Trump Is a Consistent Right-Wing, Nativist Populist

America (the U.S. part) is FUBAR!
There is the slimist chance of redemption via Sanders; and even that is questionable.
As evidenced since the 2008 elections; Usian’s are willing to grasp at straws; no matter how thin…
A population like that is doomed to panic and bad decisions.

You can grasp at whatever straws offered, for all the good it will accomplish.
This election cycle is showing the US for what it actually is!
Racist, exclusive, elitist, white centric, abusive, militaristic, and hopelessly uneducated/under-educated.
There is no possibility, that a population such as that, can maintain a vibrant democracy; or any form of democracy/freedom at all…

I wonder where supposedly well read people get the impression that Trump has said he would ‘boot Muslims out’ unless they were illegal immigrants/criminals. His statement about temporarily restricting Muslims entering the country was aimed at the poor quality of background checks done by US Customs and would end when those failures and faults were addressed.

Trump is certainly a Nationalist but his business empire relies on large numbers of legal immigrants to operate so branding him as a Nativist seems misplaced even though some true Nativists also incorrectly interpret his words to support their agenda.

@AS

Trump was viewed by the PTB and most everyone else, but Republican primary voters, as an entertaining blowhard who might bring some drama/comedy to an otherwise boring dance of the dimwits with Bush as the chosen son to lead the Party. He didn’t have to go through the normal vetting process because he wasn’t begging funds from anyone and the party elite were clueless about the grassroots irruption waiting to happen.

I doubt that Donald thought he had a chance initially but when the Little People started to listen he quickly capitalized on this discontent and started mounting his extremely clever and bold assault on everyone trying to block his road to the White House.

Very good article: http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism

Snippets:
“What’s made Trump’s rise even more puzzling is that his support seems to cross demographic lines — education, income, age, even religiosity — that usually demarcate candidates.

In South Carolina, a CBS News exit poll found that 75 percent of Republican voters supported banning Muslims from the United States. A PPP poll found that a third of Trump voters support banning gays and lesbians from the country. Twenty percent said Lincoln shouldn’t have freed the slaves.

He polled a large sample of likely voters, looking for correlations between support for Trump and views that align with authoritarianism. What he found was astonishing: Not only did authoritarianism correlate, but it seemed to predict support for Trump more reliably than virtually any other indicator. He later repeated the same poll in South Carolina, shortly before the primary there, and found the same results, which he published in Vox:

This would help explain why authoritarians seem so prone to reject not just one specific kind of outsider or social change, such as Muslims or same-sex couples or Hispanic migrants, but rather to reject all of them. What these seemingly disparate groups have in common is the perceived threat they pose to the status quo order, which authoritarians experience as a threat to themselves.

And America is at a point when the status quo social order is changing rapidly; when several social changes are converging. And they are converging especially on working-class white people.

Working-class communities have come under tremendous economic strain since the recession. And white people are also facing the loss of the privileged position that they previously were able to take for granted.

What is most likely, Hetherington suggested, is that authoritarians are much more susceptible to messages that tell them to fear a specific “other” — whether or not they have a preexisting animus against that group. Those fears would therefore change over time as events made different groups seem more or less threatening.

It all depends, he said, on whether a particular group of people has been made into an outgroup or not — whether they had been identified as a dangerous other.

n other words, what might look on the surface like bigotry was really much closer to Stenner’s theory of “activation”: that authoritarians are unusually susceptible to messages about the ways outsiders and social changes threaten America, and so lash out at groups that are identified as objects of concern at that given moment.

What stands out from the results, Feldman wrote after reviewing our data, is that authoritarians “are most willing to want to use force, to crack down on immigration, and limit civil liberties.”

What these policies share in common is an outsize fear of threats, physical and social, and, more than that, a desire to meet those threats with severe government action — with policies that are authoritarian not just in style but in actuality. The scale of the desired response is, in some ways, what most distinguishes authoritarians from the rest of the GOP.

The real divide is over how far to go in responding. And the party establishment is simply unwilling to call for such explicitly authoritarian policies.

That’s why it’s a benefit rather than a liability for Trump when he says Mexicans are rapists or speaks gleefully of massacring Muslims with pig-blood-tainted bullets: He is sending a signal to his authoritarian supporters that he won’t let “political correctness” hold him back from attacking the outgroups they fear.

This, Feldman explained to me, is “classic authoritarian leadership style: simple, powerful, and punitive.”

If Trump loses the election, that will not remove the threats and social changes that trigger the “action side” of authoritarianism. The authoritarians will still be there. They will still look for candidates who will give them the strong, punitive leadership they desire.”

“What’s made Trump’s rise even more puzzling is that his support seems to cross demographic lines — education, income, age, even religiosity — that usually demarcate candidates.”

“Working-class communities have come under tremendous economic strain since the recession. And white people are also facing the loss of the privileged position that they previously were able to take for granted.”

This sort of thing is why I’ve never been fond of Vox.

Peter*,

Don’t be fooled as Trump is part of the elite. He’s just the “drunk uncle” that embarrasses everybody else.

A1: People with the Authoritarian mind set (or tendancy towards it) come in all shapes sizes, genders and colours, sadly.

It is not about being law abiding, in fact some would argue that they may even be less than other people, or at least more tolerant of law breaking behaviour by the elites and the others they approve of.*

The key characteristics are extreme social conservatism, they do not like any changes in the ‘established pecking order’. Hypocrisy . Tolerance, even a liking, for violence against those they don’t like or who challenge the established order. A liking of hierarchies. A liking of the ‘strong man’ authoritarian leadership style. Fear, lots of fear, fear of social changes, fear of ‘the other’, fear of the ‘outsider’. An amazing ability to forgive bad or even criminal behaviour by the ‘leaders’ they like or those they think have similar values to themselves. And also hypocrisy.

The problem is that this makes them very easily manipulatable and exploitable by demagogue types who play to their fears and prejudices and who are ruthless enough to throw sections of the population to the wall to gain power.

“The American Left has been in ascendancy”…that is a laughable myth.
Right wing neo-liberal economics has been dominant in the US since at least 1980, with its ever greater enrichment of the elites and ever greater impoverishment of normal people. If the left had been dominant the average standard of living would be a lot higher for everyone.
Maybe even been a few less wars and the current ‘national security state’ might not have happened either.

Yes there has been some social advances by certain groups that in the past were totally marginalised and prejudiced against (eg women or LGBTI), but their advances have not been ‘given’ to them by anyone, right or left, they have come from very hard and long fighting by the people themselves and they are still at comparative disadvantages to comparable (by class, etc) white heterosexual males in just about every measure.

The other problem is those authoritarian types are all stupid, yes white working class men (WWCM) have been economicaly hammered (as have others too, many far worse), but who have they blamed for so long? Not their elite neo-liberal masters and their horrific economic policies. Its not the fault of the non-whites, LGBTI, women, Muslims and all the rest, but those authoritarian types within that group of men tend to blame them for everything.

Only now are significant numbers of WWCM starting to wake up to what has really happened, but the authoritarian minority within them are being exploited and distracted by non issues, yet again.

* The classic example of this tolerance is being highlighted in Australia’s Royal Commission into Child Abuse. For every paedophile priest, pastor, Brother (etc, etc, etc) there were a lot more that ignored it, or even helped cover it up, or even worse enabled it, for decades.

All those ‘good’, ‘law abiding’, ‘traditional family’ religious conservatives doing or tolerating horrific sexual and physical abuse of kids in a huge scale. ‘Good god fearing and law abiding’ parents punishing their kids if they reported that the local priest was abusing them.

That to me is the very epitame of the ‘authoritarian’ mind set.

The US media is now self parodying Via the Moons of Alabama

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/03/opinion/five-big-questions-after-a-vulgar-republican-debate.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

Does the size of Donald Trump’s penis matter?
“So, yes, the size of Trump’s penis matters — or, rather, what matters is that it was an actual subject of discussion; that it reflected and set the tone of the encounter; and that this tone favors Trump, because it’s where he lives, it’s his kingdom, and if rivals join him there, they merely become his subjects.”

@A1:

Lisa – another term for authoritarian is law abiding citizen. You know the ones that build the country and creates all the wealth. Without law abiding citizens that get up in the morning and go to work, well, you are in some second or third world shit hole.

The people of Flint actually do live in a 2nd or 3rd world shithole thanks mostly to white greedy ideological white men convinced of their superiority.

One of the hallmarks of authoritarianism is the panoply of assumptions of personal superiority due to factors outside one’s control. Our country was built on the theft of labor and resources. White males stole the country and its valuable natural wealth. They stole the labor of children, women, and people of color. They killed anyone who stood in their way. They squared it with their moral teachings by telling their victims that they deserved to be victimized because they were inferior and it for their own good. And now their descendants want to tell us that “they built it.” You built a world that led inevitably to Trump. Way to go. But it didn’t prove your superiority.

In the USA the authoritarians tend to be white.

I wonder why? Maybe it’s because white males set up the authoritarian system that rewards white males and punishes everyone else who doesn’t serve and abet them. I often write about a white female writer for Bloomberg whose work has such slavish devotion to her economic masters (in the hope of grabbing some wealth for herself) that she tries to undercut herself buy saying women are mentally inferior to men. That kind of mental slavery is rewarded.

Maybe the US should care more about whites? The American Left has been in ascendancy for what? 50 years?

As Lisa notes, that’s news to the world.

And all the problems are caused by white males? Unless they are one particular religion right? Fuck you.

When leaders act in a previously unapproved manner their followers take it as permission to do the same due to the nature of authoritarian structures. Thank God we’re on the internet and A1 can’t whip it out to show us its size and shiny whiteness.

Peter* “The irony of our present presidential race is that the most Authoritarian, Patriarchal and dangerous candidate may be the woman candidate HRC.”

Yep and the one most likely to start ww3 as well. To be fair (something I find very hard to be with HRC) the very worst candiate of all is Ted Cruz, now that is a monster.

On the pther thread I think “Trash the Party: One Wing of the Duoploy Almost Down, One to Go” nails the HRC asperations nicely. Move even further to the right. They have their ‘captured’ votes, gomore to the right to grab some of the moderate GOP ones.

In their dreams, not to say they won’t try it, not to say they don’t dream abut it. but if Trump has even a quarter of a brain he outflank them on the left then easily wth anti-free trade (etc) polocies that appeal right across the spectrum.