized in this study. We have described this state of affairs as mildly schizoid, with people believing in one set of principles abstractly while acting according to another set of principles in their political behavior. But the principles according to which the majority of Americans actually behave politically have not yet been adequately formulated in modern terms …

There is little doubt that the time has come for a restatement of American ideology to bring it in line with what the great majority of people want and approve. Such a statement, with the right symbols incorporated, would focus people’s wants, hopes, and beliefs, and provide a guide and platform to enable the American people to implement their political desires in a more intelligent, direct, and consistent manner.

As I’ve noted before, that restatement was never mounted. If we’d had it, it would have sounded a lot like Dr. Martin Luther King’s call for the Poor People’s Campaign, or like Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Instead, almost the opposite happened: Conservative ideology gained ascendency within the political class, pushing the country’s politics to the right. Racist reaction against the gains of the Civil Rights Movement played a significant role as well. More broadly, we can point to the more complex historical processes — of which increased economic inequality is just one highly significant example — associated with the turn toward a disintegrative, conflictual trend in American society, as described in Peter Turchin’s “Ages of Discord,” which I reviewed here last October. Those trends should peak sometime after 2020, providing an opening for more integrative, prosocial forces to gain traction — which is why there could still be a chance for that hoped-for restatement.

But as long as conservative ideology retains such a hold, there’s a strong tendency even for progressives to present their policies in a framework that reflects conservative assumptions, at least implicitly. Such an ideologically impaired presentation inevitably weakens progressive arguments, giving credence to all manner of false arguments. This is precisely the legacy of neoliberalism, as advanced by Bill and Hillary Clinton in the 1980s and ’90s, which was challenged repeatedly among both parties during last year’s election campaign.

To her credit, Hillary Clinton evolved in a much more progressive direction over the course of the campaign, but the lasting impact of neoliberal ideology goes far beyond any one political figure. The struggle to overcome that lasting impact will be one of the most important determinants of whether the anti-Trump movement ultimately succeeds — not just in stopping Trump, but in solving the festering problems that gave rise to Trump in the first place. In the best-case scenario, it will finally succeed in crafting “a restatement of American ideology to bring it in line with what the great majority of people want and approve.” It seems like such a simple, straightforward and obvious thing to do.