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[whyamihere]

So, I wanted to start this with saying that I'm sharing this purely as a discussion point, not necessarily that I agree with all of the tenants of the author's arguments. However, I do think why the left-wing consensus that "economic populism would've won", maybe there's something more complicated happening here. (I also find the arguments about Feingold and Strickland lacking, and think Teachout was a better example for a flawed arguments because of the way that presidential candidates drive downticket behavior, but whatever).

But I have seen a decent amount of people, some on this board, say that white people in say, poor whites would get on board with Democrats if we just focused on economics. I think the author does a decent job near the end explaining why the link between race and poverty make it so poorer whites gravitate towards candidate who wish to restrict welfare programs.

Also the title is bad but I don't want to necessarily change it since the it's the title of the article. Please read past it.

http://www.vox.com/world/2017/3/13/14698812/bernie-trump-corbyn-left-wing-populism

On November 20, less than two weeks after Donald Trump's upset win, Bernie Sanders strode onto a stage at Boston's Berklee Performance Center to give the sold-out audience his thoughts on what had gone so disastrously wrong for the Democratic Party.

Sanders had a simple answer. Democrats, he said, needed to field candidates who would unapologetically promise that they would be willing ”to stand up with the working class of this country and ... take on big-money interests."

Democrats, in other words, would only be able to defeat Trump and others like him if they adopted an anti-corporate, unabashedly left-wing policy agenda. The answer to Trump's right-wing populism, Sanders argued, was for the left to develop a populism of its own.

That's a belief widely shared among progressives around the world. A legion of commentators and politicians, most prominently in the United States but also in Europe, have argued that center-left parties must shift further to the left in order to fight off right-wing populists such as Trump and France's Marine Le Pen. Supporters of these leaders, they argue, are motivated by a sense of economic insecurity in an increasingly unequal world; promise them a stronger welfare state, one better equipped to address their fundamental needs, and they will flock to the left.

”[It's] a kind of liberal myth," Pippa Norris, a Harvard political scientist who studies populism in the United States and Europe, says of the Sanders analysis. ”[Liberals] want to have a reason why people are supporting populist parties when their values are so clearly against progressive values in terms of misogyny, sexism, racism."

The problem is that a lot of data suggests that countries with more robust welfare states tend to have stronger far-right movements. Providing white voters with higher levels of economic security does not tamp down their anxieties about race and immigration — or, more precisely, it doesn't do it powerfully enough. For some, it frees them to worry less about what it's in their wallet and more about who may be moving into their neighborhoods or competing with them for jobs.

The chart below, from the London School of Economics' Simon Hix and the University of London's Giacomo Benedetto, show how those parties have done in elections in 18 Western European countries between 1945 and 2016.

This creates a puzzle: Why did voters who by and large benefit from social democracy turn against the parties that most strongly support it?

Ironically, that could be because the European left is the victim of its own success. Ronald Inglehart, an eminent political scientist at the University of Michigan, argues that the combination of rapid economic growth and a robust welfare state have provided voters with enough economic security that they could start prioritizing issues beyond the distribution of wealth — issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, and, most crucially, immigration.

So it's not that European social democrats failed to sell their economic message, or that economic redistribution became unpopular. It's that economic issues receded in importance at the same time as Europe was experiencing a massive, unprecedented wave of nonwhite, non-Christian immigration.

That, in turn, brought some of the most politically potent nonmaterial issues — race, identity, and nationalism — to the forefront of Western voters' mind. How comfortable were they, really, with multicultural, multifaith societies?

The traditional social democratic message didn't really speak to these cultural anxieties. But the right's did.

This difference on economics didn't really seem to affect their successes. Research by Elisabeth Ivarsflaten, a professor at the University of Bergen, finds European voters' views on immigration policy were a ”near-perfect" predictor of their likelihood of supporting their country's far-right party. Views on the welfare state, by contrast, weren't especially correlated with likelihood of supporting the far right, as you can see on the below chart:

What this suggests, then, is that a party's stance on economics isn't very important to right-wing populist voters. People choose to back those parties because they want someone to shut down immigration and restrict the rights of Muslims, not because of those parties' stances on trade or welfare spending.

Kai Arzheimer, a professor at Germany's University of Mainz, studied data on working-class voters, the traditional base of social democratic parties, between 1980 and 2002. He found that the stronger the welfare state, the bigger the gains for far-right parties among the working class. The top third of countries — that is, the ones with the largest welfare states — saw roughly four times the rate of far-right support among the working class as the countries in the bottom third did.

You see a similar sort of pattern inside countries. Right-wing populists typically have gotten their best results in wealthier areas of countries — that is, with voters who experience the least amounts of economic insecurity.

On Corbyn:

After the 2010 defeat, Labour swung back to the left. The next leader after Brown, Ed Miliband, won his leadership on the back of union support — announcing, in a post-victory speech, that ”New Labour is dead." After Miliband's Labour Party lost badly in a May 2015 election, Miliband resigned. Labour replaced him with a relatively unknown member of Parliament named Jeremy Corbyn — a move some British observers have compared to the Democrats nominating Jill Stein for president.

Corbyn's platform was a return to the Labour ideals of the 1970s and '80s. The BBC has an excellent rundown of his policy proposals, which included, among other things, renationalizing Britain's railroads, abolishing tuition for British universities, and imposing rent controls to deal with Britain's affordable housing problem. He's even suggested reopening the coal mines that used to be a big part of Britain's economy.

”The reason we are losing ground to the right today is because the message of what socialism is and what it can achieve in people's daily lives has been steadily diluted," Corbyn said in a March 2016 speech. ”Unless progressive parties and movements break with that failed economic and political establishment it is the siren voices of the populist far-right that will fill the gap."

Corbyn's year-plus of Labour leadership has been something of a test case for this theory. So far, it has failed utterly.

When Corbyn took control of Labour leadership last September, UKIP — Britain's far-right, anti-EU party — had been in decline, netting around 10 percent in the Britain Elects poll aggregator. By the June 2016 Brexit vote over whether to leave the EU, UKIP's numbers had risen to a little over 15 percent.

Corbyn and Labour publicly supported staying in the EU, but didn't campaign for it particularly hard. It may not have mattered: Eric Kaufmann, a professor at the University of London who studies populism, looked at what Brexit voters said were the ”most important" issues facing the UK. More than 40 percent said immigration; a scant 5 percent said ”poverty and inequality."

According to Kaufmann, this reflects an uncomfortable truth: The kind of voter who's attracted to the far right just doesn't care a whole lot about inequality and redistribution, Corbyn's signature issues. Tacking left to win them over, as Corbyn has, is ”a bad idea," he told me in a phone conversation.

Tacking left has definitely been bad for Labour, which has stunningly low levels of public support. Only 24 percent of Britons approve of Corbyn's performance, according to the pollster Ipsos MORI, while 62 percent disapprove. This leaves him with net approval rating of -38, the worst any UK opposition leader from any party has recorded at this point in their tenure in the past 35 years of Ipsos polling. Another poll, from YouGov, found that 24 percent of Britons backed Labour — its lowest numbers in YouGov polling since the party was in government in 2009.

Let that sink in for a second. Corbyn's Labour Party is polling as badly today as it was when it was in power during a global economic meltdown. It is polling substantially worse than it was in 2005, when British troops were dying in Iraq as part of a war known to be waged on false pretenses. In fact, Labour won a parliamentary election held that year.

Britain Elect's projections say that if an election had been held in early March, the Conservatives would have won by a whopping 13.9 percent. That would be a 4.6-point improvement on their already-large 2015 victory, while Labour would fall from an already weak position by 2.2 percentage points.

”I think it is a serious possibility that Labour has come to the end of its existence," Matt Williams, a scholar of British politics at Oxford University, says. ”Socialism, of some variety, is either not considered viable or is deeply unpopular, and in some cases is both."

One can dispute Williams's judgment here, but several facts are undeniable. During Corbyn's leadership, the far right has gained influence on UK politics, not lost it. Corbyn's policy platform hasn't stemmed the spread of anti-immigrant populism, and the Tories have made restricting immigration a central part of their agenda. Corbyn himself is now pandering to the right wing; he ordered Labour MPs to vote to begin the Brexit process in Parliament. And his numbers keep falling and falling.

On the US, race and socialism (I also wouldn't call Kander a centrist and Bayh had insane name rec and I wouldn't call Strickland a populist but oh well):

There's at least suggestive evidence, as my colleague Andrew Prokop writes, that Sanders misread the election results — that embracing left-wing populism won't, in fact, win over Trump voters.

Take a look at results from several pivotal Senate races. In two Midwestern states, Wisconsin and Ohio, Democrats ran Sanders-esque populists — former Sen. Russ Feingold and Gov. Ted Strickland, respectively. Both lost by a wider margin than Hillary Clinton did in their state. By contrast, the Democratic candidates who most outperformed Clinton's statewide results — Missouri's Jason Kander and Indiana's Evan Bayh — ran as economic centrists.

In 2001, three scholars at Harvard and Dartmouth — Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote — found that the higher the percentage of black residents in a state, the less its government spent on welfare payments.

This, they hypothesized, was not an accident. People are only willing to support redistribution if they believe their tax dollars are going to people they can sympathize with. White voters, in other words, don't want to spend their tax dollars on programs that they think will benefit black or Hispanic people.

The United States is marked by far more racial division than its European peers. Poverty, in the minds of many white Americans, is associated with blackness. Redistribution is seen through a racial lens as a result. The debate over welfare and taxes isn't just about money, for these voters, but rather whether white money should be spent on nonwhites. ”Hostility between races limits support for welfare," Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote conclude flatly in the paper.

Now, it's been a decade and a half since this paper was published, so it's possible the evidence has shifted. I called up Sacerdote to ask him whether any subsequent research has caused him to change his mind. His answer was firmly negative. ”It's almost sad that it's held up so well," he told me.

Another study, by Korea University's Woojin Lee and Yale's John Roemer, used data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) to identify the percentage of white voters who express high levels of racial antagonism in the United States. They then use this to build a statistical model of American elections that, roughly, attempts to measure what percentage of the Republican and Democratic vote can be attributable to the parties' differing opinions on racial, economic, and other issues — and to what extent racial attitudes negatively impact white voters' views of economic redistribution.

Lee and Roemer found that if racism played no role in determining whom Americans voted for, and people voted only on the basis of other cultural and economic preferences, the Democratic vote share between 1976 and 1992 would have increased dramatically. The average national income tax rate, they estimate, would be 11 to 18 points higher, as voters would be more willing to use taxes to finance a European-style welfare state.

”Voter racism," they conclude, ”pushes both parties in the United States significantly to the right on economic issues."

”What Reagan had succeeded in doing was tarnishing liberalism as a giveaway to people of color," Ian Haney López, a professor at UC Berkeley who studies race and American politics, says. ”Investment in our cities, investment in our schools, investment in social welfare programs, all of that was branded as giveaway to undeserving minorities."

The uncomfortable truth is that America's lack of a European-style welfare state hurts a lot of white Americans. But a large number of white voters believe that social spending programs mostly benefit nonwhites. As such, they oppose them with far more fervor than any similar voting bloc in Europe.

In this context, tacking to the left on economics won't give Democrats a silver bullet to use against the racial resentment powering Trump's success. It could actually wind up giving Trump an even bigger gun. If Democrats really want to stop right-wing populists like Trump, they need a strategy that blunts the true drivers of their appeal — and that means focusing on more than economics.

 

[Rentahamster]

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1352201

 

[whyamihere]

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1352201

I searched the title of the article and nothing came up!