It’s happening everywhere. Right-Wing populism/nationalism vs progressive liberalism. The United States is hardly unique. Maybe not in the existence of a left-right schism… but definitely unique as to the level of extremism. If irreconcilable differences were the measurement of whether unifying the political divisions might be possible, Europe seems to be on that track while the United States seems headed in the opposite direction.
David Lauter, writing for the May 10th Los Angeles Times, summarizes the result of a recent survey from the prestigious Pew Research Center: “Anyone who has watched U.S. politics in recent years knows that a widening gap between left and right, Democrat and Republican, has defined our era. Hardly a week passes without fresh evidence.
“Americans — and some Europeans — have often talked of similar divisions in Western Europe’s major democracies. Divisive issues like Brexit in the U.K. and the rights of religious minorities in France drive comparisons to U.S. polarization… But the U.S. differs notably from those other countries: Our ideological gaps are much wider on big cultural issues, according to a major new study by the Pew Research Center.
“Pew began to study the comparison during Britain’s divisive debate over leaving the European Union and the campaign leading up to Donald Trump’s election as president. Researchers ‘really wanted to see what the concepts of nationalism and cosmopolitanism mean in the modern era,’ said Pew’s Laura Silver, one of the lead authors.
“What they found provides insights into America’s divides and how those differ from other wealthy democracies. The numbers, based on surveys of more than 4,000 adults in the U.S., France, Germany and the U.K., provide important context for understanding the Republican Party’s continuing evolution away from the country’s business establishment and toward becoming a more populist party of the right.
“On several big issues, the center of gravity among conservatives in the U.S. stands further to the right than it does among their ideological counterparts in Europe, Pew’s numbers show. On the other end of the spectrum, liberals in the U.S. have moved further to the left in the last four years.
“A large share of U.S. conservatives support restrictionist views of national identity, such as believing that ‘truly belonging’ requires being native born or being a Christian. A large number also believe that discrimination against minority groups is an exaggerated problem.
“Since 2016, across all four countries surveyed, the public has shifted toward less restrictive stands on issues of national identity. In Europe, that shift took place across the ideological spectrum. In the U.S., it did not… U.S. liberals moved left — in some cases further left than their European counterparts. U.S. conservatives, however, started off further to the right than Europeans and did not move… ‘Generally, we saw gaps closing in Europe,’ Silver said. ‘The gap didn’t close comparably in the U.S.’” The big 2016 political factor in the United States was obviously the election of a rather atypical Republican candidate, a populist/nationalist who completely redefined the Republican Party, leaving an indelible mark that has fractured GOP traditionalists from this rising and clearly minority view of this Trump-dominated reconfiguration.
Demographic realities are squarely against the GOP shift to a science averse, racially intolerant body of social conservatives. The Trump effect created a young voter turnout of unparalleled proportions, joining minorities of color and a surprising number of suburban women… all favoring the election of Joseph Biden by a wide margin. As the incumbent white traditional population is hitting birth rates at well below replacement value, population (and much economic) growth is dependent on immigration, a policy which the populist movement is dead set against. Not being white, Christian (preferably protestant) or born in the United States carries a “non-American” taint with this neo-nationalist movement. Yet younger voters are overwhelmingly against Trumpist populism, just as minorities of color are expanding compared to white traditionalists. The hard demographic numbers are seriously bad news for the recently readjusted GOP.
The GOP could have embraced pro-Latino policies, noting that those committed to a sincere practice of Roman Catholicism have inherently conservative values, but the Republican party eschewed the welcoming arms extended by Ronald Reagan and George W Bush to Latino immigrants and instead labeled them as a huge problem. To compound their self-destructive political realignment, they have marginalized climate change disaster (one of the future’s greatest threats to rising generations) and made it very clear than gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer and transgender people are not welcome as fully equal Americans. Misplaced support of “whatever the police do is OK,” that anything they oppose is automatically either part of a defined group (except there is no such group in reality) called “antifa” and/or “creeping socialism” has been their modest platform. “Fake news” is now the basis of major GOP political direction, notwithstanding the serious damage to democracy itself embedded in their efforts.
The battle to oust and replace House GOP Republican Conference Chair, Liz Cheney (opposed to Trump and the Big Lie), is additional evidence of the lemming-like march to self-destruction that the Republican Party has embraced in addition to a party-wide effort across virtually all red states to suppress and marginalize those categories of voters most likely to oppose Republican candidates… And where they think they can, most evidenced in the non-legally relevant Arizona “fourth” recount, to nullify anti-GOP votes even after the ballots have been cast.
I’m Peter Dekom, and if 2020 is any reflection of the negative reaction of younger and minority voters to Trumpism, we can expect a comparable backlash in the 2022 mid-terms against the effort to disenfranchise non-GOP voters.
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