Political reporters and pundits constantly refer to Donald Trump’s politics as “populism.” The trouble is that Trump and his policies are actually extremely unpopular:
- Trump: 39% approve, 56% disapprove (Gallup daily tracking 3/23)
- Trumpcare: 17% support, 56% oppose (Quinnipiac)
- Cabinet selections: 38% support, 52% oppose (Saint Leo)
- Building the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline: 42% support, 48% oppose (Pew)
- Increase military spending by cutting funding for the State Department, Environmental Protection Agency and other non-defense agencies: 41% support, 58% oppose (CNN)
- Building a border wall with Mexico: 39% support, 61% oppose (CNN)
- Muslim ban: 47% support, 53% opppose (CNN)
Trump lost the popular vote by 2.9 million votes, or 2.1% of the popular vote. He’s never had majority approval in the Gallup daily tracking poll, with a positive approval for exactly two days of his presidency, January 24-25, when he was at +1 (46% approved, 45% disapproved).
There are many ways to describe Trump and his policies, but “popular” is not one of them. “White nationalist,” on the other hand, is extremely accurate! Or, considering how many of Trump’s promised trade protections have been abandoned, how about “white corporatist”?
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Of fascism that I learned in college is that it is at once corporate, anti-labor, racist, populist, nationalistic, and anti-democratic.
So you know, “fascist” works pretty well. Bannon’s done his homework and he fits the bill.
Populism is an ideology that sets up a framework of a pure people oppressed by a corrupt elite. This can, of course, take many forms.
In our current environment, with automation eating up manufacturing jobs, global income distribution balancing out (e.g., the Chinese middle class, which is gigantic, has gotten a large boost while our much better off middle class languishes), and the top end eating up ever more wealth, there are large sectors of our country doomed to economic stagnation.
That can be alleviated to a degree by incrementalist policies.
But only to a degree. Incrementalism scores such mild success that it might as well not count as success. Its apparent failure creates an environment where people look for someone to blame. So we have a lot populism coming our way.
You are still relying on poll data to drive your decisions? From outlets that lean left, to be polite? Poll responses in general greatly rely on how questions are phrased and who participates. Anyone who did support Trump would just hang up on CNN – or is this a Survey Monkey poll that progressives can blitz? If this comforts you, that’s nice. But relying on it to steer policy with blow up in your face, just like the election.
Mind you, go ahead. Base your work on data collected by progressives, for progressives, here in a blue enclave. But trying to extrapolate that to a national level is just silly.
…and know how to control for the issues you raise to get a representative sample, and surely you know this.
You whine about those of us who “base [our] work on data collected by progressives, for progressives, here in a blue enclave”.
What, pray tell, sources do you base your commentary on?
Most of us know a thing or two about how to calibrate poll results. Most of us know that EVERY data source has potential biases. Credible sources therefore provide information needed to adjust for those biases.
So what polling sources do you recommend? Or are you perhaps making the more Trumpist claim that we should ignore data altogether? Do you join Ms. Conway and millions of Donald Trump supporters in choosing to rely on “alternative facts”?
I invite you to offer an approach for national information that is not “silly”.
… They didn’t hang up?? What if, rather, there is coded speech and broad elisions, which by definition mitigates and misaligns questions and answers in a way exactly opposed to the underlying assumptions of polls and pollsters: namely that people are speaking straightforwardly Even the racist, maybe especially the racist who finds his/her racism in the minority (heh), doesn’t want to sound racist. As for the sexist… well… it’s merely doubling down on the hurt to call it merely ‘locker room talk’ and ask everyone to dismiss the sexism as present but essentially victimless.
If that is the context, what makes you so certain the progressive flaws (such as they are) are to blame? Or, put another way, your underlying assumption that the polls, being progressive, missed a lot of information, because they were flawed, may be itself quite flawed: Indeed, did you ever think that the information missed may have been, in fact, withheld deliberately?
Yes, that seems to be the better description of the Trump alteration of the Republican Party. It’s clearly not populist, or conservative. Bannon wants to “tear down the state” as (I assume), he sees the state as not being racially pure.
Unfortunately, caught up in this mess are the tens of thousands of poor whites who were otherwise ignored or at worse, denigrated by the leaders of the Democratic Party and saw Trump at the very least, acknowledging their pain and at the very worse, convincing them that non-white Americans and non-whites in general world wide are to blame.
This is clearly a “Fascist” party, by any reasonable definition of “Fascist”.