Before the killings in Minnesota and Louisiana and then the massacre in Dallas seized national attention, it looked for a while like Donald Trump was going to stomp all over his fellow Republicans’ efforts to keep the focus on the Clinton email saga as it began to slip away. I wrote about the implications for the general election at New York:

It’s been noted far and wide that Donald Trump has managed to use the extraordinary force of his personality to dominate several news cycles with discussion of possible anti-Semitic imagery in his Twitter feed, the sunny side of Saddam Hussein, and other distractions. This has to have been extremely frustrating to Republicans who very badly wanted these same news cycles to be all about Hillary Clinton’s emails and FBI director James Comey’s censorious language about her conduct.

But there’s more to this problem than the opportunity costs of missing a chance to damage HRC. Trump is extremely dependent on earned media, to an extent we haven’t seen in a modern presidential candidate. NBC’s First Read today did one of its periodic updates of paid-media expenditures from SMG Delta, both nationally and in battleground states. And it’s pretty shocking:

“[T]he Clinton campaign and its allies are currently outspending Trump and his supporting groups over the airwaves by a 15-to-1 margin, $45 million to $3 million. And in the nine battleground states — now including Pennsylvania — it’s a 46-to-1 margin, nearly $43 million to $929,000.”

Speaking of Pennsylvania, remember all of the recent talk about Clinton not paying enough attention to the Keystone State? She’s still outspending Trump on P.A. media by more than a five-to-one margin.

Now, maybe this lopsided situation will be redressed somewhat thanks to Trump’s purported new fundraising success. But the fact remains that the candidate himself appears to hold paid media in low regard as a campaign resource.

That’s all well and good, and many political scientists think the value of paid-media spending is overestimated in presidential general elections so long as one side doesn’t have unchallenged command of the airwaves, making the other helpless to stop the bombardment. But Trump needs to get a move on to meet that challenge. And even if he does, his residual and habitual reliance on earned media means message discipline is absolutely crucial to his odds of victory in what is already an uphill battle. In a general election, he’s not going to be able to blot out the sky with fascinated and often positive media attention the way he did during the primaries. So his apparent inability to know when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em when it comes to commanding media attention is a real problem.

 

An incident involving strange images on Twitter all but engulfed the Trump campaign this week.  I tried to go a little deeper than the usual interpretations in explaining it at New York.

It’s difficult to believe Donald Trump is anti-Semitic. For one thing, his adored daughter Ivanka is a convert to Judaism, out of solidarity with her Jewish husband. For another, as a New York–based business tycoon, Trump has interacted frequently and cordially with Jewish colleagues, employees, investors, politicians, and members of the news media throughout his career.

That’s all the more reason to puzzle over the weaselly reaction of Trump and his campaign to allegations one of his Twitter blasts at Hillary Clinton borrowed anti-Semitic imagery from one of Trump’s anti-Semitic supporters. Trump has gone to great lengths to claim that the image in question isn’t what it is, and has in general done everything other than the obvious: apologize for screwing up and forcefully disassociate himself with his alt-right fan club.

In a thorough examination of the incident, Matt Yglesias hit on an important insight about Trump that goes beyond anti-Semitism:

“Trump has not acted to distance himself in any way from the anti-Semitic behavior of his followers. There’s been nothing remotely in the vicinity of Barack Obama’s famous race speech from the 2008 campaign, and Trump has consistently appeared angrier about being criticized for ties to anti-Semites than about the anti-Semitism expressed by many of his fans.”

Some might associate this reluctance to admit error, apologize, and then move on to Trump’s narcissism — those who endlessly admire themselves in every mirror are not prone to see or admit flaws.

But there’s something else going on that makes Trump’s supporters share the same reluctance to say they are sorry. He’s developed a cult of “political incorrectness” in which any sensitivity to others’ feelings is considered weakness, and the impulse to apologize for offensive remarks or behavior is dismissed as a surrender to bullying by elites and their minority-group clientele.

In his long, sympathetic meditation on Trump’s supporters for the New Yorker, George Saunders noticed this same phenomenon:

“Above all, Trump supporters are ‘not politically correct,’ which, as far as I can tell, means that they have a particular aversion to that psychological moment when, having thought something, you decide that it is not a good thought, and might pointlessly hurt someone’s feelings, and therefore decline to say it.”

In other words, there’s a tendency in Trumpland to view what most of us consider common decency as “political correctness,” which is to be avoided at all costs, most especially when the opprobrium of liberal elitists is involved.  It’s no accident, then, that Trump sometimes seems to court the appearance of impropriety, and defend examples of rudeness, crudeness, and bigotry even when he’s not personally guilty of perpetrating them.

Trump did not invent this strange mindset, of course. Right-wing talk-radio types have made a living from baiting liberals and women and minorities and then inciting listeners to express umbrage at the resulting outrage. Trump’s former rival and current supporter Dr. Ben Carson could not go five minutes on the presidential campaign trail without attacking “political correctness” as the source of all evil and as a secular-socialist stratagem for silencing the Folks by shaming them….

To use a phrase beloved of Trump’s great predecessor in political sin George Wallace, the mogul does not “pussyfoot around” in offending his detractors and those people — the pushy feminists and entitled minorities whose very presence profanes America in the eyes of many Trump supporters. Trump tells it like it is, which means he is not inhibited by a civility that masks nasty but essential truths.

Inevitably, this nasty but essential explanation of Trump’s appeal will annoy supporters and enemies alike, who insist on ascribing purely economic motives to those who have lifted him so shockingly high in American political life. Sorry, but I don’t think uncontrollable rage at having to “press 1 for English” or say “Happy Holidays” can be explained by displaced anger over wage stagnation or the decline of the American manufacturing sector. As Saunders said in another of his insights into Trump supporters:

“[T]he Trump supporter might be best understood as a guy who wakes up one day in a lively, crowded house full of people, from a dream in which he was the only one living there, and then mistakes the dream for the past: a better time, manageable and orderly, during which privilege and respect came to him naturally, and he had the whole place to himself.”

Such a guy may well be old enough to remember a time when he and people just like him could behave as though they had America to themselves. Nowadays that gets you hostile looks, a rebuke from HR, a shaming from moral authorities, and sometimes worse. But Donald Trump will fight for your right to offend in your own damn country. And some offenders will love him for it.

 

 

As we observed the beginnings of leadership fights in both of the UK’s major parties, it gave pause to some of the disputes we’ve been having over the presidential nominating process here, and particularly in the Democratic Party. I offered some compare-and-contrast notes at New York:

In the U.K., the party leaders (i.e., those who will compete to be prime minister in national elections) are chosen by dues-paying party members. The Tories charge 25 pounds a year — with lower rates for youth and military — and Labour has a standard monthly dues rate of 3.92 pounds, though the party recently created a cheaper “registered supporter” option at 3 pounds a year that carries with it the right to vote in leadership elections. The system also includes the equivalent of the U.S. Democratic Party’s “superdelegates.” Members of Parliament (the House of Commons, and in the Labour Party also Members of the European Parliament) determine the field for leadership contests by a nomination process; Tory MPs have the responsibility to narrow the field to two candidates before members get involved. In both parties, MPs can trigger a leadership contest by a vote of “no confidence” in the leader and then the nomination of one or more challengers. That’s the process currently in motion in the Labour Party, where Jeremy Corbyn will soon face a challenge and a new leadership election even though he has only been leader since September of last year.

While the left in the United States tends to oppose closed primaries at present, and the right tends to favor them, both left and right in the U.K. have their base in the dues-paying party membership. Indeed, the socialist Jeremy Corbyn won his leadership election — in an upset, yet by a landslide — on the basis of a big surge in party membership (and/or “registered supporter” membership), and it remains possible that he will hang on to his position in a second election despite the extraordinary and bitter opposition to him among Labour MPs and signs that his leadership and issue positions are not that popular with Labour voters or the new voters the party needs.

If the British system for nominating leaders seems, well, anti-democratic, it used to be far more restricted. Before 1998, Tory MPs completely controlled their party’s leadership contests. And before Gordon Brown proposed a new “one member, one vote” system for Labour in 2010, that party used an “electoral college” in which MPs had one vote, party affiliates (mostly unions) had one vote, and then party members had the final vote.

The more grassroots-y process now in use in the U.K. still gives short shrift to loyal voters who may not be well represented by either dues-paying party members or by MPs. All they can do is vote or not vote for the party as led or misled, and hope things get better. Such people really do have a bigger role in the U.S. system.

So count your blessings, Democrats. Your indie friends may have trouble voting in Democratic primaries in some states, but so far no one is asking any of you to pay for the privilege.

Earlier this week Donald Trump gave a much-discussed speech on trade and globalization in Pennsylvania. I am not sure all Democrats understand how heretical the whole thing must seem to your average chamber of commerce member out in the heartland–much less to Wall Street and K Street Republicans. I wrote about that at New York.

[B]y and large, this candidate, who never really embraced systematic thinking, mostly talked of trade policy as something that he would improve via his personal negotiating genius. Uncle Sam might still play the trade game, but he’d no longer be Uncle Sucker, being constantly outmaneuvered by swarthy or sallow foreigners.

But now, in a speech delivered in the Rust Belt state of Pennsylvania, Trump has gone High Protectionist, rejecting not just this or that trade deal, but the whole idea of globalization, which he regards as a politician’s trick on the Folks, who have watched helplessly as Bill and Hillary Clinton sold out their birthright of manufacturing jobs for a mess of Wall Street pottage. Trump sounds like Bernie Sanders on a very bad, dyspeptic day:

“The legacy of Pennsylvania steelworkers lives in the bridges, railways and skyscrapers that make up our great American landscape. But our workers’ loyalty was repaid with betrayal.

“Our politicians have aggressively pursued a policy of globalization — moving our jobs, our wealth and our factories to Mexico and overseas. Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very wealthy. But it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache.

“When subsidized foreign steel is dumped into our markets, threatening our factories, the politicians do nothing.

“For years, they watched on the sidelines as our jobs vanished and our communities were plunged into depression-level unemployment. Many of these areas have still never recovered.

“Our politicians took away from the people their means of making a living and supporting their families. Skilled craftsmen and tradespeople and factory workers have seen the jobs they loved shipped thousands of miles away. Many Pennsylvania towns once thriving and humming are now in a state despair. This wave of globalization has wiped out our middle class.”

And on and on it goes. Trump’s narrative of an idyllic, prelapsarian America ruined by globalization has a few holes. It begins with virtuous protectionists George Washington and Alexander Hamilton (you know, the star of that Broadway musical), and then skips far ahead to the Clintons, who wrecked it all with NAFTA and China’s admission to the WTO. You wouldn’t know from listening to him that Ronald Reagan (mentioned by Trump only in connection with a highly uncharacteristic tariff he imposed on Japan) was talking favorably about something very much like NAFTA in 1980; that his successor George H.W. Bush actually negotiated and signed the agreement; or for that matter, that the TPP is as much a product of George W. Bush’s trade diplomacy as Obama’s.

More generally, Trump is ignoring a free-trade tradition in the Republican Party that dates back to the very post–World War II era that he identifies as an American golden age. Yes, Richard Nixon offered protection to the textile industry as part of his 1968 deal with Strom Thurmond (whose South Carolina Republican Party was a wholly owned subsidiary of textile baron Roger Milliken). Yes, John Connally bashed the Japanese during his unsuccessful 1980 presidential campaign. And yes, Pat Buchanan offered very much the same analysis and prescription of America’s economic challenges during his two unsuccessful presidential campaigns (curiously, he somehow saw America as ruined even in 1992, before NAFTA!).

But for the most part, Republican protectionism, rooted in the early 19th-century Whig protectionism of Henry Clay and his “American System,” expired with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, widely blamed for setting off a worldwide trade war that made a worldwide Great Depression significantly more painful. And far from being some Clintonian invention, Democratic support for trade liberalization is probably the longest-standing policy tradition in either party, dating all the way back to Martin Van Buren (his predecessor Andrew Jackson had a protectionist streak often attributed to his important political following in the selfsame Pennsylvania where Trump unleashed his protectionist thunder today).

Bernie Sanders represents an authentic and fairly widespread progressive backlash against the Democratic free-trade tradition, rooted in the labor movement, which obviously lost an awful lot in the demise of many traditional, often unionized, industries. Hillary Clinton’s decision to oppose TPP is a sign of that perspective’s power. But in Trump’s case, he’s reaching far back to a lost Republican tradition that is now the starkest heresy among most economic conservatives. On word of Trump’s speech in Pennsylvania, you can be sure knees jerked violently not only on Wall Street and the editorial rooms of its Journal, but also in chambers of commerce across the land where the pure gospel of free trade has been preached for eons. Trump has now declared that gospel pure evil, and the blowback may make the embarrassment-bordering-on-irritated-hostility that his immigration demagoguery produced in the same circles look very mild by comparison.

It’s really unclear any votes Trump can peel off with this rhetoric will offset that blowback.  We’ll see.

In the reaction to the British vote to leave the European Union, there have been a lot of loose analogies made between the US and the UK I discussed one of them at New York:

Anyone who has been watching the run-up to the Brexit referendum in Britain, in which controversy over EU-mandated immigration policies has been a central issue, might have been surprised by Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s initial reaction to the results:

A lot of the message that has come back from this is that many communities are fed up with cuts, they are fed up with economic dislocation and feel very angry at the way they have been betrayed and marginalised by successive governments in very poor areas of the country.

So Brexit is about budget cuts and Tory social policies? Really?
Now, part of what Corbyn may be reflecting is the left’s traditional tendency to view cultural phenomena as by-products of economic dynamics — what critics call “economic reductionism.” You can see a glimmer of that in the reaction to Brexit by Bernie Sanders, a pol who is often accused of economic reductionism:

“What this vote is about is an indication that the global economy is not working for everybody,” he said. “It’s not working in the United States for everybody and it’s not working in the U.K. for everybody. When you see investors going to China and shutting down factories in this country and laying off, over a period of many years, millions of people, people are saying you know what, global economy may be great for some people but not for me.”

Not a word about immigration, even as an economic issue.

Unike Sanders, Corbyn and other Labour leaders have to be very careful in talking about this subject. On the one hand, nonwhite immigrants are a strong Labour constituency. On the other hand, white native British working-class voters appear to have overwhelmingly voted for Brexit in Labour’s northern English strongholds. And Labour is far more dependent on white working-class support than are our own Democrats. For one thing, the U.K. remains a much “whiter” country than the U.S.; as of the last census, 87 percent of the British population was white. And so Labour has not been able to make up for white working-class defections with a large minority voting population. There’s also more competition in the U.K. for the higher-income, higher-educated voters who have been gravitating to the Democratic Party in the U.S.: The Lib Dems and Greens are serious parties, as are the regional nationalist parties, and the Tories are (or were in the last two national elections) a lot more moderate than their American counterparts.

That is not to say Brexit, or even anti-immigrant sentiment, is all about race, by any means. The immigrants most associated with EU policy are typically Eastern European (about half of the immigrant population of the U.K. is now nonwhite, and half is white, according to some estimates). But many British people fear the EU will force the U.K. to accept countless Middle Eastern migrants as a by-product of the Syrian nightmare.

In any event, Labour must balance a diverse coalition anchored in a white working class that increasingly resents diversity. It simply does not have the demographic luxury to champion diversity and acceptance of immigrants the way most Democrats — notably presumptive presidential nominee Hillary Clinton — have done.

So it’s safer to talk about Tory austerity and economic inequality. Corbyn’s rap has the added advantage of expressing some truth. It’s just not the whole truth.