John B. Judis | Vox

This election could be the birth of a Trump-Sanders constituency

2019-03-05T20:34:11-05:00

Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have awakened a long-sleeping economic perspective. | Getty

Primary voters going to the polls starting next week face the prospect of voting for candidates who have been unseen in the past 35 years of presidential politics: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

But even if Trump and Sanders are denied the White House, their campaigns will have been extremely significant, perhaps even changing presidential politics forever. Their success in building a following in their parties is an early warning sign of discontent with the outlook that has dominated American politics for decades.

Sanders and Trump differ dramatically on many issues — from immigration to climate change— but both are critical of how wealthy donors and lobbyists dominate the political process, and both favor some form of campaign finance reform. Both decry corporations moving overseas for cheap wages and to avoid American taxes. Both reject trade treaties that favor multinational corporations over workers. And both want government more, rather than less, involved in the economy.

Sanders is a left-wing populist. He wants to defend the “collapsing middle class” against the “billionaire class” that controls the economy and politics. He is not a liberal who wants to reconcile Wall Street and Main Street, or a socialist who wants the working class to abolish capitalism.

Trump is a right-wing populist who wants to defend the American people from rapacious CEOs and from Hispanic illegal immigrants. He is not a conventional business conservative who thinks government is the problem and who blames America’s ills on unions and Social Security.

Both men are foes of what they describe as their party’s establishment. And both campaigns are also fundamentally about rejecting the way economic policy has been talked about in American presidential politics for decades.

Sanders and Trump both reject widely accepted economic policies that favor business interests

Both Sanders and Trump have challenged the main assumptions that have knit together American politics over the past 35 years. Some European political scientists describe these as a “neoliberal consensus,” but there has not really been consensus — it’s more a case of a dominant or hegemonic view — and the term “neoliberal” has sometimes been applied indiscriminately. So let me use the term “market liberalism” — a cross between “third way” liberalism among Democrats and Cato Institute libertarianism among Republicans — to describe this point of view.

From the 1930s through the ’60s, American politics revolved around a New Deal liberal view that stressed managed capitalism, labor-business cooperation, and political pluralism.

During the late 1970s, however, that view began to be displaced by one that stressed the superiority of market self-regulation and the extension of market relations to global capitalism, particularly with respect to trade, immigration, and foreign investment. Government regulation and taxes were increasingly seen as hampering growth. Government’s role was to remove regulations on business and get rid of barriers that prevented immigration, tariffs, and foreign investment.

Economic policy over the past 35 years has largely embraced these objectives.

In 1977 the Occupational Safety and Health Agency had 37 inspectors for every million workers; now it has only 22. OSHA's effectiveness depends entirely on its inspectors.
Marginal rates on the largest incomes have fallen from 70 percent during the 1970s to 39 percent today. Taxes on capital gains, which primarily affect the wealthy, have dropped from 40 percent in 1977 to 20 percent today.
Trade agreements have eased the way for companies to move their businesses overseas. From 1990 to 1995, spanning the Republican George H.W. Bush and Democratic Bill Clinton administrations, 27 bilateral investment treaties were signed removing obstacles to American companies relocating overseas. Attempts to tax American corporations’ overseas earnings have been consistently beaten back during Democratic and Republican administrations.
Major industries, including airlines and telecommunications, have been freed from price regulation.

There have been short interruptions in this neoliberal trend — for instance, during the first two years of the Carter and Obama administrations — but these brief exceptions have, if anything, proven the rule.

How this orthodoxy came to be so dominant in both parties

What allowed these market liberal views to gain hegemony was, above all, the offensive that business undertook against labor unions and public interest groups. As I have recounted in The Paradox of American Democracy, it began in the early 1970s.

Business used hardball tactics, including moving factories out of the unionized Midwest, hiring replacement workers, and firing labor organizers to block union drives and to decertify existing unions. In 1955, about a third of non-farm workers belonged to unions; by 1989, it was down to 16.4 percent. Business also dramatically increased its lobbying presence on Washington’s K Street. In 1971, only 175 businesses had lobbies in Washington. By 1982, 2,445 did.

Businesses initially found useful allies in a Republican party that was bringing together local business, rural voters, and white working-class voters disillusioned with the Democrats. But as labor lost members and money, businesses also assumed a larger role in funding Democratic candidates.

In 1992, Bill Clinton’s single biggest bloc of contributions came from the employees of Goldman Sachs. And Clinton didn’t disappoint his funders when he named Goldman Sachs president Robert Rubin as the head of his new National Economic Council and later as Treasury secretary, where he championed bringing China into the World Trade Organization (even as it continued to manipulate its currency and saving rates to achieve trade surpluses) and the deregulation of the financial industry.

Business’s influence was magnified by a series of Supreme Court rulings — handed down by a court whose members had been nominated by Republican presidents. It began in 1976, when the court’s decision in Buckley v. Valeo threw out the campaign finance reforms of 1971 and 1974, which had established limits on both total contributions and total spending, and has continued through Citizens United and McCutcheon, which repealed, in effect, a century-old restriction on corporate contributions. As a result, businesses and the very wealthy are able to use their financial advantage to sway both Republicans and Democrats on economic legislation that is important to them.

The changes wrought in America’s international position after 1971 also reinforced business’s political dominance. As capital became mobile, companies could move overseas or south of the border to cut costs; they could also use the threat of moving overseas, or of competition from low-wage production overseas, to force wage concessions in the United States.

Businesses also took advantage of the influx of legal and illegal immigrants that poured into the country after the new immigration laws of 1965 to drive down the wages of production and service workers in industries like construction, hotels and restaurants, and meatpacking. These measures contributed to overall inequality, and they struck at industries like auto, textiles, and meatpacking that had been heavily unionized.

The New Deal liberal order had depended upon labor functioning as a countervailing force to business. Business had still reigned supreme — as E.E. Schattschneider wrote in 1960, “The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent” — but the balance between them still undergirded America’s pluralist democracy and made possible a spate of popular reforms.

These reforms ranged from Medicare during Lyndon Johnson’s administration to the 12 new regulatory agencies, including OSHA and the Environmental Protection Agency, that originated during the Nixon and Ford administrations. With the transition to a market liberal order, the prospect for these kind of reforms has dramatically diminished, and America’s pluralism has increasingly lost its mooring.

How Trump fights against the free market policies Republicans embraced

Billionaire Donald Trump would seem an unlikely candidate to challenge this market liberal framework, but he is an outlier in a Republican Party that had become a bastion of free market economics. He is a former Democrat and political independent who seems to have gravitated to the Republican Party because it afforded him a better opportunity for political advancement. He has had little contact with, and shown little interest in, conservative ideology. He also comes from industries — real estate and construction — that depend on government largesse.

During his presidential campaign, much attention has been focused on Trump calling Mexican immigrants rapists and on his proposing to bar Muslims temporarily from immigrating to the United States, but in his speeches and his campaign books, he has taken positions that run directly counter to neoliberalism and Republican libertarianism.

Trump attacked corporate “inversions,” when a company relocates its headquarters overseas in order to avoid taxes in the US. And he declared that Wall Street “has caused tremendous problems for us. We’re going to tax Wall Street.” He criticized Ford and Nabisco for moving jobs out of the United States in search of lower wages.

Some of Trump’s appeal, like that earlier of independent candidate Ross Perot, rests on his being able to finance his own campaign so he is not dependent on campaign contributions from the wealthy and from business lobbyists.

“I don’t want lobbyists. I don’t want any special interests. I don’t want any strings attached,” Trump told Face the Nation last August. And he wants to curb the power of PACs and Super PACs. As a billionaire, he is making the case against the business- and lobby-dominated political system.

Trump’s attacks on illegal immigrants have a hard edge of xenophobia, but he is addressing an issue that is integral to the neoliberal framework. Trump has not only targeted undocumented immigrants for driving down services workers’ wages and burdening social services; he has also criticized H-1B visas for taking jobs away from American high-tech workers.

When Trump rounds on China, he sometimes seems to be encouraging a new “yellow peril,” but his criticisms of China’s trade practices challenge the market liberal framework that has turned a blind eye to Chinese mercantilism and to American firms that take advantage of China’s cheap labor to export goods back to the United States that used to be produced in the US.

Trump’s remedies may not work, but his Republican rivals refused to recognize the problem he is addressing. In the January 14 Republican debate, sponsored by Fox Business News, Trump charged that “China is ripping us on trade.” Noting that the United States had lost “thousands and thousands” of companies, he said he would consider imposing a tariff to bring down the $505 billion trade deficit with China.

Fox’s moderator brought up the usual business response — that imposing a tariff would penalize the consumer. Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz agreed. Rubio said, “The best thing we can do to protect ourselves against China economically is to make our economy stronger, which means reversing course from all the damage Barack Obama is doing to this economy.”

Trump has also rejected the typical center-right view of government. He has opposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and he has not fretted about debt and deficits. Instead, he has advocated massive government spending on infrastructure. He attacked Obama’s health care plan for subsidizing insurance companies and drug companies, and has joined Sanders and Clinton in calling for curbing drug prices.

Some of the Republican opposition to Trump stems from a fear that his harsh rhetoric about Hispanics and women would condemn the party to defeat in November. But much of it also comes from opposition to his positions on government, trade, and foreign investment.

The Club for Growth, which backs free market candidates, explained its opposition to Trump by citing his support for “universal health care,” the idea that “government can take over companies,” his proposal to raise taxes on individuals with a worth greater than $10 million, and his proposal to impose a tariff on goods from China. In National Review’s brief against Trump, conservatives cited his support for “universal health care,” “his know-nothing protectionism” and “his plans for spending but no serious proposals for spending cuts or entitlement reforms.”

How Sanders tugs Democrats back to their economic roots

Sanders, with his New Left pedigree, is a much more predictable foe of market liberalism among Democrats as well as Republicans. Until he ran for president, Sanders was an independent, not a Democrat. He has no endorsements from current senators or governors (even in his home state) and only two endorsements from House members. Some Democrats share some of his political ideas, but as a whole, what Sanders thinks runs counter to the prevailing ideology of the past three Democratic administrations.

Sanders still calls himself a socialist, although he has abandoned the Marxist conception of socialism as public ownership and control of the means of production. He also calls himself a progressive and was a founder of the House Progressive Caucus, but he is not exactly in the tradition of progressives or liberals. Progressives and liberals want to reconcile the competing demands of capital and labor.

Sanders is much more of a left-wing populist who sees a virtuous people arrayed against an establishment. Asked by NBC’s Chuck Todd why he thought he had no Senate endorsements, Sanders replied: “It tells me that we are taking on the political establishment, we’re taking on the economic establishment, the financial interest in this country, and we’re taking on the corporate establishment.”

In an exchange with Martin O’Malley in one of the January debates, Sanders drew a clear distinction between his outlook and that of a conventional liberal or a neoliberal. When O’Malley declared that the “biggest challenge we face as a people … is to heal the divisions and wounds in our country,” Sanders said he disagreed. “Where I disagree with you, Governor O’Malley, is we do have to deal with the fundamental issues of a handful of billionaires who control the economic and political life of this country.”

Sanders, like Trump, takes positions on specific issues that put him at odds with market liberalism. His proposals, whether or not they are immediately feasible, challenge an approach that prioritizes the private market. He unblushingly favors huge government spending — $1 trillion worth — on infrastructure and would pay for that and for free public college tuition by tax hikes on speculation and the wealthy that Clinton, for one, opposes. He wants Medicare for all, which would mean eliminating private health insurers except as they might supplement government programs.

Sanders opposes trade agreements that he believes encourage American companies to invest overseas rather than at home, and wants to close tax loopholes that would allow “corporate deserters” to avoid American taxes. Like Trump, he promises to be tough on China. He wants to break up the biggest banks by reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act that the Clinton administration and Congress repealed. And while he favors comprehensive immigration reform, he joins Trump in charging that the H-1B program, cherished by Silicon Valley Democrats, deprives Americans of jobs.

While Trump has financed his own campaign, Sanders, unlike Clinton, has relied on small donors and avoided PACs or Super PACs. He wants public funding of campaigns and promises to make overturning Citizens United a litmus test in a Supreme Court nomination.

But the heart of his case against the current political arrangement comes in his call for “political revolution,” which he regularly defines as “involving millions and millions of people in the political process today in a way that has never been the case before.” Sanders is referring not simply to election turnout, but to the kind of popular presence between elections that could counter the power of the “billionaire class.” Sanders’s view, however vague, is a call to reverse the oligarchic tendencies of the past decades. Only an organized movement from below could conceivably do that.

The two messages draw in different kinds of voters

Sanders and Trump appeal to very different constituencies.

According to a January Pew poll, Trump’s voters tend on average (but not exclusively) to be white, male, older, without a college degree, and in the middle or lower-middle income quintile. They are the descendants of the white working-class Reagan Democrats who made possible — but didn’t constitute the bulk of — the Republican majorities of the past 35 years. As a new RAND survey has shown, Trump’s supporters are more likely to express resentments toward racial minorities and undocumented immigrants and to favor “progressive economic policies.”

Sanders’s voters, on the other hand, tend to be younger, are attending or have graduated from college, and are in the upper-middle income quintile. There are signs of some blue-collar support, but for the most part Sanders’s supporters are more likely to be potential or existing professionals that as a group have played a similar role in Democratic majorities as the white working class in Republican majorities. In surveys, they currently tend to be white and male, but that is largely out of comparison with Hillary Clinton, who enjoys widespread support among women and minorities.

In New Hampshire, I found some voters who said they would support either Trump or Sanders, and some other reporters have come up with additional examples of potential crossover voters, but I don’t think at present the bulk of either candidate’s voters would favor the other. The gulf on minorities, immigrants, climate change, and the general attitude toward women is too great. The Sanders and Trump constituencies are parts of a whole that doesn’t yet exist, but if it were to come into being it could potentially shake the foundations of present market liberal politics.

A fear of a similar coalition — in this case between New Left student activists and striking blue-collar workers — motivated the business offensive of the ’70s. In December 1969 in a special issue on “The Seventies,” Businessweek speculated that “the blacks, the labor unions and the young” could “make the Seventies one of the tumultuous decades in American history.”

Of course, business’s quick and determined response prevented that from happening, but over the next decades, if market liberal policies lead to further downturns like the Great Recession, as some economists predict, the Trump and Sanders voters could come together. The question is, however, what form the new politics would take.

What might a Sanders/Trump constituency look like?

What is happening in the United States is very similar to what is happening in Europe. In Europe, right-wing populist parties are on the march in much of the northern tier, including France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and even Sweden, as well as in Austria and Eastern Europe. In the southern tier of Spain, Italy, and Greece, left-wing and centrist populism predominates.

If anything, the issues in Europe are more complicated because of the euro and the European Union and the predominance of Germany, but basically what these different populist movements are advocating is an economic nationalism very similar to that which Trump and Sanders are calling for.

What is happening to the United States and Western Europe now can be compared to what happened from the 1870s to the beginning of World War II. During this earlier period, capital and a laissez faire view of the economy initially reigned supreme, and, as Thomas Piketty has demonstrated, economic inequality grew apace, as it has over the past 40 years.

There were initial outbursts similar to those that the United States and Western Europe are experiencing now — the populists and socialists in the United States, the socialist and Labour parties in Europe — but they didn’t cohere into a powerful challenge until the decades after World War I and the onset of the Great Depression.

When they did come together, however, the challenge took two very different forms. In the United States, the breakdown of the old order led to the triumph of the New Deal on the left. In Europe, it resulted in the rise of fascism.

So the breakup of a political-economic order can turn left or right, and which direction the revolt will take in the United States remains to be seen. What can be said is that the Trump and Sanders campaigns, taken together, could be harbingers of that revolt.

Democrats are in more trouble than they think. And changing demographics won’t save them.

2019-03-05T18:31:27-05:00

Democrats are counting on Hispanic voters' growing demographics to save them. Are they wrong? | John Moore/Getty Images

Democrats are optimistic about the future. They may have gotten pasted in 2014, but they expect great results in the next decade based on favorable trends in the population.

“The Republican party is in a death spiral,” Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg warns in his new book America Ascendant. It is in a “pitched fight” with what Greenberg calls the “new American majority,” which is composed of “African Americans, Hispanics, Millennials,” who “will constitute 54 percent of the electorate in 2016.” If one includes “seculars with no religious affiliation,” then this group amounts to 63 percent of the electorate that is sympathetic to the Democrats.

Greenberg’s claim is merely the latest version of an argument that Celinda Lake and other Democratic pollsters as well as analysts from the Center for American Progress have been making for the past three or four years. The heart of the argument is that the groups in the population that are likely to vote for Democrats are growing, while those that are likely to vote for Republicans are shrinking as a percentage of the electorate. As a result, Democrats will inevitably win political majorities.

This argument is at least half-wrong. Democrats could eventually reclaim the majorities they won in 2008 or enjoyed earlier in the past century, but it won’t happen simply because of demography. Republicans have rising groups of their own that could counter or nullify these trends. Considered merely on that basis, the parties are at a standoff. Which party wins the coming elections will depend on politics — what kind of candidates the parties nominate, what they campaign on, and what they do in office.

Some worrying demographic trends for Democrats

Greenberg and other Democratic writers concede that Republicans will continue to win the white working-class vote — composed, roughly speaking, of whites who do not have four-year college degrees. In 2012, President Obama won only 36 percent of these voters against Republican Mitt Romney; in 2014, Democrats won just 34 percent of these voters in House races.

Though these voters are a declining proportion of the electorate —from about 65 percent in 1980 to about 35 percent today — they still hold the balance of power in the Deep South and in swing states like Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and New Hampshire.

Republicans also have two other groups that, unlike the white working class, are increasing in size: voters with a four-year, but not an advanced, college degree, and senior citizens.

Initially, these four-year college grads were torn politically between Democrats and Republicans. They backed Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, but George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. In 2006 they moved back to the Democrats, and in 2008 they supported Barack Obama and Democratic House candidates, but since then they have been gravitating back into the Republican fold and could stay there. Republican Mitt Romney won this group by 51 to 47 percent in 2012, and Republican House candidates won them in 2014 by 54 to 44 percent.

This phenomenon is especially concentrated among whites in this group, who occupy a comparable rung in the occupational ladder now to the working-class Reagan Democrats of 1980, share similar worries and resentments, and have been squeezed economically during the past 15 years. In 2008, according to the American National Election Studies (ANES), Republican John McCain won these voters against Barack Obama by 54 to 42 percent. But by 2012, the margin had widened to 57 to 38 percent — a 7-point swing that is comparable to the margins by which Romney won the white working class.

And there’s a surprising subset of this trend: While African-American support for Democrats doesn’t vary by income or occupation, there is now, according to the ANES surveys, a gap opening up between Hispanics with a high school diploma or less, who supported Obama by more than 70 percent, and those with some college or an associate degree, who supported him by just 55 percent. Based purely on current demographic trends, one could reason that in a generation, as more Hispanics get college degrees, they could become almost as tough a sell for the Democrats as white college graduates are now.

And there’s an added consideration. Sociologist Richard Alba argues in the current American Prospect that the very census categories upon which political predictions about a majority-minority country rest are highly suspect. The census this year found that more than half (50.2 percent) of the children under 5 were ethnic minorities — a clear sign that nonwhites would eventually outnumber whites in the US. But it turned out that the largest single group of these minorities — 22 percent of the children under 5 — were Hispanics whose parents identified them as white. So in fact at least 72 percent of the children might be raised as and identify politically as “whites.”

The other key group that is moving toward Republicans, senior citizens, was once a dependable Democratic vote. Bill Clinton won voters 65 and over twice, Al Gore carried them in 2000, and John Kerry in 2004. But since 2008, seniors have begun tilting Republican. Republicans gained a 6-point advantage over Democrats in 2010. This is at least partly explained by opposition to Obama’s moves on health care and immigration.

According to Pew polls, seniors have been the group most disapproving of Obama’s Affordable Care — 56.5 to 37.9 percent in September 2013. Many seniors appear to have feared that the Affordable Care Act was being financed by reductions in projected spending on Medicare. They saw themselves having to sacrifice their own coverage for the sake of the uninsured.

Seniors have also been the most critical of immigration reform proposals. In December 2014, when Obama issued an executive order allowing some undocumented immigrants to become legal residents, seniors in a Pew poll opposed Obama’s order by 58 to 39 percent. A Brookings Public Religion Research Institute poll in 2013 found that seniors were the only age group in which a greater number believed that growing immigration “threatens American customs and values.”

If you count up the percentage of the vote that working-class whites and four-year college grads represent, and add overlapping groups of senior citizens with their unusually high turnout, rural voters, evangelicals, and business owners and managers, you get the same kind of formidable bloc for Republicans. It’s one that could rival the one Greenberg finds for Democrats — even if you throw in professionals with advanced degrees, a group that Greenberg unaccountably omits from his 63 percent.

By sheer demographic calculation, you can’t plausibly predict which party will capture Washington over the next decade or two. What finally makes the difference in overall election results is not demographics but politics.

How politics can determine which party’s coalition wins out in elections

Democrats maintained majorities from 1932 to 1964 because voters identified them as the party of the “common man.” During that period, Democrats regularly commanded the support of the lower three-fifths of the income pyramid. But with the shift of white working-class Democrats to the Republican Party that began in the 1960s during the conflict over civil rights, and with the arrival in the Democratic Party of upscale professionals, the party coalitions no longer mimicked differences in class and income.

Yet — and here is where politics comes in — many state and most national elections are still won by the party that can claim the mantle of the “common man” — translated now into the “middle class” — and lost by the party that becomes identified with its “special interests.” So the trick for a party and a candidate is to maintain a base of heterogeneous special interests, while still appearing to be the champion of the ordinary American.

Even after the civil rights reforms of the 1960s won wide acceptance, Democrats continued to hemorrhage support among working- and middle-class whites. One reason was that the Democrats championed reforms that were seen as primarily aiding minorities and the poor but that were funded by, or required sacrifices from, the white working class and middle class — and not to the same measure by the upper class.

That’s what the early battles over busing and affirmative action were about, and what the outcry over welfare and taxes and big government has been about. It’s also at the heart of negative reaction to the Affordable Care Act, which — leaving aside ongoing quarrels among experts — was widely seen as forcing the already insured to pay for the uninsured.

Democrats have also suffered when they have become identified too closely with the social or cultural agenda of groups within their coalition. Democrats’ support for abortion hurt candidates in the South and West; support for same-sex marriage — which is now widespread — initially damaged Democrats in the 2004 election.

Democrats’ identification with Black Lives Matter protests against the police — no matter how justified — could also cost them in the coming election. In a special election last May in a Staten Island and Brooklyn congressional district that voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, where Democrats enjoy a 16-point edge in voter registration, the Republican district attorney who had failed to secure an indictment against the cop who killed Eric Garner routed a Democratic opponent who had been critical of his handling of the case.

In these instances, Democrats have lost votes not simply because they backed measures favored by their base, but because they became identified primarily with those measures to the exclusion of a more generalizable appeal on economics and national security — the kind that got Bill Clinton elected in 1992 and Barack Obama in 2008.

Perhaps the most vivid example in 2014 was the Texas gubernatorial election. Democrats nominated Wendy Davis, an outspoken proponent of abortion rights, as their candidate against Lt. Gov. Greg Abbott. Davis’s field operation was run by Battleground Texas, which hoped to use the race to increase Latino participation in Texas politics. But a candidate chiefly identified with abortion rights was the last person to be able to do that among Latino voters. Davis got slaughtered. Only 17 percent of Latinos turned out, and Davis won just 55 percent of them.

Republicans, of course, have a similar problem. When they run candidates who too closely identify with one part of their coalition — whether it is the uncaring rich (Mitt Romney in 2012) or the evangelical or nativist right (Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin in 2012) — they can lose state and national elections. And that’s exactly what is worrying former Bush operative Karl Rove and other establishment Republicans as they contemplate the party’s prospects in the 2016 presidential election.

What all this means for the 2016 election

Even though Bernie Sanders appears to be surging in Iowa and New Hampshire, it’s still fairly likely that, barring a major scandal, Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee for president this November. Clinton lacks Bill Clinton’s personal touch and Obama’s charisma. She will also have to bear the burden of voters’ accumulated grievances against the Obama administration. The final outcome will very much depend on whom the Republicans nominate to face her.

If they nominate a candidate who can move to the center and retain the party’s base — as several Republican Senate and gubernatorial candidates did effectively in 2014 — then the Republicans stand a good chance of winning. With their advantage in congressional races, they could dominate Washington the way Republicans did during George W. Bush’s administration.

But if the party nominates a hard-right candidate like Ted Cruz who cannot move sufficiently to the center, they could easily lose. Or if the Republicans select a maverick firebrand like Donald Trump, they could split their own vote while invigorating the Democratic base, especially among women and minorities. If Hispanics, whom Trump has already alienated, give three-quarters of their vote to a Democrat and turn out around 55 percent, a Republican president candidate will have difficulty winning an election. The United States could become post-1994 California writ large.

If the national Republican Party were then to remain mired on the populist or hard right, Greenberg’s prophecy of a new American majority could turn out to be correct — not as a result of demographics, but because the Republicans would have become identified with only one part of their coalition. But it’s more likely that Republicans would take their defeat to heart, and nominate more acceptable candidates in 2018 and 2020, as they did in 2014 after suffering defeats in 2012.

In that case, what political scientist W.D. Burnham called the “unstable equilibrium” between the two parties would persist, and the key to winning elections would continue to lie not in census figures, but in which party could run the best candidates and campaigns.

A fascinating psychological experiment could explain Donald Trump’s rise

2019-03-05T16:22:16-05:00

Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, pictured at a fundraiser in Las Vegas, has risen to a new high in national polls. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

In the wake of the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, Donald Trump’s standing in Republican polls has spiked, even after many speculated Trump had gone too far with his incendiary proposal to temporarily ban foreign Muslims from entering the United States. Trump was at 41 percent, up from 28 percent in October, in a Monmouth University poll of Republican and Republican-leaning voters.

There are all kinds of reasons why Trump has succeeded to date in attracting Republican support: among others, his strident opposition to illegal immigration and to Chinese trade practices, his bluster and belligerence, his defiance of political correctness, his reputation as a successful businessman, and his promise of independence from big contributors and lobbyists. But another factor may account for his recent boost in popularity.

To understand Trump’s rise, you must first understand this philosopher

The key to understanding Trump’s appeal may lie in the works of the late anthropologist/philosopher Ernest Becker. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Denial of Death, Becker contended that a fear of death shapes in very basic ways our being in the world. He says the fear of death contributes to a literal and figurative quest for immortality through religion, parenting, and the production of what we hope are lasting works.

It can fuel a fascination with heroes who defied death and celebrities whose fame will live after them. And in certain circumstances, it can also influence our moral and political judgments. It can make us less tolerant and even fearful of different ethnic groups, religions, and nations, creating a sharp gap between “us” and “them,” and it can strengthen our support for strong and charismatic leaders who will protect us against them. The San Bernardino massacre may have been one such circumstance, and the fear of death it awakened may help explain Trump’s sudden rise in the polls.

Three psychologists — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, who met as graduate students in psychology at the University of Kansas in the mid-1970s — were inspired by Becker’s work. Over the past 25 years, they have tried to prove his theory about the fear of death through practical, real-life experiments. The editor of a professional journal had advised them that if they wanted other psychologists to take Becker’s ideas seriously, they would have to demonstrate their validity through experiments.

How the fear of death plays out in real life

In 1989, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski devised the first of what would be scores of successful experiments. This one was intended to show that a fear of death could lead to harsh moral judgments. The psychologists recruited 22 Tucson municipal court judges. They told the judges they wanted to test the relationship between personality traits and bail decisions, but for some of them, they inserted in the middle of a personality questionnaire two exercises meant to evoke an awareness of their own mortality. (One exercise asked them to “briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you.”) Then they asked the judges to set a bond in the hypothetical case of a prostitute who a prosecutor warned was a flight risk. The judges who did the mortality exercises set an average bail of $455; those who did not do the exercises set an average of $50, which was the prevailing rate in Tucson.

Over the next decades, the psychologists, and colleagues in the United States and overseas, devised experiments that showed that these kinds of mortality reminders affected people’s views of other religions, races, and nations. They recount many of these experiments in a recently published book, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life. When they had students at a Christian college evaluate essays by what they were told were a Jewish and a Christian author, those who did the mortality exercises took a far more negative view of the Jewish author than the control group did. A German psychologist, testing these theories, found a mortality reminder increased Germans’ hostility toward Turks. Other experiments showed subjects who received the mortality reminders expressed a far greater veneration for the American flag, took a far more negative view of an essay critical of the United States, and expressed a harsher view of people who had different political views from their own.

How thinking about death makes you more likely to support George W. Bush

After 9/11, the researchers devised experiments to gauge the effect of the terrorist attack on Americans’ awareness of their own mortality. Subjects who had “911” flash subliminally before their eyes between word associations were more likely to complete word fragments with words associated with death than subjects who had innocuous word combinations flash before them. (Did “coff” become “coffee” or “coffin?”) They concluded that reminders of 9/11 functioned as mortality reminders. They then did experiments that showed that mortality reminders lent greater appeal to charismatic leaders.

They tested the response of two groups — one that experienced mortality reminders and one that didn’t — to three hypothetical gubernatorial candidates. One was “task-oriented and emphasized the ability to get things done”; another “emphasized the importance of share responsibility, relationships, and working together”; and a third was “bold self-confident, and emphasized the group’s greatness” (“you are part of a special state nation”). After a reminder of mortality, there was an eightfold increase in support for the charismatic candidate.

In October 2003, the researchers began testing whether George W. Bush’s appeal stemmed in part from mortality fears awakened by 9/11. They had two groups of Rutgers undergraduates read an essay expressing a “highly favorable opinion of the measures taken with regards to 9/11 and the Iraqi conflict.” Those who did the mortality exercises judged the statement favorably; those who didn’t did not. In late September 2004, the team gathered together undergraduates to see whether mortality reminders affected their decision to support Bush over Democratic challenger John Kerry in the upcoming election. Just as undergraduate opinion had opposed the war, it favored Kerry, and the group that did not do the mortality exercise chose Kerry by four to one. But the students who did the exercise favored Bush by more than two to one.

Trump has awakened our fear of "us" versus "them"

According to Sheldon Solomon, who teaches at Skidmore College, the psychologists are in the process of conducting experiments to see whether voters’ reaction to Trump, in the wake of a mortality reminder, is similar to their reaction in 2003 and 2004 to George W. Bush. They are not permitted to publish their results until they are vetted by peer review in a scientific journal, but Solomon wrote to me that he expects “the outcome to be the same as 2004 given the similarity of historical conditions (9/11-France/California) and candidates (Bush-Trump).”

I, too, expect the results to be similar. The San Bernardino and Paris attacks are strong mortality reminders that awaken fear of “them,” and Trump, of all the Republican candidates, combines celebrity and charisma with contempt and contumely toward those responsible for the attacks. Many voters would see his proposal to bar Muslims from the country not as an assault upon the Constitution and religious belief, but as a recognition of a mortal threat to America. And that perception of him would help explain his sudden rise in the polls.