Looking through the windows opened by Trump's Thursday conspiracy speech

People are understandably weighing in on Trump's the-Clintons-are-leading-the-worldwide-Jewish-conspiracy-against-me speech.

Digby Parton holds up Trump's speech against Michele Obama's yesterday, using them as paradigmatic speeches for the political-cultural divide so vividly on display in this Presidential election: Two speeches that defined a campaign: Donald Trump’s conspiratorial ranting and Michelle Obama’s inspiring call for decency Salon 10/14/2016.

Here is Michelle's speech Digby references, First Lady Michelle Obama complete speech in Manchester, NH C-Span 10/13/2016:

Molly Ball, who usually delivers informative but conventional evaluations of such things gave it a shot: Trump Goes to War Atlantic Politics 10/14/2016. The war metaphor isn't just in the title:

So the meteor barrels toward the earth. It's common to refer to a campaign in freefall as an "implosion," but really, this is an explosion, throwing shrapnel in all directions, immolating innocent bystanders. Trump has cast off the shackles of the bosses who tried to rein him in. He is determined to consume the ungrateful party that, having nominated him, now is having second thoughts. As an advertisement paid for by the campaign recently put it: "IT'S US AGAINST THE WORLD."

But the significance of the paranoid conspiracy passages seems to have sailed right by her.

Charlie Pierce gives his own distinctive view of the Trump speech in Michelle Obama vs. Donald Trump Esquire Politics Blog 10/14/2016: "In our major political parties, there are two people running for president now, but there is only one presidential campaign. There is one presidential campaign and one rampage."

And in more detail in yesterday's Have Faith: Society Will Survive What Trump Hath Wrought:

What comes next is the only real question. It is now assumed that disillusioned Trumpaloompas will go on some sort of rampage on Election Day and thereafter. But the real peril to the country lies in the possibility that, in the scramble to distance themselves from the stench of its 2016 nominee, the Republican Party will decide that the easiest way to reorganize itself would be to plot the destruction of yet another Clinton presidency. I certainly don't believe that the party will gather itself and abandon the essential political forces and ideas that worked for four decades to make the Trump campaign inevitable. I think that would shatter the party's fragile little mind.

The hunt for the Hildebeast is the fast, easy way to get The Base back howling in harmony and to raise money for the 2018 midterms, which will be here before we know it, God help us all.

Reuters reports basically on just the parts of Trump's speech that had to do with sex, or rather sexual abuse: Steve Holland, 'Absolutely false,' Trump says defiantly after women's groping allegations 10/13/2016.

Chauncey Devega says of Trump's speech (Frankenstein’s monster Salon 10/14/2016):

Trump’s speech is the paranoid style that has been common to movement conservatism since the 1950s, amplified by the rumor mongering and conspiracy theories that are presented as truth throughout the right-wing news media entertainment echo chamber. Trump’s speech at West Palm Beach, Florida, is also virulently anti-Semitic. His allusions to conspiracies and international banks are evocative of “Mein Kampf.” Given how he is championed by white supremacists and white nationalists, this should not be a surprise. In all, it would have been much more efficient if Trump simply yelled, “It’s the Jews; damn it!”

And he uses that speech as a starting point to point out that the Republican Party has been sticking with Trump through a variety of obscene demagogic moments. This conclusion seems immanently reasonable:

It appears that Donald Trump’s bigotry and racism against people of color and Muslims could be explained away by Republican leaders as a “gaffe” or the words of someone who is not a “professional politician” or he is an “outsider.” By comparison, when Trump was caught on video bragging about sexually harassing white women, an informal rule regarding propriety and behavior among conservatives had been breached. The Republican Party and its leaders care about the votes of white women; it does not care about how black and brown people are treated.

This is also an important observation recognizing the various but connected manifestations of political authoritarianism:

There are many lessons to be learned from Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and hopefully, his defeat on Election Day in November. The most important of these is that racism, sexism, nativism, and bigotry are not usually separate and discrete things. A person like Donald Trump — and the basket of human deplorables who have rallied around him — usually possess most of those character defects and not just one or a few.

Neoliberalism and rightwing authoritarianism

Jonathan Chait gives a reliably conventional take on third-party candidate Jill Stein of the Green Party, Jill Stein Explains Her Plan to Stop Trump by Electing Him President New York 07/28/2016.

Someone on Facebook called attention in particular to this quote from Stein, "The answer to neofascism is stopping neoliberalism."

I try to be sparing in the use of the label "fascism" or variations like "neofascism." Chait sneers at Stein's comment as "jargon-laced evasion." Meaning evasion of Chait's assumption that a vote for Stein is effectively a vote for Donald Trump.

This seems like a modified version of a (relatively) famous 1939 quote from Max Horkheimer, "Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism." Horkheimer was the head of the Frankfurt School (Institute for Social Research), whose members had to emigrate once the Nazis took over. They were alert enough prior to 1933 to transfer most of the Instutute's assets to Switzerland because they were realistic about the chances for a Nazi takeover. Not incidentally, Horkeimer headed the studies on anti-Semitism sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, the most famous of which was the pathbreaking sociological study of The Authoritarian Personality, part of a larger project called Studies of Prejudice. The AJC website has the full text of all five published volumes of the Studies in Prejudice.

In other words, he was kind of an authority on the topic of fascism. The historical/poli-sci discussions of whether Hitler's regime should be called fascist or whether it was a distinct type of dictatorship came later; everybody took it for granted in the 30s and 40s that Nazism was a variation of fascism.

One of the important findings of The Authoritarian Personality study was that there was a significant amount of among white and black workers in America. And both that and the larger AFJ research project focused heavily on the role that authority structures in the family and childrearing practices play in producing authoritartian tendencies. Horkheimer and the Institute had previously done a major study based on survey results in Germany published as Studies on Authority and the Family. So that did some of the most important groundbreaking work on how family structures and psychological factors are important independent variables from economic ones in shaping people's political attitudes.

But Horkheimer's point about capitalism and fascism is still true, even when we attach "neo" to both. "Neoliberalism" is finally becoming a widely-used term in the US, at least among economists. And it has been the dominant economic-political ideology in the US and Britain since the 1980s. And it's an ideology that's very, very focused on letting corporations and especially banks run wild. And its political side has a very undemocratic tendency (to put it very mildly).

Citizens United is neoliberal political theory in action. Deregulating the banks including abolishing Glass-Steagall is neoliberal political theory in action. So is the push to privatize what is now public education. (Pioneered by the White Citizens Council back in the day.) So is the Flint, Michigan poisoned water situation. And private prisons. It's a toss-up for me which of those last two is the more obscene.

So are deregulation treaties like TPP dressed up as "trade" treaties that allow international corporations to override national standards on health and safety regulation, environmental laws and labor protections by going through a corporate-run court system. Germany dictating to Greece, Italy and Portugal is neoliberal governance in action.

There are two very descriptive sentences on neoliberal economics and politics. One is TINA, There Is No Alternative, a favorite slogan of Maggie Thatcher and Angela Merkel, meaning that governments have to do what The Market demands, not what the voters put them in office to do. Even more representative is what Angie's Finance Minister told Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis just after the Syriza government took power in early 2014, “Elections cannot be allowed to change an economic programme of [an EU] member state!”

I've paid hardly paid any attention to Jill Stein, and the American Green Party has never made much of an impression on me.

But, yeah, people who won't talk about the substance of neoliberal policies, even if they use other words for it, might as well not bother talking about fascism either. Because the social developments in the US and the EU that created the conditions for the current surge in rightwing movements have an awful lot to do with neoliberal economic policies and political practices. Not least of which is that center-left parties have largely embraced neoliberalism even to the point of, say, proposing to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits in the United States. To take a random example.

Peter Gordon on the "Adorno et al" study about the authoritarian personality

Peter Gordon brings the ideas of Theodor Adorno to bear on current American politics in The Authoritarian Personality Revisited: Reading Adorno in the Age of Trump Boundary 2 Online 06/15/2016.

Author of the forthcoming book Adorno and Existence, Gordon provides some refreshingly Adornian social criticism in this article. He even indulges a bit of Situationist thinking, "But what passes for politics today in the United States has its etiology not in determinate forms of psychological character but rather in modes of mindless spectacle that may awaken doubt as to whether the 'mind' remains a useful category of political analysis."

But his argument about how Adorno's social-political outlook refutes the basic premise of the famous "Adorno et al" study on The Authoritarian Personality (1950) is not convincing. This was the book presenting the findings of a pioneering sociological study in which Adorno was a leading figure. The project was sponsored by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and focused on defining the potential constituency for a Hitler-type political movement in the United States.

And his observations on the "Trump phenomenon" provide confirmation for the the individual-psychological findings of the study, the very thing he argues that Adorno's own broader theoretical outlook undermines. At the same time, his attempt to read very broad implications for the total American culture into the popularity of Trump comes off as kind of a backhanded normalization of Trump's politics.

It seems to me that Gordon is making too much of the differences between Adorno's sociological-political view of the effects of social structures on individuals and the individual-focused nature of the AJC study. It was focused, after all, on the kind of authoritarianism and anti-Semitism that had brought Europe and the US to a massive war view the Nazi government in Germany. That was very much a political and social phenomenon. But doing a study like The Authoritarian Personality that focused on individual psychology doesn't contradict understanding political and social phenomena as such. Unless we adopt a Robinson Crusoe view of the individual - and even Robinson Crusoe needed his human companion Friday to survive on his fictional island - individual psychology is inseparable from society, and societies are organized agglomerations of individuals.

Later in the article, Gordon invokes Adorno's sociological/political outlook as being helpful in understanding the "Trump phenomenon." But he uses that argument as a rejection of the findings of the Authoritarian Personality studies. He's making a kind of imminent criticism of Adorno's work on individual psychology.

It strikes me that Gordon makes two different distinctive points on methodology: (1) The "authoritarian personality" studies were empirically invalid in some important sense because Adorno, and by implication the other participants of the study, made broader assumptions about social constraints and influences on the individual that were not clearly specified in the text reporting the study; and, (2) that Adorno's broader social views were in major part prima facie invalid - even though his overriding argument is to use Adorno's social theories to reject the "authoritarian personality" study's work on individual psychology.

The real value of Adorno’s critical outlook, he writes, "is the fact that he refused to identify such social pathologies with specific personalities or social groups." But how could there be social pathologies at all without "specific personalities" or "social groups"? Adorno's criticism of the totalizing tendencies of capitalist society did not assume that all meaningful distinctions between groups and classes had been erased.

Gordon takes the previously unpublished Adorno quotes that he cites as a sort of "smoking gun" that shows Adorno himself rejected the basic notion of the individual on which the study was based. But I don't read them that way. Adorno had a dynamic/dialectical view of the relationship between society, capitalist society in particular, and the individual. So the fact that Adorno, for instance, saw the nature of individuality in modern society changing over time with the shrinkage of the spheres of life previously considered as private or as part of "civil society," doesn't mean that he was repudiating the basic assumptions of the authoritarian personality study or the earlier Frankfurt School studies on family and society, which Deborah Antunes recently described at length in her book Por um Conheciment o Sincero no Mundo Falso: Teoria (2013). Gordon even reads Adorno's comment, “Psychological dispositions do not actually cause fascism,” as a repudiation of the whole concept of individual psychology.

Ironically, or perhaps just inconsistently, Gordon makes a plausible case for how applicable the "authoritarian personality" model applies to the "Trump phenomenon":

It would be hard to deny, of course, that many items from the original list of features describing the authoritarian personality map all too easily onto Trumpism, especially its chauvinism and swagger, and its “toughminded” style. (Curiously, sexual repression would seem to be a point of discontinuity: Trump has traded the older American convention of sexual moralism for sexual boasting, a change that has not inhibited his growing appeal among American evangelicals.) [my emphasis]

What's striking to me about this is that he doesn't seem to realize that the support of the Christian Right for a notorious libertine like Donald Trump is also confirming evidence for the authoritarian-personality model. The authoritarian aspect is more important to their political preferences than their professed convictions on sexual morality. One "tell" is that polls show support for torture is highest among those identifying themselves as evangelical Christians (which in America means conservative Protestants). The contempt for feminism and women's rights among the Christian Right voters is also a important connection to Trump's brand of politics. Both those factors are explicable in terms of the findings of The Authoritarian Personality.

Adorno's use of phrases like "omnipotent social adjustment" if taken in isolation might seem to be repudiating the whole concept of individual psychology. But that is very much part of Adorno's style, to state one side of a dialectical relationship in a drastic way, maybe even melodramatically.

And that basic idea of the increasing authoritarian tendencies of society was certainly not unique to Marxism or any other left political view as such. Freud made essentially the same argument in Civilization and Its Discontents. He described it in psychoanalytic terms as the increasing external demands of society (civilization) increasing the demands that individual superegos make, which he saw as creating a greater inclination to aggression and violence. And though Freud regarded the problem at least as seriously as Adorno did, he definitely did not see it as abolishing the validity of individual psychology entirely.

When he applies his approach to the Trump campaign, Gordon writes, "Trumpism, though it masquerades as society’s rebellion against its own unfreedom, represents not an actual rebellion but the standardization of rebellion and the saturation of consciousness by media forms."

And he argues, "If Adorno was right, then Trumpism cannot be interpreted as an instance of a personality or a psychology; it would have to be recognized as the thoughtlessness of the entire culture." But that is only true if one accepts Gordon's more-than-dubious argument that Adorno's social/cultural/political theories refute the findings that Adorno himself drew from the AJC studies on the authoritarian personality.

And on Trump's appeal, Gordon is casting his net far too wide. Trump's campaign style and particular brands of hate-mongering are distinguished from the standard Republican appeal of the last 20 years or mostly by being more crass and not so rhetorically linked to doctrinaire conservative economic policy ideas. The Republicans have pretty consistently used rightwing populist ideas and styles as a major part of their messaging since 1968. Richard Nixon's Vice President Spiro Agnew was pretty much as obnoxious as Donald Trump. But he used better syntax. And "reality TV" as we know it today hadn't yet come onto the scene. Gordon acknowledges this history in passing at one point, "Even [Trump's] unabashed misogyny, racism, and demagogic remarks about Muslims merely recapitulate a repertoire of stereotyped attitudes that have long characterized American public discourse."

And if "Trumpism" is equivalent to "the thoughtlessness of the entire culture," how would we explain the fact that, for all his popularity among the Republican base, he is still notably behind Hillary Clinton in most Presidential polls despite Hillary's own remarkably high negative ratings? And how is then that most of the know-nothing, flat-earther position on Islam, economics, climate science and most other kinds of science are to be found distinctly more concentrated in the Republican Party than the Democrats?

Put another way, if half or more of the voting public is ready to see Trump as an undesirable and even dangerous character to put in the Oval Office, then the only way for "Trumpism" to be equivalent to "the thoughtlessness of the entire culture," is that supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders would also have to be expressing such thoughtlessness. In fact, if "Trumpism" represents the entire culture, the Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters would also have to represent Trumpism. Even allowing for some melodrama of Gordon's own in stating the point, this line of argument just doesn't hold together very well.

And I'm 100% sure - okay, maybe only 99.9999% sure! - that Theodor Adorno would perceive some very clear distinctions among "Trumpism," Bernie Sanders brand of militant social democracy, and Hillary Clinton's tepid and vague centrist neoliberalism.

Gordon even indulges in his own version of the favorite pundit trope that Both Sides Do It:

The eclipse of serious journalism by punchy soundbites and outraged tweets, and the polarized, standardized reflection of opinion into forms of humor and theatricalized outrage within narrow niche markets makes the category of individual thought increasingly unreal. This is true on the left as well as the right, and it is especially noteworthy once we countenance what passes for political discourses today. Instead of a public sphere we have what Habermas long ago called the refeudalization of society and the mere performance of publicity before an abject public that has grown accustomed to inaction. [my emphasis]

Except in one political party this year, the Democrats, we've seen a distinct fight between Clinton's hawkish neoliberalism and Sanders' antiwar New Deal approach. On the Republican side, we pretty much saw a contest among several different versions of howling at the moon. That's a meaningful distinction from a view anywhere below the proverbial 30,000 foot level.

He goes further, "Name just about any political position and what sociologists call 'pillarization' — or what the Frankfurt School called 'ticket' thinking — will predict almost without fail a full suite of opinions. This is as true for enthusiasts in the Democratic Party as it is for the zealots who support Trump." (my italics) Having just been through the primary season in which Clinton was attacked by the Sanders camp for being committed to the current system of campaign financing which has become virtually indistinguishable from legalized bribery, and having the Clinton people attack Sanders and his supporter as barbarian rabble and woman-haters to boot, I would say it would take a pretty broad definition of "a full suite of opinions" to have that be a meaningful description of the 2016 Democratic primary process.

The conformity on major issues by most measures of public opinion is much more homogenous among the Republican base, consistent with what one would expect from the prevalence of the "authoritarian personality" in a political party.

In a way, Gordon is doing a conceptual slight-of-hand trick here. He takes an Adornian-sounding phrase like, "This phenomenon of standardization through the mass media signifies not the return of fascism but the dissolution of critical consciousness itself." And then uses it to make a superficial Both Sides Do It argument about Trump and the Democrats.

One of the challenges of reading Adorno is that he makes statements like that seem like hugely sweeping generalizations. That additionally sound like versions of, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here." But for Adorno, those statements represent one side of what he understands as a dialectical process. And he always gets around to referencing the other side of that contradiction. Sometimes including a quick move from broad philosophical observations to very empirically specific observations.

Emerging approaches to explaining the Trump Phenomenon

The "Trump phenomenon" has put out mainstream press corps and our leading pundits in a real dilemma.

They are deeply committed to a political analysis that features Democrats and Republicans in a ever-shifting but never-ending mirror image of each. Both Sides Do It. This side says, the other side says. America is a center-right nation, goes one of our Pod Pundits' favorite truisms.

Josh Marshall did a famous article back in 2003 as Shrub Bush's Iraq War was still only a few months old called The Post-Modern President Washington Monthly Sept 2003. He wrote then of the Cheney-Bush Administration and their defenders, "They are like deconstructionists and post-modernists who say that everything is political or that everything is ideology." Those are French philosophical trends that became very influential in the Western world, particularly in literary theory. Their popularity increased after the fall of the Soviet Union because to a certain extent they could be enunciated as left theories of society with an anti-Marxist twist. But they are identified with an anti-empiricist assumption that means we cannot distinguish objective reality as such, but we construct various narratives about reality that compete with each other, none of which have superior epistemological claims to the others. (If you want to dig into the philosophical theories themselves, see Gary Aylesworth, Postmodernism (2015) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which includes a section on deconstructionism; Nancy Holland, Deconstruction n/d, accessed 12/23/2015, and Ashley Woodward, Jean-François Lyotard (1924—1998) accessed 12/23/2015, both in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

In the more popular terms that Josh uses in the piece, it's a way of creating your own reality by just pretending that the external world conforms to your claims, whether or not it does. Only the narratives count, and the narratives are all ideological. So you get to choose which one to adopt without worrying whether it's "true," in the pedestrian sense. Or the scientific one, for that matter.

The White House seemed guilty of what might be called persistent, chronic up-is-downism, the tendency to ridicule the possibility that a given policy might actually have its predictable adverse consequences, to deny those consequences once they have already occurred, or--failing that--to insist against all evidence that those consequences were part of the plan all along. By late July, even a paragon of establishment conservatism like Barron's columnist Alan Abelson was lamenting the president's "regrettable aversion to the truth and reality when the truth and reality aren't lovely or convenient."

The president and his aides don't speak untruths because they are necessarily people of bad character. They do so because their politics and policies demand it. As astute observers such as National Journal's Jonathan Rauch have recently noted, George W. Bush campaigned as a moderate, but has governed with the most radical agenda of any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Indeed, the aim of most of Bush's policies has been to overturn what FDR created three generations ago. On the domestic front, that has meant major tax cuts forcing sharp reductions in resources for future government activism, combined with privatization of as many government functions as possible. Abroad, Bush has pursued an expansive and militarized unilateralism aimed at cutting the U.S. free from entangling alliances and international treaty obligations so as to maximize freedom of maneuver for American power in a Hobbesian world. [my emphasis]

Under the pressure of decades of conservative criticism not balanced by comparable "working the refs" on the liberal/progressive side, it's also become the habit of even of leading "quality" news media to shy away from investigating the truth behind the claims made by partisans.

And when the frame of reference is Both Sides Do It, if One Side is just making stuff up and the Other Side is hewing more closely to empirical reality, the "balanced" coverage of the disputes give an automatic advantage to the liars and fabulists. And if One Side becomes more and more extreme while the Other Side doesn't, then the "middle" between the Both Sides shifts more and more toward the crackpot side. And what gets defined as "radical" and "moderate" shifts accordingly. Political types and DFH bloggers refer to this concept as shifting the Overton Window, "the range (or window) of policies that the public will accept." (What is the Overton window? New Statesman 04/27/2015)

Which brings us to the Trump Phenomenon.

Two different and to a large extent directly opposing approaches to it are elaborated in the following two articles:

David Frum, The Great Republican Revolt The Atlantic Jan/Feb 2016 edition (accessed 12/22/2015)

Digby Parton, Donald Trump will make America white again: “White working-class anxiety” is a dog-whistle for racism Salon 12/22/2015

Both articles deserve a full reading to understand the perspectives. Frum's is more ideological than analytical, though he presents it as the latter. Still, it's important in understanding how the mainstream media and Republican partisans are likely to spin the meaning of the raw racism, xenophobia and militarism we see in the Trump campaign and among his "very passionate" followers. (See Justin Moyer, Trump says fans are ‘very passionate’ after hearing one of them allegedly assaulted Hispanic man Washington Post 08/21/2015)

What Frum's article shows is one version of a Republican narrative to, uh, whitewash the venom and violence associated with the Trump movement. A moment in the continuing effort to move the Overton Window further to the right, in other words. Frum's approach is to essentially ask us to overlook the manifest content (to borrow a Freudian term) of the Trump movement and look at legitimate economic grievances of Trump's supporters. "A majority of Republicans worry that corporations and the wealthy exert too much power," he writes. "Their party leaders work to ensure that these same groups can exert even more."

There's an obvious problem with this perspective. Do Trump's "very passionate" supporters think that Black Lives Matter is a corporate lobbying operation? Did those two guys accused of assaulting a Latino think he was a hedge fund manager? Did the Richmond CA guy arrested with pipebombs allegedly in his house think the Muslim mosque he threatened earlier this month with "I'm going to kill you all" mistake the mosque for a corporate board meeting? (Matthias Gafni, et al, Richmond: Donald Trump supporter arrested on suspicion of threatening Muslims, possessing pipe-bomb device Contra Costa Times 12/21/2015)

Let's just say it strains credibility.

Which is essentially what Digby is saying in her article:

To think racial animus is activated by economic distress is something that progressives desperately want to believe. Because if that’s true, they have solutions. Racism, not so much. Recall Governor Howard Dean’s memorable line back in 2003:

“White folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals on the back ought to be voting with us, and not [Republicans], because their kids don’t have health insurance either, and their kids need better schools too.”

That these white folks might sincerely be more upset about African Americans becoming equal or undocumented immigrants destroying “American culture” or Muslims worshipping a religion they find threatening and weird than their own economic well-being is an unsettling thought. But it’s very hard to ignore the fact that in good times and bad it still exists.

Digby's observation is consistent with that of the famous Authoritarian Personality study headed by the Frankfurt School's Max Horkheimer, who can scarcely be accused of being a conservative.

A few considerations are important to keep in mind in discussions of this issue.

Democratic candidates prior to 1980 had understandable if not exactly honorable reasons to soft-peddle their support for civil rights for African-Americans in particular. Southern states with Democratic Parties that were still partly segregationist were still considered to be competitive in national elections. And the Democratic caucuses in Congress were heavily dependent on Southern Democrats that were partially elected with, let's put it bluntly, white racist votes. But with the Republican Party having successfully identified itself as the anti-black party and the more general ideological realignment of the two major parties, making the same kind of pitch now just sounds silly. And it's impractical politics.

The fight against what Andrew Jackson and his followers called the Money Power has been going on for a long time. "The One Percent" is the most recent popular image for the super-rich who control most of the economy and exert enormously outsized influence in politics through both financing campaigns and lobbying. It would be astonishing if "the super-rich and the giant corporations" (former Sen. Fred Harris' favorite phrase for the One Percent) hadn't come up with alternative targets real and imaginary for angry members of the public to focus their frustration and even hatred against. Black people have long served as such a target, as have immigrants.

One of the most successful alternative targets offered up by neoconservatives in particular is the academic and media elite, which are considered by conservatives to be hotbeds of everything conservatives hate: liberalism, Marxism, anti-Americanism, atheism, Islamism, Communism, etc., etc. While the academic institutions play a major role in supporting the established order - which conservatives support - it takes quite an imagination to see them as ruling the country themselves, whether in cohoots with the Liberal Press bogeyman or not.

Media corporations are indeed very powerful in themselves. But especially since 1992 when the New York Times kicked off the "quality press" frenzy over the Whitewater pseudoscandal, the notion of a generally "liberal press" has become even more unreal than it was back in the days when Spiro Agnew was spewing rather Trump-like venom at the national press. It would be hard to find a living, breathing liberal who thinks the US has a "liberal press." Especially since the Iraq War horror, the perspective of most liberals/progressives can be seen at the Media Matters website.

The liberal/progressive criticism of mainstream media is dramatically, even radically different from that of conservatives. Conservatives want the media to be uniformly conservative propaganda along the FOX News model. Progressives want them to practice actual critical journalism. Even prior to Whitewater, Bernie Sanders gave a left view of the state of the major US media (Time for an American Glasnost Harvard Crimson 11/28/1989; h/t Richard Kreitner of The Nation):

For a free society to function effectively, people need full access to information. As part of the recent "merger mania," the ownership of the mass media in the United States has been concentrated to an alarming degree in the hands of fewer and fewer large corporation. Independent newspapers and magazines have been bought out by major chains, and the radio and television networks are controlled by such powerful companies as General Electric (which now owns NBC).

It is not difficult to argue that commercial television today is largely censored and tightly controlled. It is virtually impossible for serious writers to produce a program for television which would deal with ideas hostile to the interests of the owners of the networks or to corporate sponsors.

Neocons elaborated the theory of a New Class, in which not corporations and banks and wealthy capitalists ruled the country, but rather intellectuals (!!) including journalists. Damon Linker defined the concept this way in his obituary for neocon godfather Irving Kristol: The Unlikely Neocon CBS News/The New Republic 09/21/2009:

In one of their most influential theories, they argued that when modern societies reach what Daniel Bell called a "post-industrial" level of development they tend to become increasingly dependent on a "new class" of highly skilled intellectuals, including scientists, teachers, journalists, lawyers, psychologists, social workers, and other professionals.

Since all societies are dominated by some elite, the rise of this new class was unremarkable aside from one troubling fact: intellectual elites differ from others in their tendency to adopt an adversarial, even subversive, relation to their own societies. As literary critic Lionel Trilling noted in an important essay of the mid-'60s that significantly shaped the political imagination of Kristol and the other early neocons, the modern intellectual stakes out and occupies "a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn . . . the culture that produced him." Using these concepts to analyze America in the early '70s, Kristol and his colleagues concluded that the tumult and turmoil of the time could be traced to the influence of a decadent and subversive elite. [my emphasis]

The concept has become progressive vulgarized even further, Limbaughized, we might say. So when Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker goes after school teachers and university professors, believers in the New Class theory or its various corruptions see him as attacking the real ruling class of the country. The Koch Brothers and the Paul Singers of the world must get some delight out of this particular political slight-of-hand.

Christopher Lasch, who had signed on to the neocon cause by the time he wrote The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991) uses a highbrow version of the New Class theory in that book, painting a picture of snotty, out-of-touch soft intellectuals who are out of touch with what Sarah Palin calls the Real Americans:

Priding themselves on the global reach of their culture, the educated classes led what was in many ways a constricted, insular life. Modern conveniences sheltered them from everyday discomforts. Air-conditioning and central heating protected them from the elements but cut them off from the vivid knowledge of nature that comes only to those who expose themselves to her harsher moods. Exemption from manual labor deprived them of any appreciation of the practical skills it requires or the kind of knowledge that grows directly out of firsthand experience.

Real Amurcans, you see, ain't got no use for all that sissy "air-conditioning" and "central heating." No, Real Amurcans just go out in the woods and build themselves a far without using no matches. (That's the translation into FOXSpeak.)

Also, beware the "false consciousness" trope. There is a popular conservative narrative that runs like this: "Those elitist Democrats think you non-wealthy people who vote for Republicans. They are snobs who look down on you and think you are too dumb to make your own choices in elections." This is a tribal-identifier argument that is effective only if you don't think it through. Any campaign that tries to persuade undecided voters or supporters of the other side that their candidate is better and invites them to vote for that candidate is trying to change the minds of the targeted voters. You could say that the campaign is assuming that the campaign is snobbishly assuming that those voters have a "false consciousness" that makes them think for the moment that don't want to vote for your candidate. For that matter, any sales pitch could be said to be aimed at correcting a potential customer's "false consciousness" that they don't want to buy your product. (See also my post Krugman says "false consciousness" 09/08/2014.)

Alan Rappeport in Analysis of Donald Trump Tax Plan Sees a Boon for Wealthy and Trillions in Debt New York Times 12/23/2015 notes one of several ways that the economic interests of most middle- and lower-income people would not be served, in fact would be damaged, by a Trump Presidency. It's just important to realize that for a non-trivial number of white voters, identfying with the White Man's tribe against blacks, immigrants, Latinos and Muslims is simply more important than improving their own economic prospects. Politics isn't a purely rational activity.

Greg Sargent interviews demographer Ruy Teixeira on how the Trumped-up Republican Party can put together a winning Presidential vote in 2016: Republicans are caught in a brutal demographic trap. But they can still win in 2016. Washington Post/Plum Line 12/22/2015.

But Presidential races are contests, and actual voters decide them in the end. Unless it's 2000 and Jeb Bush is Governor of Florida, of course, in which case a Republican Supreme Court decides instead. But I always worry about Democrats falling back on a lazy assumption that demographics are going their way. Because it could encourage the kind of complacency which is a chronic affliction of the real existing Democratic Party.

And Josh Marshall argues plausibly that Trumpish rhetoric itself creates real barriers to a nationwide 2016 Republican win. (They Must Be So Pleased TPM 12/22/2015)

We'll leave the last word for now to Charlie Pierce (The Republicans Crying About Trump Should Admit They Helped Create Him Esquire Politics Blog 12/23/2015).

I opened this post with a 2003 quote from Josh Marshall to emphasized that the process within the Republican Party that has led to the raw, desublimated version of hate that we hear from Trump and his "very passionate" fans has been in motion for a long time. Here are just a few references on that topic:

• John Amato and David Neiwert, Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane (2010)
• William Arkin, "The Continuing Misuses of Fear" Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 62:42 (2006)
• Max Blumenthal, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party (2009)
• David Bromwich, Liberty, Security, and Fear Huffington Post 08/02/2013
• Joe Conason, It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in The Age of Bush (2007)
• Mark Danner, "The Politics of Fear" New York Review of Books 12/22/2012
• John Dean, Conservatives Without Conscience (2006)
• Josh Eidelson, Confederate sympathizers and top GOPers unite in auto fight Salon 02/11/2014
• Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (2006)
• Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America (2007)
• Ed Kilgore, The Cult Of The Second Amendment TPM 12/08/2015
• Paul Krugman, The Closed Minds Problem New York Times 02/27/2015
• Michael Lind, Made In Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics (2003)
• Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton (2000); also the related 2004 documentary, The Hunting of the President
• Robert McElvaine, Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America (2008)
• David Neiwert, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right (2009)
• David Neiwert, The Rise of Pseudo Fascism 02/25/2005
• Robert Parry, How the US Press Lost Its Way Consortium News 05/15/2012
• Melanie Tannenbaum, "Decoding Trump-Mania: The Psychological Allure of Hating Political Correctness," Part 1 08/14/2015; Part 2 08/15/2015; Part 3 09/08/2015
• Nicholas Valentino and David Sears, "Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South" American Journal of Political Science 49:3 (July 2005)
• Ray Williams, Anti-Intellectualism and the "Dumbing Down" of America Psychology Today 07/07/2014

Trump authoritarianism

I've recently gone back to the various reports collected in The Authoritarian Personality (1950), the famous study by "Adorno et al," as it's usually cited. The was a major study headed by Max Horkheimer, head of the Institute for Social Research, more widely known as "the Frankfurt School." It is part of the Studies in Prejudice series that was a product of a project on prejudice and anti-Semitism sponsored by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in the 1940s.

I was reminded that it is a rich source that I still hadn't fully explored by my friend Deborah Antunes in her recent book, Por um Conhecimento Sincero no Mundo Falso: 1 (2014) that discusses how this work fits into the development in the thought of Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno and in the development of the larger field of Critical Theory.

In the strange precincts of the far right, this work was a target of one of the many paranoid political conspiracy theories on the crackpot right, "Cultural Marxism." But that's another story.

Trying to milk quotable stand-alone zingers out of the The Authoritarian Personality isn't an advisable undertaking. It involves the explanation and interpretation of a major sociological study, involving some complex philosophical, historical and psychological assumptions. And it is a publication from 65 years ago, discussing field work that took place several years before that. But there are nevertheless themes that resonate with today's Radical Right politics.

And Radical Right politics is more prevalent in the Republican Party today than ever before. Writing about today's party and its currently leading Presidential candidate for 2016, Donald Trump, Paul Krugman says (From Trump on Down, the Republicans Can’t Be Serious New York Times 08/07/2015):

For while it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals. If you pay attention to what any one of them is actually saying, as opposed to how he says it, you discover incoherence and extremism every bit as bad as anything Mr. Trump has to offer. And that’s not an accident: Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party. ...

Or to put it another way, modern Republican politicians can’t be serious — not if they want to win primaries and have any future within the party. Crank economics, crank science, crank foreign policy are all necessary parts of a candidate’s resume. [my emphasis]

And David "Bobo" Brooks has offered his Deep Thoughts on Donald Trump's surge in popularity in the Republican Party, Donald Trump’s Allure: Ego as Ideology New York Times 08/04/2015. Bobo's analysis of today's political scene isn't quite so, uh, nuanced as Theodor Adorno's in 1950. Bobo:

The times are perfect for Donald Trump. He’s an outsider, which appeals to the alienated. He’s confrontational, which appeals to the frustrated. And, in a unique 21st-century wrinkle, he’s a narcissist who thinks he can solve every problem, which appeals to people who in challenging times don’t feel confident in their understanding of their surroundings and who crave leaders who seem to be. ...

When Trump is striking populist chords, he appeals to people who experience this invisibility. He appeals to members of the alienated middle class ... who believe that neither the rich nor the poor have to play by the same rules they do. He appeals to people who are resentful of immigrants who get what they, allegedly, don’t deserve.

Bobo's concluding sentence illustrates the profundity of his analysis, "He is deeply rooted in the currents of our time." As opposed to, I guess, people who died 100 years ago?

He also offers this puzzling description of Trump's message: "Society is led by losers, who scorn and disrespect the people who are actually the winners."

Adorno's famously dense prose is direct and clear compared to that!

Bobo in his column is using words and phrases which, strung together competently, sound Very Serious because they are so familiar. But these are the kinds of observations that politicians and pundits use to describe demagogues without saying their are appealing to hateful and violent impulses among their supporters.

Adorno in his chapter Politics and Economics in the Interview Material, isn't so delicate.

Here, I want to concentrate on Adorno's observations on what he calls "pseudoconservatism." Political terms like right, left, liberal, conservative, radical are famously plastic. Adorno in 1950 defined the difference between "genuine" and "pseudo" conservatives this way:

[A differentiation between scores in a group surveyed] was interpreted in terms of genuine and pseudoconservatives, the former supporting not only capitalism in its liberal, individualistic form but also those tenets of traditional Americanism which are definitely antirepressive and sincerely democratic, as indicated by an unqualified rejection of antiminority prejudices. ...

The idea [of pseudoconservatism] is that the potentially fascist character, in the specific sense given to this concept through our studies, is not only on the overt level but throughout the make-up of his personality a pseudoconservative rather than a genuine conservative. The psychological structure that corresponds to pseudoconservatism is conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness on the ego level, with violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere. [my emphasis]

Which more meaningfully describes the kind of voters to whom a rich, egotistical, belligerent bully like Donald Trump appeals? Bobo's "members of the alienated middle class ... who believe that neither the rich nor the poor have to play by the same rules they do"? Or Adorno's "authoritarian submissiveness on the ego level, with violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere"? I'm thinking the 1950 characterization works better than the 2015 one does.

Adorno goes on to say:

This break-through of the nonconservative element is enhanced by certain supra-individual changes in today's ideology in which traditional values, such as the inalienable rights of each human being, are subject to a rarely articulate but nevertheless very severe attack by ascendent forces of crude repression, of virtual condemnation of anything that is deemed weak. There is reason to believe that those developmental tendencies of our society which point into the direction of some more or less fascist, state capitalist organization bring to the fore formerly hidden tendencies of violence and discrimination in ideology. All fascist movements officially employ traditional ideas and values but actually give them an entirely different, antihumanistic meaning. (p. 676) [my emphasis]

The "supra-individual changes" he talks about there probably refers in particular to the concern Sigmund Freud expressed in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930, German: Das Unbehagen in der Kultur) that the increasing complexity of modern society brings with it an increase in internal feelings of guilt in individuals that also boosts aggressive impulses. Adorno's Frankfurt School colleagues Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm would elaborate on such concerns in the following decades.

He mentions two key things about the authoritarian inclination: contempt for the weak, and the use of "traditional values" to justify hostility, exclusion and violence rather than the building of community.

Authoritarian Ibérico Saint-Jean (1922-2012)

There is an infamous quote illustrating authoritarian attitudes toward the weak. It's from General Ibérico Saint-Jean, military governor of Buenos Aires Province 1976-1981:

Primero mataremos a todos los subversivos; luego mataremos a sus colaboradores, después a sus simpatizantes, enseguida a aquellos que permanecen indiferentes y, finalmente, mataremos a los tímidos

[First we kill all the subversives; later we kill their collaborators, then their sympathizers; after that, those who remain indifferent and, finally, we kill the timid.]

(See: Ibérico Saint-Jean Wikipedia, accessed 08/07/2015; ¡Basta de confrontación, argentinos! La batalla cultural n/d, accessed 08/07/2015)

Richard Hofstader also famously used the term "pseudoconservative" to describe the Radical Right of the 1950s: The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt The American Scholar Winter 1954-55. He said explicitly that he borrowed the term from The Authoritarian Personality. He framed it this way:

... its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by the Eisenhower Administration. Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways — a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive clinical evidence.

Here was Donald Trump's closing statement at the August 6 Republican Presidential debate, the last of the evening (Transcript of the 2015 GOP debate (9 pm) 08/07/2015):

Our country is in serious trouble. We don't win anymore.

We don't beat China in trade. We don't beat Japan, with their millions and millions of cars coming into this country, in trade. We can't beat Mexico, at the border or in trade.

We can't do anything right. Our military has to be strengthened. Our vets have to be taken care of. We have to end Obamacare, and we have to make our country great again, and I will do that.

Thank you.

This attitude, of course, simultaneously trashes conditions as they are and promises to "make our country great again."

Digby Parton notes of the August 6 debate (Fear & loathing at the GOP debates Salon 08/07/2015):

These Republicans are running on fear and anger and nothing more. Even their various ways of saying “let’s make America great again” are demoralizing. It’s understandable. They know they are unlikely to win the presidency as long as their angry, fearful, conservative white base insists on insulting everyone who doesn’t look like them but they have no choice but to roll with it.

One always has to keep in mind in talking about American politics prior to 1965, the left-right/liberal-conservative divide overlapped the two parties. On a variety of issues including segregation, there were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, as well as conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats.

Hofstadter used these examples of the pseudoconservative phenomenon:

The lady who, when General Eisenhower’s victory over Senator Taft had finally become official, stalked out of the Hilton Hotel declaiming, “This means eight more years of socialism” was probably a fairly good representative of the pseudo-conservative mentality. So also were the gentlemen who, at the Freedom Congress held at Omaha over a year ago by some “patriotic” organizations, objected to Earl Warren’s appointment to the Supreme Court with the assertion: “Middle-of-the-road thinking can and will destroy us”; the general who spoke to the same group, demanding “an Air Force capable of wiping out the Russian Air Force and industry in one sweep,” but also “a material reduction in military expenditures”; the people who a few years ago believed simultaneously that we had no business to be fighting communism in Korea, but that the war should immediately be extended to an Asia-wide crusade against communism ...

Adorno addressed the situation of people with no realistic prospect of becoming very wealthy themselves who nevertheless identify with wealthy people who advocate policies designed to benefit people like themselves primarily or exclusively:

This socioeconomic aspect of pseudoconservatism is often hard to distinguish from the psychological one. To the prospective fascist his social identification is as precarious as that with the father. At the social root of this phenomenon is probably the fact that to rise by the means of "normal" economic competition becomes increasingly difficult, so that people who want to "make it"-which leads back to the psychological situation-are forced to seek other ways in order to be admitted into the ruling group. They must look for a kind of "co-optation," somewhat after the fashion of those who want to be admitted to a smart club. Snobbery, so violently denounced by the fascist, probably for reasons of projection, has been democratized and is part and parcel of their own mental make-up: who wants to make a "career" must really rely on "pull and climbing" rather than on individual merit in business or the professions. Identification with higher groups is the presupposition for climbing, or at least appears so to the outsider, whereas the "genuine" conservative group is utterly allergic to it. However, the man who often, in accordance with the old Horatio Alger ideology, maintains his own "upward social mobility" draws from it at least some narcissistic gratifications and felicitously anticipates internally a status which he ultimately hopes to attain in reality. [my emphasis]

He also addresses the superficially odd combination of hyperconservatism and identification with traditional values, on the one hand, and revolutionary/subversive rhetoric on the other. The latter is a common feature of gun-proliferation advocates and neo-Confederates, both of which are very common in today's Republican Party base, despite the recent image problems of the Confederate battle flag.

Rand "Baby Doc" Paul used such a combination last night when talking about his opposition to same-sex marriage and his support of religious-liberty arguments to justify persecution of LGBT people outside of the personal-life and church contexts:

Look, I don't want my marriage or my guns registered in Washington. And if people have an opinion, it's a religious opinion that is heartly felt, obviously they should be allowed to practice that and no government should interfere with them. One of the things, one of the things that really got to me was the thing in Houston where you had the government, the mayor actually, trying to get the sermons of ministers. When the government tries to invade the church to enforce its own opinion on marriage, that's when it's time to resist. [my emphasis]

Baby Doc was carefully hinting that resistance with guns against the lesbian mayor of Houston might have been justified in the issue to which he refers (and describes inaccurately).

The urban-legend analysis site Snopes explains the incident to which Baby Doc referred in Houston Hustle 10/17/2014. (Short version: it wasn't what conspiracy-theory fan Baby Doc made it sound like.) See also: Katie Zavadski, Is Houston’s Lesbian Mayor Really Out to Get Conservative Preachers? New York 10/15/2014, who explains that Houston's Mayor Annise Parker, actually criticized attorneys working on behalf of the city over the subpoena in a case which, like many topics that the Republicans and other conspiracy theorists blow up into tales of persecution, was actually a fairly obscure legal question on a narrow issue.

Adorno notes that for subjects who scored high on the authoritarianism scale, conspiracy theories were among their "favorite subjects." (p. 709)

He also notes that "conspiracy fantasies ... are so highly characteristic of the usurper complex." (p. 689) The topic of the "usurper complex" focused on Franklin Roosevelt during the time the study was done. It's notable that the theme of usurper has become now a standard Republican attitude toward Democratic President. And not just for official partisans. Sally Quinn's famous column expressing the contempt of the Beltway Village toward Bill Clinton, In Washington, That Letdown Feeling Washington Post 11/02/1998, gives great examples of this. She quotes the man who was for many years called The Dean Of The Washington Press Corps: "'He [Clinton] came in here and he trashed the place,' says Washington Post columnist David Broder, 'and it's not his place.'"

The usurper charge has more recently been embodied by the "birthers" like Donald Trump who have insisted that the first African-American President wasn't born in the US and is therefore ineligible to be President.

Adorno quotes an accountant in their study who:

... states quite clearly and in fairly objective terms the contradiction which seems at the hub of anti-Roosevelt sentiment:

Subject did not like Roosevelt because of WP A. It creates a class of lazy people who would rather get $20 a week than work. She feels that Roosevelt did not accomplish what he set out to do - raise the standard of the poorer classes.

The conceptions of communist, internationalist, and war-monger are close to another one previously mentioned-that of the snob. Just as the fascist agitator persistently mixes up radicals and bankers, claiming that the latter financed the revolution and that the former seek financial gains, the contradictory ideas of an ultraleftist and an exclusive person alienated from the people are brought together by anti-Roosevelt sentiment. One may venture the hypothesis that the ultimate content of both objections is the same: the resentment of the frustrated middle-class person against those who represent the idea of happiness, be it by wanting other people-even the "lazy ones" - to be happy, be it that they are enjoying life themselves. This irrationality can be grasped better on the level of personality than on that of ideology. [my emphasis]

Obviously, the rage of Republicans against the lazy is a favorite topic of conservation and of campaign appeals to "individual responsibility."

Adorno also notes the wide latitude that foreign policy gives leaders to offer a focus for expressing aggression and rage:

During the last several years all the propaganda machinery of the country has been devoted to promoting anticommunist feeling in the sense of an irrational "scare" and there are probably not many people, except followers of the "party line," who have been able to resist the incessant ideological pressure. At the same time, during the past two or three years it may have become more "conventional" to be overtly opposed to anti-Semitism, if the large number of magazine articles, books, and films with wide circulation can be regarded as symptomatic of a trend. The underlying character structure has little bearing on such fluctuations. If they could be ascertained, they would demonstrate the extreme importance of propaganda in political matters. Propaganda, when directed to the antidemocratic potential in the people, determines to a large extent the choice of the social objects of psychological aggressiveness. (p. 726) [my emphasis]

The pseudoconservatives of the postwar period still showed signs of prewar Isolationism. Hofstadter wrote of the pseudocon, "He is the most bitter of all our citizens about our involvement in the wars of the past, but seems the least concerned about avoiding the next one."

But the underlying nationalist belligerence was still there. The "libertarian" trend represented most prominently by Baby Doc Paul today has a similar posture. Baby Doc is critical of aspects US war policy. But he wants to bomb ISIS anyway.

Least surprising of all to those familiar with American politics is that subjects scoring high on the authoritarianism scale also expressed a higher intensity of white racism against blacks. This is from the chapter by William Morrow, Criminality and Antidemocratic Trends: A Study of Prison Inmates:

In the interviews, the principal traits ascribed to Negroes by high scorers are uninhibited sexuality, "laziness," "dirtiness," crude aggression, asocial acquisitiveness (petty thievery), pathological (infantile) lying, and exhibitionism. In a word, Negroes are held to be characterized by "untamed instincts," which keep them "primitive" and "childish." This imagery is partly expressed in questionnaire Item p: Negroes are "lazy, ignorant, and without self-control."

The most conventional of the prejudiced interviewees, Robert, summarizes this idea in general terms: "They have more of a primitive nature ... just want to exist as the cannibal type of man." The fascists tend to be more picturesque: "They're very closely linked with the jungle. They're built for it" (Floyd). Or, Negroes "originated from the apes" (Buck), and are "still half-African savage, no matter how dressed up they get" (Adrian).

Digby in Untitled Hullabaloo 08/06/2015 comments on the importance of race for the authoritarian base voters of today's Republican Party:

For all the blabber about Trump being the avatar of "tell-it-like-it-is", anti-Washington fervor, they [Republican base voters] really just love him for articulating their hatred for people who don't look and sound like them. That's what powers right wing populism, here and elsewhere. Sure they are against Big Gummint and bailouts etc. But mostly they just hate foreigners and African Americans taking things they don't deserve.

Regular Republican elites are nervous about all this because they can see the demographic problem they face nationally if large numbers of young American Latinos come to identify as Democrats and see Republicans as their enemies. (Party ID tends not to change.) It wouldn't last forever but it's likely to be a problem for quite some time, particularly since Mexican and Central American migration is different than earlier waves of immigration. It's always there. [my emphasis]