A country like Italy ought to have a moderate, responsible, free enterprise-oriented right. But it is indeed an “ought”: not, in our case, an “is” and a truly felt tradition in this country.
As in France, Austria, the Netherlands, and Germany, the traditional center-left party largely collapsed, with just over 20 percent of the vote
My guess is that if the U.S. had a similar electoral system, we would observe the same thing. As of now, a center-left party would do less well than a far-left party. The right would be split among libertarians (not a large bloc), Trump supporters, and traditional conservatives, with the latter possibly split into a faction that stresses social issues and a faction that stresses the economy and foreign policy.
It could be that Martin Gurri is correct, and that the new media environment helps to foster a revolt against elites. But another possibility is that the financial crisis of 2008 had an effect on the perception of elites in America not unlike the Vietnam War. That is, the “best and the brightest” looked really foolish, and they lost the trust of many people.
Taste-makers in the press have not been kind to Vietnam War architects Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, and Dean Rusk. But for policy makers involved in the financial crisis, the outcome has been different. Henry Paulsen, Timothy Geithner, and especially Ben Bernanke are often described by journalists in heroic terms, and they have vigorously patted themselves on the back in their memoirs. Barney Frank and Chris Dodd etched their names in history as the co-author of post-crisis banking legislation, blotting out their prior role as bosom buddies of Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and Countrywide Funding when those firms were running up dangerous risks.
The public may have a better intuitive sense of the policy elite’s role in all this. For the center not to wither, it has to earn the trust of the people.
I find it difficult to believe in a trust narrative. No one voted for Trump because they trusted him. Something else is going on.
I tend to agree with Tom. If you listen to what people on the left are actually saying these days, I don’t see lingering antipathy over the financial crisis as being a prominent issue. The animating concerns, at least as far as economics goes, are more along the lines of status anxiety resulting from increasing inequality, declining unionization (the cargo cult around unions just won’t die), and wage stagnation from what I can tell.
Please note the elite gave us free trade as well! Trump hated one.
And Democrat Left Center Lamb incredibly narrow victory a district that was 10 – 15 Republican last night. (It went 20% Trump) Also Doug Jones and Ralph Northam are left center Democrats as well. So I don’t see how the Left Center is failing to win elections and even though HRC screwed up, she still won the popular vote by over 2M votes.
1) The right center is dominating the elections in Europe right now against Left Center. Note Obama governed as a right center for most European nations and Trudeau is popular in Canada. Additionally Macron won his election by margins bigger than Reagan 1984. So this generalization is weak IMO.
2) Listen to Trump’s campaign rallies. They were against the elites on Immigration, Mexicans taking your jobs, and Free Trade ((globalist!)) So it was the Clintons and globalist that made your life worse. And this is one reason why Trump is struggling because he wants to force more manufacturing jobs in the Rust Belt when most of the nation is against it. And look at Trump struggling with steel tariffs and effectively weakening his own policies exempting Canada & Mexico.
3) Again, Trump promised to protect Social Security and Medicare so that sounds very right center to me. He promised a comprehensive health plan to cover everybody. So Trump was a right center candidate on 95% of the issues. (It was taunting liberals and Mexicans where he won the far voters in the primary.)
What I am seeing is a lot of protest “CHANGE” but not too much. So Brexit negotiations can’t find footing, Trump’s steel tariffs have no teeth and Democrats are winning every close special election.
Protecting Social Security and Medicare are more left center than right center. It’s the right that wants to privatize Social Security. The right doesn’t call for Medicare for all.
True – Protecting Social Security and Medicare are more left center than right center. And Trump campaigned on those issues on left center position. (Check out the rallies.)
Trump ran on protecting both Social Security and Medicare in the Primary and election. (Also Medicaid but I assume Trump did not understand what that was.) He did run not on privatizing Social Security either.
So on most issues, Trump was the definition of center politics and political pundits, including Arnold Kling, are not accounting for this reality. And I bet if Trump had taken more right positions (Like Romney/Ryan 2012 or Bush 2005/2006) on Social Security, he loses the 2016 election as he would have not won as many WWC voters. (It was the positions on immigration and politic taunting that Trump won the hard right and he has governed closer to these positions.)
Trump just chose Larry Kudlow as his top economic advisor. His previous choice was Gary Cohn. Both are passionate advocates of free trade. If Trump was seriously opposed to free trade he wouldn’t have chosen either.
As Arnold Kling previously said, immigration is not primarily an economic issue. You resistance to immigration as one of job market competition and anxiety; that really isn’t the issue. I can tell you precisely what the issue is, but I suspect you, Kling, and most of this crowd probably including you, already knows.
And Trump is trying to pass unpopular steel and aluminum tariffs at this point so the jury is out how much Trump is moving towards protectism despite his economic advisors. And we constantly complains about NAFTA. (Politically if Trump was quieter and more careful, he would be more effective at moving the goal post.) So let us give this one more time to see how he acts and he has already surpassed Obama and Bush Jr. (who passed tariffs with ending date) on trade barriers.
In terms of Immigration, it was not a Party defined issue until 2012ish and first term Obama deported a lot of people. Also, Bush Jr. was more Open borders and I remember in 2004 Republicans claiming they were going to win the Hipsanic-American vote long term. And I do live in SoCal where my kids go to a H-A majority school so I would like to know what the issue of Immigration truly is because most SW border states moved against Trump in 2016.:
1) Is it the competing of jobs in the states?
2) Is it the higher crime rates?
3) They don’t vote majority Republican?
4) Economic anxiety? (the Twitter joke version)
Because where I live ‘Open Borders’ is more popular and don’t understand the complete dislike against Immigrants.
HRC ran a fairly standard left of center campaign and handily beat both Sanders (far left for US) and Trump (C right) in vote totals. Center left presidential candidates in the US have taken more votes than the candidate on the right in the 2000, 2008, 2012 and 2016 elections.
Centrist candidates do well in two-candidate elections, where median voter theorem holds. With more than two candidates, passionate minority pluralities can win, which is what we see in Europe and in US primaries such as the 17-candidate Republican presidential primary in 2016. Centrist Democrat Connor Lamb seems to be doing quite well in a conservative Pennsylvania district, but Lamb did not need to survive a Democratic primary. (Even a two-candidate primary can filter out centrist candidates, of course, because the median primary voter is not the median general election voter.)
Centrist candidates would do better in the US if the primary system were changed to select the broadly least objectionable candidate rather than the possibly minority plurality candidate with the most enthusiastic support, e.g., some sort of disapproval and/or multi-round voting.
We forget Trump was a centrist candidate in 2016 outside of Immigration and race relations. (Which gave him the Primary!) He promised to protect Social Security and Medicare and had a great healthcare program. (Notice Lamb won with voters caring most about healthcare according to exit polls.) He promised both less foreign interventions but more victories. On trade he sounded like a Midwest Democrat. On certain issues he was more left than HRC. So Trump won the right set of voters for the electoral college. (That almost put John Kerry in the WH in 2004.)
The elite GOP establishment fails to talk enough about Christian voters.
They like Christian culture, they’re pro-life, they want more folk to be middle class — AND they also like middle class benefits from the gov’t. SS, Medicare, healthcare; unemployment & retraining; lower cost mortgages; more take home pay. Many Christians are strong on the social safety net, and since they’ve been kicked out of the Dem party, they’re taking over the Rep Party, where there aren’t enough top 30%ers to win enough elections.
They’re often also pretty pragmatic & more results oriented than just hot air — so if Trump is delivering, they’ll be likely to vote for more of him.
I think left-center-right is probably not the right framework to analyze the political moment, especially because the “right” in Europe is often indistinguishable from a “center left” mainstream Democrat in the US. Even populists-vs-elites is off, because what we’re seeing is not really about a breakdown in political legitimacy derived from a lack of competence or performance, but from a sense of opposition. Also, and frankly, in 2018 “elites” has become basically synonymous with “globalist progressivism monoculture” except for a few shrinking enclaves, and so is not easily distinguishable from “the left”.
So, Elites vs. Populists only gets at it indirectly because of something that most elites support which large numbers of voters do not: more open immigration policies, and the issue of immigration is kind of a running theme in the analysis of many of these election results. Immigration policy is special because it shapes the future electorate in a predictably left-leaning direction, and so the stakes are incredibly high to include the very future viability and political survival of any right-wing parties at all. Once again the example in the back of everyone’s minds is once politically competitive California which became a One Party State by virtue of the demographic change brought about by large immigration flows.
What tends to happen is that there is a feedback between ideological positions and tactics useful for securing political power, and what starts out as a cynical political expedient (akin to an “inside joke”) quickly morphs into a moral imperative (especially for those, perhaps a generation down the line, who weren’t “in on the joke,” and so take any related advocacy completely seriously.) And my hunch is that the left (center or otherwise) in almost all western democratic countries have dug themselves so far into an effectively open borders position that they find it impossible to compromise even when they realize it leads to counterproductive overreach which a lot of voters don’t like, which means it’s coming at a high electoral cost. And what we’re observing is the fallout of that cost being paid, which I’m guessing will end up being a mostly minor and temporary phenomena without much long-term impact, no matter how salient and full of significance it seems at the moment.
This is more insightful than the OP. I value Kling’s writing and perspective, but by any chance do you have or have you considered writing your own posts?
This is Handle’s blog. Doesn’t post much lately but the archives are a head trip.
http://handleshaus.com/
I agree that the “populists” oppose the “elites” because the former sense that the latter are indifferent or actively hostile to them and, moreover, despise them. And, yes, this contempt/resentment circle is most salient on the immigration issue. But American populist voters – those responsible for Trump’s nomination and those who switched to him from the Democrats in the general – appear to be incapable of coalescing around leaders who will pursue a coherent policy agenda, on immigration or anything else, that will serve their interests. Maybe things are so far-gone that no such agenda exists (as you seem to hint), and maybe no such leaders are available. But Trump seems increasingly likely to sell out on immigration (as I always expected he would); he’s reported to be about to fire his only cabinet member with any commitment to immigration restriction. Again, this is not a surprise; Trump made no secret of his unreliability on this issue (even compared to Cruz, for all the latter’s flaws) during the primaries. The reaction of Trump’s constituency is to rally around Trump personally, whatever he does or says. They care more about his tweets than whether he is advancing the ball on any policy changes. IMHO, Trump’s base (which is, of course, a subset of those who voted for him) is not just unsophisticated (which would be nothing new) but politically nihilistic and irrational, voting based on a feeling of identification with a candidate, not any kind of rational calculation (however poorly informed and unsophisticated) about the connection between electing a particular politician and their own interests. Meanwhile, to the extent Republicans get elected, they are conventional Republicans (albeit now pledging loyalty to Trump, whatever that means). Perhaps one reason why, before Trump, the GOP failed to respond to the dissatisfaction of much of their rank and file with their platform of antiquated, warmed-over Reaganism (sometimes leavened with “compassion” for the benefit of suburban soccer moms) was that the political pros realized that an attempt at populist-style change by ordinary political types would be unlikely to go anywhere. The audience for such an effort is too disengaged, distracted, and demoralized to stick with it. Trump, on the other hand, was able to take over the party, not because of the “agenda” that guys like Bannon were for a while able to graft onto him, but because he is a celebrity millions of people feel a connection with, who, on their behalf, gives the finger to the Establishment. But it’s really all just a matter of entertainment and emotional catharsis. Nothing is going to change, and not even Trump’s voters expect anything to change.