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Historically, conservative political parties face the problem Harvard political scientist Daniel Ziblatt calls the conservative dilemma. How does a party that represents the interests of moneyed elites win elections in a democracy? The dilemma sharpens as inequality widens: The more the haves have, the more have-nots there are who will vote to tax them.

This is not mere ivory-tower theorizing. Conservative politicians know the bind theyre in. When Mitt Romney told a room of donors during the 2012 election that there were 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what because they believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it, even though they pay no income tax, he was describing the conservative dilemma. Our message of low taxes doesnt connect, he said, a bit sadly.

If anything, Romney understated the case. Sure, 47 percent of Americans, in 2011, didnt pay federal income taxes though they paid a variety of other taxes, ranging from federal payroll taxes to state sales taxes. But slicing the electorate by income tax burden only makes sense if youre wealthy enough for income taxes to be your primary economic irritant. Thats not true for most people. Romneys 53 percent versus 47 percent split was a gentle rendering of an economy where the rich were siphoning off startling quantities of wealth.

Occupy Wall Streets rallying cry We are the 99%! framed the math behind the conservative dilemma more directly: How do you keep winning elections and cutting taxes for the rich in a (putative) democracy where the top 1 percent went from 11 percent of national income in 1980 to 20 percent in 2016, and the bottom 50 percent fell from 21 percent of national income in 1980 to 13 percent in 2016? How do you keep your party from being buried by the 99 percent banding together to vote that income share back into their own pockets?

In their new book, Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson offer three possible answers. You can cease being a party built around tax cuts for the rich and try to develop an economic agenda that will appeal to the middle class. You can try to change the political topic, centering politics on racial, religious, and nationalist grievance. Or you can try to undermine democracy itself.

Despite endless calls for the GOP to choose door No. 1 and poll after poll showing their voting base desperate for leaders who would represent their economic interests while reflecting their cultural grievances Republican elites have refused. Take the 2017 tax cuts. Donald Trump might have run as a populist prepared to raise taxes on plutocrats like, well, him, but according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the bill he signed gave more than 20 percent of its benefits over the first 10 years, and more than 80 percent of the benefits that last beyond the first 10 years, to the top 1 percent. For that reason, its one of the most unpopular bills ever to be signed into law. Its not the kind of accomplishment you can run for reelection on.

Thats left Republicans reliant on the second and third strategies. Hacker and Pierson call the resulting ideology plutocratic populism, and their book is sharp and thoughtful on how the GOP got here and the dangers of the path theyve chosen. Where its less convincing is in its description of where here is: Does Trump represent the culmination of the Republican coalition or the contradictions that will ultimately tear it apart?

Plutocratic populism presents as a contradiction like shouted silence or carnivorous vegan. The key to Hacker and Piersons formulation is that, in the GOP, plutocracy and populism operate on different axes. The plutocrats control economic policy, and the populists win elections by deepening racial, religious, and nationalist grievances.

To advance an unpopular plutocratic agenda, Republicans have escalated white backlash and, increasingly, undermined democracy, Hacker and Pierson write. In the United States, then, plutocracy and right-wing populism have not been opposing forces. Instead, they have been locked in a doom loop of escalating extremism that must be disrupted.

This is their synthesis of the great economic anxiety versus racial resentment debate. Republican elites weaponize racial resentment to win voters who would otherwise vote their economic self-interest. Hacker and Pierson are careful to sidestep the crude version that holds that ethnic and religious division are mere distractions. Voters see racial and religious dominance as political interests as compelling and legitimate as tax benefits, and the demand for politicians to reflect those underlying resentments and fears is real.

This is a key point in Hacker and Piersons analysis: They focus on the decisions made by GOP elites, not the desires of conservative voters. Their fundamental claim is that if Republican elites had chosen a more politically sellable economic agenda, they would have or at least could have resisted the lure of white resentment and still won elections. But once they made tax cuts for the rich and opposition to universal health care the immovable lodestones of their governance, they had little political choice save to power their movement with the dirty, but abundant, energy offered by ethnonationalism.

The most compelling evidence Hacker and Pierson cite for this argument comes from a study conducted by political scientists Margit Tavits and Joshua Potter, which looked at party platforms from 450 parties in 41 countries between 1945 and 2010. Tavits and Potter find that as inequality rises, conservative parties ratchet up their emphasis on religious and racial grievances particularly in countries with deep racial and religious fractures. The pivot only works, Tavits and Potter say, when there is high social demand for ethnonationalist conflict.

The question this raises, and which Hacker and Pierson dont really answer, is what would happen to this demand in the absence of conservative politicians willing to meet it particularly in an age of weakened political parties, demographic change, and identitarian social media? Trumps rise, which Hacker and Pierson present as the culmination of plutocratic populism, can also be read as a symptom of its mounting internal contradictions, and of the way Republicans voters are increasingly capable of demanding the representation they want.

It may be that the uneasy coalition that married white identitarians to Davos Man is breaking apart. Indeed, reading Hacker and Piersons book, I found myself wondering whether inequality was, itself, the cause of the coalitions collapse: Perhaps the plutocratic agenda is becoming too unpopular to even survive Republican presidential primaries. And if thats so, is the future of the Republican Party more moderate on all fronts, or more purely ethnonationalist?

If you survey the modern Republican Party, the figures most intent on turning it into a vehicle for ethnonationalist resentment are the least committed to the plutocratic agenda. Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Sen. Josh Hawley, and 2016 candidate Donald Trump are all examples of the trend: They are, or were, explicit in their desire to sever the ties that yoke angry nationalism and a desire for a whiter America to Paul Ryans budget.

Conversely, the Republican figures most committed to plutocracy like Ryan or the Koch brothers or the Chamber of Commerce tend to back immigration reform and recoil from ethnonationalist rhetoric, and in 2016, they opposed Trump in favor of Jeb Bush and Chris Christie and Marco Rubio. They just lost on all those fronts.

Hacker and Pierson emphasize the fact that once in office, Trump abandoned populist pretense and gave the Chamber of Commerce everything it had ever wanted and more. But, as with so much else with Trump, it can be hard to distinguish decision-making from disinterest. Trump outsourced the staffing of his White House to the Koch-soaked Mike Pence and his agenda to congressional Republicans. The question, then, is whether the dissonance of his administration represents an inevitability of Republican Party politics or simply a lag between Trump demonstrating the bases prioritization of ethnonationalist resentment and a politician who will both win and govern on those terms.

This is the central unanswered question of Hacker and Piersons book: If you cut the plutocrats out of the party, either because bigotry drove them out or campaign finance reform neutered them or the Ayn Rand rapture ascended them, would their absence lead to a Republican Party that moderates on economics and eases off the ethnonationalism, or would it lead to a Republican Party that moderates on economics so it can more effectively pursue social division? Put differently, do you get 2000-era John McCain or 2020-era Tucker Carlson? I suspect the latter.

Hacker and Pierson admit they are assessing the GOP as an elite-led institution, and quite often, thats probably the right way to look at it. But they end up virtually ignoring the power that Republican voters actually hold and, when they are sufficiently offended, wield.

Bush and Rubio and Christie were humiliated in 2016. GOP-led efforts at immigration reform failed in 2007 and 2013. Majority Leader Eric Cantor was deposed by Rep. Dave Brat. The Republican autopsy, which recommended that the GOP become more racially and generationally inclusive, was ignored. At key moments, Fox News tried to support immigration reform and deflate Trump, and it lost those fights and remade itself in Trumps image. There are lines even conservative media cant cross.

Hacker and Pierson marshal data showing the very rich are more economically conservative than the median voter, but also more socially liberal. As the GOP becomes more crudely identitarian, theres some evidence that its losing the economic elites who George W. Bush once called my base: Contributions from the Forbes 400 have been tipping toward the Democratic Party in recent decades, and theres reason to believe thats accelerated under Trump. Hillary Clinton won the countrys richest zip codes in 2016 a change from past Democratic performance while Trumps Electoral College win relied on gains among lower-income whites.

Hacker and Pierson dont assess the Democratic Party much in their book, but the future of plutocratic populism likely depends on the direction that coalition takes. Joe Bidens Democratic Party is a tent restive billionaires might feel comfortable in. Yes, theyll pay higher taxes, but theyll also receive competent protection from pandemics and wont have to explain away the white nationalists in their ranks. If Bernie Sanderss vision is the future of the Democratic Party, billionaires will remain in the Republican Party, where they are at least seen as allies.

The most chilling argument in Hacker and Piersons book is that Trumps rhetoric has focused us on the wrong authoritarian threat. The fear that he would entrench himself as an individual strongman has distracted from the reality that his party is insulating itself from democracy:

As their goals have become more extreme, Republicans and their organized allies have increasingly exploited long-standing but worsening vulnerabilities in our political system to lock in narrow priorities, even in the face of majority opposition. The specter we face is not just a strongman bending a party and our political institutions to his will; it is also a minority faction entrenching itself in power, beyond the ambitions and careers of any individual leader. Whether Trump can break through the barriers against autocracy, he and his partywith plutocratic and right-wing backingare breaking majoritarian democracy.

A useful thought experiment in American politics is simply to imagine what would happen if the system worked the way we tend to tell our children it works: Whoever wins the most votes wins the election. In that case, George W. Bush would never have passed his tax cuts nor made his Supreme Court nominations, and neither would Donald Trump. The Republican Party would likely have had to moderate its approach on both economics and social and racial issues, as thered be no viable path forward that combines an economic agenda that repels most voters and a social agenda that offends the rising demographic majority. As Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said in 2012, before becoming first Trumps most slashing critic and then one of his most sycophantic defenders, Were not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.

As I argue in my book on polarization, which similarly ends with a call for democratization, if Trump had won exactly as many votes in 2016 but lost the election because of it, he and his followers would be blamed for blowing a clearly winnable contest and handing the Supreme Court to the Democrats for a generation. In that world, the toxic tendencies he represents would be weakened, and the Republican Party, having lost three presidential elections in a row, would have been far likelier to reform itself. Its ability to keep traveling the path of plutocratic populism stems entirely from the minoritarian possibilities embedded in Americas political institutions.

As Hacker and Pierson show, this is a point of true convergence between the identitarians and the plutocrats: Both have lost confidence that they can win elections democratically, so they have sought to rewrite the rules in their favor. What hold on power they retain comes from the way American politics amplifies the power of whiter, more rural, more conservative areas and thats given the conservative coalition a closing window in which to rig the system such that they can retain control.

America does not exist in a steady state of tension between majoritarian and minoritarian institutions. Those institutions can be changed, and they are being changed. A party in power can rewrite the rules in its own favor, and the Republican Party, at every level, is trying to do just that using power won through white identity politics and geographic advantage, but deploying strategies patiently funded by plutocrats. As Hacker and Pierson write:

Recent GOP moves in North Carolina show whats possible in a closely balanced state. Republicans first took the statehouse in 2010. They quickly enlisted the leading Republican architect of extreme partisan gerrymanders, Thomas Hofeller. A mostly anonymous figure until his death in 2018, Hofeller liked to describe gerrymandering as the only legalized form of vote-stealing left in the United States. He once told an audience of state legislators, Redistricting is like an election in reverse. Its a great event. Usually the voters get to pick the politicians. In redistricting, the politicians get to pick the voters. In 2018, North Carolina Republicans won their election in reverse, keeping hold of the statehouse even while losing the statewide popular vote. In North Carolinas races for the US House, Republicans won half the statewide votes and 77 percent of the seats. A global elections watchdog ranked North Carolinas electoral integrity alongside that of Cuba, Indonesia, and Sierra Leone.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has sought to reword the census so Hispanics fear filling it out, in the hope that the political representation theyd normally receive flows to white, Republican voters instead. So far, the White House has been too clumsily explicit about the aims of this strategy for courts to clear it, but thats a mistake that can easily be remedied by savvier successors.

Hacker and Pierson argue that the conservative dilemma matters because conservative parties matter. History shows that democratic systems thrive amid responsible conservative parties parties that make their peace with democracy and build agendas that can successfully compete for votes and they collapse when conservative parties back themselves into defending constituencies and agendas so narrow that their only path to victory is to rig the system in their favor.

This is the cliff on which American democracy now teeters. The threat isnt that Donald Trump will carve his face onto Mount Rushmore and engrave his name across the White House. Its that the awkward coalition that nominated and sustains him will entrench itself, not their bumbling standard-bearer, by turning America into a government by the ethnonationalist minority, for the plutocratic minority.

I spoke with Hacker and Pierson about their book, and the questions it raised for me, on my podcast, The Ezra Klein Show. Listen here, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your pods.

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Is Donald Trump the Republican Partys future, or its past? - Vox.com

I.

Marine One waited for the president of the United States on the South Lawn of the White House. It was July 30, 2019, not long past 9 a.m.

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Donald Trump was headed to historic Jamestown to mark the 400th anniversary of the first representative assembly of European settlers in the Americas. But Black Virginia legislators were boycotting the visit. Over the preceding two weeks, the president had been engaged in one of the most racist political assaults on members of Congress in American history.

Like so many controversies during Trumps presidency, it had all started with an early-morning tweet.

So interesting to see Progressive Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run, Trump tweeted on Sunday, July 14, 2019. Why dont they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you cant leave fast enough.

Trump was referring to four freshman members of Congress: Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a Somali American; Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, an African American; Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, a Palestinian American; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a Puerto Rican. Pressley screenshotted Trumps tweet and declared, THIS is what racism looks like.

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On the South Lawn, Trump now faced reporters and cameras. Over the drone of the helicopter rotors, one reporter asked Trump if he was bothered that more and more people were calling him racist.

I am the least racist person there is anywhere in the world, Trump replied, hands up, palms facing out for emphasis.

His hands came down. He singled out a vocal critic, the Reverend Al Sharpton. Now, hes a racist, Trump said. What Ive done for African Americans, no president, I would say, has done And the African American community is so thankful.

It was an absurd statement. But in a twisted way, Trump was right. As his administrations first term comes to an end, Black Americansindeed, all Americansshould in one respect be thankful to him. He has held up a mirror to American society, and it has reflected back a grotesque image that many people had until now refused to see: an image not just of the racism still coursing through the country, but also of the reflex to deny that reality. Though it was hardly his intention, no president has caused more Americans to stop denying the existence of racism than Donald Trump.

We are living in the midst of an anti-racist revolution. This spring and summer, demonstrations calling for racial justice attracted hundreds of thousands of people in Los Angeles, Washington, New York, and other large cities. Smaller demonstrations erupted in northeastern enclaves such as Nantucket, Massachusetts, and Bar Harbor, Maine; in western towns such as Havre, Montana, and Hermiston, Oregon; in midsize cities such as Waco, Texas, and Topeka, Kansas; and in wealthy suburbs such as Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and Darien, Connecticut.

Adam Serwer: Protest is the highest form of patriotism

Veteran activists and new recruits to the cause pushed policy makers to hold violent police officers accountable, to ban choke holds and no-knock warrants, to shift funding from law enforcement to social services, and to end the practice of sending armed and dangerous officers to respond to incidents in which the suspect is neither armed nor dangerous. But these activists werent merely advocating for a few policy shifts. They were calling for the eradication of racism in America once and for all.

The president attempted to portray the righteous demonstrations as the work of looters and thugs, but many of the people watching at home didnt see it that way. This summer, a majority of Americans57 percent, according to a Monmouth University pollsaid that police officers were more likely to use excessive force against Black culprits than they were against white ones. Thats an increase from just 33 percent in December 2014, after a grand jury declined to indict a New York City police officer in the killing of Eric Garner.

Whats more, by early June, roughly three out of four Americans were saying that racial and ethnic discrimination is a big problem in the United Statesup from only about half of Americans in 2015, when Trump launched his presidential campaign.

It would be easy to see these shifts as the direct result of the horrifying events that have unfolded in 2020: a pandemic that has had a disproportionate effect on people of color; the video of George Floyd dying beneath the knee of an impassive Minneapolis police officer; the ghastly killing of Breonna Taylor, shot to death in her own home.

Yet fundamental shifts in American views of race were already under way before the COVID-19 disparities became clear and before these latest examples of police violence surfaced. The percentage of Americans who told Monmouth pollsters that racial and ethnic discrimination is a big problem made a greater leap from January 2015 (51 percent) to July 2016 (68 percent) than from July 2016 to June 2020 (76 percent). What we are witnessing right now is the culmination of a longer processa process that tracks closely with the political career of Donald Trump.

In the days leading up to Trumps attack on Omar, Pressley, Tlaib, and Ocasio-Cortez, Fox News slammed the Squad, especially Omar. All four had been publicly sparring with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over a $4.6 billion border-aid package that they thought did not sufficiently restrain Trumps immigration policies.

Yet Pelosi promptly defended her fellow Democrats on July 14, 2019. When @realDonaldTrump tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries, Pelosi tweeted, he reaffirms his plan to Make America Great Again has always been about making America white again.

It has always been a racial slur for white Americans to tell Americans of color, Go back to your country. Because their country is New York City, where Ocasio-Cortez was born. Their country is Detroit, Tlaibs birthplace. Their country is greater Boston, where Pressley lives. Their country is the United States, to which Omars family immigrated when she was young.

Ibram X. Kendi: Am I an American?

As Democratic politicians raged at the president that Sunday, Republicans were silent. Its become frighteningly common for many of my Republican colleagues to let these moments sail by without saying even a word, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor.

To be fair, by Monday, a few Republicans, including Representatives Mike Turner of Ohio and Will Hurd of Texas, had called the presidents tweets racist. But Trump, emboldened by the silence from the rest of his caucus, doubled down on his attacks.

IF YOU ARE NOT HAPPY HERE, Trump wrote to the four women on Twitter, YOU CAN LEAVE.

The president added: If Democrats want to unite around the foul language & racist hatred spewed from the mouths and actions of these very unpopular & unrepresentative Congresswomen, it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

By Monday night, House Democrats had had enough. They introduced a resolution to strongly condemn the presidents racist tweets.

Trump woke up the next morning once again in a state of angry denial. Those Tweets were NOT Racist, he tweeted. I dont have a Racist bone in my body!

For better or worse, Americans see themselvesand their countryin the president. From the days of George Washington, the president has personified the American body. The motto of the United States is E pluribus unumOut of many, one. The one is the president.

To Trump, and to many of his supporters, the American body must be a white body. When he launched his presidential campaign, on June 16, 2015, he began with attacks on immigrants of color and on the person whose citizenship hed falsely questioned as a peddler of birtherism: Barack Obama. They were all desecrating the American body. Of Mexican immigrants, he said: Theyre bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists. Of Obama, he said: Hes been a negative force. We need somebody that can take the brand of the United States and make it great again.

Trump presented himself as that somebody. To make America great again, he would make it seem as if a Black man had never been president, erasing him from history by repealing and replacing his signature accomplishments, from the Affordable Care Act to DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy. He would also build a wall to keep out immigrants, and he would ban Muslims from entering the country.

Days after first proposing his Muslim ban, in December 2015still early in his candidacyTrump told CNNs Don Lemon, I am the least racist person that you have ever met.

Trumps denial was audacious, but back then, his audacity only contributed to the complacent sense among many Americans that this interloper from reality television posed no serious threat. Yet the Americans who dismissed Trumps chances were living in denial themselves.

For many, Obamas presidency was proof that the country was rising to its ideals of liberty and equality. When a Black man climbed to the highest office in the land, it signified that the nation was postracial, or at least that history was inexorably bending in that direction. The Obama administration itself boasted that it was fighting the remnants of racisma mop-up operation in a war that was all but won.

I was less sanguine. In the months leading up to the 2016 election, I told family and friends that Trump had a good chance of winning. Across American history, racial progress has normally been followed by its opposite.

So I was glad to be alone on Election Night. I did not want to see people I loved shocked that a racist nation had elected a racist president. On November 8, 2016, I watched the returns come in by myself, on the couch. My daughter, Imani, was sleeping in her crib. My wife, Sadiqa, was at the hospital, treating patients during an overnight shift in the pediatric emergency department.

I stayed up until 1:35 a.m. When Trump carried Pennsylvania, I turned off the television and called Sadiqa to hear how her shift was going. Our conversation was brief; she had to get back to her patients. Later, I would read about how, around 2:50 a.m., Trump greeted his exuberant supporters in New York City with a victory speech. He pledged to be a president for all Americans.

Within days of being sworn in, Trump broke that promise. He reversed holds on two oil-pipeline projects, including one through the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, which was opposed by more than 200 Indigenous nations. He issued executive orders calling for the construction of a wall along the southern border and the deportation of individuals who pose a risk to public safety or national security. He enacted his first of three Muslim bans.

By the end of the spring, Attorney General Jeff Sessions had directed federal prosecutors to seek the harshest prison sentences whenever possible. Sessions had also laid the groundwork for the suspension of all the consent decrees that provided federal oversight of law-enforcement agencies that had demonstrated a pattern of racism.

Led by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the administration worked on ways to restrict immigration by people of color. There was a sense of urgency, because, as Trump said at a private White House meeting in June 2017, Haitians all have AIDS and Nigerians would never go back to their huts once they came to the United States.

Then came Charlottesville. On August 11, 2017, about 250 white supremacists marched on the University of Virginia campus, carrying torches that lit up the night sky with racism and anti-Semitism. Demonstrating against Charlottesvilles plan to remove statues honoring Confederates, they chanted, Blood and soil! They chanted, Jews will not replace us! They chanted, White lives matter!

The white supremacists clashed with anti-racist demonstrators that night and the next afternoon. White lives did not matter to the white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. He drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of counterprotesters, murdering Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others.

We condemn, in the strongest possible terms, this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides, on many sides, Trump said in response. He spoke about there being very fine people on both sides.

Adam Serwer: After Charlottesville, the white nationalists are winning

On September 5, 2017, Trump began his long and unsuccessful attempt to eliminate DACA, which deferred deportations for roughly 800,000 undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. as children. The Trump administration also began rescinding the Temporary Protected Status of thousands of refugees from wars and natural disasters years ago in Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti, El Salvador, Nepal, and Honduras.

Near the end of his first year in office, Trump wondered aloud at a White House meeting: Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? He was referring to Haiti, El Salvador, and nations in Africa. He suggested that the U.S. should bring in more people from countries like Norway.

Three days later, on January 14, 2018, speaking before reporters in West Palm Beach, Florida, he was again asked if he was racist. No, Im not a racist, he responded. I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed.

The America that denied its racism through the Obama years has struggled to deny its racism through the Trump years. From 1977 to 2018, the General Social Survey asked whether Black Americans have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people mainly due to discrimination. There are only two answers to this question. The racist answer is noit presumes that racist discrimination no longer exists and that racial inequities are the result of something being wrong with Black people. The anti-racist answer is yesit presumes that nothing is wrong or right, inferior or superior, about any racial group, so the explanation for racial disparities must be discrimination.

Ibram X. Kendi: The hopefulness and hopelessness of 1619

In 2008, as Obama was headed for the White House, only 34.5 percent of respondents answered yes, a number Ill call the anti-racist rate. This was the second-lowest anti-racist rate of the 41-year polling period. The rate rose to 37.7 percent in 2010, perhaps because the emergence of the Tea Party forced a reckoning for some white Americans, but it fell back down to 34.9 percent in 2012 and 34.6 percent in 2014.

In 2016, as Trump loomed over American politics, the anti-racist rate rose to 42.6 percent. It went up to 46.2 percent in 2018, a double-digit increase from the start of the Obama administration. In large part, shifts in white public opinion explain the jump. The white anti-racist rate was barely 29.8 percent in 2008. It jumped to 37.7 percent in 2016 and to 40.5 percent two years into Trumps presidency.

The deniers of racism, those who blame people of color for racial inequity and injustice, have mostly been white, but not exclusively so. Between 1977 and 2018, the lowest anti-racist rate among Black respondents47.2 percentcame in 2012, the midpoint of Obamas presidency. That rate climbed to 61.1 percent in 2016 and 66 percent in 2018, a nearly 20-point swing from the Obama years.

It has become harder, in the Trump years, to blame Black people for racial inequity and injustice. It has also become harder to tell Black people that the fault lies with them, and to urge them to improve their station by behaving in an upstanding or respectable manner. In the Trump years, the problem is obvious, and it isnt Black peoples behavior.

The United States has often been called a land of contradictions, and to be sure, its failings sit alongside some notable achievementsa New Deal for many Americans in the 1930s, the defeat of fascism abroad in the 1940s. But on racial matters, the U.S. could just as accurately be described as a land in denial. It has been a massacring nation that said it cherished life, a slaveholding nation that claimed it valued liberty, a hierarchal nation that declared it valued equality, a disenfranchising nation that branded itself a democracy, a segregated nation that styled itself separate but equal, an excluding nation that boasted of opportunity for all. A nation is what it does, not what it originally claimed it would be. Often, a nation is precisely what it denies itself to be.

There was a grand moment, however, when a large swath of Americans walked away from a history of racial denial. In the 1850s, slaveholders expanded their reach into the North. Their slave-catchers, backed by federal power, were superseding state and local law to capture runaways (and free Blacks) who had escaped across the Mason-Dixon Line. Formerly enslaved people such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, as well as journalists such as William Lloyd Garrison, stood in pulpits across the North and West describing the brutality and inhumanity of slavery. Meanwhile, slaveholders fought to expand their power out westwhere white people who did not want to compete with enslaved Black labor were calling for free soil. Beginning in 1854, slaveholders went to war with free-soilers (and abolitionists like John Brown) in Kansas over whether the stateand the United Stateswould be free or slave. The Supreme Courts Dred Scott decision, in 1857, implied that Black people and northern states had no rights that slaveholders were bound to respect.

From the October 2018 issue: Ibram X. Kendi on a house still divided

Slaveholders seemed intent on spreading their plantations from sea to shining sea. As a result, more and more white Americans became antislavery, whether out of concern for the enslaved or fear of the encroaching slave power. Black Americans, meanwhile, fled the country for Canada and Liberiaor stayed and pressed the cause of radical abolitionism. A critical mass of Americans rejected the Souths claim that enslavement was good and came to recognize the peculiar institution as altogether bad.

The slaveholders attempts to perpetuate their system backfired; in the years before the Civil War, the inhumanity and cruelty of enslavement became too blatant for northerners to ignore or deny. Similarly, Trumps racismand that of his allies and enablershas been too blatant for Americans to ignore or deny. And just as the 1850s paved the way for the revolution against slavery, Trumps presidency has paved the way for a revolution against racism.

On July 16, 2019, the House bitterly debated the resolution to rebuke Trump for his racist tweets against the four congresswomen of color. The four were members of the most diverse class of Democrats in American history, which had retaken the House in a midterm repudiation of the president.

Every single member of this institution, Democratic and Republican, should join us in condemning the presidents racist tweets, Speaker Pelosi said from the House floor. Republicans sounded off in protest. Pelosi turned to them, voice rising, and added: To do anything less would be a shocking rejection of our values and a shameful abdication of our oath of office to protect the American people.

Republicans claimed that Pelosi had violated a House rule by characterizing an action as racist. They moved to have the word struck from the Congressional Record.

The motion to strike racist from the record failed along party lines. I know racism when I see it, I know racism when I feel it, and at the highest level of government, theres no room for racism, Representative John Lewis, the civil-rights icon, said during the debate.

From the October 2017 issue: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Donald Trump, the first white president

One after another, Republicans rose to defend their president. What has really happened here is that the president and his supporters have been forced to endure months of allegations of racism, said Representative Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania. This ridiculous slander does a disservice to our nation.

In the end, only four Republicans and the Houses lone independent voted with all the Democrats to condemn the president of the United States. That means 187 House Republicans, or 98 percent of the caucus, denied that telling four congresswomen of color to go back to their countries was racist. They believed, as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, that the presidents not a racist.

To call out the presidents racism would have been to call out their own racism. McConnell had been quietly killing anti-racist bills that had come out of the House since January 2019, starting with the new Houses first bill, which aimed to protect Americans against voter suppression.

The day after being rebuked by House Democrats, Trump held the first rally of his reelection campaign. He spent a large portion of his speech in Greenville, North Carolina, railing against the four congresswomen. As he was pummeling Omar with a round of attacks, the crowd started chanting, Send her back! Send her back! Send her back!

Trump stopped speaking. He made no effort to stop the chant as it grew louder. He basked in the racial slur for 13 seconds.

Send her back! Send her back! Send her back!

On Thursday, Republicans were quick to denounce the chant. Theres no place for that kind of talk, Tom Emmer of Minnesota said to reporters. But, he added, theres not a racist bone in the presidents body.

Trump disavowed the Send her back chant, but by Friday he had disavowed his disavowal, calling the chanters incredible patriots and denying their racism along with his own. Many Americans saw through these patently false claims, however. By the end of July, for the first time, a majority of voters said the president of the United States was, in fact, a racist.

I thought I appreciated the power of denial from studying the history of racist ideas. But I learned to understand it in a personal way during the first year of Trumps presidency. In 2017, I fell ill; I felt as sick as Id ever been. But I told myself the hourly trips to the bathroom were nothing. The blood wasnt serious. I ignored the symptoms for months.

I waited until the pain was unbearable before I admitted that I had a problem. And even then, I wasnt able to acknowledge it on my own. My partner saved my life.

Sadiqa saw the totality of my symptoms during a weeklong vacation over New Years. It was the first time in months that we were together all day, every day. As soon as we returned home, in January 2018, she dragged me to the doctor.

I acquiesced to the appointment, but I still wouldnt permit the thought that my condition was serious. I did not have any of the commonly known risk factors for the worst possibilitycolon cancer. I was 35, and I exercised regularly, didnt smoke, rarely drank, and had no family history. I was a vegan, for goodness sake.

I realize now that I was engaged in a powerful bout of denial. Americans, too, can easily summon a litany of reasons their country is not racist: Look at the enlightened principles upon which the nation was founded. Look at the progress the country has made. Look at the election of Barack Obama. Look at the dark faces in high places. Look at the diversity of the 2020 Democratic field.

Even after the doctor found the tumor, my denial persisted. Once I accepted that I had cancer, I was convinced that it had to be Stage 1, for all the reasons I had been convinced that I did not have cancer at all. A routine surgery was in order, and then all would be good.

I fear that this is how many Americans are thinking right now: Routine surgerythe defeat of Donald Trump at the pollswill heal the American body. No need to look deeper, at police departments, at schools, at housing. Are Americans now acknowledging racism, but telling themselves the problem is contained? Are they telling themselves that it is a big problem, but it cant have spread to almost every part of the body politic? Will this become the new form of American denial?

False hope was my new normal, until it wasnt. When they scanned my body, doctors found that the cancer had spread. I had Stage 4 colon cancer. I had two choices: denial and death, or recognition and life. America now has two choices.

Trumps denials of his racism will never stop. He will continue to claim that he loves people of color, the very people his policies harm. He will continue to call himself not racist, and turn the descriptive term racist back on anyone who has the temerity to call out his own prejudice. Trump clearly hopes that racist ideaspaired with policies designed to suppress the votewill lead to his reelection. But now that Trump has pushed a critical mass of Americans to a point where they can no longer explain away the nations sins, the question is what those Americans will do about it.

One path forward leads to a mere restoration. Barack Obamas vice president unseats Trump, removing the bad apple from the barrel. With Trump dispatched, the nation believes it is again headed in the right direction. On this path, Americans consider racism to be a significant problem. But they deny the true gravity of the problem and the need for drastic action. On this path, monuments to racism are dismantled, but Americans shrink from the awesome task of reshaping the country with anti-racist policies. With Trump gone, Americans decide they dont need to be actively anti-racist anymore.

Or Americans can realize that they are at a point of no return. No returning to the bad old habit of denial. No returning to cynicism. No returning to normalthe normal in which racist policies, defended by racist ideas, lead to racial inequities.

On this path, Trumps denialism has permanently changed the way Americans view themselves. The Trump effect is real, and lasting. The reckoning we have witnessed this spring and summer at public demonstrations transforms into a reckoning in legislatures, C-suites, university-admissions offices.

On this path, the American people demand equitable results, not speeches that make them feel good about themselves and their country. The American people give policy makers an ultimatum: Use your power to radically reduce inequity and injustice, or be voted out.

The abolition of slavery seemed as impossible in the 1850s as equality seems today. But just as the abolitionists of the 1850s demanded the immediate eradication of slavery, immediate equality must be the demand today. Abolish police violence. Abolish mass incarceration. Abolish the racial wealth gap and the gap in school funding. Abolish barriers to citizenship. Abolish voter suppression. Abolish health disparities. Not in 20 years. Not in 10 years. Now.

This article appears in the September 2020 print edition with the headline The End of Denial.

Read more from the original source:
Is This the Beginning of the End of American Racism? - The Atlantic

As the White House has continued to push a narrative of a sharp recovery after a history-making recession, the economic data in large part has not been cooperating.

Jobs numbers of late are showing progress but pointing to at best a gradual recovery. The sharp uptick in coronavirus cases appears to be have ebbed but not by enough to generate confidence to get activities anywhere close to normal again.

And perhaps most importantly, a persistent inability of Congress and the White House to agree on more rescue funding threatens to push those still reeling from virus-related impacts further down the ladder.

"Dreams of a V-shaped recovery are long gone," Beth Ann Bovino, U.S. chief economist at S&P Global, said in a note. "The economic cycle feels more like we are riding a wave fueled by COVID-19 with only quarantines, federal stimulus, and advances from the medical community keeping our personal health and economic recovery afloat."

Bovino estimated a 30%-35% chance of a "wipeout" that could see "this fragile recovery falling back into recession."

That runs counter to the message from President Donald Trump's economic team.

National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow has touted the potential of a V-shaped recovery no fewer than four times over the past month, either on CNBC or elsewhere. As recently as last week, he told CNN the "V-shaped recovery is in place."

Economists generally do see a sharp snapback in activity for the third quarter after Q2's stunning 32.9% drop in GDP as measured if the current pace kept up for four quarters.

Still, the ability to keep up a gain that could exceed 20% for the July through September period is being called into question.

"With virus fears on the rise, jobs being lost and incomes squeezed, the second phase of the recovery will be more challenging," wrote James Knightley, chief international economist at ING. "In the absence of a timely and substantial fiscal package we should be braced for the threat of weaker employment and spending numbers, which will provide a major test for financial market optimism on the 'V' shaped recovery."

To be sure, some of the high-frequency data has been looking better.

Jefferies tracks a variety of these markers, such as retail foot traffic, public transportation use and employee hours at small businesses, and found that activity has resumed to 60.5% of the normal pace as measured by 2019 data points, which is the highest level of the pandemic recovery.

Markets also continue to look through the present circumstances and are pricing in a return to strength in the U.S. economy.

"The resurgence in COVID-19 infections and the upturn in unemployment claims raises the question of our call for a V-shaped economic recovery. While the deterioration in progress against the pandemic is saddening, we remain convinced the recovery will not be materially altered," wrote Lisa Shalett, chief investment officer at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management.

"We never thought the V-shaped recovery would be characterized by straight lines and a lack of hiccups given the vast unknowns and forecasting complexity surrounding the virus. Rather, our outlook is based simply on the realities of math and the direction of travel," Shalett said.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell last week said the recovery is largely dependent on the virus.

However, economists also think that the political calculus and how that translates into more rescue funding also will be critical.

"Given our crazy politics, which are particularly crazy given the election, there is a nonzero probability they fall short," Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, said regarding the relief negotiations. "Depending on how short will determine whether the economy will gain some traction or slide into a depression."

Link:
Trump's dream of a 'V' recovery is hanging in the balance of stimulus talks - CNBC

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Before COVID-19 hit, Donald Trumps business empire was continuing to earn hundreds of millions of dollars. But the presidents recently filed personal financial disclosures show that much of that came from hotels and resorts, two of the industries hardest hit by the pandemic. We wont know the specifics of how COVID-19 has diminished Trumps wealth until next year (and even then, only if he is reelected and has to file another disclosure), but based on last years report, it could get quite ugly for the presidentright before he has hundreds of millions of loans due to private lenders.

Trump annually files a personal financial disclosure form that details the income he earned, the assets he owns, and the debt he owes. It is not as detailed as his tax returns, and it crucially leaves out key information for assessing the presidents financial statusfor example, how much money he spends. According to the most recent copies of the forms, filed Friday night, Trump earned at least $446 million in the 2019 calendar year through his businesses and investmentsa slight uptick from the previous year. But its not clear how much of that the president kept, and even when numbers appeared to be good for individual businesses in the presidents portfolio, all may not be as well in reality.

For instance, according to Trumps disclosure, his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland earned $25.6 million in revenue in 2019, up $5.2 million from 2018. But those figures dont include how much it costs to run the golf courseand it costs a lot. We know from corporate filings in the United Kingdom that in 2018, the golf course actually lost $13.1 millionfar more than even the 2019 increase in revenue. Unless Trump dramatically cut costs at Turnberry (well know later this fall when the British corporate filings are due), it seems unlikely the course was profitable.

At Trumps Mar-a-Lago resort, which he touts as the Winter White House, revenues slid by $3.7 million to $21.4 million for the year. No information is available on how much Trump spends to operate Mar-a-Lago, but its not a good sign for one of his marquee properties. Down the road at the Doral golf course he ownswhich he tried to steer an international summit to last fallrevenues climbed $2.4 million from 2018 to 2019, but profitability at the resort has slipped since Trump was elected.

Trumps other favorite vacation getaway, his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, also had revenues rise by about $2.5 million last year, but across many of his other golf courses, revenues seemed to just inch up, even as the economy as a whole was roaring. Trumps Jupiter golf course, in Palm Beach, Florida, where he frequently golfs while visiting Mar-a-Lago, saw an increase in revenues of just about $429,000.

One of the most prominent properties the president owns is a luxury hotel in downtown Washington, DC, which he opened shortly before Election Day in 2016 and quickly became a hangout for administration members, lobbyists, and foreign delegations hoping to make an impression on the president. Trump rents the building from the federal government and pays rent, partially based on how much profit he makesand has yet to pay above the basic amount, suggesting that even as its revenues inched up to $40.5 million (a $150,000 increase from 2018), the property is still not making much money for the president when all its expenses are added up. The Trump family announced they were planning to sell the property last fall, but the sale seems to have been put on hold.

To the degree that the Trump Organization appears to have been financially healthy in 2019, much of the business is built on Trumps resort and hotel business. Besides his golf clubs and hotels he owns, Trump manages hotels for others around the world. All told, revenues from resorts, hotels, or management fees accounted for $352 million, about 78 percent of all of Trumps revenues. The bad news, for Trump, is that in 2020, just weeks after the period covered in this financial disclosure, the COVID-19 pandemic steamrolled across the global economy, with the hotel and resort industries hit particularly hard. One industry group estimates American hotels have lost $46 billion in revenue since the pandemic started.

At one point, nearly all of Trumps resorts were closed, and he was forced to lay off as many as 1,500 employees. His Scottish golf courses rely heavily on wealthy American golfers, but with international travel out of the United States almost completely curtailedthe UK has maintained a two-week mandatory quarantine for travelers from the United Statesany progress reported by Trumps businesses in 2019 has likely been completely erased in 2020.

In that respect, the Trump Organization is no different than almost every other business around the world, but the presidentwho has retained full ownership of all of the properties, refusing to divest upon taking officehas some unique challenges. For one, he continues to owe a lot of money. The 2019 personal financial disclosure shows no substantive change in his listed debtshe still owes hundreds of millions to lenders on mortgages for some of his favorite properties. While Trumps overall level of debt is not unusually hightheNew York Times estimated his assets are worth about $1.35 billion compared to debt in the neighborhood of at least $470 millionseveral of his largest debts are coming due in the next few years, possibly during a second presidential term. Among others, Trump will need to repay Deutsche Bank about $125 million for mortgages on the Doral resort, and $170 million on the Washington, DC, hotel. If Trump doesnt have the cash to pay these debts, he could try to refinance the loansbut banks will look toward his recent revenues to determine his creditworthiness, numbers that will probably not be pretty after the damage from the pandemic is totaled up.

Read Trumps full personal financial disclosure below:

Read more here:
Donald Trump's Businesses Did Okay in 2019. But 2020 Might Be Awful for His Personal Wealth. - Mother Jones

President Donald Trumps early Saturday tweetstorm took an oddly aggressive position, as the nations cities continued to erupt in protest over the death of Minneapolis man George Floyd earlier this week while in police custody.

Late on Friday, Trump was still trying to deal with the fallout of his Thursday tweet that looting leads to shooting, which sparked more outrage and escalated passions. Trump tried to walk back its impact on Friday, saying that It was spoken as a fact, not as a statement. Its very simple, nobody should have any problem with this other than the haters, and those looking to cause trouble on social media. Honor the memory of George Floyd!

However, protests outside the White House on Friday night seemed to indicate that people were not buying that explanation. Trump praised the Secret Service for its handling of the protests, and alluded to the awful fate awaiting any protester who made it past the White House barriers, citing vicious dogs, among other defenses.

Related StoryJoe Biden Asks "A Nation Furious At Injustice" To Restrain From Violence In George Floyd Death Protests; Donald Trump Silent As Curfews Spread Across America

He also called out Washington, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser for not assisting the White House in quelling the protests, which he blamed today on ANTIFA and the Radical Left.

Well post more communications as they roll in. The tweetstorm so far:

See the rest here:
President Donald Trump Tweetstorm The Saturday Edition - Deadline