Metapolitics | Praxis

Gallup: The Supreme Court’s Favorability Is at a Record Low

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 42% job approval rating is down slightly from September and matches the low point in Gallup’s 16-year trend, recorded in June 2005. The Supreme Court’s approval ratings have not been above 50% since September 2010. The latest results are from a July 13-17 Gallup poll. Although the current approval rating ties the historical low, it is not a major departure from updates over the last five years, when approval has ranged between 43% and 49% — including 45% when Gallup last…

After Trump: GOP Elites Haven’t Realized They Can’t Return to the Status Quo

Editor’s note: This is the first of several “After Trump” pieces we will be running about how the candidacy of Donald Trump has irrevocably changed the Republican Party and American conservatism. Three pieces this week intertwine to present a picture of the broader challenges facing the political right at the moment: Matthew Sheffield’s important study of the conservative media, Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal column about the Trump campaign, and this New York Times story on the future of reform conservatism. All three touch on the crisis of paralysis facing…

Trump Voters Like Crime and Remodeling, Clinton Fans Prefer Strong Women

Earlier this week, I wrote about how conservative political junkies have become trapped in a political echo chamber that marginalizes them. A left-wing echo chamber exists as well (another day and another article). Regular Americans are also split in terms of their political preferences, of course, and it reflects sometimes in weird ways. According to an analysis from the DVR company TiVo, supporters of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have different preferences for entertainment shows as well. Might it be a televised version of the…

Globalism vs. Nationalism May Be the Future of American Politics

First-past-the-post voting like America’s tends inevitably to yield two-party systems, which usually require awkward coalitions. What determines which interest groups coalesce? In 1929 Harold Hotelling, an economist, wrote that a rational voter would choose a candidate whose views showed most “proximity” to his own. In turn, a political party serious about winning should take the positions most likely to convince the voter in the electorate’s ideological middle. Since both parties needed to attract most votes from a broad electorate, this “median-voter theorem” would push them…

It’s Donald Trump’s Tea Party Now

“I had been predicting a tea party resurgence in 2016 because I thought the climate was right for it, but the only problem was that a guy named Donald Trump came along and basically co-opted the movement,” said Judson Phillips, head of Tea Party Nation. Ken Crow, a tea party activist in Iowa, said the “tea party is in turmoil” over how to feel about Mr. Trump. “The hard-core tea party wanted a strict constitutional guy like a Mike Lee or Ted Cruz — someone…

The Conservative Echo Chamber Is Making the Right Intellectually Deaf

One of the more interesting developments since the emergence of the web as a mass medium is the establishment of a conservative media presence. Prior to the internet, there were basically no large-audience right-leaning media operations aside from a few talk radio programs. Since the 1996 establishment of Fox News and the popularization of the web, it has now become possible for a conservatively inclined people to consume all kinds of news and opinion catering to their specific tastes and viewpoints. Many right-leaning people have…

Among Whites, There’s a Strong Correlation Between Racial Antagonism and Trump Support

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign effectively bucked what the political scientists Donald Kinder and Lynn Sanders adroitly termed the Republican Party’s electoral temptation of race — using implicit racial appeals to win over racially conservative voters without appearing overtly racist. Trump’s play instead was to make several explicitly hostile statements about minority groups. Trump has been willing to go where most Republican presidential candidates haven’t. That might have made anti-minority sentiments a more potent force in the 2016 GOP primaries than in primaries past. That’s plausible, because campaign appeals…

The Incredible Value of ‘Oppression’ in Holding Together the Democratic Coalition

To maintain loyalty, the Democratic party incites anxiety about discrimination and exclusion. A form of reverse race-baiting, perhaps best thought of as bigot-baiting, has become crucial for sustaining the Democratic coalition, which is why we hear so much about “hate” these days. At the recent gay pride parade in New York, a few weeks after the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, marchers held aloft an avenue-wide banner that read, “Republican Hate Kills!” It’s important to remember a first law of politics for…

Do Hillary Clinton’s Democrats Have an Actual Policy Agenda?

For the past two days, I put this question specifically to delegates and staffers, to the people who ought to know: “What, at core, is the Democratic message coming out of this convention?” […] Delegates I spoke to paused, backed up, rephrased. In each case, they settled on general virtues: justice, inclusion, progress, the idea that the party was not so much associated with a particular program but with goodness itself, with a progressive sensibility that will, on the whole, produce virtuous outcomes. […] This…

After Wooing Them, Clinton Is Writing Off Liberal Voters

Even after a charged, protracted Democratic primary season that revealed deep philosophical fractures in the party, Hillary’s willingness to cater to actors on her left remains minimal. Accordingly, the historic Sanders delegate walkout is emblematic of what should now be obvious: there is a level of hostility toward Hillary among activist-minded progressives that never existed toward Barack Obama in 2008 or 2012. For one thing, the composition of the party has changed dramatically over eight years. Ideological progressives, who in 2008 yearned principally for emancipation from the…

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