Trump’s Industrial Belt Appeal. By Joel Kotkin.

Trump’s Industrial Belt Appeal. By Joel Kotkin. Real Clear Politics, June 1, 2016.

Kotkin:

In his still improbable path to the White House, Donald Trump has an opening, right through the middle of the country. From the Appalachians to the Rockies, much of the American heartland is experiencing a steady decline in its fortunes, with growing fears about its prospects in a Democratic-dominated future. This could prove the road to victory for Trump.

The media like to explain Trump’s appeal by focusing on the racial and nationalistic sentiments of his primarily white supporters in places like the Midwest and in small towns. Perhaps more determinative are the mounting economic challenges facing voters in that part of the country. Much of this has to do with an industrial structure facing growing challenges from a high dollar, decreasing commodity prices and a pending tsunami of environmental regulation.

Unlike the Democrats’ coastal strongholds, which depend increasingly on such professions as media, software, finance, and high-end business services, the middle swath of the country depends far more on manufacturing, resource extraction, and agriculture. All these so-called “tangible” industries are facing serious declines, which in a close election could swing some critical states such as Ohio, Colorado, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Iowa into the Republican column. Seven of the 10 most manufacturing-dependent metro areas in America are in the Midwest battleground states. Another lies in yet another purple state, North Carolina.

Economic Slowdown in Mid-America

When President Obama ran for re-election in 2012, the tangible economy was on a roll. Super-charged by the federal bailout, the car industry was roaring back, restoring jobs and confidence in the country’s midsection. The president was even described by The Washington Post as a “man on a mission” to save American manufacturing. And the two states then with the fastest declines in unemployment since the onset of the Great Recession—Ohio and Michigan—are in the Midwest.

At the same time, Obama benefited from the resurgence of domestic oil and gas production that   stimulated growth in steel, heavy equipment, and industrial sector employment. This fortunate confluence was fortuitous for the Democrats, who carried most of the states outside the South buoyed by this nascent industrial rebirth. Good times in coal country helped the president in parts of Virginia; the energy boom helped lock up Colorado for him.

Hillary Clinton likely will not enjoy a similar tailwind this year. Manufacturing indexes have tended downward over the past year, and the energy sector has been in full-scale retreat. This not only impacts oil patch bastions Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, which are unlikely to vote Democratic anyway, but also the battlegrounds states Pennsylvania and Ohio. Agricultural economies in the midsection are also reeling.

Clinton will argue that job growth is on the rise nearly everywhere, but more than half of the increase has come in low-wage sectors such as retail and food service, which is one key reason for persistently weak income growth.

The damage is not yet universal, but can be seen clearly in many areas. Many Rust Belt and Appalachian regions are once again hemorrhaging residents. In a recent survey of metropolitan economies for Forbes, economist Michael Shires and I traced the job growth in communities across the country. The bottom 10 among the 70 largest metropolitan areas reads like a stroll down Rust Belt Lane: Hartford, Conn., Milwaukee, Detroit, Albany, N.Y., Newport News, Va., Birmingham, Ala., Cleveland, Newark, N.J., Pittsburgh, Buffalo and -- in last place -- Rochester, once one of the beacons of industrial innovation in the country and now part of New York’s upstate disaster area.

Last year, amid some decent employment growth nationally, almost all these areas suffered sub-1 percent job declines after enjoying growth rates well above that in previous years. More grievously affected are a host of smaller communities, many of them in the Midwest and industrial Northeast, several already seeing negative job growth. At the bottom of the list are places like Johnstown, Pa., and Elmira, N.Y., where the Democrats’ “hope and change” promise has failed to reverse dismal local economies.

Enter Trump 

Throughout his divisive campaign, Donald Trump has fattened up on these voters, winning by landslides in places like upstate New York, central and western Pennsylvania, the industrial suburbs of Detroit, northern Indiana and the resource-dependent parts of Colorado. In hard-hit Erie County, N.Y., home to Buffalo, Trump won two-thirds of the primary vote.

Also appealing to similar populist sentiment, Bernie Sanders has won some of the same areas, often decisively. For his part, Trump’s only serious Rust Belt setbacks occurred in Ohio (where John Kasich ran as a virtual favorite son candidate), Iowa (where evangelicals still wield outsized influence) and Minnesota, which is arguably the most post-industrial of the central states. Recent announcements by such large companies as Ford and United Technologies  to move jobs to Mexico have reinforced Trump's appeal.

Trump’s support, as Nate Silver has shown, is not comprised only of knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. On average, they earn above-average incomes and boast education levels that also exceed the national average. Some are professionals and merchants on Main Street, who acutely ride the ups and downs of the tangible economy. These voters may also be susceptible to rants about Mexican “rapists” and certainly would not favor a massive incursion of Muslim refugees. But their primary concerns are economic, not social. If they really favored regressive social policies, Ted Cruz was their man.

The trajectory of the Democratic race—as well as that of the economy—could help Trump expand his appeal to such voters. Hillary Clinton once tended to be supportive of industrial and energy development; her State Department gave tacit approval to the Keystone XL Pipeline. Now, under pressure from Bernie Sanders’ left-wing legions, she has backed away from support for this organized-labor-backed project. The divisions between the public sector unions and those in the industrial sector could boost Trump’s turnout in states where manufacturing and energy still matter.

To make matters more difficult, Clinton may be saddled at the convention with a ban on fracking. This stance warms the hearts of bicoastal enviros, but is unpopular in large parts of the nation’s heartland. Likewise, the Obama administration’s all-out assault on fossil fuels has already cost Clinton any shot at formerly Democratic-leaning West Virginia, and is likely to hurt her across the Appalachian belt, which includes portions of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia and Ohio. Even if oil and gas prices rise, the Obama proposals for higher taxes and regulation of energy seem destined to slow any recovery in this high-paying, largely blue-collar industry.

In addition, Trump is showing unanticipated strength in several key states dependent on coal-fired electricity. He’s currently running even with Clinton in Ohio and Pennsylvania, both of which twice went for Obama. This should be enough to keep Clinton’s advisers, who are planning to deploy massive resources to these states, awake at night.     

In this respect, Clinton faces a difficult situation. Ever more dependent on her party’s post-industrial urban core, she will be hard-pressed to moderate her stance on environmental issues.     Her predecessor and her husband were able to finesse this ground by feinting toward the moderate middle in campaign years, but such ideological contortionism is getting harder to pull off.

Megabuck donors like San Francisco’s Tom Steyer are committed to forcing Clinton to embrace   progressive green orthodoxy. This will leave many mid-America workers and businesspeople feeling abandoned and, thus, potentially more receptive to Trump’s pitch. Ultimately, suggests historian Michael Lind, Trump could presage the transformation of the GOP into a middle-class populist party, with a strong Midwestern as well as Southern base, while the Democrats rest their hopes on an unlikely coalition of the coastal gentry, the hyper-educated, minorities, and the poor.

So far, the crass New York billionaire has played brilliantly on middle-American resentments, many of them well-founded. He promises repeatedly to cut a “better deal” for them. If he can convincingly make his case, Donald Trump also might yet close the most successful real estate deal of his lifetime: occupancy of the White House.

Yuval Noah Harari: AI Will Create a “Useless Class” of Human.

“Most of what people learn in school ... will be irrelevant by the time they are 40 or 50,” says Yuval Noah Harari. Photograph: Antonio Olmos

AI will create “useless class” of human, predicts bestselling historian. By Ian Sample. The Guardian, May 20, 2016.

Yuval Noah Harari: The age of the cyborg has begun – and the consequences cannot be known. By Carole Cadwalladr. The Guardian, July 5, 2015.

The theatre of terror. By Yuval Noah Harari. The Guardian, January 31, 2015.

Sample:

Smarter artificial intelligence is one of 21st century’s most dire threats, writes Yuval Noah Harari in follow-up to Sapiens.

It is hard to miss the warnings. In the race to make computers more intelligent than us, humanity will summon a demon, bring forth the end of days, and code itself into oblivion. Instead of silicon assistants we’ll build silicon assassins.

The doomsday story of an evil AI has been told a thousand times. But our fate at the hand of clever cloggs robots may in fact be worse - to summon a class of eternally useless human beings.

At least that is the future predicted by Yuval Noah Harari, a lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, whose new book says more of us will be pushed out of employment by intelligent robots and on to the economic scrap heap.

Harari rose to prominence when his 2014 book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, became an international bestseller. Two years on, the book is still being talked about. Bill Gates asked Melinda to read it on holiday. It would spark great conversations around the dinner table, he told her. We know because he said so on his blog this week.

When a book is a hit, the publisher wants more. And so Harari has been busy. His next title, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, is not out until September but early copies have begun to circulate. Its cover states simply: “What made us sapiens will make us gods”. It follows on from where Sapiens ends, in a provocative, and certainly speculative, gallop through the hopes and dreams that will shape the future of the species.

And the nightmares. Because even as the book has humans gaining godlike powers, that is only one eventuality Harari explores. It might all go pear-shaped, of course: we sapiens have a knack for hashing things up. Instead of morphing into omnipotent, all-knowing masters of the universe, the human mob might end up jobless and aimless, whiling away our days off our nuts on drugs, with VR headsets strapped to our faces. Welcome to the next revolution.

Harari calls it “the rise of the useless class” and ranks it as one of the most dire threats of the 21st century. In a nutshell, as artificial intelligence gets smarter, more humans are pushed out of the job market. No one knows what to study at college, because no one knows what skills learned at 20 will be relevant at 40. Before you know it, billions of people are useless, not through chance but by definition.

“I’m aware that these kinds of forecasts have been around for at least 200 years, from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and they never came true so far. It’s basically the boy who cried wolf,” says Harari. “But in the original story of the boy who cried wolf, in the end, the wolf actually comes, and I think that is true this time.”

The way Harari sees it, humans have two kinds of ability that make us useful: physical ones and cognitive ones. The Industrial Revolution may have led to machines that did away with humans in jobs needing strength and repetitive actions. But the takeover was not overwhelming. With cognitive powers that machines could not touch, humans were largely safe in their work. For how much longer, though? AIs are now beginning to outperform humans in the cognitive field. And while new types of jobs will certainly emerge, we cannot be sure, says Harari, that humans will do them better than AIs, computers and robots.

AIs do not need more intelligence than humans to transform the job market. They need only enough to do the task well. And that is not far off, Harari says. “Children alive today will face the consequences. Most of what people learn in school or in college will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40 or 50. If they want to continue to have a job, and to understand the world, and be relevant to what is happening, people will have to reinvent themselves again and again, and faster and faster.”

Even so, jobless humans are not useless humans. In the US alone, 93 million people do not have jobs, but they are still valued. Harari, it turns out, has a specific definition of useless. “I choose this very upsetting term, useless, to highlight the fact that we are talking about useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system, not from a moral viewpoint,” he says. Modern political and economic structures were built on humans being useful to the state: most notably as workers and soldiers, Harari argues. With those roles taken on by machines, our political and economic systems will simply stop attaching much value to humans, he argues.

None of this puts us in the realm of the gods. In fact, it leads Harari to even more bleak predictions. Though the people may no longer provide for the state, the state may still provide for them. “What might be far more difficult is to provide people with meaning, a reason to get up in the morning,” Harari says. For those who don’t cheer at the prospect of a post-work world, satisfaction will be a commodity to pay for: our moods and happiness controlled by drugs; our excitement and emotional attachments found not in the world outside, but in immersive VR.

All of which leads to the question: what should we do? “First of all, take it very seriously,” Harari says. “And make it a part of the political agenda, not only the scientific agenda. This is something that shouldn’t be left to scientists and private corporations. They know a lot about the technical stuff, the engineering, but they don’t necessarily have the vision and the legitimacy to decide the future course of humankind.”

Cadwalladr:

The author of the bestselling Sapiens says that the future of life on Earth is now, worryingly, in the hands of a very small group of entrepreneurs.

By rights, Yuval Noah Harari should be an anonymous academic buried in an obscure university department somewhere toiling away on his somewhat dusty discipline – medieval military history. He’s a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and there is almost nothing in his background to suggest that he would write a book that has become one of the most talked about non-fiction bestsellers of the year – Sapiens. Or that he’d join the globetrotting TED-ocracy: the academic superstars who travel the world delivering keynotes on zeitgeisty topics, in Harari’s case, the not inconsiderable subject of the history of the whole of mankind.

When I meet him, he’s just been the star turn at Penguin Random House’s global sales conference. In May, he packed out Hay. Earlier this month, he delivered a TED talk. And last month, he received the ultimate imprimatur when Sapiens was selected by Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, for his online book club. He’s invited his 38 million followers to read what he describes as “a big history narrative of human civilisation– from how we developed from hunter-gatherers to how we organise our society and economy today”.

That’s a workable description of what Sapiens is, though it’s a history book only in the sense that Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time is a physics book (Sapiens’ subtitle – A Brief History of Humankind – suggests that this is not entirely coincidental). Its scope is so hugely ambitious that I had expected Harari to be one of those overconfident telly historian types, all male ego and a crushing sense of certainty, whereas, in the flesh, he’s a slightly nerdy, more thoughtful figure. Academic superstardom seems to have caught him by surprise as much as anyone.

The book was based on an introductory course on world history he taught when none of his more senior colleagues wanted to take it on, and it was turned down by almost every major publishing outfit in Israel before finding a receptive editor. Since then, however, its success has been swift and resounding: it became a bestseller in Israel and has gone on to be published in 20 countries around the world. But then, the book’s success, and the way that Harari has been taken up by the global tastemakers, makes sense in that he considers himself a historian of globalisation. “In a way, it’s like in the 19th century with the rise of nationalism. You establish an independent national state and the first thing you do is to write a history of that state. Now we have a more global world, you need the history of the whole of the global world, not of a particular country, or religion, but the history of humankind as a whole.”

This is entirely characteristic of the way that Harari speaks. In full sentences, paragraphs, even. My transcript, which is usually a mess of elipses, reads like it’s been lifted off the page. And his book is a brilliant read. He zips from subject to subject, through thousands of years of human history, alighting on whatever seems to take his fancy but gradually builds up a picture of us as… well, as what exactly? As more successful monkeys, basically, so successful that we’ve enslaved all the other animals and bent the planet to our will. But whereas sharks and lions evolved over millennia to take their place at the top of the food chain, Harari compares us to “banana republic dictators” who just got here. “They came to power very violently and lately so they feel extremely insecure about their position. So all the time they just take more and more power to beef up their position.”

A chimpanzee alpha male would never think of using his power in order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighbouring chimpanzee band.

Because, in Harari’s view, we have no real idea what we want even at the most basic, personal level, let alone as a species. “Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order.” There’s nothing “natural or obvious” about taking a holiday abroad, he says by way of example. “A chimpanzee alpha male would never think of using his power in order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighbouring chimpanzee band. The elite of ancient Egypt spent their futures building pyramids and having their corpses mummified but none of them thought of going shopping in Babylon.” We’re all victims of the “myths of romantic consumerism”, he says.

But everything is a myth, a story, according to Harari. Justice is a story. Human rights are a story. Money, he told the moneyed elite at TED, is “the greatest story ever told”. So what’s your story?

“About the history of the world?”

No, about you. Your story, about yourself.

“Oh, myself? For me, I suppose the most important thing is the search for the truth. I really want to understand reality, what’s really happening here. As far back as I remember, this was something that I was extremely preoccupied by. I remember in high school asking my parents and my teachers to explain what’s happening here, what is life, what’s it all about, and so forth.

“What struck me most was not that they didn’t tell me an answer but that they weren’t really concerned about it. Many people in their teens wonder about these big questions, what’s the meaning of life, what are we doing here, then somewhere in their 20s they seem to say, ‘I’ll just get married. I’ll just have kids. I’ll get back to that later.’ But they never do. For me, it kept boiling. And it still is boiling.”

He grew up in a secular Jewish family of eastern European origin in the Haifa area and there are a few things he recognises about himself that have informed his world view, or at least his desire to question other people’s view of the world. The first is being gay.

“You don’t take the accepted view for granted just because everybody believes it. It really affects the way that I view everything. Nothing should be taken for granted even if everybody believes it. It forces you to look at society a bit from the side.”

Another influence was the collapse of the Berlin Wall when he was a teenager in 1989.

“It means I don’t take capitalism and neo-liberalism for granted. I teach all these 20-year-old students and they were born into a capitalist world. It’s the only system. There’s no alternative and nobody can even imagine that there could be. But I remember the time when these things were really hotly contested. And also the way that you can live in a certain type of world and be sure that this will go on for ages and ages and suddenly everything collapses.”

In some ways, I say, it struck me that Sapiens isn’t actually a history book – it’s a philosophy book that asks the big, philosophical questions and attempts to answer them through history.

“Yes, that’s a very accurate description. I think that I see history as a philosophy laboratory. Philosophers come up with all these very interesting questions about the human condition, but the way that most of them – though not all – go about answering them is through thought experiments. But if you’re interested in, say, justice, history is full of empirical evidence about justice in human society.”

It’s no surprise, either, that he’s come to the attention of Mark Zuckerberg. Harari is one of the very few thinkers around who’s really looking at what’s happening now. Sapiens is his attempt to tell the story of the past to understand the present: the great technological advances that we are all living through now.

The way you tell it is that we’re at a point of inflection: that we’re on the cusp of perhaps the greatest change for the human race ever?

“Probably, yes. I mean the one thing that has remained constant in history was humans themselves. Homo sapiens, you and me, we are basically the same as people 10,000 years ago. The next revolution will change that.”

The “next revolution”, as Harari sees it, the latest in a line that began with the cognitive revolution and takes in the agricultural revolution and the scientific revolution, is what is happening in the biotech field, in artificial intelligence.

“When people talk about merging with computers to create cyborgs, it’s not some prophecy about the year 2200. It’s happening right now. More and more of our reality exists within computers or through them.”

But this is only the start of it. For the first time in history, “we will see real changes in humans themselves – in their biology, in their physical and cognitive abilities”. And while we have enough imagination to invent new technologies, we are unable to foresee their consequences.

“It was the same with the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago. Nobody sat down and had a vision: ‘This is what agriculture is going to be for humankind and for the rest of the planet.’ It was an incremental process, step by step, taking centuries, even thousands of years, which nobody really understood and nobody could foresee the consequences.”

Only now, the decisions are being taken by “a small international caste of business people, entrepreneurs and engineers”. Governments have become “managers”, he says. They have no vision, “whereas meet the people in Google, in Facebook, they have tremendous visions about the future, about overcoming death, living for ever, merging humans with computers. I do find it worrying that the basis of the future, not only of humankind, the future of life, is now in the hands of a very small group of entrepreneurs.”

But then, even those of us who are aware of the arguments aren’t necessarily losing sleep over it, a fact that Harari puts down to one of our unique attributes as humans: our cognitive dissonance, our ability to hold two utterly conflicting ideas in our heads at the same time. That we can say, what a cute dog and yum, yum, what a delicious steak and not see a problem with that somehow.

Harari is a vegan and the dire plight of animals, particularly domesticated animals, since the agricultural revolution is something he riffs on in the book, but there are countless other examples. “In modern secular societies, people believe in equality and people believe in freedom and they don’t realise that usually freedom and equality are contradictory. The more freedom you give people, the more inequality you have.”

His views on inequality – that the 20th century was a blip basically; we’ve always been unequal and we’re heading back that way – link him to that other great intellectual du jour, Thomas Piketty, but much of Sapiens feels inventively original, a fact that he puts down to his longstanding interest in meditation. Harari, it seems, doesn’t succumb to the myth of romantic consumerism when it comes to deciding what to do on his holidays. Last summer, he went on a 60-day silent vipassana retreat. He discovered it at Oxford when researching his PhD.

“I suddenly had a tool to scientifically observe directly my mind… and I realised I had no idea who I really was. I had this fictional story in my head but the connection between that and my reality was rather tenuous.” It changed him, personally, he says, but also professionally. “It gave me the ability to focus on what is really important. When you look inside, you find that there are so many different voices inside you. Most of life, we just allow all these voices just to pull us any which way.”

It’s an interest that he shares with the Silicon Valley types he critiques (Steve Jobs was a practitioner of Zen Buddhism) and, in a distracted age, focus – and its handmaiden, mindfulness – is more fashionable in west-coast America than curly kale. But without meditation, he says, “I would probably be far less satisfied and happy. And I would probably be a far worse historian. I suppose I would still be researching medieval military history, but not the neanderthals or cyborgs.”

It’s bracing, Harari’s focus on the big things. His next book is “about the human agenda for the 21st century in terms of dangers, opportunities, questions”. Mark Zuckerberg will no doubt read it. Probably the rest of us should too.

The Better Jackson’s of Trump’s Nature. By Nicholas M. Gallagher.

The Better Jackson’s of Trump’s Nature. By Nicholas M. Gallagher. National Review, June 13, 2016 issue.

Gallagher:

He has tapped into a tradition that has thankfully grown more inclusive. Conservatives must find a way to make common cause with Andrew Jackson’s nationalist heirs.

Donald Trump clinched the GOP nomination by exploiting vulnerabilities few were aware existed. When the 2016 race began, almost no one seemed to have understood that a plurality of the Republican party had a fundamentally different set of policy preferences from those of doctrinaire conservatism. Trump saw this opening and took full advantage.

Trump’s positions follow the contours not of movement conservatism but of American folk nationalism, often known as Jacksonianism. As Walter Russell Mead, my boss over at The American Interest, has noted, Jacksonians characteristically emphasize anti-elitism and egalitarianism while drawing a sharp distinction between members of the folk group and those outside it. In domestic policy, this translates to tough-on-crime stances and stubborn adherence to traditional views on social issues (and, historically, opposition to civil rights), and to advocacy of government assistance for “deserving” members of the folk group. Looking abroad, they are uninterested in Wilsonian nation-building projects or promoting global order, but if they feel the nation is threatened, they are willing to fight back by whatever means are necessary. Sound familiar yet?

Jacksonians don’t fit easily into either the liberal or the conservative camp; they are the “radical middle.” They also don’t comport with regional stereotypes. Jacksonians are not synonymous with southerners or rednecks: Trump has performed best in northeastern states and prospered in cities. And while Trump is supported by racists (especially by the ugly little band of Twitter trolls known as the alt-right), Jacksonians cannot be dismissed as such en masse. In the past, Jacksonians have been found at the heart of the Confederacy, but they also formed the core of the Union Army, and later the one that defeated Hitler. Their motivations and history are too complex — and they comprise too wide a swath of the American public — to be rightly considered atavistic or a sectional rump.

When Jacksonians take up politics, they do so with a vengeance, and Jacksonian uprisings have overturned the American political order more than once. But Jacksonians tend to be quiet politically when things are going well. Much of the time, it’s easy for elites to misread them as supporters of other movements, forget them, or take them for granted.

And that’s exactly what Republicans had been doing. After the “paleoconservatives” and Buchananites were defeated a generation ago, leading GOP politicians minimized and sometimes outright denied tensions between Jacksonian sentiment and conservative ideology. They focused on issues where the two viewpoints overlapped (from an aversion to liberal identity politics to the need to take the fight to the bad guys after 9/11), while politely ignoring (or forgetting) the important differences between the groups. This was made easier by the fact that for much of that period, a rising economic tide lifted all boats and kept the visibility of disagreements to a minimum.

Many Republicans, especially those of the “neocon” persuasion, went a step farther by denying the existence of American nationalism outright. This usually involved their contrasting nationalism, which was something bad that others (usually: Europeans) had indulged in, with patriotism, which was presented as good and American — and universalistic and ideal-based. In his first inaugural address, President George W. Bush declared: “America has never been united by blood or birth or soil. We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests, and teach us what it means to be citizens.”

It is true that America is a country uniquely rooted in ideas, with a universal message accessible to all people. It’s also true that Americans are patriotic. But for much of the Right, patriotism — love of country — itself has become identified with reverence for a specific body of ideas, including the classical-liberal, individualist, and universalist Enlightenment ideals enshrined in America’s founding documents. At its most expansive, this can include — and was read as including — a series of classical-liberal economic prescriptions, certain foreign- and domestic-policy assumptions, and even originalist judicial philosophy.

There’s something to this. Lincoln, who revered the Declaration of Independence and used its principles to animate his political views, was a better patriot than Stephen Douglas or Robert E. Lee, even though in some sense all three loved their country. But expansive rhetoric and blurred categories can muddle thinking. The conservative movement, which reveres tradition, forgot that there were other traditions of how to view one’s country and understand what binds us together. The idea that America has never had a sense of national folk identity is just plain false — and making political and policy judgments on that assumption was madness. The reappearance of naked nationalism has been a shock to those who spent decades maintaining that America’s unique and unqualified achievement has been to synthesize love of country and universal democratic ideals. Jacksonians have consistently felt that some combination of ethnicity, where you were born, and (though Bush didn’t mention it) faith unite the American people, though not quite in the same way as — and generally much more expansively conceived than — the European “blood and soil” ideologies to which President Bush alluded.

As a form of nationalism, Jacksonianism has had two saving graces. First, it’s proven to be expandable in a way that no other folk nationalism in history has been. Although it was originally carried to America by the Scots-Irish who settled the frontier, the Jacksonian understanding of the folk group has expanded in time beyond its white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant roots to include millions of immigrants from far-flung places, such as Irish Catholics and Eastern European Jews. If this process was rougher than is sometimes remembered, and if America has not yet achieved total reconciliation on racial matters, nevertheless this record of assimilation is an immense and unprecedented achievement in the bloody annals of a fallen world.

Second, Jacksonianism has usually embraced and supported American idealistic patriotism. It’s an oversimplification to think of these as competing ideologies: One operates (mostly) at the level of feeling and the other at the level of principle. Most Jacksonians would profess to be ardent patriots and lovers of America’s founding principles, and most Americans have at least some Jacksonianism in them.

The tension between the two is nonetheless real and tricky to manage for a conservative movement that is, as it’s suddenly and rudely been reminded, a minority both in the country and within the Republican party. Conservatives need Jacksonian votes to form a governing coalition. Yet from trade to immigration, foreign policy to fiscal policy, Jacksonian instincts are often incompatible with conservative prescriptions.

There are lots of ways to deal with this friction. The least helpful is to pretend it doesn’t exist. Exhibits A and B of this tendency are the proposed immigration bills in 2007 and 2013, which repeated in their essentials the failed 1986 amnesty-for-enforcement bargain. More broadly, party leaders failed to take the Jacksonian base’s positions on economic policy into account or even acknowledge them rhetorically, and they failed also to respond to Jacksonian dissatisfaction with the Wilsonian aspects of the Iraq War. By the time 2016 rolled around, the Republicans — including much of their supposed anti-establishment wing — were acting as though Jacksonianism didn’t exist.

Meanwhile, structural shifts in the economy, from globalization to automation, have been breaking down traditional sources of blue-collar and clerical employment, even as 50 years of mass immigration — a large chunk of it not sanctioned by law — have altered the nature of the American folk group. The latter has weakened social cohesion, and the former not only grates on Jacksonians’ sense of economic security but undermines their very identity as industrial workers and providers. Meanwhile, the perception that the world abroad was threatening and thankless grew even as confidence in the efficacy of conservative foreign and military policy waned. The conditions for a Jacksonian revolt were ripe.

While conservatives are more than within their rights to write off Trump, they would be neither wise nor justified to write off the Jacksonians. They may be disgusted with Trump’s antics, and they may find some Jacksonian positions inchoate, wrongheaded, or unfulfillable. But after the dust from this election settles, it will be urgently necessary to once again fuse patriotic, idealistic, and inclusive conservatism with Jacksonian nationalism.

Ideals need gut instincts and folk tradition on their side in order to be efficacious. The Jacksonian sense of common American identity enables self-governance, charity, and neighborliness; for many — including groups that the GOP has been trying to court for years, such as Hispanic Americans and single women without college degrees — it gives important meaning to life. And Jacksonian support will also be necessary to addressing our pressing foreign-policy problems.

For now, Jacksonianism lies closer to conservatism than it does to the identity-politics Left, and one may reasonably hope for a “best of both” compromise between intellectual conservatism and Jacksonian impulses. It will take some time to work out the details, but time is something we conservatives will have a lot of as we spend the rest of the 2016 presidential campaign in the political wilderness. Consider it the price of ignoring political reality for a generation.

Five Reasons Donald Trump Is Dominating American Politics. By Robert W. Merry.

5 Reasons Trump Is Dominating American Politics. By Robert W. Merry. The National Interest, May 29, 2016.

Merry:

One remarkable element of American politics is the extent to which unthinkable developments become commonplace once they happen. Consider simply the men who have become president by defying the conventional wisdom that said they could never reach that office, because they weren’t right for the times and the times weren’t right for them. They include Abraham Lincoln, considered a western bumpkin with only a single congressional term under his belt and no discernible sophistication about him. Or Ronald Reagan, considered a failed actor, a man whose detractors felt he was simply too dumb to be president. And let’s not forget Barack Obama, clearly an accomplished and polished politician whose race, it was believed by many, would constitute a barrier because the country wasn’t yet ready for a black president. But when these men actually reached the White House it seemed entirely natural. The country casually absorbed the reality of something that previously had seemed impossible.

Now we have Donald Trump emerging as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, a development utterly unthinkable until it happened. When he first announced his candidacy, it was considered a joke. When he emerged as the leader in polls, it was said he would falter as soon as actual voting commenced. When he began winning primaries, we were assured it wouldn’t last. When he kept winning, the party elites mounted plans to outmaneuver him through convention manipulations, because this simply couldn’t happen.

And yet here he is, occupying a position once thought unthinkable. And now it seems possible that he actually could become president. How did this happen? How did the unthinkable become commonplace? Herewith a stab at identifying the five greatest reasons for the Trump emergence, offered with a proviso that whenever the unthinkable becomes reality, there are always understandable and compelling reasons that simply weren’t perceived beforehand.

Political Correctness

The disciplines of this powerful movement had become so entrenched in the American culture that we didn’t really perceive just how much seething anger it was generating among Americans who didn’t view the world as the enforcement legions of political correctness demanded. Of course, everyone now knows how this bludgeon of right thinking has practically destroyed free speech and free thought on American campuses, as spineless administrators have stood by or joined in. That clearly disturbs many Americans, particularly those who want their children to seek an education in an environment that is at least open to political thinking consonant with their own views and principles. But it wasn’t clear until Trump’s emergence just how much ordinary citizens chafed at this cultural phenomenon in terms of the impact on their own everyday lives. Political correctness has sought, with much success, to narrow the range of political discourse by labeling as illegitimate certain views and thoughts that, just a few years ago, were considered entirely acceptable.

Thus, if you believed in secure borders for America, you ran the risk of being labeled a racist or a xenophobe. Same thing if you wondered aloud whether, given the historical antagonism between the West and Islam and the anti-Western fervor of Islamist fundamentalism, it might be best to curb the Muslim inflow into the West. If you harbored traditional views about marriage that, a generation ago, were considered entirely normal by the vast majority of Americans, suddenly you found yourself labeled an extremist or a bigot. If you believed that a civilized society requires a certain respect for law enforcement, you watched in disgust as an assault on the nation’s police generated diffidence among officers and their leaders, and contributed to a sudden rise in crime.

A stark reflection of this could be heard in a radio news report in Seattle recently about a high school youth there who put up a sign saying, “Build the Wall.” He was ordered to take it down, which was appropriate enough if the school had a policy against overt political expression on campus. But the principal had another rationale for the action. “We don’t tolerate racism at this school,” she told the radio station. The student was forced into a groveling apology. Thus did we have a student expressing the views of a politician who had collected nearly 11 million votes in the GOP primaries—yet was forced to recant upon pain of being cast out of polite society as a racist.

Donald Trump stood up to all of that, and he did so with pugilistic resolve. No presidential politician had done that before, and now it’s clear that many Americans were waiting for someone to express their frustrations over the zealous cadres of political correctness. The most stark example was Trump’s call for a temporary ban on the entry of Muslims into the country, pending a better understanding of the domestic terrorism threat. His suggestion was considered outlandish, if not utterly outrageous, and he was roundly attacked from both left and right. But exit polls during the primary season revealed that significant numbers of Americans agreed. Political correctness may have silenced many of those people, but it couldn’t convert them.

Immigration

Before Trump’s emergence on the political scene, no politician had demonstrated a credible seriousness about sealing the U.S. border. The country had never really managed to get beyond what might be called the Great Fraud of 1986—amnesty for illegal immigrants already in the country in exchange for promises of a sealed border. But then the illegal influx increased dramatically under the noses of inert government officials. Nobody believed their leaders in Washington were really serious about the problem. Meanwhile, liberal commentators and intellectuals delighted in suggesting that the game was up, that the influx of immigrants was transforming the country’s politics in ways that disfavored traditionalists and Republicans and anyone who felt that the old cultural sensibilities of the country were worth protecting and sustaining. So the message was: Get over it. Republican leaders, with their straight-line analysis, generally embraced the view that they would have to get on board this bandwagon or the party would be swamped by newcomers who found distasteful the old Republican principles of self-reliance, nationalism and secure borders.

Then along comes Trump, who not only takes on the globalist elites, with their casualness toward open borders, but does so with force and an open disdain for the political correctness that previously had enveloped the debate. In doing so, he declared unmistakably that this was one politician who took the issue seriously and would do something about it. By transforming the terms of debate on the issue, he transformed also the dynamics of the issue.

Middle-Class Decline

Late last year the Pew Research Center reported that America’s middle class had shrunk to less than half the population, compared to 61 percent in the late 1960s. These are the people who once were considered the bedrock of American society and the engine of much of its growth and progress. Many factors contributed to this decline, but one was the deindustrialization of America. As the country’s industrial base was hollowed out, so was the working class that propelled those industrial factories and enjoyed the fruits of those solid blue-collar jobs. Many of those people traditionally did well even without college degrees. But now that has changed. “Those Americans without a college degree stand out as experiencing a substantial loss in economic status,” said the Pew report.

Research by an MIT professor named David Autor, reports the Financial Times, suggests that “the earnings gap between the median college-educated US male and the median male with a high school education doubled between 1979 and 2012.” This during a time when there wasn’t much overall wage growth in the country at large.

Much has been written about the social havoc this economic decline as wreaked on America’s traditional middle class, with significant increases in divorce, alcoholism, drug use and suicide. Many of these people feel that they have been left out and left behind by the political elites of the country, focused as they are on helping the poor and bringing in immigrants who put downward pressure on wage rates. Few politicians spoke to them or their plight—until Trump. His answer is to attack the deindustrialization of the country through protectionist tariffs. Whether that can work is an open question, but it evinces a concern for those people left out in the cold by the country’s industrial decline.

Globalism

I have written in these spaces about globalism and nationalism as representing probably the most fundamental political fault line in the country today. Globalists don’t like borders. They believe goods, money and people should be able to move freely around the world without much interdiction or burden. They don’t hold much truck with nationalism—a relic, in their view, of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which codified the recognition of coexisting nation states. Nationalists believe in the nation state, particularly their own. That’s why they believe in borders. Globalists seem enchanted by overseas adventures either to foster American greatness (neoconservatives such as George W. Bush) or to salve the hurts and wounds of humanity (Wilsonian interventionists such as Hillary Clinton). Globalists dominate the country’s elite institutions—the media, academia, big corporations, big finance, Hollywood, think tanks, NGOs, charitable foundations.

But nationalist sentiment is widespread in America, though nationalists have tended to feel frustrated in the face of the barrage of globalist sentiment and advocacy coming from the elite institutions. Now they have an outlet for expressing their frustration—a vote for Trump.

The Coarsening of American Culture

This phenomenon has been seen in a decades-long assault on traditional mores and values relating to sex, drug use, everyday language, marriage, ethics and much more. Nearly three decades ago the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined a phrase, “defining deviancy down,” meaning lowering the definition of what once was considered deviant behavior and accepting—even embracing—activity once frowned upon by society. The senator was talking mostly about criminal behavior, but the concept applies to all of society, seen most starkly in the popular culture of movies, TV, popular music and drama. Raunch is in, and getting raunchier.

Trump, of course, has given us his own debasement of political behavior, so his emergence certainly can’t be seen as a reaction to the vulgarization of American culture. Quite the opposite, that vulgarization has cleared the way for his own brand of tawdry politics. But it’s interesting to see Trump’s detractors waxing indignant about his coarse rhetoric as they go about their lives in a sea of vulgarity that brings from them hardly a stir of recognition, let alone indignation. That American middle class, as a bedrock of the country’s economic health in the long-ago past, also strained to enforce certain standards and values of behavior. That middle-class role got crushed by new standards and values enforced through elite institutions and the popular culture.

And so there was no bulwark to stand against Trump’s bad-boy politics. The coarsening of American society had helped pave the way for him.

Bret Stephens: Trump Must Be So Decisively Defeated That “Republican Voters Will Forever Learn Their Lesson.”

WSJ editor: Trump needs to be destroyed in the November election to teach GOP voters a lesson. By Tom Boggioni. Raw Story, May 29, 2016. Video at YouTube.

WSJ’s Bret Stephens: Trump Must Lose So Badly That the GOP Voters “Learn Their Lesson.” By Sam Reisman. Mediaite, May 29, 2016.

WSJ’s Stephens: Trump Must Be “Decisively Rebuked” So Republican Voters “Learn Their Lesson.” By Jeff Poor. Breitbart, May 29, 2016.

Wall Street Journal columnist wants to teach Republican voters a lesson by defeating Trump. By Richard Miniter. American Thinker, May 30, 2016.

Boggioni:

Appearing on CNN, an opinion page editor from the Wall Street Journal left no doubt how he feels about presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, saying not only will he not vote for him, but that Trump needs to be crushed in the November election as a lesson to Republicans.

Pressed by host Fareed Zakaria if he was going to get behind Trump as the Republican nominee, conservative columnist Bret Stephens got right to the point.

“I most certainly will not vote for Donald Trump,” Stephens began tersely. “I will vote for the least left-wing opponent to Donald Trump and I want to make a vote that makes sure he is the biggest loser in presidential history since, I don’t know, Alf Landon.”

Then Stephens went off: “It’s important that Donald Trump, or what he represents, this kind of quote ‘ethnic conservatism or populism,’ be so decisively rebuked that the Republican Party and the Republican voters will forever learn their lesson that they cannot nominate a man so manifestly unqualified to be president in any way, shape or form.”

“So they have to learn a lesson perhaps the way Democrats learned a lesson from McGovern in ’72,” he added.

Asked if the Wall Street Journal would state the same in an editorial, Stephens pointed out the the Journal has not endorsed anyone since Herbert Hoover, adding: “And we will not repeat that mistake.”