How We Feel about Politics Professor Tom Miller, Dept. of English [email protected] and 626-0202  Bookmarks to weekly assignments in this document  Links to online sources o Sources only available on line  How a Socialist and a Populist Crashed the Parties Page 3

 Campaign Exposes Divisions Over Issues, Values and How Life Has Changed in the U.S. (3/31/16).  Voters’ Perceptions of the Candidates: Traits, Ideology and Impact on Issues, (7/14/16)  How do the political parties make you feel?, (6/22/16)  Donald J. Trump’s Nomination Speech  Clinton’s Nomination Speech  Democratic Party Platform  Republican Party Platform  “Unconscious Reactions Separate Liberals and Conservatives”  “How Politics Breaks Our Brains”

 Trumping Conservativism Page 37

 “The Appeal of ”  “The Fact That You’re Going To Die Is Donald Trump’s Biggest Asset”  “95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, From Donald Trump’s Tongue”  “How Should Conservatives Respond to the Age of Trump?”  “The GOP’s Ideological Earthquake and the Aftermath”  Videos not included here: o The Debates between Lincoln and Douglas o CNN Make or Break Moments in Presidential Debates o 1960 Kennedy and Nixon Debate with commentary by Walter Cronkite o 1980 Debate of Reagan and Carter o 1992 Bush and Clinton Debate o 2012 Obama and Romney Debate

 How Much of It is Because She’s a Woman? Page 47

 “Hey Hillary, Here’s Why People Don’t Trust You”  “'s Trust Gap Is Killing Her with Millennials”  “Donald Trump Says Hillary Clinton is Corrupt—Is He Right?”  “Americans’ views of women as political leaders differ by gender”  “Five Ways Sexism Colors Public Perception of Hillary Clinton” o On line: “Gender Stereotyping of Political Candidates”  “Take This Test to See How Biased You are Against Having a Woman as President” o On line: Implicit Association Test  “How Gender Bias Plays a Role in Elections” o On line Implicit Association Tests

E Pluribus Unum? Page 59

 A Wider Ideological Gap Between More and Less Educated Adults  Feelings about partisans and the parties  The roots of partisanship A History of Immigration in America  “The Impact of Immigration on American Society”  “What Makes People Vote Republican?”  “Why Won’t They Listen?” o A History of Immigration in America 2

 Have our Problems Become Too Complicated for Voters to Understand? Page 85

 “Democracies End When There is Too Much Democracy”  “The Complexity Crisis”  “The Great Democracy Meltdown”  “It’s complicated”

 Predicting the Campaign Turnout Page 102

 Differences in Conservative and Liberal Brains - 2012 Presidential Election - ProCon.org  10 Iconic Presidental Campaign Ads that Changed Political Advertising.  Can Social Media Impact the 2016 Presidential Election as Much as Obama’s 2012 Campaign?  2016 Presidential Election Circus: Is Social Media the Cause? o On line The Ad Campaign: Breaking down the messaging powering the 2016 presidential election. o On line Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952-2012 from the Museum of the Moving Image o On line Political Communication Lab Campaign Ads, 1994-2016 Stanford University

 What Did America Say? Page 113

 Demography Favors the Democrats  America’s electoral future: How changing demographics could impact presidential elections from 2016 to 2032. American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institution, and Center for American Progress (2/15/16)  How Demographics Will Shape the 2016 Election is a tool for the true political junkie because it can be used to project how small changes in particular demographic groups would affect results on a state by state basis.

 The Politics of Print, Radio, TV and the Internet Page 117

 Why the Media Love Presidents & Presidents Hate the Media (2000)  The First Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln (1861)  The First Inaugural Address of Theodore Roosevelt (1905)  The First Inaugural Address of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933)  The Inaugural Address of John F. Kennedy (1961)  The First Inaugural Address of Ronald Reagan (1981)

 What Has Politics Come to Represent over Our Lifetimes? Page 135

 Comparing Millennials to Other Generations | Pew Research Center  Generation Gap at the Polls Is Echoed in Attitudes on Budget Tradeoffs | Pew Research Center  Generation X: America’s neglected ‘middle child’ | Pew Research Center  How to Fix Washington: Elect Generation X - POLITICO  Generations and Partisanship | Pew Research Center

 The American Dream—in living color Page 146

 YourMorals.org surveys  moralfoundations.org  Science of Virtues: Evaluation o PDF on line: John Haidt’s Righteous mind Chapter 7 I’m living the dream,  Do you live in a bubble? A quiz just not sure whose.

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 How a Socialist and Populist Crashed the Parties

Campaign Exposes Fissures Over Issues, Values and How Life Has Changed in the U.S. Just 38% of GOP voters say party would ‘solidly unite’ behind Trump The 2016 presidential campaign has exposed deep disagreements between – and within – the two parties on a range of major policy issues. But these divisions go well beyond the issues and extend to fundamentally different visions of the way that life in the has changed. Overall, 46% of registered voters say that life in America today is worse than it was 50 years ago “for people like them,” while 34% say life is better and 14% think it is about the same. Republican and Republican-leaning voters are more than twice as likely as Democratic voters to say life in this country has gotten worse over the past half-century for people like them (66% to 28%). Among GOP voters, fully 75% of those who support Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination say life for people like them has gotten worse, compared with 63% of Ted Cruz supporters and 54% of those who back John Kasich. While Democratic voters generally express more positive views of how life in the U.S. has changed over the past 50 years, those who favor Bernie Sanders are more negative (34% say life has gotten worse) than those who support Hillary Clinton (22%). The latest national survey by Pew Research Center, conducted March 17-27 among 2,254 adults, including 1,787 registered voters, finds higher levels of dissatisfaction – with long-term changes in the country, the federal government, as well as with the economy and personal finances – among Trump supporters than among those who back any other candidate, Republican or Democrat. Overall, there has been no increase in voter anger toward the federal government since before the start of the presidential campaign. Currently, 22% of registered voters say they are “angry” at the federal government, while 59% are “frustrated” and 17% “basically content.” These opinions are little changed from last fall, in Pew Research Center’s major study of attitudes toward government, and from early 2014. Republican and Republican-leaning voters (35%) continue to be more likely than Democrats and Democratic leaners (10%) to express anger at government. Within the GOP, anger at government is heavily concentrated among Trump supporters – 50% say they are angry at government, compared with 30% of Cruz backers and just 18% of those who support Kasich. GOP voters who support Trump also stand out for their pessimism about the nation’s economy and their own financial situations: 48% rate current economic conditions in the U.S. as “poor” – no more than about a third of any other candidate’s supporters say the same. And 50% of Trump supporters are not satisfied with their financial situations, the highest among any candidate’s supporters. The major issues that have emerged in the presidential campaign reveal divisions within the two parties in different ways. But for the most part, the gaps are much wider among Republican voters than among Democrats, especially when it comes to opinions about immigrants and immigration policy, government scrutiny of Muslims in the United States, and abortion and other social issues.

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Overall, 57% of all registered voters say that immigrants in the United States today strengthen the country because of their hard work and talents, while 35% say they are a burden because they take jobs, housing and health care. Republican and Republican-leaning voters are more than three times more likely than Democrats and Democratic leaners to view immigrants as a burden (56% vs. 17%). Among those who support Trump for the GOP nomination, 69% say immigrants are a burden, compared with 51% of Cruz supporters and 40% of Kasich supporters. Fewer than one-in-five Clinton (17%) and Sanders supporters (14%) consider immigrants a burden on the country. Overall, most voters continue to oppose subjecting Muslims living in the United States to greater scrutiny solely because of their religion. Again, GOP voters are divided: most Trump (64%) and Cruz supporters (53%) say U.S. Muslims should be subject to heightened scrutiny; most of those who support Kasich (58%) say they should not. Large majorities of Sanders (85%) and Clinton supporters (75%) oppose subjecting U.S. Muslims to additional scrutiny solely because of their religion. On the other hand, there are differences within both parties in opinions about the fairness of the U.S. economic system. Democrats overall say the system unfairly favors powerful interests, but Sanders supporters (91%) are more likely than Clinton supporters (73%) to describe the economic system as unfair. Among Republicans, a majority of those who back Trump (61%) view the system as unfair, compared with 51% of Kasich supporters and 45% of Cruz supporters. A majority of all voters (60%) say that global problems would be worse without U.S. involvement, while 34% say U.S. efforts to solve problems “usually end up making things worse.” Among Sanders supporters, 45% say U.S. international efforts make things worse, compared with 28% of Clinton supporters. Trump supporters (38%) are more likely than Kasich (27%) or Cruz (25%) supporters to say the same. Trade has emerged as a contentious issue in both parties’ candidate debates, but majorities of both Clinton (58%) and Sanders supporters (55%) say that free trade agreements have been a good thing for the United States. Cruz supporters (48% good thing) and Kasich supporters (44%) are divided, but among Trump supporters, just 27% say trade agreements are beneficial for the U.S, while 67% say they are bad thing. Social issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage, divide Republicans along different lines than do immigration or trade. Far more Cruz supporters (73%) than Trump (53%) or Kasich (50%) supporters say abortion should be

9/20/16 5 illegal in most or all cases. Only about a quarter of Clinton supporters (24%) and 21% of Sanders supporters favor making abortion illegal in at least most cases. Not all issues are so divisive. Among all voters, 71% say that, when thinking about the future of Social Security, benefits should not be reduced (26% say reductions need to be considered). Among supporters of the presidential candidates, majorities ranging from 62% to 73% say Social Security benefits should not be reduced. The 2016 Campaign As the primary campaigns move into a pivotal stage, 41% of Republican and Republican-leaning registered voters say they would like to see Trump nominated as the party’s presidential candidate, compared with 32% who favor Cruz and 20% who support Kasich. Reflecting the pattern seen in several GOP primary contests thus far, Trump nationally draws more support from Republican voters who have not completed college than from college graduates. Kasich’s strongest groups are the mirror image of Trump’s – he fares better among better-educated Republican voters and those with higher incomes. Cruz gets higher levels of support among religiously observant GOP voters than those who are less observant. Among Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters, 49% prefer Clinton, while 43% support Sanders. As has been the case in several primary contests to date, Clinton nationally draws greater support among blacks than whites. Sanders has much broader appeal among young voters, especially young men, than among older voters. As they were in January, registered voters are generally skeptical that any of the presidential candidates would make a good president. Far more voters continue to say that Trump would make a poor or terrible president (59%) than a good or great chief executive (26%). The share anticipating that Trump would be a “terrible” potential president has increased six percentage points, from 38% to 44%, since January. Though viewed less negatively than Trump, more voters also say both Clinton and Cruz would make poor or terrible presidents than good or great ones, while expectations of a Sanders presidency remain mixed. These views are little changed since January. Kasich, meanwhile, is better known than he was in January and more voters view him as a potentially good or great president than did so then (33% now, 13% then). One-in-five voters (19%) say Kasich would be poor or terrible in the White House (24% said this in January), while 39% view him as a potentially average president (up from 32% two months ago.) Presidential primary campaigns are typically bruising affairs, but the current contest has taken an especially heavy toll on Republican unity. Many supporters of both Kasich and Cruz take a dim view of Trump as a potential president. A majority of Kasich supporters (55%) say Trump would be a poor or terrible president, with 36% describing him as terrible. Half of Cruz supporters (50%) think a Trump presidency would be poor or terrible, with 28% saying Trump would make a terrible president. Among Democrats, only about a quarter of Sanders supporters (28%) say Clinton would make a poor or terrible president. GOP voters also are skeptical that the party will unite behind Trump if he is the party’s nominee. Just 38% say the party would “unite solidly” behind Trump, while 56% say disagreements within the party would keep many Republicans from supporting him. That is much lower than the share of Republican voters who expected the party to unite behind (65%) and John McCain (64%) at comparable points in the 2012 and 2008 nomination campaigns. By contrast, most Democratic voters (64%) think their party will solidly unite behind Clinton if she is the nominee. In March 2008, about as many Democrats (66%) said the party would unite behind if he won the Democratic nomination.

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Thus far, the 2016 presidential campaign has attracted very high levels of interest – fully 85% of registered voters say they have given “quite a lot” of thought to the election. That is higher than the shares of voters who said they had given a great deal of thought to the election at this point in 2012 (66%) and 2008 (78%). Yet the primary process gets relatively low marks from voters in both parties, with the notable exception of Trump supporters. Just 35% of registered voters – including 42% of Republicans and 30% of Democrats – view the primary system as a good way of determining the best-qualified nominees. Among Trump supporters, however, 60% have a positive view of the primary process, compared with no more than about 40% of the supporters of any other candidate. There also is general agreement among the supporters of the remaining candidates – again, with the exception of Trump backers – that the billionaire has received too much press coverage. Overall, 75% of voters say news organizations have given too much coverage to Trump. No more than about four-in-ten say that about any of the other candidates (41% say Clinton has gotten too much coverage). In a campaign that has been punctuated by harsh personal attacks, about two-thirds of voters (68%) say that “personally insulting political opponents is never fair game;” only 30% say personal attacks are sometimes fair game. Two-thirds or more of supporters of all candidates — with the exception of Trump supporters — say personal attacks are off-limits; Trump supporters are more divided (47% say they are sometimes fair game, while 51% say they never are). The Political Landscape With less than a year to go in his presidency, Barack Obama’s job rating is in positive territory for the first time in nearly three years. Currently, 51% of the public approves of the way Obama is handling his job as president, while 44% disapprove. In January, Obama’s job ratings were more mixed (46% approve vs. 48% disapprove). The public’s views of the nation’s economy are little changed from December: 29% view economic conditions as excellent or good, 43% say they are only fair, while 28% say they are poor. As was the case in December, economic optimism remains somewhat limited. Currently, 22% say they expect conditions to be better a year from now, 17% say they will be worse and 55% say they will be the same. The public’s perceptions of the Republican and Democratic parties have shown little change over the past year. A majority of Americans (54%) say the Republican Party is “too extreme,” which is unchanged since last fall. Fewer (37%) continue to describe the Democratic Party as too extreme. Similarly, perceptions of whether the parties are tolerant and open to all groups of people, care about the middle class and have good policy ideas have changed little since February 2015. About twice as many view the Democratic Party as tolerant and open than describe the GOP this way (65% vs. 32%). More also say the Democratic Party cares about the middle class (61%) and has good policy ideas (53%) than say this about the Republican Party (43% and 45%, respectively). Next Sections of Survey: 1. Views of the primaries, press coverage of candidates, attitudes about government and the country 2. Views on immigration, diversity, and social issues 3. Views on economy, government services, trade

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Voters’ Perceptions of the Candidates: Traits, Ideology and Impact on Issues, (7/14/16) Few voters ‘check the box’ on positive descriptions of candidates A new national survey finds that when voters are asked to “check the box” on words and phrases describing Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, relatively small percentages express positive views of either presidential candidate. Just 18% of registered voters check the description “someone you admire” for Clinton and even fewer (10%) indicate that this description applies to Trump. Few voters also associate the word “honest” with either Trump (19%) or Clinton (13%). This also is the case for the phrase “can unite the country” – 19% indicate that this describes Trump, while 17% check it for Clinton. Clinton is viewed more positively – and less negatively – than Trump in several dimensions. About a third (36%) checks “well-informed” for Clinton, compared with 13% who do so for Trump. And while 36% associate the phrase “willing to work with people they disagree with” to Clinton, just 20% indicate that it applies to Trump. The largest gap between perceptions of Clinton and Trump is over whether the word “extreme” applies to each. More than half of voters (55%) indicate that this description applies to Trump, while just 19% associate it with Clinton.

The new survey was conducted June 7-July 5 among 4,602 adults, including 3,834 registered voters, on the Pew Research Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel. This survey differs from many online and telephone surveys that ask voters to compare the candidates’ traits and characteristics – who is more honest or better informed – or if various traits do or do not apply to each candidate. In this case, respondents were given the list of nine descriptions and were asked to separately check all that describe Clinton and Trump. As we have noted previously, results from self-administered surveys often differ from interviewer-administered surveys. This particular format – asking voters to “check all that apply” – could result in smaller percentages of respondents identifying candidates with positive or negative traits than do other surveys that ask explicitly if the traits do or do not describe each candidate. A recent national survey by Pew Research Center included head-to- head comparisons of the candidates’ traits: 56% of registered voters said Clinton was better described by the phrase “personally qualified to be president,” while just 30% said this better described Trump. Clinton also held an advantage on having good judgment in a crisis (53%-36%). In evaluations of which candidate was better described as “honest and truthful,” 40% said Trump, 37% Clinton, while a sizable minority (20%) volunteered neither.

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Supporters’ views of the candidates Both Clinton and Trump are viewed more positively by voters who support them in the general election than those who do not. Even among their supporters, however, views of the candidates are not all that positive. Most Clinton supporters associate her with the phrases “well-informed” and “willing to work with people she disagrees with” (64% each). But far fewer Clinton supporters ascribe other positive traits to their candidate. Only about a third of voters who favor Clinton in a general election contest against Trump indicate that Clinton “has deeply held beliefs” (34%), is “someone you admire” (34%) and “can unite the country” (33%). Just 24% of Clinton supporters check the term “honest” as a description of their candidate. Yet Trump’s supporters are even less positive about their candidate than Clinton’s backers are about theirs. There is no positive trait that a majority of Trump supporters ascribe to their candidate. While 64% of Clinton supporters associate Clinton with the description “well-informed,” fewer than half as many Trump supporters (29%) think this phrase fits Trump. Trump supporters are far more likely than Clinton supporters to associate the term “extreme” with their candidate. About four-in-ten Trump supporters (42%) check off “extreme” as a description of Trump, compared with just 6% of Clinton supporters who associate that term with their candidate. Lingering effects from primaries Both Clinton and Trump are viewed less positively among voters who supported other candidates in the primaries than among their own primary supporters. Among Democratic-leaning registered voters who say they backed Bernie Sanders in the party primaries, just one-in-five indicate that Clinton is someone they admire or associate Clinton with the phrase “can unite the country” (20% each) and 11% associate her with the word “honest.” Far higher shares of Democratic voters who say they backed Clinton in the primaries say all three traits apply to her, though only about a third of Clinton primary backers check off “honest” as a description for her. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning voters, majorities of those who backed Trump in the primaries indicate that the terms “can unite the country” (59%) and “honest” (55%) apply to Trump. Only about two-in-ten Republicans who say they supported other candidates for the GOP nomination associate these terms with Trump (20% honest, 19% can unite the country). Trump and Clinton supporters’ views of the opposing candidate Both Clinton and Trump supporters see the opposing candidate negatively. Nearly eight-in-ten Clinton supporters (79%) offer that

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Trump has poor judgment, while a comparable share of Trump supporters associate this trait with Clinton (77%). Almost two-thirds (64%) of Clinton voters describe the presumptive GOP nominee as “out of touch.” Nearly six-in-ten Trump supporters (57%) check off this description of Clinton. However, while a sizable majority of Clinton supporters (68%) check the word “extreme” as a description of Trump, just a third of Trump supporters indicate that this description applies to Clinton.

Very few Trump voters or Clinton voters assign positive attributes to the other candidate. Most of these assessments number in the single digits, including the 1% of Clinton supporters who offer that Trump is well-informed and 8% of Trump supporters who report this of Clinton. Perceptions of the candidates’ ideologies Most voters (58%) say Clinton has liberal views on almost all or most issues. Just 28% say Clinton has a mix of liberal and conservative positions and 10% think Clinton has conservative issue positions. Perceptions of Trump’s ideology are more divided: 44% say he has conservative views on almost all issues or most issues, while 40% say he has a mix of conservative and liberal positions. Just 11% say he takes all or mostly liberal positions. Trump and Clinton supporters differ substantially in their views of Clinton’s ideology, while the gaps are much more modest in perceptions of Trump’s ideology. About eight-in-ten Trump voters (78%) describe Clinton as having at least mostly liberal views, with 59% saying that she has liberal views on almost all issues. Among Clinton supporters, 33% say she takes liberal positions on at least most issues and just 9% say she takes liberal positions on almost all issues. In assessing Trump’s ideology, identical shares of Trump and Clinton supporters (45% each) say he has conservative views on most or almost all issues. But more Clinton than Trump supporters say Trump is conservative on almost all issues (21% vs. 10%). Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters who say they backed Bernie Sanders for the party’s nomination view Clinton’s ideology fairly similarly as do those who backed Clinton in the primaries. Among Clinton primary supporters, 44% say she has at least mostly liberal views while nearly as many say has a mix of conservative and liberal positions (40%). Among Sanders primary supporters, more say Clinton has mixed views (50%) than liberal views (40%).

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Among Republican and Republican-leaning voters, those who say they backed Trump in the primaries are more likely than those who supported other candidates to say he has conservative views on almost all or most issues (53% vs. 41%). Views of the candidates’ impact on issues Voters are broadly skeptical that, if elected, Clinton or Trump would achieve progress on major issues facing the country. Asked to look ahead a few years, fewer than half say things would get even a little better on six different issues – ranging from the economy to foreign policy – under either a Clinton or Trump administration. In general, higher percentages say all six issues will get at least a little better in coming years under Trump than Clinton. However, on five of the six issues, comparable percentages feel that things would get worse under Trump as under Clinton. And far more voters say foreign policy would get worse under a Trump presidency (49%) than under a Clinton administration (34%). Across the six issues, more voters expect say things would not change much under Clinton than under Trump. Roughly a third of voters say that on issues ranging from security from terrorism (36%) to the budget deficit (31%), things will not be much different in the years ahead than they are today. In assessing a possible Trump presidency, smaller percentages – no more than about one-in-five –expect little change on any issue. Even many Clinton supporters do not anticipate much change if Clinton were to become president. On immigration and security from terrorism, for example, about as many Clinton supporters expect things to get better if she becomes president (49% immigration, 46% terrorism) as say things would be little different (43% immigration, 45% terrorism). On the other hand, Trump supporters are more likely than Clinton supporters to expect improvement on every issue if Trump becomes president. Fully 86% of Trump supporters expect immigration to get better under a Trump presidency, including 58% who say it would get a lot better. Nearly as many Trump supporters (83%) expect security from terrorism to improve, with 53% saying it would get a lot better. Methodology

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How do the political parties make you feel?, (6/22/16) Republicans and Democrats have strong negative reactions to the opposing party. Feelings of frustration are most common – 58% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans feel frustrated by the other party. But large shares also react with fear and anger toward the other party. A majority of Democrats (55%) say the GOP makes them feel afraid, while 49% of Republicans say the same about the Democratic Party. And nearly half of Democrats (47%) and Republicans (46%) say the other party makes them feel angry. Overwhelming majorities in both parties (87% in each) have at least one of these negative feelings about the other party – frustration, fear or anger. When thinking about their own parties, substantial majorities of both Democrats (73%) and Republicans (64%) say their parties make them feel hopeful. But far fewer say their own parties stir feelings of enthusiasm or pride. Only about a quarter of Democrats (26%) and a similar share of Republicans (23%) say their party makes them feel enthusiastic. Roughly a quarter of Democrats (26%) also say their party makes them feel proud, while fewer Republicans (16%) say the same about their party. Republicans are more likely to say that their party engenders frustration than say it makes them feel enthusiastic or proud. A third of Republicans (33%) say the GOP makes them feel frustrated. By comparison, just 13% of Democrats express frustration with their party. Very few partisans feel afraid or angry toward their own party. And only tiny shares in each party say the other party makes them feel hopeful, enthusiastic or proud. Highly politically engaged are most likely to be afraid of other party Those who are more politically active are significantly more likely to be express negative emotions about the other party – particularly to say that it makes them feel afraid or angry. Among highly politically engaged Republicans – those who say they vote regularly and have volunteered for or donated to a political campaign in the past year – 62% say that the Democratic Party makes them feel afraid. Among those moderately engaged (those who vote regularly, but do not participate in or donate to campaigns) 51% are afraid. And among the least engaged Republicans (irregular voters or those not registered to vote), just 37% say they are afraid of the Democratic Party. The pattern is similar among Democrats. Fully 70% of highly engaged Democrats say they are afraid of the Republican Party, compared with 46% of Democrats who do not vote regularly or are not registered. Similarly, political engagement is associated with anger at the other party: 58% of both Democrats and Republicans who are highly politically engaged are angered by the other party; fewer than half of those who are less engaged say the same. On the other hand, frustration with the other party is not associated with political engagement: About six-in-ten of those in both parties, regardless of how actively they participate in politics, say they feel frustrated with the other party.

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Political engagement and feelings about one’s own party Among Democrats, those with higher levels of political engagement are more likely than those who are less engaged to express positive emotions about their party. But among Republicans the differences in positive feelings are far more modest. And Republicans who are more engaged are less enthusiastic about the party – and more frustrated – than are those who are less active. Highly engaged Democrats say their party makes them feel hopeful (83%) at higher rates than less engaged Democrats. And while feelings of enthusiasm and pride are not widely felt emotions, those who are the most politically active are more likely to express both emotions about the Democratic Party. Highly engaged Democrats are no more likely than less engaged Democrats to express frustration with their own party (14% vs. 13%).

Among Republicans, the GOP inspires feelings of hope among similar shares of the highly engaged as well as the least engaged (70% vs. 65%). But about a third of the least engaged Republicans (34%) feel enthusiastic about the GOP, compared with 19% of those who are more politically engaged. Relatively few Republicans overall (16%) feel proud of the GOP, and there is no significant difference by levels of political engagement. Highly engaged Republicans are, however, more likely than those who are less engaged to express frustration with the GOP: Fully 45% of highly engaged Republicans say this, compared with a quarter (25%) of the least engaged Republicans. Primary preferences and views of the parties Republican registered voters who supported Donald Trump in the GOP primary are more likely than those who supported other candidates to say that the Democratic Party makes them feel angry (58% vs. 44%). But Republican voters who supported Trump in the primaries are no more likely than those who did not back Trump to say that they feel frustrated with or afraid of the Democratic Party.

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On the Democratic side, voters who supported Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in the primaries are about as likely to say that the Republican Party makes them feel frustrated (59% and 64%, respectively). But Sanders backers are more likely than those who preferred Clinton to say that they the Republican Party makes them feel afraid (68% vs. 55%), and to say that the GOP makes them feel angry (57% vs. 46%). Republican voters who backed Trump in the primaries are more hopeful, enthusiastic and proud of the Republican Party than those who did not support him in the primaries. For example, 75% of those who supported Trump say the party makes them feel hopeful, compared with 59% of Republicans who supported another candidate. On the other hand, Democratic supporters of Clinton and Sanders are about equally hopeful or enthusiastic about the Democratic Party, while those who backed Clinton are more likely than Sanders supporters to say that the party makes them proud (32% vs. 21%). How leaners feel about their party and the opposition Like partisans, independents who lean to the Republican or Democratic Party feel negatively toward the opposition. Eight-in-ten Republican-leaning independents (80%) have at least one negative reaction to the Democratic Party (frustration, anger or fear) as do 87% of those who identify as Republicans. Among Democratic leaners, 75% express at least one of these emotions about the GOP, compared with 87% of Democrats. Democratic leaners are far more likely than Democrats to be frustrated with the Democratic Party. More than a third of Democratic-leaning independents (36%) say they are frustrated with the Democratic Party, compared with just 13% of those who affiliate with the party. Among Republicans and Republican leaners, there are smaller differences in the shares saying they are frustrated with the Republican Party (33% of partisans vs. 40% of leaners). Both Democrats and Republicans feel more positively toward their parties than do leaners. For instance, 64% of Republicans say their party makes them feel hopeful, compared with just 38% of Republican leaners. And while 73% of Democrats feel hopeful about the Democratic Party, about half (52%) of Democratic leaners say the same.

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Donald J. Trump’s Nomination Speech [Video and Photos are available at this link.] Friends, delegates and fellow Americans: I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States. USA! USA! Who would have believed that when we started this journey on June 16th of last year we – and I say “we” because we are a team – would have received almost 14 million votes, the most in the history of the Republican Party, and that the Republican Party would get 60 percent more votes than it received four years ago. The Democrats, on the other hand, received almost 20 percent fewer votes than they got four years ago. Together, we will lead our party back to the White House, and we will lead our country back to safety, prosperity, and peace. We will be a country of generosity and warmth. But we will also be a country of law and order. Our Convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation. The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life. Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country. Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities. Many have witnessed this violence personally, some have even been its victims. I have a message for all of you: the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon -- and I mean very soon -- come to an end. Beginning on January 20th, 2017, safety will be restored. The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its own citizens. Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead. It is finally time for a straightforward assessment of the state of our nation. I will present the facts plainly and honestly. We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore. So if you want to hear the corporate spin, the carefully crafted lies, and the media myths -- the Democrats are holding their convention next week. Go there. But here, at our convention, there will be no lies. We will honor the American people with the truth, and nothing else. These are the facts: Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this Administration’s rollback of criminal enforcement. Homicides last year increased by 17% in America’s fifty largest cities. That’s the largest increase in 25 years. In our nation’s capital, killings have risen by 50 percent. They are up nearly 60% in nearby Baltimore. In the President’s hometown of Chicago, more than 2,000 have been the victims of shootings this year alone. And almost 4,000 have been killed in the Chicago area since he took office. The number of police officers killed in the line of duty has risen by almost 50% compared to this point last year. Nearly 180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our country, are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens. The number of new illegal immigrant families who have crossed the border so far this year already exceeds the entire total from 2015. They are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources. One such border-crosser was released and made his way to Nebraska. There, he ended the life of an innocent young girl named Sarah Root. She was 21-years-old, and was killed the day after graduating from college with a 4.0 Grade Point Average. Number one in her class. Her killer was then released a second time, and he is now a fugitive from the law. I’ve met Sarah’s beautiful family. But to this administration, their amazing daughter was just one more American life that wasn’t worth protecting. No more. One more child to sacrifice on the altar of open borders. What about our economy? Again, I will tell you the plain facts that have been edited out of your nightly news and your morning newspaper: Nearly 4-in-10 African-American children are living in poverty, while 58 percent of African-American youth are now not employed. Two million more Latinos are in poverty today than when President Obama took his oath of office less than eight years ago. Another 14 million people have left the workforce entirely. Household incomes are down more than $4,000 since the year 2000. Our trade deficit in goods -- think of this -- our trade deficit reached nearly $800 billion last year alone. We're going to fix that. The budget is no better. President Obama has doubled our national debt to more than $19 trillion, and growing. And yet, what do we have to show for it? Our roads and bridges are falling apart, our airports are Third World condition, and forty-three million Americans are on food stamps. Now let us consider the state of affairs abroad. Not only have our citizens endured domestic disaster, but they have lived through one international humiliation after another. One after another. We all remember the images of our 9/20/16 15 sailors being forced to their knees by their Iranian captors at gunpoint. This was just prior to the signing of the Iran deal, which gave back to Iran $150 billion and gave us absolutely nothing – it will go down in history as one of the worst deals ever made. Another humiliation came when president Obama drew a red line in Syria – and the whole world knew it meant absolutely nothing. In Libya, our consulate – the symbol of American prestige around the globe – was brought down in flames. America is far less safe – and the world is far less stable – than when Obama made the decision to put Hillary Clinton in charge of America’s foreign policy. Let's defeat her in November. I am certain it is a decision President Obama truly regrets. Her bad instincts and her bad judgment – something pointed out by Bernie Sanders – are what caused so many of the disasters unfolding today. Let’s review the record. In 2009, pre- Hillary, ISIS was not even on the map. Libya was stable. Egypt was peaceful. Iraq was seeing a big, big reduction in violence. Iran was being choked by sanctions. Syria was somewhat under control. After four years of Hillary Clinton, what do we have? ISIS has spread across the region, and the world. Libya is in ruins, and our Ambassador and his staff were left helpless to die at the hands of savage killers. Egypt was turned over to the radical Muslim brotherhood, forcing the military to retake control. Iraq is in chaos. Iran is on the path to nuclear weapons. Syria is engulfed in a civil war and a refugee crisis that now threatens the West. After fifteen years of wars in the Middle East, after trillions of dollars spent and thousands of lives lost, the situation is worse than it has ever been before. This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction, terrorism and weakness. But Hillary Clinton’s legacy does not have to be America’s legacy. The problems we face now – poverty and violence at home, war and destruction abroad – will last only as long as we continue relying on the same politicians who created them in the first place. A change in leadership is required to get a change in outcomes. Tonight, I will share with you my plan of action for America. The most important difference between our plan and that of our opponent, is that our plan will put America First. Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo. As long as we are led by politicians who will not put America First, then we can be assured that other nations will not treat America with respect -- the respect that we deserve. The American People will come first once again. My plan will begin with safety at home – which means safe neighborhoods, secure borders, and protection from terrorism. There can be no prosperity without law and order. On the economy, I will outline reforms to add millions of new jobs and trillions in new wealth that can be used to rebuild America. A number of these reforms that I will outline tonight will be opposed by some of our nation’s most powerful special interests. That is because these interests have rigged our political and economic system for their exclusive benefit. Believe me, it's for their benefit. Big business, elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place. They are throwing money at her because they have total control over everything she does. She is their puppet, and they pull the strings. That is why Hillary Clinton’s message is that things will never change. Never, ever! My message is that things have to change – and they have to change right now. Every day I wake up determined to deliver for the people I have met all across this nation that have been ignored, neglected and abandoned. I have visited the laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of our country. And they are forgotten, but they're not going to be forgotten long. People who work hard but no longer have a voice. I AM YOUR VOICE. I have embraced crying mothers who have lost their children because our politicians put their personal agendas before the national good. (PROTESTER INTERRUPTS) How great are our police? And how great is Cleveland? I have no patience for injustice, no tolerance for government incompetence, no sympathy for leaders who fail their citizens. When innocent people suffer, because our political system lacks the will, or the courage, or the basic decency to enforce our laws – or worse still, has sold out to some corporate lobbyist for cash – I am not able to look the other way, and I won't look the other way. And when a Secretary of State illegally stores her emails on a private server, deletes 33,000 of them so the authorities can’t see her crime, puts our country at risk, lies about it in every different form and faces no consequence – I know that corruption has reached a level like never ever before in our country. When the FBI Director says that the Secretary of State was “extremely careless” and “negligent,” in handling our classified secrets, I also know that these terms are minor compared to what she actually did. They were just used to save her from facing justice for her terrible crimes.

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In fact, her single greatest accomplishment may be committing such an egregious crime and getting away with it – especially when others have paid so dearly. When that same Secretary of State rakes in millions of dollars trading access and favors to special interests and foreign powers I know the time for action has come. I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it. I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders – he never had a chance. But his supporters will join our movement, because we will fix his biggest single issue: trade deals that strip our country of our jobs and strip us of our wealth as a country. Millions of Democrats will join our movement, because we are going to fix the system so it works justly for each and every American. In this cause, I am proud to have at my side the next Vice President of the United States: Governor Mike Pence of Indiana. And a great guy. We will bring the same economic success to America that Mike brought to Indiana. He is a man of character and accomplishment. He is the man for the job. The first task for our new Administration will be to liberate our citizens from the crime and terrorism and lawlessness that threatens their communities. America was shocked to its core when our police officers in Dallas were brutally executed. In the days after Dallas, we have seen continued threats and violence against our law enforcement officials. Law officers have been shot or killed in recent days in Georgia, Missouri, Wisconsin, Kansas, Michigan and Tennessee. On Sunday, more police were gunned down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Three were killed, and four were badly injured. An attack on law enforcement is an attack on all Americans. I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of our police: When I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order to our country. Believe me. Believe me. I will work with, and appoint, the best prosecutors and law enforcement officials to get the job properly done. In this race for the White House, I am the law And order candidate. The irresponsible rhetoric of our President, who has used the pulpit of the presidency to divide us by race and color, has made America a more dangerous environment for everyone than frankly I have ever seen and anybody in this room has ever watched or seen. This Administration has failed America’s inner cities. Remember: it has failed America's inner cities. It’s failed them on education. It’s failed them on jobs. It’s failed them on crime. It’s failed them on every single level. When I am President, I will work to ensure that all of our kids are treated equally, and protected equally. Every action I take, I will ask myself: does this make life better for young Americans in Baltimore, in Chicago, in Detroit, in Ferguson who have as much of a right to live out their dreams as any other child in America? Any other child. To make life safe in America, we must also address the growing threats we face from outside America: We are going to defeat the barbarians of ISIS. And we're going to defeat them fast. Once again, France is the victim of brutal Islamic terrorism. Men, women and children viciously mowed down. Lives ruined. Families ripped apart. A nation in mourning. The damage and devastation that can be inflicted by Islamic radicals has been proven over and over – at the World Trade Center, at an office party in San Bernardino, at the Boston Marathon, and a military recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And many, many other locations. Only weeks ago, in Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist. This time, the terrorist targeted our LGBTQ community. No good. And we're going to stop it. As your President, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology. I must say as a Republican it is so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said. Thank you. To protect us from terrorism, we need to focus on three things. We must have the best intelligence- gathering operation in the world. We must abandon the failed policy of nation- building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria. Instead, we must work with all of our allies who share our goal of destroying ISIS and stamping out Islamic terrorism and doing it now, doing it quickly. We’re going to win. We’re going to win fast. This includes working with our greatest ally in the region, the State of Israel. Recently I have said that NATO was obsolete, because it did not properly cover terror, and also, that many of the member countries were not paying their fair share. As usual, the United States has been picking up the cost. Shortly thereafter, it was announced that NATO will be setting up a new program in order to combat terrorism -- a true step in the right direction.

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Lastly, and very importantly we must immediately suspend immigration from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism until such time as proven vetting mechanisms have been put in place. We don't want them in our country. My opponent has called for a radical 550% increase in Syrian -- Think of this. Think of this. This is not believable, but this is what's happening -- refugees on top of existing massive refugee flows coming into our country under President Obama. She proposes this despite the fact that there’s no way to screen these refugees in order to find out who they are or where they come from. I only want to admit individuals into our country who will support our values and love our people. Anyone who endorses violence, hatred or oppression is not welcome in our country and never will be. Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African-American and Latino workers. We are going to have an immigration system that works, but one that works for the American people. On Monday, we heard from three parents whose children were killed by illegal immigrants Mary Ann Mendoza, Sabine Durden, and my friend Jamiel Shaw. They are just three brave representatives of many thousands. Of all my travels in this country, nothing has affected me more deeply than the time I have spent with the mothers and fathers who have lost their children to violence spilling across our border, which we can solve. We have to solve it. These families have no special interests to represent them. There are no demonstrators to protest on their behalf. My opponent will never meet with them, or share in their pain. Instead, my opponent wants Sanctuary Cities. But where was sanctuary for Kate Steinle? Where was sanctuary for the children of Mary Ann and Sabine and Jamiel? Where was sanctuary for all the other -- oh, it is so sad to even be talking about it because we can fix this problem so quickly -- Americans who have been so brutally murdered, and who have suffered so horribly? These wounded American families have been alone. But they are not alone any longer. Tonight, this candidate and this whole nation stand in their corner to support them, to send them our love, and to pledge in their honor that we will save countless more families from suffering and the same awful fate. We are going to build a great border wall to stop illegal immigration, to stop the gangs and the violence, and to stop the drugs from pouring into our communities. I have been honored to receive the endorsement of America’s Border Patrol Agents, and will work directly with them to protect the integrity of our lawful, lawful, lawful immigration system. Lawful. By ending catch-and-release on the border, we will stop the cycle of human smuggling and violence. Illegal border crossings will go down. We will stop it. It won't be happening very much anymore. Believe me. Peace will be restored. By enforcing the rules for the millions who overstay their visas, our laws will finally receive the respect they deserve. Tonight, I want every American whose demands for immigration security have been denied – and every politician who has denied them – to listen very closely to the words I am about to say. On January 20th of 2017, the day I take the oath of office, Americans will finally wake up in a country where the laws of the United States are enforced. We are going to be considerate and compassionate to everyone. But my greatest compassion will be for our own struggling citizens. USA! USA! My plan is the exact opposite of the radical and dangerous immigration policy of Hillary Clinton. Americans want relief from uncontrolled immigration. Communities want relief. Yet Hillary Clinton is proposing mass amnesty, mass immigration, and mass lawlessness. Her plan will overwhelm your schools and hospitals, further reduce your jobs and wages, and make it harder for recent immigrants to escape the tremendous cycle of poverty that they're going through right now and make it almost impossible to join the middle class. I have a different vision for our workers. It begins with a new, fair trade policy that protects our jobs and stands up to countries that cheat of which there are many. It’s been a signature message of my campaign from day one, and it will be a signature feature of my presidency from the moment I take the oath of office. I have made billions of dollars in business making deals – now I’m going to make our country rich again. Using the richest people in the world, which our country has, I am going to turn our bad trade agreements into great trade agreements. America has lost nearly-one third of its manufacturing jobs since 1997, following the enactment of disastrous trade deals supported by Bill and Hillary Clinton. Remember, it was who signed NAFTA, one of the worst economic deals ever made by our country -- or, frankly, any other country. Never again. I am going to bring our jobs back to Ohio and Pennsylvania and New York and Michigan and all of America – and I am not going to let companies move to other countries, firing their employees along the way, without consequences. Not going to happen anymore.

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My opponent, on the other hand, has supported virtually every trade agreement that has been destroying our middle class. She supported NAFTA, and she supported China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization – another one of her husband’s colossal mistakes and disasters. She supported the job- killing trade deal with South Korea. She has supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP will not only destroy our manufacturing, but it will make America subject to the rulings of foreign governments and it's not going to happen. I pledge to never sign any trade agreement that hurts our workers, or that diminishes our freedom and independence. I will never, ever sign bad trade deals. America fist, again! America first! Instead, I will make individual deals with individual countries. No longer will we enter into these massive transactions, with many countries, that are thousands of pages long – and which no one from our country even reads or understands. We are going to enforce all trade violations, against any country that cheats. This includes stopping China’s outrageous theft of intellectual property, along with their illegal product dumping, and their devastating currency manipulation. They are the greatest that ever came about; they are the greatest currency manipulators ever! Our horrible trade agreements with China and many others, will be totally renegotiated. That includes renegotiating NAFTA to get a much better deal for America – and we’ll walk away if we don’t get that kind of a deal. We are going to start building and making things again. Next comes the reform of our tax laws, regulations and energy rules. While Hillary Clinton plans a massive -- and I mean massive -- tax increase, I have proposed the largest tax reduction of any candidate who has declared for the presidential race this year – Democrat or Republican. Middle-income Americans will experience profound relief, and taxes will be simplified for everyone, and I mean everyone. America is one of the highest-taxed nations in the world. Reducing taxes will cause new companies and new jobs to come roaring back into our country. Believe me, it will happen, and it will happen fast. Then we are going to deal with the issue of regulation, one of the greatest job-killers of them all. Excessive regulation is costing our country as much as $2 trillion a year, and we will end it very, very quickly. We are going to lift the restrictions on the production of American energy. This will produce more than $20 trillion in job-creating economic activity over the next four decades. My opponent, on the other hand, wants to put the great miners and steel workers of our country out of work and out of business — that will never happen with Donald Trump as president. Our steelworkers and our miners are going back to work again. With these new economic policies, trillions of dollars will start flowing into our country. This new wealth will improve the quality of life for all Americans – We will build the roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, and the railways of tomorrow. This, in turn, will create millions more jobs. We will rescue kids from failing schools by helping their parents send them to a safe school of their choice. My opponent would rather protect bureaucrats than serve American children. And that's what she's doing, and that's what she's done. We will repeal and replace disastrous Obamacare. You will be able to choose your own doctor again. And we will fix TSA at the airports which is a total disaster! Thank you. Thank you. We are going to work with all of our students who are drowning in debt to take the pressure off these young people just starting out their adult lives. We will completely rebuild our depleted military, and the countries that we protect, at a massive loss, will be asked to pay their fair share. We will take care of our great veterans like they have never been taken care of before. My just-released Ten Point Plan has received tremendous veteran support. We will guarantee those who serve this country will be able to visit the doctor or hospital of their choice without waiting five days in line and dying. My opponent dismissed the VA scandal as being not widespread – one more sign of how out of touch she really is. We are going to ask every Department Head in government to provide a list of wasteful spending projects that we can eliminate in my first 100 days. The politicians have talked about it, I’m going to do it. We are also going to appoint justices to the United States Supreme Court who will uphold our laws and our Constitution. The replacement for our beloved Justice Scalia will be a person of similar views and judicial philosophies. Very important. This will be one of the most important issues decided by this election. My opponent wants to essentially abolish the 2nd amendment. I, on the other hand, received the early and strong endorsement of the National Rifle Association and will protect the right of all Americans to keep their families safe.

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At this moment, I would like to thank the evangelical and religious community because I'll tell you what, the support they have given me, and I'm not sure I totally deserve it has been so amazing and has had such a big reason for me being here tonight. So true. They have so much to contribute to our politics, yet our laws prevent you from speaking your minds from your own pulpits. An amendment, pushed by Lyndon Johnson, many years ago, threatens religious institutions with a loss of their tax-exempt status if they openly advocate their political views. Their voice has been taken away. I am going to work very hard to repeal that language and protect free speech for all Americans. We can accomplish these great things, and so much more – all we need to do is start believing in ourselves and in our country again. Start believing. It is time to show the whole world that America is back – bigger, and better and stronger than ever before. In this journey, I'm so lucky to have at my side my wife Melania and my wonderful children, Don, Ivanka, Eric, Tiffany, and Barron: you will always be my greatest source of pride and joy. And by the way, Melania and Ivanka -- did they do a job? My Dad, Fred Trump, was the smartest and hardest working man I ever knew. I wonder sometimes what he’d say if he were here to see this and to see me tonight. It’s because of him that I learned, from my youngest age, to respect the dignity of work and the dignity of working people. He was a guy most comfortable in the company of bricklayers and carpenters, and electricians and I have a lot of that in me also. I love those people. Then there’s my mother, Mary. She was strong, but also warm and fair-minded. She was a truly great mother. She was also one of the most honest and charitable people I have ever known, and a great, great judge of character. She could pick 'em out from anywhere. To my sisters Mary Anne and Elizabeth, my brother Robert and my late brother Fred, I will always give you my love. You are most special to me. I have had a truly great life in business. But now, my sole and exclusive mission is to go to work for our country – to go to work for you. It’s time to deliver a victory for the American people. We don't win anymore, but we are going to start winning again. But to do that, we must break free from the petty politics of the past. America is a nation of believers, dreamers, and strivers that is being led by a group of censors, critics, and cynics. Remember: All of the people telling you that you can’t have the country you want, are the same people that wouldn't stand -- I mean, they said Trump doesn't have a chance of being here tonight. Not a chance! The same people. Oh, we love defeating those people, don't we? Love it, love it, love it. No longer can we rely on those same people in politics and in the media, who will say anything to keep a rigged system in place. Instead, we must choose to Believe In America. History is watching us now. It’s waiting to see if we will rise to the occasion, and if we will show the whole world that America is still free and independent and strong. I'm asking for your support tonight so that I can be your champion in the White House. My opponent asks her supporters to recite a three-word loyalty pledge. It reads: “I’m With Her”. I choose to recite a different pledge. My pledge reads: “I’M WITH YOU – THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.” I am your voice. So to every parent who dreams for their child, and every child who dreams for their future, I say these words to you tonight: I’m With You, and I will fight for you, and I will win for you. To all Americans tonight, in all our cities and towns, I make this promise: We Will Make America Strong Again. We Will Make America Proud Again. We Will Make America Safe Again. And we Will Make America Great Again! God bless you, and good night! I love you!

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Clinton’s Nomination Speech [Video and Photos are available at this link.] Thank you all very, very much! Thank you for that amazing welcome! Thank you all for the great convention that we've had. And Chelsea, thank you. I am so proud to be your mother and so proud of the woman you've become. Thank you for bringing Mark into our family and Charlotte and Aidan into the world. And Bill, that conversation we started in the law library 45 years ago ... it is still going strong. You know, that conversation has lasted through good times that filled us with joy and hard times that tested us. And I've even gotten a few words in along the way. On Tuesday night I was so happy to see that my "explainer in chief" is still on the job. I'm also grateful to the rest of my family and to the friends of a lifetime. To all of you whose hard work brought us here tonight and to those of you who joined this campaign this week, thank you. What a remarkable week it's been! We heard the man from Hope, Bill Clinton, and the man of hope, Barack Obama. America is stronger because of President Obama's leadership. And I'm better because of his friendship. We heard from our terrific vice president, the one and only Joe Biden. He spoke from his big heart about our party's commitment to working people as only he can do. And first lady Michelle Obama reminded us that our children are watching. And the president we elect is going to be their president, too. And for those of you out there who are just getting to know Tim Kaine you will soon understand why the people of keep promoting him from city council and mayor to governor and now senator. And he will make our whole country proud as our vice president. And I want to thank Bernie Sanders. Bernie, your campaign inspired millions of Americans, particularly the young people who threw their hearts and souls into our primary. You've put economic and social justice issues front and center where they belong. And to all of your supporters here and around the country, I want you to know I've heard you. Your cause is our cause. Our country needs your ideas, energy and passion. That is the only way we can turn our progressive platform into real change for America. We wrote it together, now let's go out and make it happen together! My friends, we've come to Philadelphia, the birthplace of our nation, because what happened in this city 240 years ago still has something to teach us today. We all know the story, but we usually focus on how it turned out and not enough on how close that story came to never being written at all. When representatives from 13 unruly colonies met just down the road from here, some wanted to stick with the king and some wanted to stick it to the king. The Revolution hung in the balance, and somehow they began listening to each other, compromising, finding common purpose. And by the time they left Philadelphia, they had begun to see themselves as one nation. That's what made it possible to stand up to a king. That took courage, they had courage. Our Founders embraced the enduring truth that we are stronger together. Now America is once again at a moment of reckoning. Powerful forces are threatening to pull us apart. Bonds of trust and respect are fraying. And just as with our Founders, there are no guarantees. It truly is up to us. We have to decide whether we will all work together so we can all rise together. Our country's motto is E Pluribus Unum, out of many we are one. Will we stay true to that motto? Well, we heard Donald Trump's answer last week at his convention. He wants to divide us from the rest of the world and from each other. He's betting that the perils of today's world will blind us to its unlimited promise. He's taken the Republican Party a long way, from morning in America to midnight in America. He wants us to fear the future and fear each other. Well, you know, a great Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt came up with the perfect rebuke to Trump more than 80 years ago during a much more perilous time: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself! Now, we are clear-eyed about what our country is up against. But we are not afraid. We will rise to the challenge just as we always have. We will not build a wall; instead, we will build an economy where everyone who wants a good job can get one. And we'll build a path to citizenship for millions of immigrants who are already contributing to our economy. We will not ban a religion. We will work with all Americans and our allies to fight and defeat terrorism.

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Yet, we know there is a lot to do. Too many people haven't had a pay raise since the crash. There's too much inequality, too little social mobility, too much paralysis in Washington. Too many threats at home and abroad. But just look for a minute at the strengths we bring as Americans to meet these challenges. We have the most dynamic and diverse people in the world. We have the most tolerant and generous young people we've ever had. We have the most powerful military, the most innovative entrepreneurs, the most enduring values, freedom and equality, justice and opportunity, we should be so proud that those words are associated with us. I have to tell you, as your secretary of state I went to 112 countries. When people hear those words, they hear America! So don't let anyone tell you that our country is weak. We're not. Don't let anyone tell you we don't have what it takes. We do. And most of all, don't believe anyone who says I alone can fix it. Yes, those were actually Donald Trump's words in Cleveland. And they should set off alarm bells for all of us. Really? I alone can fix it? Isn't he forgetting troops on the front lines, police officers and firefighters who run toward danger, doctors and nurses who care for us, teachers who change lives, entrepreneurs who see possibilities in every problem, mothers who lost children to violence and are building a movement to keep other kids safe? He's forgetting every last one of us. Americans don't say "I alone can fix it." We say "we'll fix it together!" And remember, remember, our Founders fought a Revolution and wrote a Constitution so America would never be a nation where one person had all the power. 240 years later, we still put our faith in each other. Look at what happened in Dallas after the of five brave police officers. Police Chief David Brown asked the community to support his force, maybe even join them. And you know how the community responded? Nearly 500 people applied in just 12 days. That's how Americans answer when the call for help goes out. Twenty years ago I wrote a book called "It Takes a Village." And a lot of people looked at the title and asked, what the heck do you mean by that? This is what I mean. None of us can raise a family, build a business, heal a community or lift a country totally alone. America needs every one of us to lend our energy, our talents, our ambition to making our nation better and stronger. I believe that with all my heart. That's why "stronger together" is not just a lesson from our history, it's not just a slogan for our campaign, it's a guiding principle for the country we've always been and the future we're going to build, a country where the economy works for everyone, not just those at the top. Where you can get a good job and send your kids to a good school, no matter what ZIP code you live in. A country where all our children can dream and those dreams are within reach, where families are strong, communities are safe and, yes, where love trumps hate. That's the country we're fighting for. That's the future we're working toward. And so, my friends, it is with humility, determination and boundless confidence in America's promise that I accept your nomination for president of the United States! Now, sometimes -- sometimes -- the people at this podium are new to the national stage. As you know, I'm not one of those people. I've been your first lady, served eight years as a senator from the great state of New York, then I represented all of you as secretary of state. But my job titles only tell you what I've done. They don't tell you why. The truth is, through all these years of public service, the service part has always come easier to me than the public part. I get it that some people just don't know what to make of me. So let me tell you. The family I'm from, well, no one had their name on big buildings. My family were builders of a different kind, builders in the way most American families are. They used whatever tools they had, whatever God gave them and whatever life in America provided and built better lives and better futures for their kids. My grandfather worked in the same Scranton lace mill for 50 years. Because he believed that if he gave everything he had, his children would have a better life than he did. And he was right. My dad, Hugh, made it to college, he played football at Penn State and enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor. When the war was over, he started his own small business printing fabric for draperies. I remember watching him stand for hours over silkscreens. He wanted to give my brothers and me opportunities he never had, and he did. My mother, Dorothy, was abandoned by her parents as a young girl. She ended up on her own at 14 working as a housemaid. She was saved by the kindness of others. Her first-grade teacher saw she had nothing to eat at lunch, and

9/20/16 22 brought extra food to share the entire year. The lessons she passed on to me years later stuck with me. No one gets through life alone. We have to look out for each other and lift each other up. And she made sure I learned the words from our Methodist faith: Do all the good you can for all the people you can in all the ways you can as long as ever you can. So I went to work for the Children's Defense Fund, going door-to- door in New Bedford, Massachusetts on behalf of children with disabilities who were denied the chance to go to school. I remember meeting a young girl in a wheelchair on the small back porch of her house. She told me how badly she wanted to go to school. It just didn't seem possible in those days. And I couldn't stop thinking of my mother and what she'd gone through as a child. It became clear to me that simply caring is not enough. To drive real progress, you have to change both hearts and laws. You need both understanding and action. So we gathered facts, we built a coalition and our work helped convince Congress to ensure access to education for all students with disabilities. It's a big idea, isn't it? Every kid with a disability has the right to go to school. But how? How do you make an idea like that real? You do it step by step, year by year, sometimes even door by door. My heart just swelled when I saw Anastasia Somoza representing millions of young people on this stage. Because we changed our law to make sure she got an education. So it's true. I sweat the details of policy, whether we're talking about the exact level of lead in the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, the number of mental health facilities in Iowa or the cost of your prescription drugs. Because it's not just a detail if it's your kid, if it's your family. It's a big deal. And it should be a big deal to you president, too. After the four days of this convention, you've seen some of the people who have inspired me, people who let me into their lives and became a part of mine, people like Ryan Moore and Lauren Manning. They told their stories Tuesday night. I first met Ryan as a 7-year old. He was wearing a full-body brace that must have weighed 40 pounds because I leaned over to lift him up. Children like Ryan kept me going when our plan for universal health care failed and kept me working with leaders of both parties to help create the Children's Health Insurance Program that covers 8 million kids in our country. Lauren Manning, who stood here with such grace and power, was gravely injured on 9/11. It was the thought of her and Debbie St. John who you saw in the movie and John Dolan and Joe Sweeney and all the victims and survivors that kept me working as hard as I could in the Senate on behalf of 9/11 families and our first responders who got sick from their time at ground zero. I was thinking of Lauren, Debbie and all the others 10 years later in the White House Situation Room when President Obama made the courageous decision that finally brought Osama bin Laden to justice. And in this campaign, I've met many more people who motivate me to keep fighting for change. And with your help, I will carry all of your voices and stories with me to the White House. And you heard from Republicans and independents who are supporting our campaign. Well, I will be a president for Democrats, Republicans, independents, for the struggling, the striving, the successful, for all those who vote for me and for those who don't. For all Americans together! Tonight we've reached a milestone in our nation's march toward a more perfect union. The first time that a major party has nominated a woman for president! Standing here as my mother's daughter and my daughter's mother, I'm so happy this day has come. I'm happy for grandmothers and little girls and everyone in between. I'm happy for boys and men. Because when any barrier falls in America, it clears the way for everyone. After all, when there are no ceilings, the sky's the limit! So let's keep going. Let's keep going until every one of the 161 million women and girls across America has the opportunity she deserves to have! But even more important than the history we make tonight is the history we will write together in the years ahead. Let's begin with what we're going to do to help working people in our country get ahead and stay ahead. Now, I don't think President Obama and Vice President Biden get the credit they deserve for saving us from the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes. Our economy is so much stronger than when they took office. Nearly 15 million new private sector jobs, 20 million more Americans with health insurance, and an auto industry that just had its best year ever. Now, that's real progress, but none of us can be satisfied with the status quo, not by a long shot. We're still facing deep-seated problems that developed long before the recession and have stayed with us through the recovery.

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I've gone around the country talking to working families and I've heard from many who feel like the economy sure isn't working for them. Some of you are frustrated, even furious. And you know what? You're right. It's not yet working the way it should. Americans are willing to work and work hard, but right now an awful lot of people feel there is less and less respect for the work they do and less respect for them, period. Democrats, we are the party of working people. But we haven't done a good enough job showing we get what you're going through, and we're going to do something to help. So tonight I want to tell you how we will empower Americans to live better lives. My primary mission as president will be to create more opportunity and more good jobs with rising wages right here in the United States. From my first day in office to my last, especially in places that for too long have been left out and left behind, from our inner cities to our small towns, from Indian country to coal country...from communities ravaged by addiction, to regions hollowed out by plant closures. And here's what I believe. I believe America thrives when the middle class thrives. I believe our economy isn't working the way it should because our democracy isn't working the way it should. That's why we need to appoint Supreme Court justices who will get money out of politics and expand voting rights, not restrict them. And if necessary, we will pass a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United! I believe American corporations that have gotten so much from our country should be just as patriotic in return. Many of them are, but too many aren't. It's wrong to take tax breaks with one hand and give out pink slips with the other. And I believe Wall Street can never, ever be allowed to wreck Main Street again. And I believe in science! I believe climate change is real and that we can save our planet while creating millions of good-paying, clean-energy jobs. I believe that when we have millions of hardworking immigrants contributing to our economy, it would be self- defeating and inhumane to try to kick them out. Comprehensive immigration reform will grow our economy and keep families together. And it's the right thing to do. So whatever party you belong to or if you belong to no party at all, if you share these beliefs, this is your campaign. If you believe that companies should share profits, not pad executive bonuses, join us! If you believe the minimum wage should be a living wage and no one working full time should have to raise their children in poverty, join us! If you believe that every man, woman and child in America has the right to affordable health care, join us! If you believe that we should say no to unfair trade deals, that we should stand up to China, that we should support our steelworkers and autoworkers and home-grown manufacturers, then join us! If you believe we should expand Social Security and protect a woman's right to make her own health care decisions, then join us! And yes, yes, if you believe that your working mother, wife, sister or daughter deserves equal pay, join us! That's how we're going to make sure this economy works for everyone, not just those at the top. Now, you didn't hear any of this, did you, from Donald Trump at his convention? He spoke for 70-odd minutes, and I do mean odd....and he offered zero solutions. But we already know he doesn't believe these things. No wonder he doesn't like talking about his plans. You might have noticed I love talking about mine. In my first 100 days, we will work with both parties to pass the biggest investment in new, good-paying jobs since World War II. Jobs in manufacturing, clean energy, technology and innovation, small business and infrastructure. If we invest in infrastructure now, we'll not only create jobs today, but lay the foundation for the jobs of the future. And we will also transform the way we prepare our young people for those jobs. Bernie Sanders and I will work together to make college tuition free for the middle class and debt free for all. We will also liberate millions of people who already have student debt. It's just not right that Donald Trump can ignore his debts and students and families can't refinance their debts. And something we don't say often enough, sure, college is crucial, but a four-year degree should not be the only path to a good job. We will help more people learn a skill or practice a trade and make a good living doing it.

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We will give small businesses, like my dad's, a boost, make it easier to get credit. Way too many dreams die in the parking lots of banks. In America, if you can dream it you should be able to build it. And we will help you balance family and work. And you know what? If fighting for affordable child care and paid family leave is playing the woman card, then deal me in! Now, here's the other thing. Now, we're not only going to make all of these investments, we're going to pay for every single one of them. And here's how: Wall Street, corporations and the super rich are going to start paying their fair share of taxes. This is not because we resent success. But when more than 90 percent of the gains have gone to the top 1 percent, that's where the money is. And we are going to follow the money. And if companies take tax breaks and then ship jobs overseas, we'll make them pay us back and we'll put that money to work where it belongs, creating jobs here at home. Now, I imagine that some of you are sitting at home thinking, well, that all sounds pretty good, but how are you going to get it done? How are you going to break through the gridlock in Washington? Well, look at my record. I've worked across the aisle to pass laws and treaties and to launch new programs that help millions of people. And if you give me the chance, that's exactly what I'll do as president. But then I also imagine people are thinking out there, but Trump, he's a businessman, he must know something about the economy. Well, let's take a closer look, shall we? In Atlantic City, 60 miles from here, you will find contractors and small businesses who lost everything because Donald Trump refused to pay his bills. Now, remember what the president said last night: Don't boo; vote! But think of this. People who did the work and needed the money, not because he couldn't pay them, but because he wouldn't pay them. He just stiffed them. And you know that sales pitch he's making to be president, put your faith in him and you'll win big? That's the same sales pitch he made to all those small businesses. Then Trump walked away and left working people holding the bag. He also talks a big game about putting America first. Well, please explain what part of "America first" leads him to make Trump ties in China, not Colorado, Trump suits in Mexico, not Michigan, Trump furniture in Turkey, not Ohio, Trump picture frames in India, not Wisconsin? Donald Trump says he wants to make America great again. Well, he could start by actually making things in America again. Now, the choice we face in this election is just as stark when it comes to our national security. You know, anyone -- anyone -- reading the news can see the threats and turbulence we face, from Baghdad to Kabul to Nice and Paris and Brussels, from San Bernardino to Orlando. We're dealing with determined enemies that must be defeated. So it's no wonder that people are anxious and looking for reassurance, looking for steady leadership, wanting a leader who understands we are stronger when we work with our allies around the world and care for our veterans here at home. Keeping our nation safe and honoring the people who do that work will be my highest priority. I'm proud that we've put a lid on Iran's nuclear program without firing a single shot. Now we have to enforce it. And we must keep supporting Israel's security. I'm proud that we shaped a global climate agreement. Now we have to hold every country accountable to their commitments, including ourselves. And I'm proud to stand by our allies in NATO against any threat they face, including from Russia. I've laid out my strategy for defeating ISIS. We will strike their sanctuaries from the air and support local forces taking them out on the ground. We will surge our intelligence so we detect and prevent attacks before they happen. We will disrupt their efforts online to reach and radicalize young people in our country. It won't be easy or quick, but make no mistake we will prevail. Now, Donald Trump, Donald Trump says, and this is a quote, "I know more about ISIS than the generals do." No, Donald, you don't. He thinks he knows more than our military because he claimed our armed forces are a disaster. Well, I've had the privilege to work closely with our troops and our veterans for many years, including as a senator on the Armed Services Committee, and I know how wrong he is. Our military is a national treasure. We entrust our commander in chief to make the hardest decisions our nation faces, decisions about war and peace, life and death. A president 9/20/16 25 should respect the men and women who risk their lives to serve our country...including Captain Khan and the sons of Tim Kaine and Mike Pence, both Marines. So just ask yourself, do you really think Donald Trump has the temperament to be commander in chief? Donald Trump can't even handle the rough and tumble of a presidential campaign. He loses his cool at the slightest provocation, when he's gotten a tough question from a reporter, when he's challenged in a debate, when he sees a protester at a rally. Imagine, if you dare, imagine, imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis. A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons! I can't put it any better than Jackie Kennedy did after the Cuban Missile Crisis. She said that what worried President Kennedy during that very dangerous time was that a war might be started not by big men with self-control and restraint, but by little men, the ones moved by fear and pride. America's strength doesn't come from lashing out. It relies on smarts, judgment, cool resolve and the precise and strategic application of power. And that's the kind of commander in chief I pledge to be. And if we're serious about keeping our country safe, we also can't afford to have a president who's in the pocket of the gun lobby. I'm not here to repeal the Second Amendment. I'm not here to take away your guns. I just don't want you to be shot by someone who shouldn't have a gun in the first place. We will work tirelessly with responsible gun owners to pass common sense reforms and keep guns out of the hands of criminals, terrorists and all others who would do us harm. You know, for decades people have said this issue was too hard to solve and the politics too hot to touch. But I ask you, how can we just stand by and do nothing? You heard, you saw family members of people killed by gun violence, on this stage. You heard, you saw family members of police officers killed in the line of duty because they were outgunned by criminals. I refuse to believe we can't find common ground here. We have to heal the divides in our country, not just on guns, but on race, immigration and more. And that starts with listening, listening to each other, trying as best we can to walk in each other's shoes. So let's put ourselves in the shoes of young black and Latino men and women who face the effects of systemic racism and are made to feel like their lives are disposable! Let's put ourselves in the shoes of police officers kissing their kids and spouses good-bye every day, heading off to do a dangerous and necessary job. We will reform our criminal justice system from end to end and rebuild trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve. And we will defend all our rights, civil rights, human rights and voting rights, women's rights and workers' rights, LGBT rights and the rights of people with disabilities. And we will stand up against mean and divisive rhetoric wherever it comes from. You know, for the past year many people made the mistake of laughing off Donald Trump's comments, excusing him as an entertainer just putting on a show. They thought he couldn't possibly mean all the horrible things he says. Like when he called women pigs, or said that an American judge couldn't be fair because of his Mexican heritage, or when he mocks and mimics a reporter with a disability or insults prisoners of war, like John McCain, a hero and a patriot who deserves our respect.Now, at first, at first, I admit, I couldn't believe he meant it either. It was just too hard to fathom that someone who wants to lead our nation could say those things, could be like that. But here's the sad truth: There is no other Donald Trump, this is it. And in the end, it comes down to what Donald Trump doesn't get: America is great because America is good! So enough with the bigotry and the bombast. Donald Trump's not offering real change, he's offering empty promises. And what are we offering? A bold agenda to improve the lives of people across our country to keep you safe, to get you good jobs, to get your kids the opportunities they deserve. The choice is clear, my friends. Every generation of Americans has come together to make our country freer, fairer and stronger. None of us ever have or can do it alone. I know that at a time when so much seems to be pulling us apart, it can be hard to imagine how we'll ever pull together. But I'm here to tell you tonight progress is possible. I know because I've seen it in the lives of people across America who get knocked down and get right back up. And I know it from my own life. More than a few times I've had to pick myself up and get back in the game. Like so much else in my life, I got this from my mother, too. She never let me back down from any challenge. When I tried to hide from a neighborhood bully, she literally blocked the door, go back out there, she said. And she was right. You have to stand up to bullies. You have to keep working to make things better, even when the odds are long and the opposition is fierce.

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We lost our mother a few years ago, but I miss her every day. And I still hear her voice urging me to keep working, keep fighting for right no matter what. That's what we need to do together as a nation. And though we may not live to see the glory, as the song from the musical "Hamilton" goes, let us gladly join the fight, let our legacy be about planting seeds in a garden you never get to see. That's why we're here, not just in this hall, but on this earth. The Founders showed us that and so have many others since. They were drawn together by love of country and the selfless passion to build something better for all who follow. That is the story of America. And we begin a new chapter tonight.Yes, the world is watching what we do. Yes, America's destiny is ours to choose. So let's be stronger together, my fellow Americans! Let's look to the future with courage and confidence. Let's build a better tomorrow for our beloved children and our beloved country. And when we do, America will be greater than ever! Thank you, and may God bless you and the United States of America!

Democratic Party Platform Preamble In 2016, Democrats meet in Philadelphia with the same basic belief that animated the Continental Congress when they gathered here 240 years ago: Out of many, we are one. Under President Obama's leadership, and thanks to the hard work and determination of the American people, we have come a long way from the Great Recession and the Republican policies that triggered it. American businesses have now added 14.8 million jobs since private-sector job growth turned positive in early 2010. Twenty million people have gained health insurance coverage. The American auto industry just had its best year ever. And we are getting more of our energy from the sun and wind, and importing less oil from overseas. But too many Americans have been left out and left behind. They are working longer hours with less security. Wages have barely budged and the racial wealth gap remains wide, while the cost of everything from childcare to a college education has continued to rise. And for too many families, the dream of homeownership is out of reach. As working people struggle, the top one percent accrues more wealth and more power. Republicans in Congress have chosen gridlock and dysfunction over trying to find solutions to the real challenges we face. It's no wonder that so many feel like the system is rigged against them. Democrats believe that cooperation is better than conflict, unity is better than division, empowerment is better than resentment, and bridges are better than walls. It's a simple but powerful idea: we are stronger together. Democrats believe we are stronger when we have an economy that works for everyone—an economy that grows incomes for working people, creates good-paying jobs, and puts a middle-class life within reach for more Americans. Democrats believe we can spur more sustainable economic growth, which will create good-paying jobs and raise wages. And we can have more economic fairness, so the rewards are shared broadly, not just with those at the top. We need an economy that prioritizes long-term investment over short-term profit-seeking, rewards the common interest over self-interest, and promotes innovation and entrepreneurship. We believe that today's extreme level of income and wealth inequality—where the majority of the economic gains go to the top one percent and the richest 20 people in our country own more wealth than the bottom 150 million— makes our economy weaker, our communities poorer, and our politics poisonous. And we know that our nation's long struggle with race is far from over. More than half a century after Rosa Parks sat and Dr. King marched and John Lewis bled, more than half a century after César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and Larry Itliong organized, race still plays a significant role in determining who gets ahead in America and who gets left behind. We must face that reality and we must fix it.

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We believe a good education is a basic right of all Americans, no matter what zip code they live in. We will end the school-to-prison pipeline and build a cradle-to-college pipeline instead, where every child can live up to his or her God-given potential. We believe in helping Americans balance work and family without fear of punishment or penalty. We believe in at last guaranteeing equal pay for women. And as the party that created Social Security, we believe in protecting every American's right to retire with dignity. We firmly believe that the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street must be brought to an end. Wall Street must never again be allowed to threaten families and businesses on Main Street. Democrats believe we are stronger when we protect citizens' right to vote, while stopping corporations' outsized influence in elections. We will fight to end the broken campaign finance system, overturn the disastrous Citizens United decision, restore the full power of the Voting Rights Act, and return control of our elections to the American people. Democrats believe that climate change poses a real and urgent threat to our economy, our national security, and our children's health and futures, and that Americans deserve the jobs and security that come from becoming the clean energy superpower of the 21st century. Democrats believe we are stronger and safer when America brings the world together and leads with principle and purpose. We believe we should strengthen our alliances, not weaken them. We believe in the power of development and diplomacy. We believe our military should be the best-trained, best-equipped fighting force in the world, and that we must do everything we can to honor and support our veterans. And we know that only the United States can mobilize common action on a truly global scale, to take on the challenges that transcend borders, from international terrorism to climate change to health pandemics. Above all, Democrats are the party of inclusion. We know that diversity is not our problem—it is our promise. As Democrats, we respect differences of perspective and belief, and pledge to work together to move this country forward, even when we disagree. With this platform, we do not merely seek common ground—we strive to reach higher ground. We are proud of our heritage as a nation of immigrants. We know that today's immigrants are tomorrow's teachers, doctors, lawyers, government leaders, soldiers, entrepreneurs, activists, PTA members, and pillars of our communities. We believe in protecting civil liberties and guaranteeing civil rights and voting rights, women's rights and workers' rights, LGBT rights, and rights for people with disabilities. We believe America is still, as Robert Kennedy said, "a great country, an unselfish country, and a compassionate country." These principles stand in sharp contrast to the Republicans, who have nominated as the standard-bearer for their party and their candidate for President a man who seeks to appeal to Americans' basest differences, rather than our better natures. The stakes have been high in previous elections. But in 2016, the stakes can be measured in human lives—in the number of immigrants who would be torn from their homes; in the number of faithful and peaceful Muslims who would be barred from even visiting our shores; in the number of allies alienated and dictators courted; in the number of Americans who would lose access to health care and see their rights ripped away. This election is about more than Democrats and Republicans. It is about who we are as a nation, and who we will be in the future. Two hundred and forty years ago, in Philadelphia, we started a revolution of ideas and of action that continues to this day. Since then, our union has been tested many times, through bondage and civil war, segregation and depression, two world wars and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Generations of Americans fought and marched and organized to widen the circle of opportunity and dignity—and we are fighting still. Despite what some say, America is and has always been great—but not because it has been perfect. What makes America great is our unerring belief that we can make it better. We can and we will build a more just economy, a more equal society, and a more perfect union—because we are stronger together.

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Republican Party Platform Preamble With this platform, we the Republican Party reaffirm the principles that unite us in a common purpose. We believe in American exceptionalism. We believe the United States of America is unlike any other nation on earth. We believe America is exceptional because of our historic role — first as refuge, then as defender, and now as exemplar of liberty for the world to see. We affirm — as did the Declaration of Independence: that all are created equal, endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We believe in the Constitution as our founding document. We believe the Constitution was written not as a flexible document, but as our enduring covenant. We believe our constitutional system — limited government, separation of powers, federalism, and the rights of the people — must be preserved uncompromised for future generations. We believe political freedom and economic freedom are indivisible. When political freedom and economic freedom are separated — both are in peril; when united, they are invincible. We believe that people are the ultimate resource — and that the people, not the government, are the best stewards of our country's God-given natural resources. As Americans and as Republicans we wish for peace — so we insist on strength. We will make America safe. We seek friendship with all peoples and all nations, but we recognize and are prepared to deal with evil in the world. Based on these principles, this platform is an invitation and a roadmap. It invites every American to join us and shows the path to a stronger, safer, and more prosperous America. This platform is optimistic because the American people are optimistic. This platform lays out — in clear language — the path to making America great and united again. For the past 8 years America has been led in the wrong direction. Our economy has become unnecessarily weak with stagnant wages. People living paycheck to paycheck are struggling, sacrificing, and suffering. Americans have earned and deserve a strong and healthy economy. Our standing in world affairs has declined significantly — our enemies no longer fear us and our friends no long trust us. People want and expect an America that is the most powerful and respected country on the face of the earth. The men and women of our military remain the world's best. The have been shortchanged in numbers, equipment, and benefits by a Commander in Chief who treats the Armed Forces and our veterans as a necessary inconvenience. The President and the Democratic party have dismantled Americans' system of healthcare. They have replaced it with a costly and complicated scheme that limits choices and takes away our freedom. The President and the Democratic party have abandoned their promise of being accountable to the American people. They have nearly doubled the size of the national debt. They refuse to control our borders but try to control our schools, farms, businesses, and even our religious institutions. They have directly attacked the production of American energy and the industry-related jobs that have sustained families and communities.

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The President has been regulating to death a free market economy that he does not like and does not understand. He defies the laws of the United States by refusing to enforce those with which he does not agree. And he appoints judges who legislate from the bench rather than apply the law. We, as Republicans and Americans, cannot allow this to continue. That is why the many sections of this platform affirm our trust in the people, our faith in their judgment, and our determination to help them take back their country. This means removing the power from unelected, unaccountable government. This means relieving the burden and expense of punishing government regulations. And this means returning to the people and the states the control that belongs to them. It is the control and the power to make their own decisions about what's best for themselves and their families and communities. This platform is many things: A handbook for returning decision-making to the people. A guide to the constitutional rights of every American. And a manual for the kind of sustained growth that will bring opportunity to all those on the sidelines of our society. Every time we sing, "God Bless America," we are asking for help. We ask for divine help that our country can fulfill its promise. We earn that help by recommitting ourselves to the ideas and ideals that are the true greatness of America.

“Unconscious Reactions Separate Liberals and Conservatives” by Emily Laber-Warren September 1, 2012 Psychological insights might tone down the bitter feuding between Democrats and Republicans BLUE STATE, red state. Big government, big business. Gay rights, fetal rights. The United States is riven by the politics of extremes. To paraphrase humor columnist Dave Barry, Republicans think of Democrats as godless, unpatriotic, Volvo-driving, France-loving, elitist latte guzzlers, whereas Democrats dismiss Republicans as ignorant, NASCAR-obsessed, gun-fondling religious fanatics. An exaggeration, for sure, but the reality is still pretty stark. Congress is in a perpetual stalemate because of the two parties' inability to find middle ground on practically anything. According to the experts who study political leanings, liberals and conservatives do not just see things differently. They are different—in their personalities and even their unconscious reactions to the world around them. For example, in a study published in January, a team led by psychologist Michael Dodd and political scientist John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln found that when viewing a collage of photographs, conservatives' eyes unconsciously lingered 15 percent longer on repellent images, such as car wrecks and excrement—suggesting that conservatives are more attuned than liberals to assessing potential threats. Meanwhile examining the contents of 76 college students' bedrooms, as one group did in a 2008 study, revealed that conservatives possessed more cleaning and organizational items, such as ironing boards and calendars, confirmation that they are orderly and self-disciplined. Liberals owned more books and travel-related memorabilia, which conforms with previous research suggesting that they are open and novelty-seeking. “These are not superficial differences. They are psychologically deep,” says psychologist John Jost of New York University, a co-author of the bedroom study. “My hunch is that the capacity to organize the political world into left or right may be a part of human nature.” Although conservatives and liberals are fundamentally different, hints are emerging about how to bring them together—or at least help them coexist. In his recent book The Righteous Mind, psychologist Jonathan Haidt of the N.Y.U. Stern School of Business argues that liberals and conservatives need not revile one another as immoral on issues such as birth control, gay marriage or health care reform. Even if these two worldviews clash, they are equally grounded in ethics, he writes. Meanwhile studies by Jost and others suggest that political views reside on a continuum that is mediated in part by universal human emotions such as fear. Under certain circumstances, everyone can shift closer to the middle—or drift further apart. The Fear Factor 9/20/16 30

Psychologists have found that conservatives are fundamentally more anxious than liberals, which may be why they typically desire stability, structure and clear answers even to complicated questions. “Conservatism, apparently, helps to protect people against some of the natural difficulties of living,” says social psychologist Paul Nail of the University of Central Arkansas. “The fact is we don't live in a completely safe world. Things can and do go wrong. But if I can impose this order on it by my worldview, I can keep my anxiety to a manageable level.” Anxiety is an emotion that waxes and wanes in all of us, and as it swings up or down our political views can shift in its wake. When people feel safe and secure, they become more liberal; when they feel threatened, they become more conservative. Research conducted by Nail and his colleague in the weeks after September 11, 2001, showed that people of all political persuasions became more conservative in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, in an upcoming study, a team led by Yale University psychologist Jaime Napier found that asking Republicans to imagine that they possessed superpowers and were impermeable to injury made them more liberal. “There is some range within which people can be moved,” Jost says. More practically, instead of trying to change people's emotional state (an effect that is temporary), astute policy makers might be able to phrase their ideas in a way that appeals to different worldviews. In a 2010 paper Irina Feygina, a social psychology doctoral student at N.Y.U. who works with Jost, found a way to bring conservatives and liberals together on global warming. She and her colleagues wondered whether the impulse to defend the status quo might be driving the conservative pooh-poohing of environmental issues. In an ingenious experiment, the psychologists reframed climate change not as a challenge to government and industry but as “a threat to the American way of life.” After reading a passage that couched environmental action as patriotic, study participants who displayed traits typical of conservatives were much more likely to sign petitions about preventing oil spills and protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Environmentalism may be an ideal place to find common political ground. “Conservatives who are religious have this mind-set about being good stewards of the earth, to protect God's creation, and that is very compatible with green energy and conservation and other ideas that are usually classified as liberal,” Nail says. Moral Scorecards On topics where liberals and conservatives will never see eye to eye, opposing sides can try to cultivate mutual respect. In The Righteous Mind, Haidt identifies several areas of morality. Liberals, he says, tend to value two of them: caring for people who are vulnerable and fairness, which for liberals tends to mean sharing resources equally. Conservatives care about those things, too, but for them fairness means proportionality—that people should get what they deserve based on the amount of effort they have put in. Conservatives also emphasize loyalty and authority, values helpful for maintaining a stable society. In a 2009 study Haidt and two of his colleagues presented more than 8,000 people with a series of hypothetical actions. Among them: kick a dog in the head; discard a box of ballots to help your candidate win; publicly bet against a favorite sports team; curse your parents to their faces; and receive a blood transfusion from a child molester. Participants had to say whether they would do these deeds for money and, if so, for how much—$10? $1,000? $100,000? More? Liberals were reluctant to harm a living thing or act unfairly, even for $1 million, but they were willing to betray group loyalty, disrespect authority or do something disgusting, such as eating their own dog after it dies, for cash. Conservatives said they were less willing to compromise on any of the moral categories. Haidt has a message for both sides. He wants the left to acknowledge that the right's emphasis on laws, institutions, customs and religion is valuable. Conservatives recognize that democracy is a huge achievement and that maintaining the social order requires imposing constraints on people. Liberal values, on the other hand, also serve important roles: ensuring that the rights of weaker members of society are respected; limiting the harmful effects, such as pollution, that corporations sometimes pass on to others; and fostering innovation by supporting diverse ideas and ways of life. Haidt is not out to change people's deepest moral beliefs. Yet he thinks that if people could see that those they disagree with are not immoral but simply emphasizing different moral principles, some of the antagonism would subside. Intriguingly, Haidt himself has morphed from liberal to centrist over the course of his research. He now finds value in conservative tenets that he used to reject reflexively: “It's yin and yang. Both sides see different threats; both sides are wise to different virtues.”

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“How Politics Breaks Our Brains” by Brian Resnick Atlantic Humans are partisans by nature—but there's hope for ways to fight the impulse toward conflict. I'm lying in the metal coffin of an MRI machine, listening to what sounds like jackhammers and smelling my own breath go stale. My head is secured in place. I have a panic button. I won't press it, but I do grip it tightly. Above me, faces flash on a screen. Some are human, others are dolls, and some are digitally blended to be something in between. It's my job to figure out which are which. And as I do, researchers at New York University's brain-imaging center are tracking what goes on in my head. I'm not sick, and we're not here to test my calm in the face of claustrophobia. Instead, I'm a subject for research on a bigger question: Is the human political brain broken?

The NYU team is trying to show that our brains are hardwired for partisanship and how that skews our perceptions in public life. Research at NYU and elsewhere is underscoring just how blind the "us-versus-them" mind-set can make people when they try to process new political information. Once this partisanship mentality kicks in, the brain almost automatically pre-filters facts—even noncontroversial ones—that offend our political sensibilities. "Once you trip this wire, this trigger, this cue, that you are a part of 'us-versus-them,' it's almost like the whole brain becomes re-coordinated in how it views people," says Jay Van Bavel, the leader of NYU's Social Perception and Evaluation Lab. See video at this URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/09/how-politics-breaks-our-brains/380600/

Our tendency toward partisanship is likely the result of evolution—forming groups is how prehistoric humans survived. That's helpful when trying to master an unforgiving environment with Stone Age technology. It's less so when trying to foster a functional democracy. Understanding the other side's point of view, even if one disagrees with it, is central to compromise, policymaking, and any hope for civility in civic life. So if our brains are blinding us to information that challenges our partisan predisposition, how can we hope ever to find common ground? It's a challenge that is stumping both the electorate and the elected officials who represent them. Congressional hearings are hearings in name only—opportunities for politicians to grandstand rather than talk with each other. And the political discussion, even among those well versed in the issues, largely exists in parallel red and blue universes, mental spheres with few or no common facts to serve as starting points.

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But rather than despair, many political-psychology researchers see their results as reason for hope, and they raise a tantalizing prospect: With enough understanding of what exactly makes us so vulnerable to partisanship, can we reshape our political environment to access the better angels of our neurological nature? What does any of this have to do with photos of dolls? The researchers are testing one of partisanship's more frightening features: It allows us, even pushes us, to dehumanize those we categorize as "them." I'm tasked with distinguishing humans from nonhumans, and it's not as easy as it sounds. While some of the faces appear to be normal photographs of men and women, others are warped into something that would have scared me as a child—faces that look like masks. They have no creases in their plasticky skin, and their big, anime-style eyes shine death stares. They are distinctly nonhuman. It's the ones in between that pose the problem, however. A face that's 90 percent human and 10 percent doll is plainly seen as human. But when the face is 50 percent doll and 50 percent human, that's where partisan perspective takes over. For the first trial I am just shown a set of faces, but for the next run, Van Bavel introduces a twist: The faces are divided into two groups. Before I see the first group, the American flag flashes, and I'm told I'm looking at my countrymen. Before the second, a Russian flag appears. These are faces of Russians. As I try to assess which faces have a soul behind them, a dark facet of partisan psychology surfaces. If the face belongs to a team member—in my case, an American—I'm more likely to assign them humanity. I'm less inclined to do the same for Russians.

It's not entirely my fault—or, at least, not the fault of any conscious decisions. Instead, it's just my brain process following a well-worn pattern. When Van Bavel looks at the brain scans of people in his dollhouse experiment, he finds that the brain regions used to empathize with others aren't as active when a person is evaluating faces he or she has been told belong to the other team. Humans' willingness to dehumanize is often mentioned alongside some of the darkest chapters of history—the Holocaust, genocide in Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge—when regimes went to great lengths to build anger against "the other." In my case, the experiment relies on a national identity reinforced since birth. Partisanship allows us, even pushes us, to dehumanize those we categorize as "them." But to create the base "us and them" structure, none of that is needed. The brain is so hardwired to build such groups that Van Bavel says he can turn anyone on the street into a partisan. "I can do it in five minutes with a random stranger," he says. All it takes is a coin flip. "Somebody comes into your lab and you tell them, 'You're part of the blue team,' " he explains. "The next person who comes in, you flip a coin, let's say it comes up the other way. And you say, 'You're on the red team.'" That's it. The teammates never have to meet. Or interact. There doesn't need to be anything at stake. But within minutes, these insta-partisans like their teammates better than they like the other guys. And it shows when Van Bavel puts his subjects through his MRI dollhouse. Red-team members are more likely to see humans when they're told they're looking at fellow red-team faces. Blue- team members respond the same way. Other tests reveal that red-team members remember red-team faces more accurately, and if Van Bavel asks subjects to allocate money, red-team members will pay out more to their own. Team members also have less sympathy for those on the other side, and even experience pleasure while reading about their pain. I'm not just inside the MRI to be stumped by Russian dolls. The researchers are also checking to see if my brain has a conservative or liberal shape. In 2011, a team of British scientists published a paper that found that brain structures correlated with political orientation. Specifically, conservatives tended to have larger amygdala areas—brain matter that plays a role in fear conditioning—than liberals. The results added to a body of research that finds conservatives and liberals have different physiological responses to the environment, and even perceive the world differently.

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At NYU, they're testing that conclusion, and the magnets around me are measuring the volume of my amygdala. Before my MRI, I took a test aimed at giving me a score on the researchers' "system-justification scale," a measure that correlates with one component of where a person falls on the liberal-to-conservative spectrum. People who score high on system justification tend to be patriotic and defenders of the status quo. Those who score low tend to be the rebels. So far, with 100 participants, Van Bavel's group is finding meaningful differences between the brains of high system-justifiers and low system-justifiers. (Colleagues joked that I might want to keep my test results to myself if I wanted to continue working as a nonpartisan journalist in Washington. But—for the record—I'm a lab-certified moderate: "Yeah, you were right in the heart of the distribution, not only in the terms of your system-justification tendencies but also your amygdala volume is very healthy," Van Bavel tells me the day after, laughing.) But when it comes to American politics, how troubled should we be by any of these findings? America's partisan divide is as old as America's democracy. And it's neither feasible nor desirable to hope for a national consensus on every issue. Even if we all worked from the same set of facts, and even if we all understood those facts perfectly, differences of opinion would—and should—remain. Those opinions are not the problem. The trouble is when we're so blinded by our partisanship that it overrides reason—and research suggests that is happening all the time. With just a hint of partisan priming, an Arizona State University researcher was able to instantly blind Democrats to a noncontroversial fact, leading them immediately to fail to solve the easiest of math problems. In the 2010 experiment, political scientist Mark Ramirez asked subjects two similar questions. The control group saw this question: "Would you say that compared to 2008, the level of unemployment in this country has gotten better, stayed the same, or gotten worse?" A separate group saw this one: "Would you say that the level of unemployment in this country has gotten better, stayed the same, or gotten worse since Barack Obama was elected President?" The key difference between the two: The first mentions the time period for assessing unemployment, while the second frames the issue around President Obama. When asked the first question, Democrats and Republicans responded similarly, with most saying unemployment had remained about the same. But among subjects who got the second question, opinions shifted along partisan lines: Around 60 percent of Democrats said unemployment had gotten better or somewhat better, and about 75 percent of Republicans said the opposite. In fact, the unemployment rate increased between Obama's election and Ramirez's study. One can argue about whether this is a fair frame for evaluating this or any president's economic record, but from a raw-numbers perspective, the rise in the unemployment rate between 2008 and 2010 is indisputable. But even giving Democrats that information did not increase the accuracy of their responses. Ramirez's study asked some participants the following question: "The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows unemployment has increased by 4.6 percent since 2008. Would you say that the level of unemployment in this country has gotten better, stayed the same, or gotten worse since Barack Obama was elected President?" Even giving Democrats the facts did not increase the accuracy of their responses. Clearly, the answer is in the sentence that immediately precedes the question. But the mention of Obama launched a partisan mental process that led many astray: Nearly 60 percent of Democrats said unemployment had lessened since Obama's election. Essentially, once Democrats focused on Obama, most of them largely ignored the facts. (About 80 percent of Republicans got the answer right when it was spoon-fed to them, but Republicans tempted to cry victory should be cautioned that researchers have found them to be similarly off base in assessing the economy when one of their own is in the Oval Office.) Ramirez's experiment also reveals that our biases don't completely blind us to information, however. When he gave Democrats the correct unemployment statistics, it did not change their answers, but it did make them less confident in those responses, as reported in a post-test questionnaire. "It tells me that people might actually be processing the information in an unbiased way," Ramirez says. The question, then, is how to amplify that unbiased processing to overcome the partisan blindness. Brendan Nyhan knows just how hard it is to move that mental needle.

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"I had the dream of, if we give people the right information, it'll make a difference," says Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth and contributor to 's The Upshot. But after 15 years of throwing facts in people's faces, Nyhan has found the matter to be much more complicated. In the early 2000s, he cofounded the fact-checking website Spinsanity to combat the "he said, she said" coverage he saw in the media. "I'm very proud of the work we did, but it did illustrate how hard it was to change people's minds, even among the select group of people who were willing to take the time to read a nonpartisan fact-checking website," Nyhan said. More recently, Nyhan attempted to debunk an argument that is growing in popularity but utterly lacking in scientific support: that parents shouldn't have their children vaccinated. Nyhan and his collaborators wanted to convince parents who were against vaccinations that their opposition was unfounded. Working with a large sample of 1,759 parents, the team sent them a variety of material, including pamphlets that explained the lack of evidence linking vaccinations with autism, explanations of the dangers of measles, photos of sick children whose diseases could have been prevented, and a story about an infant who almost died from infection. Some were appeals to pure reason; some were appeals to pure emotion. Nothing worked. One of the interventions—the pamphlet explaining the lack of evidence—actually made anti- vaccination parents even less inclined to vaccinate. "Some of the conclusions of that research people find pretty depressing," Nyhan says. "Myself included." In another study, Nyhan wanted to see if he could find a real-world way to press actual politicians to be better handlers of the facts. In the months leading up to the 2012 election, Nyhan and coauthor Jason Reifler performed an experiment on 1,169 unwitting state legislators. They wanted to see if fact checks could motivate the politicians to be more truthful. A third of the legislators received a letter that contained a veiled threat. It read: "Politicians who lie put their reputations and careers at risk, but only when those lies are exposed." The letter then reminded the politicians that PolitiFact, a fact-checking group, operated in their state. The letter clearly implied, "PolitiFact will be watching you." Another third of the lawmakers received a letter that excluded references to fact checking. The last third received no letter. Throughout the election cycle, Nyhan and Reifler logged the politicians' PolitiFact ratings (from "true" to "pants on fire"). They also had a research assistant comb through the media coverage of each legislator, searching for critical stories. The results, pending publication in the American Journal of Political Science, were limited but promising. Overall, only a very few legislators—27 out of 1,169—were called out on lies. But of those 27, only five had received the threatening letter—less than a third. That's reason enough to research the idea further. "This study was a first step," Nyhan says. "Human psychology isn't going to change," he says. "The factors that make people vulnerable to misinformation aren't going to change. But the incentives facing elites can change, and we can design institutions that function better or worse under polarization and that do a better or worse job at providing incentives to make accurate statements." There's an easier way to help people look past their innate partisanship: Pay them to do it. A 2013 study out of Princeton found that monetary incentives attenuate the partisan gap in answers to questions about the economy. The researchers designed an experiment similar to Ramirez's unemployment study but with a modification: Some participants were plainly informed, "We will pay you for answering correctly." All it took was $1 or $2 to dramatically improve the chances of a right answer, cutting the partisan gap between Republicans and Democrats in half—half! Of course, a mass "pay Americans to pay more attention to facts" campaign isn't happening. So the question, then, is how do we get people to be more objective, without throwing money at them? Jimmy Carter discovered one answer during the 1978 peace negotiations between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The talks were on the brink of collapsing in their final hours, and the prime minister was prepared to walk. That's when Carter directed his secretary to find out all the names of Begin's grandchildren. Carter autographed photos for them and personally gave them to the Israeli leader. "He had taken a blood oath that he would never dismantle an Israeli settlement," Carter later recalled in an interview. "He looked at those eight photographs and tears began to run down his cheeks—and mine—as he read the names."

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A few minutes later, Begin was back at the negotiating table. By appealing to a nonpolitical idea Begin cared about—his family—Carter was able to bring him to a place where he could bend. The technique works even when world peace isn't on the line. Kevin Binning, a University of Pittsburgh psychologist, used it to reshape the way partisans reacted to a 2008 presidential debate. Just two days before the election, Binning assembled 110 self-identified Republicans and Democrats—60 Rs and 50 Ds—to watch a recording of a recent debate between Obama and Republican nominee John McCain. Before they viewed the debate, however, one group of participants was given a list of nonpolitical values such as "social skills" and "creativity," and then asked to write briefly about an instance when their own behavior had embodied one of those values. (The other group also wrote about nonpolitical values, but they were asked to write about how those might be important to other people, not about their personal experiences.) By having one group write about nonpolitical experiences, Binning wanted to get participants thinking of themselves as individuals rather than partisans. The idea was that affirming the human identity would make people would feel more receptive to ideas that didn't align with their worldview. It worked. When Binning asked the participants to judge the candidates' performances, members of that group were more likely than those in the other to give a favorable rating to the opposition candidate. "It's not like all of a sudden I say, 'Well, yeah, McCain actually won the debate,' " he explains, "but we might say, 'Well, yeah, Obama, I think he did have some good points, but McCain may have had some other good points as well. I don't need to just blindly embrace Obama.'” Which seems like the ideal way to converse about politics, right? And it wasn't a one-time effect. Ten days after the election, Binning asked the Republicans in the group what type of president they thought Obama would be. Those who had been part of the group that wrote personally about nonpolitical values before watching the debate were significantly more optimistic about the Obama presidency. So how might we persuade people to set aside their blind partisanship in other contexts? Let's start with a forum in which the stakes are infinitely lower than at the Middle East peace talks but where the partisan vitriol runs every bit as high: Internet comment sections. Comment sections bring out the worst in partisan thinking: ad hominem attacks, people who clearly will not be convinced of the other side, and stubborn arguments where users talk past one another, not with each other. But maybe the structure of comment sections, rather than the people doing the commenting, has turned them into such intellectual sewers—and maybe a tweak or two at the margins could clean them up. "You can think of comment sections as mini-institutions," Nyhan says. "It's a context in which debate is happening, and if we can help people be more civil toward each other, that might be a positive step." Talia Stroud is trying to take that step. As the director of the Engaging News project at the University of Texas (Austin), she leads a research group with the goal of making the Internet more civil for politics. "It's unbelievably difficult," she says. One way to start, her research suggests, is to reevaluate the "like" button, a common feature on comment threads. In the context of a political-news article, "liking" a comment or a post could activate us-versus-them thinking. "Liking" something means you associate with it. It reminds people of their partisanship. "So we did a study where we manipulated whether it was a 'like' button or a 'respect' button," Stroud says. She found that people were more willing to express "respect" for arguments that ran counter to their own. It's "not 'I like what you're saying' but 'I respect it' even though I might not agree with you," she says. "That showed some of the power of really small things and changes that could be easily implemented." A month of speaking to scientists about the political brain produced no shortage of depressing conclusions. Their research reveals our brains to be frustratingly inept at rational, objective political discourse. And those revelations come at a time when elected officials have strong incentives to stay the partisan course, and when the people who elect those officials are increasingly getting their political news through sources pre-tailored to reinforce their opinions.

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But the research is more than just another explanation for our current partisan morass. On balance, it offers a better case for optimism—about Congress, about voters, about your outspoken extremist uncle at Thanksgiving, and about the power of reason in democracy. Because the research is also revealing that our brains, while imperfect, are surprisingly flexible, and that they can be nudged in a better direction. Yes, we wall ourselves off from unappealing truths. But when motivated—by money, by the right environment, by an affirmed sense of self, by institutions that value truth and civility—those walls come down. Outside of the laboratory, people are putting that research into practice, developing civic forums with our mental shortcomings in mind. After a dispute over a coal plant divided Tallahassee, Florida, into furiously partisan camps, Allan Katz, then a city commissioner, decided he had enough. "It was very nasty, it was very contentious, it was very personal," Katz recalls of the 2006 debates. "Facts didn't matter." Katz, who is also a former U.S. ambassador to Portugal, joined with other community members to create the Village Square, which hosts events where the public is invited to discuss ongoing issues with experts and activists. Incivility and non-truths are not tolerated. During debates, the Village Square employs fact checkers to keep people in line. "So people couldn't make shit up," Katz says. There's also a civility bell: If people start yelling, the bell is rung to remind them of their better nature. For the first meeting, 175 people showed up. Now the Village Square is running 20 programs a year in Tallahassee, and it has expanded into St. Petersburg, Kansas City, and Sacramento. In Tallahassee, city officials ask the Village Square to host public forums on divisive issues. "You're not trying to turn liberals into conservatives or vice versa," Katz says. "But the only way to get people to see the other point of view, even if they don't agree with it, is to do it in person." Katz and his fellow organizers are relying on people finding a common humanity, and in so doing, he is playing to one of the brain's great strengths: The same tribal cognitive processes that make it easy to turn people against one another can also be harnessed to bring them together. When people consider themselves to be part of the same team, be it as Village Square participants, as fellow Americans, or even—one might dream—as fellow members of Congress, they do a much better job of dropping their combative stance and processing the world through a less partisan lens. And we make those identity jumps all the time, as our brains are wired to let us do. Sometimes, in the middle of his red team/blue team exercise, Van Bavel will switch a participant from one group to the other. "We say, 'Listen, there's been a mistake, you're actually on the other team,' " he says. "And the moment we do, we completely reverse their empathy. Suddenly, they care about everybody who is in their new in-group." Suddenly, they see the other side.

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 Trumping Conservativism Return to Top “The Appeal of Donald Trump” Psychology Today December 2015 How being risky can be a winning political strategy Why is Donald Trump still leading the polls in the Republican presidential race? The pundits keep expecting him to crash and burn. But Trump continues to lead. And there are cognitive reasons to think he could become the Republican nominee. A lot of explanations have been suggested for Trump’s success. People are angry. He’s saying what people are thinking. People want someone with business experience. I’ve seen some claims that this reflects the racism of the people who prefer Trump. But basic cognitive psychology offers another reason for his success — a reason that may result in Trump leading for a long time. The appeal of Trump may have to do with how the political issues are being framed this year. Do you feel like we need to try something really different, something unusual, something risky? Are you willing to take a risk? Are you willing to gamble with your money, your health, and the future of your country? When does the risky choice become more attractive than the safe choice? What leads people to feel like taking a big risk? Decisions about trying risky or safe alternatives are influenced by the decision frame — the way in which the problem is presented. Framing effects occur when you can bias judgments by how you present a problem. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky earned a Nobel Prize in economics for their work on heuristics, framing, and judgments. They noted that we often frame problems in terms of gains or losses. When a problem is framed in terms of gains or saving things, then people are risk averse — they will prefer the safe choice. When a problem is presented in terms of losses and threats, then people will make risky choices and be willing to take risky gambles. The interesting thing is that most problems can be framed either way. You can focus on what someone can save and gain on the one hand. Or you can emphasize threats and what someone can lose on the other hand. The classic example comes from Kahneman and Tversky. They asked people to imagine that the United States is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual disease that is expected to kill 600 people. One set of respondents was given a choice of 2 options. Option A would save 200 people. Option B would have a one-third probability of saving all 600 people and a two-thirds probability of saving no people. A second group of people were also given 2 options. For these people, Option A results in 400 people dying and Option B has a one-third probability that no one will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die. The cool thing about the two different sets of options is that they are exactly the same. The only difference is in the framing. In the first pair, the options focus on saving people. In the second set, the options focus on people dying. The frame is either on gains/saving or losses/dying. When people are focused on saving people, they are strongly biased toward the safe option — the one in which 200 people are saved. When people are focused on people dying, they strongly prefer the risky gamble — that small chance that no one will die. What does this have to do with politics and Donald Trump? Political climates and issues are always framed. Save our way of life and our values. We have lost our way of life and our values. We need to rebuild our economy for everyone. We have lost our middle class. The unemployment rate is low and most people have jobs. People can’t find good jobs because we have lost them all to other countries. We are addressing the problem of terrorism and the odds of an attack remain very low. We are under a terrorist threat and we could die in a terrorist attack at any moment. Any issue can be presented by focusing on saving and making gains. But the exact same issue can be presented in terms of threats and losses. When people are focused on what they have lost, what they might lose, and the threats they face, they are biased toward selecting a risky candidate. Without making judgments about either political party, I think we can agree that the republicans have been focused on losses and threats for the last several years. Most of the candidates have emphasized threats, fear, and losses (surely some of this is happening on the democratic side as well). This is a situation that may lead people, even conservatives, to feel risky. If everything is lost and threatened, then choose the risky option.

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And why shouldn’t people find the risky option attractive? If you believe and feel that you have already lost so much. If you believe and feel that so much of what you still have is threatened and could be lost. Why choose a safe option? You might save something with that safe option. But so much is already lost and you’ll still lose more even with the safe option. Take the big risk instead. Most likely you’ll lose. But you’ve been losing anyway. The odds are against you. But with the risky option, there’s a chance that you could win. Even if there is only a small chance, you might finally get lucky. You’ve already lost so much, what do you have left? Demagogues prosper in this type of environment. And no candidate is riskier than Donald Trump. He isn’t the normal candidate. He isn’t making the standard speeches. He has no experience in government. He is proposing things that are quite radical. He is the riskiest candidate among a set of unusual options. From a framing perspective, he should be leading the pack. The next several candidates in the polls are also unusual and risky options. These are not the establishment Republicans. Given the focus on threats and losses, I’m not surprised that the next several candidates are also outsiders. No wonder the standard Republican candidates are polling so poorly. They are the safe options. And the way the issues are being framed is not leading voters to safe options. Choose the risk when everything is at risk anyway. Every time the media and candidates focus on threats and losses, people are driven to prefer high risk choices. Every time Trump says something crazy, he confirms his status as the riskiest candidate. The crazy statements don’t decrease his standing in the polls. When the election is focused on threats and losses, the crazy statements lead people to Trump. I’ve regularly seen comments that Trump will drop at some point. The voters will eventually get serious and start really evaluating the candidates. At that moment they will turn toward the safe, standard options. There is some cognitive reason to suspect this could occur. People can either be guided by fast thinking or slow thinking. Fast thinking is guided by biases, heuristics, and frames. Slow thinking involves more rational decision making, but takes effort and is hard to do well. People aren’t engaged in serious evaluation now and thus they are guided by the framing effect. Perhaps later they’ll get serious. Perhaps the voters will engage in slow effortful thinking. Then they won’t be guided by the framing effect and Trump will drop in the polls. But I’m not sure. Yes, people can engage in slow, effortful, and logical thinking. But frequently they don’t. For the risky options to be less attractive, the narrative and framing will have to change. The candidates, pundits, and conservative media need to focus on saving what we have. They have to focus on the positive aspects of our economy, our society, and the international situation. See the glass as half full. Then you can frame the debate about saving what you have and advancing. At that point people will be biased toward the safe options — the more traditional establishment Republicans. Given the last decade of Republican rhetoric focused on loss, threat and fear, I don’t see a change in narrative and framing happening. The longer the election stays focused on threats and losses, the better for the riskiest option in the deck. There are a lot of things that may be contributing to Trump’s ability to stay at the top of the polls. And being risky when people are focused on threats and losses could be a winning strategy. Anyone feel like taking a gamble at the Trump casino? February Update: My predictions based on decision science and framing effects are winning. Donald Trump has now won 3 of the 4 primaries and is in good shape to win several more next week on March 1st. The voters have not yet gotten serious and turned toward the safe options. Instead they are selecting risky options since the frame for republicans has emphasized loss and threat. I think psychological science is making a better prediction this year than political science (the party decides argument means there should be a consolidation behind a safe establishment candidate).

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“The Fact That You’re Going To Die Is Donald Trump’s Biggest Asset, Psychologists Say” Ned Resnikoff (5/21/16) Pundits and academics have been struggling for months to understand the rise of Donald Trump. Some have argued the presumptive Republican nominee draws his power from authoritarian voters, while others say he has successfully capitalized on white resentment. These theories are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and some have considerable overlap. But they only indirectly address the much larger factor that could explain Trump’s ascent. What if the inevitability of death is the key to understanding 2016? For thousands of years, philosophers and theologians have tried to grasp what it means to live in the shadow of death. More recently, psychologists have taken up the challenge as well. Academics working in the burgeoning field of Terror Management Theory have spent the past three decades studying how our knowledge of death’s inevitability shapes every aspect of human life — including our politics. One of Terror Management Theory’s pioneers, Skidmore College professor Sheldon Solomon, has spent his career studying the relationship between people’s behavior and their awareness of their own mortality. In 2015, he decided to examine the particular effect mortality awareness had on support for Trump. The New York billionaire had recently launched his campaign for the Republican nomination but was still far from becoming the presumptive nominee. The results of Solomon’s study were unambiguous. People who were reminded of their own death were far more likely to support Trump. To reach that conclusion, Solomon randomly sorted 152 college students into two groups. The first group was prompted to answer the following question: “Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you.” That was followed with another prompt: “Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die and once you are physically dead.” The other group was asked questions about pain, but not death. After completing these questions, both groups were asked questions regarding Trump’s leadership, and positive attributes. Support for Trump was far higher among people who had been asked to consider their own mortality — no matter their political orientation. Solomon told International Business Times the results of that initial experiment line up with what previous studies have shown. When people are forced to confront mortality, they are likelier to embrace charismatic nationalists. “This has ominous implications for democracy,” Solomon said. How ominous? The answer to that question can be found in the work of Ernest Becker, the grandfather of Terror Management Theory. Becker was largely disregarded by his colleagues throughout his career, and he did not live to see the publication of his most significant work, “The Denial of Death,” in 1973. But a few years later it caught the eye of Solomon and two of his fellow psychology majors at the University of Kansas, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski. Together, Greenberg, Pyszczynski and Solomon have spent much of the last 30 years corroborating Becker’s theories with experimental data. Although Becker was ignored and marginalized in his own time, their work has given him renewed prominence. Their 2015 book The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life synthesizes decades of empirical research into Becker’s central claim that humans spend most of their lives struggling to transcend mortality. Terror Management Theory says people do this in two ways. On the one hand, some try to achieve literal immortality through things like prayer, religious ritual and cryogenic freezing. On the other hand, nearly everyone aims to achieve symbolic immortality through fame, lasting accomplishments or progeny who will carry on their name. People can also achieve a measure of symbolic immortality by dedicating themselves to a grand cause, such as a political movement. Becoming a part of something greater than one’s self can be perfectly benign or even noble. But it also has a dark side. In times of political instability or economic distress, people are drawn to charismatic nationalists who offer them protection and vicarious immortality.

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“Teeming with admiration and sensing a way to feel significant again, people join the cause of the seemingly larger- than-life leader as a revitalized basis of self-worth and meaning in life,” write Greenberg, Pyszczynski and Solomon in “The Worm at the Core.” “Nationalism and passionate affection for, deference toward and identification with charismatic leaders therefore supplies what [Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank] aptly dubbed ‘collective immortality’ to satisfy our aching need for heroic triumph over death.” The authors cite Adolf Hitler as one such giver of collective immortality. Nazism, they note, came to power in Germany while the country was weathering a severe economic depression. Adding to the ideology’s appeal, Hitler vowed he would cleanse Germany of the humiliation caused by the punitive Versailles Treaty that followed World War I’s end. Nazis also “seemed to have a pathological affection for death,” according to “The Worm at the Core.” Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler, as Solomon was careful to stress in his interview with IBT. Many scholars of fascism have classified Trump as a modern right-wing populist, not an outright fascist. But Solomon pointed out the Republican nominee’s rise has been facilitated by global instability, fear of terrorism and illegal immigration, and the lingering effects of the Great Recession. “When Trump declared that he was going to run for president, and he declared that he was going to do so under the guise of making America great again, literally the first thing out of his mouth was that Mexicans are rapists so we’ve got build that big wall,” said Solomon, referring to one of the more incendiary claims from Trump’s announcement speech. “And then he implied that most adherents to Islam are terrorists, so we’ve got to keep them out.” According to Terror Management Theory, fear of death can help strengthen cultural prejudices as people flee deeper into the belief networks that promise them symbolic immortality. Solomon has done research suggesting that Americans experience unconscious thoughts of death more frequently after being asked to contemplate what would happen if undocumented immigrants moved into their neighborhood, or if a mosque were built nearby. “We’ve got a pretty vicious, not so virtuous cycle here, because just the mention of either immigrants or Muslims is sufficient to make death thoughts salient,” Solomon said. “And that, in turn, increases support for charismatic leaders.” He found similar results when studying support for President George W. Bush approximately 10 years ago. Along with Greenberg and Pyszczynski, he ran tests that seemed to indicate the Sept. 11 terror attacks reminded Americans of their own mortality and drove them to identify Bush as the sort of charismatic figure who could extinguish those thoughts. Trump may be an even more potent identification figure than Bush because he has something the former president lacked: a popular reality TV show. Long before he was a political figure, Trump was a celebrity, known for his ostentatious displays of wealth. Both wealth and celebrity also convey a glimmer of vicarious immortality, according to Terror Management Theory. “Trump is bigger than life. He’s had a TV show, he has Trump Tower in New York,” said Greenberg, who teaches at the University of Arizona. “He’s a guy who will leave a legacy. He already seems like an eternal figure who will outlive his existence. In a sense, we all want that. So if we can’t be Trump, we can try to feel connected to him.” Trump’s appeal as a death-denying figure does have limits. While the Republican Party is consolidating around him, polls show he is stillstruggling to make inroads with the rest of the electorate. Now that Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee and Hillary Clinton has almost locked down the Democratic nomination, Solomon plans to run more tests related to the election. But he said it’s possible that the threat of a Trump presidency could make fearful liberals more, not less, conscious of their own mortality. “At least in our studies of 2004, death reminders made all Americans, regardless of political affiliation, support President Bush more than [Democratic challenger John] Kerry. But it is not inconceivable that it could go both ways this year,” he said. If that turns out to be the case, then humankind’s terror of mortality could work against Donald Trump just as much as it works for him.

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“95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, From Donald Trump’s Tongue” by Patrick Healy and Maggie Habermandec New York Times (12/5/15) “Something bad is happening,” Donald J. Trump warned New Hampshire voters Tuesday night, casting suspicions on Muslims and mosques. “Something really dangerous is going on.” On Thursday evening, his message was equally ominous, as he suggested a link between the shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., and President Obama’s failure to say “radical Islamic terrorism.” “There is something going on with him that we don’t know about,” Mr. Trump said of the president, drawing applause from the crowd in Washington. The dark power of words has become the defining feature of Mr. Trump’s bid for the White House to a degree rarely seen in modern politics, as he forgoes the usual campaign trappings — policy, endorsements, commercials, donations — and instead relies on potent language to connect with, and often stoke, the fears and grievances of Americans. The New York Times analyzed every public utterance by Mr. Trump over the past week from rallies, speeches, interviews and news conferences to explore the leading candidate’s hold on the Republican electorate for the past five months. The transcriptions yielded 95,000 words and several powerful patterns, demonstrating how Mr. Trump has built one of the most surprising political movements in decades and, historians say, echoing the appeals of some demagogues of the past century. Mr. Trump’s breezy stage presence makes him all the more effective because he is not as off-putting as those raging men of the past, these experts say. The most striking hallmark was Mr. Trump’s constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery that American presidents rarely use, based on a quantitative comparison of his remarks and the news conferences of recent presidents, Democratic and Republican. He has a particular habit of saying “you” and “we” as he inveighs against a dangerous “them” or unnamed other — usually outsiders like illegal immigrants (“they’re pouring in”), Syrian migrants (“young, strong men”) and Mexicans, but also leaders of both political parties. At an event in Raleigh, N.C., on Friday evening, his voice scratchy and hoarse, Mr. Trump was asked by a 12-year- old girl from Virginia, “I’m scared — what are you going to do to protect this country?” “You know what, darling? You’re not going to be scared anymore. They’re going to be scared. You’re not going to be scared,” Mr. Trump said, before describing the Sept. 11 terrorists as “animals” who sent their families back to the Middle East. “We never went after them. We never did anything. We have to attack much stronger. We have to be more vigilant. We have to be much tougher. We have to be much smarter, or it’s never, ever going to end.” While many candidates appeal to the passions and patriotism of their crowds, Mr. Trump appears unrivaled in his ability to forge bonds with a sizable segment of Americans over anxieties about a changing nation, economic insecurities, ferocious enemies and emboldened minorities (like the first black president, whose heritage and intelligence he has all but encouraged supporters to malign). “ ‘We vs. them’ creates a threatening dynamic, where ‘they’ are evil or crazy or ignorant and ‘we’ need a candidate who sees the threat and can alleviate it,” said Matt Motyl, a political psychologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who is studying how the 2016 presidential candidates speak. “He appeals to the masses and makes them feel powerful again: ‘We’ need to build a wall on the Mexican border — not ‘I,’ but ‘we.’ ” In another pattern, Mr. Trump tends to attack a person rather than an idea or a situation, like calling political opponents “stupid” (at least 30 times), “horrible” (14 times), “weak” (13 times) and other names, and criticizing foreign leaders, journalists and so-called anchor babies. He bragged on Thursday about psyching out Jeb Bush by repeatedly calling him “low-energy,” but he spends far less time contrasting Mr. Bush’s policies with his own proposals, which are scant.” And on Friday night in Raleigh, he mocked people who reportedly did not contact the authorities with concerns about the California shooting suspects for fear of racial profiling. “Can anybody be that dumb?” Mr. Trump said. “We have become so politically correct that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing. We don’t know what we’re doing.” 9/20/16 42

The specter of violence looms over much of his speech, which is infused with words like kill, destroy and fight. For a man who speaks off the cuff, he always remembers to bring up the Islamic State’s “chopping off heads.” And he has expressed enthusiasm for torturing enemies beyond waterboarding. Last month, after several men hit a Black Lives Matter protester at one of his rallies, Mr. Trump said, “Maybe he should have been roughed up.” “Such statements and accusations make him seem like a guy who can and will cut through all the b.s. and do what in your heart you know is right — and necessary,” said Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University, echoing the slogan that Barry Goldwater used in his 1964 presidential campaign. And Mr. Trump uses rhetoric to erode people’s trust in facts, numbers, nuance, government and the news media, according to specialists in political rhetoric. “Nobody knows,” he likes to declare, where illegal immigrants are coming from or the rate of increase of health care premiums under the Affordable Care Act, even though government agencies collect and publish this information. He insists that Mr. Obama wants to accept 250,000 Syrian migrants, even though no such plan exists, and repeats discredited rumors that thousands of Muslims were cheering in New Jersey during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He promises to “bomb the hell” out of enemies — invoking Hiroshima and Nagasaki — and he says he would attack his political opponents “10 times as hard” as they criticize him. (Mr. Trump, who also pledges to build up the military to show American toughness, will hold a rally on Monday on the aircraft carrier Yorktown in South Carolina to commemorate the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.) And as much as he likes the word “attack,” the Times analysis shows, he often uses it to portray himself as the victim of cable news channels and newspapers that, he says, do not show the size of his crowds. Mr. Trump declined a request to be interviewed for this article. This pattern of elevating emotional appeals over rational ones is a rhetorical style that historians, psychologists and political scientists placed in the tradition of political figures like Goldwater, George Wallace, Joseph McCarthy, Huey Long and Pat Buchanan, who used fiery language to try to win favor with struggling or scared Americans. Several historians watched Mr. Trump’s speeches last week, at the request of The Times, and observed techniques — like vilifying groups of people and stoking the insecurities of his audiences — that they associate with Wallace and McCarthy. “His entire campaign is run like a demagogue’s — his language of division, his cult of personality, his manner of categorizing and maligning people with a broad brush,” said Jennifer Mercieca, an expert in American political discourse at Texas A&M University. “If you’re an illegal immigrant, you’re a loser. If you’re captured in war, like John McCain, you’re a loser. If you have a disability, you’re a loser. It’s rhetoric like Wallace’s — it’s not a kind or generous rhetoric.” “And then there are the winners, most especially himself, with his repeated references to his wealth and success and intelligence,” said Ms. Mercieca, noting a particular remark of Mr. Trump’s on Monday in Macon, Ga. (“When you’re really smart, when you’re really, really smart like I am — it’s true, it’s true, it’s always been true, it’s always been true.”) “Part of his argument is that if you believe in American exceptionalism, you should vote for me,” Ms. Mercieca said. Historically, demagogues have flourished when they tapped into the grievances of citizens and then identified and maligned outside foes, as McCarthy did with attacking Communists, Wallace with pro-integration northerners and Mr. Buchanan with cultural liberals. These politicians used emotional language — be it “segregation forever” or accusatory questions over the Communist Party — to persuade Americans to pin their anxieties about national security, jobs, racial diversity and social trends on enemy forces. A significant difference between Mr. Trump and 20th-century American demagogues is that many of them, especially McCarthy and Wallace, were charmless public speakers. Mr. Trump, by contrast, is an energetic and charismatic speaker who can be entertaining and ingratiating with his audiences. There is a looseness to his language that sounds almost like water-cooler talk or neighborly banter, regardless of what it is about. For some historians, this only makes him more effective, because demagogy is more palatable when it is leavened with a smile and joke. Highlighting that informality, one of his most frequently used words is “guy” — which he

9/20/16 43 said 91 times last week and has used to describe President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a stranger cheering him on at a rally and a celebrity friend. “His relaxed, jokey tone makes statements about his resolve to solve every problem because he knows what’s right and has the energy to do it more persuasive,” said Mr. Kazin of Georgetown, who described Mr. Trump’s idea for a database of Muslims in the United States as insidious but also said he found Mr. Trump amusing at points. Over many decades, Mr. Trump’s career as both a real estate developer and a celebrity has been infused with language described as divisive, even racially charged. In the 1980s, it was with advertisements condemning the young men, four of them black and one Latino, accused of marauding through Central Park and raping a jogger. Just over a decade ago, it was the controversy during the first season of his reality show “The Apprentice,” in which he played a boardroom billionaire who fired people. He and other cast members clashed with Omarosa Manigault, a black woman who claimed someone had called her a racial slur and suggested that Mr. Trump had been insensitive. Mr. Trump has said he will tear into anyone who tries to take him on, and he presents himself as someone who is always right in his opinions — even prophetic, a visionary. He repeatedly insists that he alone predicted the rise of Osama bin Laden in 2001 (despite the fact that the Bin Laden network had attacked two United States embassies and the U.S.S. Cole in the three years before). “I said, ‘We better be careful, that’s gonna happen, it’s gonna be a big thing,’ and it certainly is a big thing,” Mr. Trump has said of what he wrote about the Al Qaeda leader in 2000.

“How Should Conservatives Respond to the Age of Trumptism,” Rachel Lu, National Review Morning has broken in Republican America. On this bright new day, what was once the party of Lincoln has become the party of Donald Trump. Our electoral scene is more dynamic than at any other time in living memory. The fertile mind explodes with new imagined possibilities for how America’s future might unfold. No longer shackled to the crippled agendas of the Bush and Boehner eras, Trump and his supporters are now free to craft a fresh, forward- looking policy agenda for the 21st century. The first order of business, obviously, is to bludgeon the holdouts into submission. Don’t be too gentle about it. It’s better to be feared than loved. If Paul Ryan won’t immediately pledge fealty, put Sarah Palin on his case. Have Mike Huckabee issue get-in-or-get-out ultimatums to anybody who might still be on the fence. Meanwhile, have the candidate play hard-to-get by assuring skeptical conservatives that they aren’t really needed anyway. It’s called the Republican party, people. Republics can be liberal. The next step, most likely, is aggressive outreach to Bernie Sanders’s fresh-faced socialists. But at the risk of provoking another Corey Lewandowski attack, I’d like to pose a question first: What is this grand new party? Do Trumpites have an answer to the charge that they have sold their conservative birthright for a mess of white-identity politics? If I remain un-hypnotized by Trump’s strongman antics, was anyone planning to give me another reason to vote for him, or are we just leaving all of our eggs in the Not-Hillary basket? With Trump preparing to assume command, it’s time for round two of “What Is ?” questions. And this time we need answers. Three months ago, a sizable group of conservatives claimed to be for it, even as they criticized Trump personally. For tactical reasons, I always thought that was a mistake. Now that the phantom is taking on flesh, it’s time to look beyond the tactical. Anti-anti- Trumpism was mainly an expression of sympathy, usually seasoned with a dash of “I told you so” for whatever mistakes the speaker thought the Republican party had made in the past. It turns out in the end that two antis do make a pro. What now? Donald Trump is vile. Can we admit now that Trumpism is also bad? Even its defenders implicitly acknowledged this when they rhapsodized about depressed rust-belt towns, withering cultural foundations, and fancy Manhattanites who use the term “redneck” without shame. Notice that these apologias, even if they inspire sympathy, are not justifications. They are excuses. Excuses are what we give for people we know are doing wrong. Trump’s backers have done wrong, and not because any particular Republican candidate was ever entitled to widespread voter support. Trumpism is irresponsible and destructive. In their wrath, Trumpites blithely treated millions of ordinary working, family-rearing, flyover-dwelling Americans (who regard Trump as offensive and disturbing) as mere collateral damage in their private war with snooty Washington elites. Even in victory, they seem to cherish the hope that they can grow the movement with vinegar (their favorite flavor) instead of resorting to the less-satisfying honey of persuasion.

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For me, one of the more disturbing experiences of recent months was watching as Trump-sympathetic friends and associates slowly shifted away from rational argument to a different strategy: ousting “elitists” from the conversation. It’s not so important to be right anymore, so long as you’re not “out of touch.” No need to hash out policies, principles, or other such high-falutin’ frivolities. Your degrees are too fancy. I beat you on Charles Murray’s bubble quiz. You’re not as American as me. It’s stupefying. Before our very eyes, we have watched our associates morph from members of a movement into members of a tribe. Is that a guillotine I hear being sharpened? I’ve suddenly lost my taste for cake. Of course, Trumpites are not the only people in the Republican camp who have made some mistakes. We can condemn their errors while retaining some measure of sympathy especially for wounded people who are desperately looking for hope. Nevertheless, the Trumpites are in the driver’s seat now, so there’s no time for a sharing circle. Bad behavior needs to be forgiven, not justified, and it certainly should not be accepted as the new normal. We need to crystalize that point before we can move forward with purpose. Most of the discussion of the last week has focused on electoral flag-planting. Who, in the end, will support our ghoulish new chieftain? Who will revolt? In the frenzy to declare ourselves on this point, we should not overlook the significance of Trumpism. Walking the anti-anti tightrope is no longer an available option now that Trump has effectively clinched the nomination, so it’s important to re-affirm our deeper loyalties. We need to make clear that conservatism is not a nativist cult. That some of us are still committed to core conservative principles. That we hope to reconcile with some of the Trumpites in time, under the banner of a genuinely conservative movement. But if that’s not possible, we’re not on the same team anymore. What that means politically remains to be seen, given the murkiness of our longer-term electoral picture. This much, however, is obvious: Trumpism cannot replace conservatism as the engine of a major political party. Its identity is tribal, but based in a demographic that is far too small to build a viable party. Its energy comes from a surge of nativist angst that will inevitably fizzle over time. Its intellectual foundation . . . does not exist. In tumultuous moments, that kind of appeal inevitably provokes a round of guffaws from the peanut gallery. What did conservatism ever do for the struggling breadwinner whose job got outsourced? How did conservatism halt Obama’s progressive agenda? We build ivory towers (at great public expense!) for this kind of philosophical stuffed- shirt-ism. Spare us the lecture on True Conservatism. In fact, it is precisely at moments like these that such reveries are needed. The fabric of our civil society is decaying, and our politics is devolving into a series of interest-group skirmishes. The progressive Left hopes to orchestrate these into a bid for more complete control over its only serious opponents (principled conservatives and religious traditionalists), so that its ideological agenda can advance unopposed. Without a substantive vision of our own, we have no real hope of defending order, or our cherished liberties. Returning to the source of our movement is the only way to proceed in chaotic times, and conservatism is that source. What does that mean? Several excellent books exist that can help clarify what conservatism finally is. The short version is that American conservatism has two primary pillars. First, it recognizes that modern societies are perpetually vulnerable to the problem of governmental overreach. As technology makes it increasingly possible to control large populations through aggressive technocratic micromanagement, we must expect that some will wish to do so, for benevolent or not-so-benevolent reasons. Drawing especially from thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek, conservatives recognize the dangers of that temptation. Big government is inefficient, but even more critically, it undermines human dignity. It saps our creative energies and prevents us from realizing the greatness of which rational beings are capable. Conservatives perpetually try to rein in the state’s relentless push for greater control over our resources and our lives. Unfortunately, we have no assurance that conservative principles will always find expression in our political system. As its second pillar, conservatism recognizes a robust moral order. Human beings have a nature. Things can be objectively good or bad for us. We have obligations, not all of which are subject to our personal consent. We are capable of true excellence, but also of moral failure, for which we should rightly be held to account. These are fundamental truths that shape the conservative worldview. Even as progressives seek to appropriate our property, they also have a fractious relationship with these moral realities, which they would like to clear away in a quest for a more radical autonomy. Conservatives object, insisting that the moral order is not ours to reshape at will. At its best, modern American conservatism draws together these two points into a happy synergy — fusionism. Libertarians warn their more Burkean counterparts of the hazards of seizing any available opportunity to use state power to further their social and cultural agendas. Conservatives help their colleagues hold the line between

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“libertarian” and “libertine,” perpetually reminding us that market forces are not divine mandates, and that even culture has its limits. Applying these principles to good policy is never a simple matter, and campaigning politicians often feel obliged to bow to the grasping demands of fallen human beings. That being the case, the party of Lincoln has never been a perfect vehicle for fusionism, as indeed no party ever will be. Still, the relationship has been significant, and even in some of their less-glorious years, American conservatives have retained the capacity to speak this fusionist language in a way that could translate into a new policy agenda and revitalized conservative vision. But it’s exceedingly difficult to see the outlines of any such renewal in the threats and tantrums of Trump or his surrogates. Whatever the electoral picture, principled conservatives need to repeat clearly and regularly that this is not what we are. Unfortunately, we have no assurance that conservative principles will always find expression in our political system. If we acclimate ourselves to the mores of Trumpism for the sake of winning an election, there is no guarantee that these principles will ever re-emerge on the American scene in a robust, politically relevant way. A new day has dawned, and it promises to be a hot one. Let’s get to work.

“The GOP’s Ideological Earthquake and Its Aftermath,” National Review What lies behind Donald Trump’s nomination victory? Received wisdom among conservatives is that he, the outsider, sensed, marshaled, and came to represent a massive revolt of the Republican rank and file against the “establishment.” This is the narrative: GOP political leaders made promises of all kinds and received in return, during President Obama’s years, major electoral victories that gave them the House, the Senate, twelve new governorships, and 30 state houses. Yet they didn’t deliver. Exit polls consistently showed that a majority of GOP primary voters (60 percent in some states) feel “betrayed” by their leaders. Not just let down or disappointed. Betrayed. By RINOs who, corrupted by donors and lobbyists, sold out. Did they repeal Obamacare? No. Did they defund Planned Parenthood? No. Did they stop President Obama’s tax-and-spend hyperliberalism? No. Whether from incompetence or venality, they let Obama walk all over them. But then comes the paradox. If insufficient resistance to Obama’s liberalism created this sense of betrayal, why in a field of 17 did Republican voters choose the least conservative candidate? A man who until yesterday was himself a liberal. Who donated money to those very same Democrats to whom the GOP establishment is said to have caved, including Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, and Hillary Clinton. Trump has expressed sympathy for a single-payer system of socialized medicine, far to the left of Obamacare. Trump lists health care as one of the federal government’s three main responsibilities (after national security); Republicans adamantly oppose federal intervention in health care. He also lists education, which Republicans believe should instead be left to the states. As for Planned Parenthood, the very same conservatives who railed against the Republican establishment for failing to defund it now rally around a candidate who sings the praises of its good works (save for the provision of abortion). More fundamentally, Trump has no affinity whatsoever for the central thrust of modern conservatism — a return to less and smaller government. If the establishment has insufficiently resisted Obama’s Big Government policies, the beneficiary should logically have been the most consistent, indeed most radical, anti-government conservative of the bunch, Ted Cruz. Cruz’s entire career has consisted of promoting tea-party constitutionalism in revolt against party leaders who had joined “the Washington cartel.” Yet when Cruz got to his one-on-one with Trump at the Indiana OK Corral, Republicans chose Trump and his nonconservative, idiosyncratic populism. Which makes Indiana a truly historic inflection point. It marks the most radical transformation of the political philosophy of a major political party in our lifetime. The Democrats continue their trajectory of ever-expansive liberalism from the New Deal through the Great Society through Obama and Clinton today. While the GOP, the nation’s conservative party, its ideology refined and crystallized by Ronald Reagan, has just gone populist. It’s an ideological earthquake. How radical a reorientation? Said Trump last week: “Folks, I’m a conservative. But at this point, who cares?” Who cares? Wasn’t caring about conservatism the very essence of the talk-radio, tea-party, grass-roots revolt against the so-called establishment? They cheered Cruz when he led the government shutdown in the name of conservative

9/20/16 46 principles. Yet when the race came down to Cruz and Trump, these opinion-shaping conservatives who once doted on Cruz affected a studied Trump-leaning neutrality. Trump won. True, the charismatically challenged Cruz was up against a prepackaged celebrity, an already famous showman. True, Trump appealed to the economic anxiety of a squeezed middle class and the status anxiety of a formerly dominant white working class. But the prevailing conservative narrative — of anti-establishment fury — was different and is now exposed as a convenient fable. If Trump is a great big middle finger aimed at a Republican establishment that has abandoned its principles, isn’t it curious that the party has chosen a man without any? Trump doesn’t even pretend to have any, conservative or otherwise. He lauds his own “flexibility,” his freedom from political or philosophical consistency. And he elevates unpredictability to a foreign-policy doctrine. The ideological realignment is stark. On major issues — such as the central question of retaining America’s global pre-eminence as leader of the free world, sustainer of Western alliances, and protector of the post–World War II order — the GOP candidate stands decidedly to the left of the Democrat. And who knows on what else. On entitlements? On health care? On taxes? We will soon find out. But as Trump himself says of being a conservative — at this point, who cares? As of Tuesday night, certainly not the GOP.

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 How Much of It is Because She’s a Woman? Return to Top “Hey Hillary, Here’s Why People Don’t Trust You” Hillary Clinton gave a fascinating interview recently in which she tried to explain why so many people simply do not trust her. She was stumped. Hillary struggled to offer an explanation. Clearly, she is very troubled by this perception of her, so she knows it is a real issue for her presidential campaign. Yet she also clearly fails to comprehend it. Hillary fell back on the explanation that the cause is due to all of the right-wing attacks against her over the years, and she even offered-up the example of Benghazi. But this rings hollow. Sure, the right-wing attacks against her have been voluminous and disgraceful. And they certainly account for the reason why right-wing Republicans would not trust Hillary. But Democratic voters see through this right-wing nonsense and don’t buy it. So this does not account for the reason why Democratic voters don’t trust Hillary and instead are supporting her competitor, Bernie Sanders. If Hillary is going to confront and address this issue, she must look within herself. Time and again, she does not appear to be motivated by the truth, but instead, she behaves like a political attack machine motivated by an insatiable drive to win for herself at any cost. This aspect of Hillary was on full display in the recent outburst over which of the two Democratic candidates is more “progressive.” The truth is obvious. Of course Bernie is more progressive. This has been his political posture for his entire career, even being a Socialist for goodness sake. But Hillary pulled her switchblade and began fighting. In this political climate, she wants to be viewed as the progressive regardless of the truth. So she cherry-picked a few of Bernie’s past votes in the Senate and tried to paint him as not being progressive. Huh? Bernie not progressive? It just makes no sense. It doesn’t hold water. Of course Bernie is progressive. He has always been progressive. Hillary’s motivation here was not truth, but politics. She is all too willing to manipulate, distort, and deceive to try to score political points for herself. We saw this again in the Democratic presidential debate in New Hampshire when Bernie stated that Hillary was part of the political establishment. In the current climate, “establishment” is a dirty word, so out comes Hillary’s switchblade again. She denied that she was part of the political establishment. What? This, of course, is absurd. The Clintons are nothing less than the premier political dynasty in this nation. Yet there is Hillary denying it. Stunning. Right before our very eyes we see a politician seeking to manipulate what we all know is the truth in an attempt to achieve political gain. It is indeed disheartening. And then, shockingly, Hillary takes it even further by claiming that of course she is not in the political establishment due to the fact that she is a woman. Unbelievable. This is political manipulation at its height. Of course, we all desire to see a woman in the White House. But Hillary played upon our desire by attempting to use it to overcome an unrelated political weakness. Now that’s called playing the gender card. Subsequently, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright appeared with Hillary on the campaign trail and admonished women to vote for Hillary solely because she is a woman, saying that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” Now that’s called doubling-down on playing the gender card. Hillary denies playing the gender card and says that no one should vote for her simply because she is a woman. Yeah right. So what we have is Hillary blatantly playing the gender card while simultaneously denying that she is playing it. So what does this make Hillary? Simple. A typical politician.

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We have seen it over and over again. In the Democratic debate, Hillary pulled her switchblade again and jumped Bernie for waging a “smear” campaign against her over the issue of Hillary’s acceptance of political contributions from Wall Street. What? This is hardly a “smear” tactic by Bernie. In fact, this goes to the very essence of Bernie’s central campaign theme of income inequality. Bernie contends that a major cause of income inequality is political contributions from Wall Street, and it just so happens that Hillary was a prime recipient. In fact, shockingly, Hillary even tried to defend all the money she took. But Hillary has no adequate explanation for this, so instead she attempts to re- characterize it as a “smear” campaign against her. This is a typical device employed by tricky politicians. Hillary also unfairly attacked Bernie by saying that Bernie wanted to “start over again” with a new healthcare system that would “rip away the security that people finally have.” Bernie corrected this false charge by explaining that his plan would improve the healthcare system and of course he would never dismantle the current system and “rip away” anyone’s healthcare without having a full system in place. The debate, in fact, presented quite a spectacle with the two of them on stage. Bernie directed himself to voters as he repeatedly articulated issues and his central campaign themes. Hillary repeatedly attempted to club Bernie over the head. In a rare exhibition of nobility in a political campaign, Bernie declined to club her back. Bernie refused yet again to attack Hillary on the controversial issue of her alleged misuse of emails. Wow. It is indeed difficult to imagine anyone else demonstrating such integrity in a campaign. Yet this did not stop Hillary from bashing Bernie for being soft on guns. She is trying to get to the left of Bernie wherever possible and this is just about the only issue she can come up with. Bernie has been remarkably candid in response, explaining that his state of Vermont is very rural where hunting is widespread and guns are ubiquitous. So Bernie was merely representing the interests of his own constituents. Indeed, if Hillary were a senator from Vermont, it seems certain that she would have done the same. But nonetheless, Hillary is seeking to exploit this as a political issue among democratic voters by attempting to paint Bernie as being on the wrong side of the gun issue. Supposedly, Hillary is planning to meet with African-American mothers who have lost children to gun violence. This is stunning. It is a blatant political maneuver. It is clearly not motivated out of a genuine compassion for these grieving mothers, but instead, Hillary is playing politics and seeking to exploit the gun issue against Bernie. Hillary is also using this maneuver to exploit the racial issue because Bernie’s support is soft among minorities, including African Americans, and the campaign is now headed south for the South Carolina primary election where support of African Americans is key for Hillary. So she is killing two political birds with one stone — guns and race. Amazing. Hillary is clearly pulling a political stunt here. That’s fine, Hillary, go ahead with all of your political manipulations, attacks, and tricks designed to misdirect voters. But you cannot then wonder why people don’t trust you.

“Hillary Clinton's Trust Gap Is Killing Her with Millennials” Kevin Drummar 3/10/16 Earlier today I was musing over a tweet from a guy who said his daughter's friends all loathed Hillary Clinton. Just really, really couldn't stand her. This is obviously a fairly common sentiment. Bernie Sanders didn't win 80 percent of the millennial vote in Michigan just because he's an idealistic liberal. The only way you get to a number like that is against an opponent who's pretty seriously disliked. But why? The most obvious reason millennials dislike Hillary so strongly is that they think she's too slippery. "I feel like Clinton lies a lot," a college student told PBSa few weeks ago. "She changes her views for every group she speaks to. I can't trust her." Quotes like that litter the internet, and in tonight's debate Karen Tumulty asked about it yet again. "Is there anything in your own actions and the decisions that you yourself have made that would foster this kind of mistrust?"

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People of my age find all this a little peculiar. After all, we're the ones who experienced the full storm of the '90s. There was a new Hillary "scandal" on practically a monthly basis back then, and even if you later learned there was virtually nothing to any of them, that kind of nonstop mudslinging leaves a mark. It's hard to hear this stuff over and over and not think that maybe there's something there. Smoke and fire, you know. But millennials went through none of that. So why do they distrust her? Unfortunately, Hillary has fostered a lot of this mistrust herself. I'm going to be wildly unfair here and cherry-pick a bunch of quotes from Hillary and Bernie Sanders. First up, here's Bernie: . On whether he supports fracking: "My answer is a lot shorter. No, I do not support fracking." . On reforming Wall Street: "If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist…Within one year, my administration will break these institutions up so that they no longer pose a grave threat to the economy." . On whether there's even a "single circumstance" in which abortion should be illegal: "That is a decision to be made by the woman, her physician, and her family. That's my view." . On prison reform: "I promise at the end of my first term we won't have more people in jail than in any other country." There's no nuance here, no shading. Bernie has simple, crowd-pleasing answers to every question. He's for X, full stop. He's against Y, end of story. At this point I should compare these answers with the more gray-shaded responses Hillary gives on policy questions. But I'm not being fair, so instead you get this: . On whether she lied to the Benghazi families (from tonight's debate): "You know, look, I feel a great deal of sympathy for the families of the four brave Americans that we lost at Benghazi…" . On releasing transcripts of her speeches: "Let everybody who's ever given a speech to any private group under any circumstances release them—we’ll all release them at the same time." . On her private email server: "Everything I did was permitted. There was no law. There was no regulation. There was nothing that did not give me the full authority to decide how I was going to communicate." . On getting money from big Wall Street donors: "I represented New York on 9/11 when we were attacked. Where were we attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan where Wall Street is. I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild. That was good for New York. It was good for the economy and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country." . On her super-PAC: "You're referring to a super-PAC that we don't coordinate with…It's not my PAC."

These are terrible answers. Tonight, Jorge Ramos brought up allegations by the Benghazi families that Hillary had deceived them, and asked, "Secretary Clinton, did you lie to them?" The only answer to this question is "of course not." But Hillary started by expressing her sympathy for the Benghazi families and only then said of her accuser, "She's wrong." Maybe this seems like nitpicking, but it's not. Unless the very first words out of her mouth are "of course not," she's going to leave an immediate impression that she's about to tap dance around the whole thing. I like Hillary, and even I sighed when she began delivering that answer. The other quotes are similar. It doesn't even matter if they're the truth. They don't sound like the truth. People my age might forgive Hillary a bit of this lawyerlyness because we remember the '90s and understand the damage that even a slightly misplaced word can cause. But millennials don't. They just see another tired establishment pol who never gives a straight answer about anything. Life isn't fair. Politics isn't fair. I think Hillary Clinton is careful, a little bit paranoid, and, ironically, congenitally honest on policy issues. She just can't bring herself to give simple-minded answers when she knows perfectly well the truth is more complicated. But especially this year, when her competition is a guy like Bernie Sanders, this just makes her look evasive and insincere. After 40 years in the public eye, I don't know why Hillary is still so bad at this. But she is. For a long time, liberals mostly forgave her wary speaking style because they were keenly aware of the Republican smear campaign that birthed it. Now, for the first time, there's a generation of liberals who don't care about any of that. And an awful lot of them loathe her.

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“Donald Trump Says Hillary Clinton is Corrupt—Is He Right?” by Chris Matthews Fortune Magazine (6/13/16) Presidential elections are arguments about history. Four years ago—when both Democrats and Republicans believed they were just one election away from breaking the fever of Washington gridlock—this argument was about the historical causes of American prosperity. But in 2016, the debate will be about personal history. Last Tuesday, Donald Trump promised that his first major speech after Hillary Clinton captured the Democratic nomination would focus on Hillary and Bill Clinton’s past scandals. His plans have changed in the wake of the mass shooting in Orlando, and it appears that Trump will now discuss terrorism and gun violence in America. But if Trump’s sobriquet for Secretary Clinton, “Crooked Hillary,” is any indication, it won’t be long before Trump refocuses his messaging on the idea that Hillary Clinton is corrupt. Of course, Trump’s coming attacks will merely mark a continuation of a theme of the Democratic primaries. Senator Bernie Sanders questioned the ethics of Hillary Clinton’s acceptance of upwards of $250,000 a pop to give speeches to companies like Goldman Sachs. But Sanders generally avoided Hillary and Bill Clinton’s long history of questionable decisions like accepting compensation and favors from people and institutions trying to curry favor with one of the most powerful couples in America. We should expect no such reticence from Donald Trump. And the Manhattan businessman has not proven able to reliably distinguish between legitimate criticism of his opponents and wild, unfounded theories. Voters should expect to hear plenty of accusations that Hillary Clinton is corrupt, but what are the facts? Here are four of the most important scandals in Clinton history. Cattle Futures In 1978, when Bill Clinton was Arkansas Attorney General and was preparing to stage his first run for Governor, Hillary Clinton decided to supplement her family’s income through speculating in cattle futures markets. At the advice of lawyer Jim Blair, whom the New York Times described as “the primary outside lawyer for Tyson Foods,” Clinton decided to invest $1,000 with the now defunct commodities broker Refco. Within a year, Clinton turned her initial $1,000 into $100,000. Though many investors were making a killing in the cattle futures market in the late 1970s, research published in the Journal of Economics and Finance estimates that the odds of realizing the sort of gains Clinton was able to capture were 1 in 34 trillion. This is why critics speculate that Blair and the brokers at Refco put their thumbs on the scale to make sure that the Clintons profited from these trades, all to curry favor with a rising star in Arkansas politics. How could this have happened? Here’s how described it when the scandal broke in 1994: The broker, buying futures, hits the jackpot on some contracts and loses on others within the same day. At the close, he “allocates” winning contracts to some clients and losing contracts to others. Only the broker knows how the allocation was made, so he is able to reward some clients at the expense of others. There is no hard evidence that Clinton’s investing success was the result of anything but amazing luck, but Bill and Hillary’s willingness to accept advice from and maintain close, mutually beneficial relationships with powerful figures is a theme that has run through the Clintons’ political careers. Whitewater The most consequential scandal in Clinton history—it indirectly led to revelations about Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky— also has its roots in the Clintons’ attempts to supplement their incomes. The term Whitewater refers to a real estate investment that the Clintons engaged in with their associates Jim and Susan McDougal in 1978, located on the White River in Marion County, Arkansas. The plan was to subdivide the investment into vacation-home plots and to resell the real estate at a profit. The Clintons timed their purchase poorly, however, as rising interest rates and an economic downturn put a damper on demand for vacation homes. The Clintons lost money on the investment, and though there were questions as to why it didn’t lose them as much money as their partners, the more significant accusations of impropriety surrounded the 1986 failure of a savings and loan that McDougal bought years after the initial Whitewater investment.

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McDougal’s bank—Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan —ran into trouble during Bill Clinton’s second term as Arkansas Governor. And critics, armed with aggressive reporting by the New York Times, alleged that Clinton installed a pliant ally as Arkansas securities commissioner in order to buy McDougal time to raise needed capital when regulators should have been stepping in to declare the bank insolvent. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton was serving as Madison Guaranty’s lawyer as it tried to avoid running afoul of Arkansas and federal regulators, adding to the perception that the Clintons were motivated to give official favors to their investment partner. Despite years of investigations by the and a special prosecutor, however, no one ever proved the Clintons doled out illegal benefits to McDougal. The Clinton Foundation As one of the youngest ex-presidents in history, it is only natural that Bill Clinton would want to leverage his stature to continue promoting the causes that were dear to him as a public servant. But the forty-second president did not pursue this goal in a traditional way. He launched the Clinton Foundation a year after he left office and over the years built it into a non-profit juggernaut (the foundation says it brought in $337 million in 2014). At the same time, Hillary Clinton became a senator from New York and was later appointed Secretary of State. Critics alleged that Bill Clinton’s fundraising, which in many cases came from foreign billionaires who have reason to court influence in the United States government, created at the very least the perception of quid-pro-quo corruption, in which big dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation won favorable treatment from Hillary Clinton in her roles as senator and Secretary of State. This was the argument of a book released last year by conservative writer Peter Schweizer called Clinton Cash, which claimed to have discovered several examples in which big donations from wealthy foreigners led Hillary Clinton to give official favors. Schweizer found no hard evidence of a time when Hillary Clinton changed her opinion on an issue of concern or provided an official favor for a Clinton Foundation donor. The examples in Schweizer’s book do show that Bill Clinton leveraged the connections that he made as president to help the foundation’s donors at the same time that his wife was serving as a senator and Secretary of State circumstances that at the very least create the temptation to commit corrupt acts. But even if donations to the Clinton Foundation had no effect on Secretary Clinton’s decisions at the State Department, the fact that the Clinton Foundation continued to accept donations from powerful foreigners and foreign governments while Hillary was Secretary of State is troubling. Even if these donations did not lead to favors, Bill and Hillary Clinton violated an agreement they made with the Obama Administration to cease accepting these sorts of donations and showed they were willing to risk the public’s trust to further their work, however noble it may be. Paid speeches The Clintons have amassed considerable wealth, largely through speaking fees. A CNN analysis showed that the Clintons earned $153 million from speaking gigs since Bill Clinton left office in 2001, with millions of those dollars coming from large banks like Goldman Sachs, a fact that Bernie Sanders did not tire of pointing out to voters. It’s impossible to know whether these payments influenced Hillary Clinton’s treatment of her benefactors in her official roles, or whether they will influence her decisions as president. But even the fiercest Clinton defenders wonder why Hillary Clinton does not seem to understand how upsetting accepting such payments is to voters, especially when Clinton has claimed that there is too much unaccountable money in politics. So, is Hillary Clinton corrupt? In a country where money is the essential fuel for political success, no politician, save for those who are independently wealthy, can avoid the seemingly contradictory task of courting rich donors all to represent the majority of Americans who aren’t affluent. We should remember that it is fairly uncommon for people like the Clintons, who weren’t already wealthy, to ascend to the highest levels of American power. The fact that the Clintons (Bill, in particular) are more familiar with how the other half lives than most politicians should be comforting for those who think that money has too much influence on the American political process.

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That said, there are plenty of troubling details in Hillary Clinton’s past, even if there isn’t evidence of quid-pro-quo arrangements with her benefactors. If corruption is a vice against which our leaders must be ever vigilant, then Hillary Clinton is not actually a shining example of such discipline. Clinton has argued in recent months that her record of fighting against moneyed interests serves as proof that, however she may have personally benefited from her associations with the rich and powerful, she has consistently fought on the side of the little guy. The Democratic primaries showed that most Democrats are willing to buy this argument, but Donald Trump will spend the summer and fall cross-examining this argument. Because there is no cut and dry evidence that Hillary Clinton is in fact “crooked,” as Trump likes to call her, he’ll rely on rumors and innuendo to make his case. It’s unclear if Trump will be successful, but you can trust that the 2016 election will in part be an effort to determine what makes a corrupt politician and whether Hillary Clinton is one.

“Americans’ views of women as political leaders differ by gender” by D’Vera Cohn and Gretchen Livingston, Pew Research Center (5/19/16) Americans’ views of women as political leaders differ by gender For the first time in history, a woman is the leading candidate for the presidential nomination of a major U.S. political party. As Democrat Hillary Clinton wages her campaign to be the first female chief executive, what do Americans have to say in general about the prospects and qualifications of female candidates for high political offices? For the most part, Americans – including similar shares of men (74%) and women (76%) – said in a 2014 Pew Research Center survey that women and men make equally good political leaders. When it comes to essential traits of a leader, both men and women saw women as being more compassionate, organized and honest than men, and saw men as being more ambitious and decisive (though for most traits, an even higher share said both genders possess them equally). But the survey found marked differences between women and men on other questions relating to gender and leadership, including the reasons that more women have not been elected. Here are five key findings from the survey on gender differences in views about women and leadership: Women in our survey said men had an easier path to political leadership, and they also were more likely to say that having more female leaders would improve the quality of life for women. About three-quarters (73%) of women said it’s easier for men to get elected to high political office, while 58% of men agreed. And 38% of women said that having more women in top political or business leadership positions would improve the quality of life for all women “a lot.” Only half as many men (19%) agreed. There were similar differences by political party on this question,

9/20/16 53 with more than twice as many Democrats (39%) as Republicans (17%) saying that having more women in high political office would improve the lives of women, while independents (28%) ranked in the middle. In 2015, there were104 women in Congress, a record number representing 19% of all Senate and House seats. There was no overall consensus among the public in our survey on what holds women back from gaining top elective offices, though women were far more likely than men to cite societal and institutional factors as major reasons. About half (47%) of women said that a major reason there are not more women in top political offices is that female candidates are held to higher standards than men, compared with 28% of men who said so. Four-in-ten women (41%), compared with three-in-ten men (31%), said that a major reason for the lack of women in top political offices is that many Americans aren’t ready to elect a woman to a higher office. And 33% of women, compared with 21% of men, said that females getting less support from party leaders is a major reason. Relatively small shares of men (15%) and women (18%) said that family responsibilities are a major reason that fewer women hold elective offices. There was a wide and consistent gender gap in opinions about the relative strengths of male and female political leaders on five attributes tested in our survey, though most men and women said there is no gender difference on these traits. One of the largest gender gaps was on the ability to work out compromises: 41% of women compared with 27% of men said women are better at this. Women also were more likely than men to say female leaders surpass men in being honest and ethical, working to improve quality of life for Americans, standing up for their beliefs despite political pressure, and being persuasive. The survey also asked about gender differences among leaders on various policy issues, and found less-pronounced differences among male and female respondents. There were generational differences among women in our survey on the attributes that a woman brings to political office. Younger women were less likely to give female leaders an edge over male leaders, and instead were more likely to say men and women are equally likely to possess certain traits. For example, when it comes to working out compromises, 33% of Millennial women and 37% of Generation X women said women are better than men, compared with about half of women from the Baby Boomer (47%) and Silent (50%) generations who said so. Asked about which gender is better at working to improve Americans’ quality of life, only 22% of Millennial women and 24% of Gen X women said female leaders are better, compared with 39% of Baby Boomer women and 35% of Silent generation women who said so. In November 2014, before Clinton had declared her candidacy, Democrats were more enthused than Republicans about a potential female president. This partisan difference was bigger than the gender difference among survey respondents. Our survey question asked people whether they hoped a female president will be elected in their lifetime, or whether that did not matter to them. For many, the prospect of a Clinton presidency may have influenced their responses to this “hypothetical” question. Democratic women (69%) were the most likely to say they hoped a female U.S. president would be elected in their lifetimes, followed by Democratic men (46%) and independent women (45%). Among Republicans, fewer women (20%) and men (16%) said they hoped for this, as did about a third (32%) of independent men.

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“Five Ways Sexism Colors Public Perception of Hillary Clinton” by Everett Maroon (2/9/16) My partner, who studies public policy, calls this time of the election cycle “the mean season.” It’s that time when campaigns begin their final push to win over primary voters and caucus goers as the nomination process for each party crystallizes. My social media feeds devolve into a mix of campaign spin for this candidate or that, heralding of each day’s must-read thinkpiece, and an equal number of posts from friends beseeching each other to stop posting about the campaigns. Whatever friendliness the Sanders and Clinton campaigns had for each other last summer, their staffs have dug in their heels and the serious fighting has begun within the Democratic Party. One of the issues playing out this primary cycle is how sexism affects our understanding of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is enacting this sexism, and to what degree. I think it’s important to understand, amid the current hostility of both Democratic front-runners’ campaigns, that we only know Ms. Clinton through a sexist lens. Sexism is ingrained in the way we think about Clinton—yes, even for self-described feminists and progressives, sexism colors the way we see Hillary. First, let’s look at the history of attacks against her. Hillary Clinton’s looks have always faced sharp scrutiny. Way back in 1988, when she was First Lady of Arkansas, a syndicated piece ran about her with the headline “Hillary: The good, the bad, the dress size.” During Bill’s presidential campaign, right-leaning media outlets made remarks about her hair style and a headband she wore on a 60 Minutes interview, an apparent fashion faux pas that people commented on for more than a year. By 1995 she even joked, “If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hair style.” Because she had a law degree and her own career, right-wing pundits wondered openly how she would have power beyond the more behind-the- scenes duties of other First Ladies. She confirmed their fears when she took the lead of a task force to establish universal health care coverage, a platform Bill had campaigned on. “When that plan went down to defeat, many people assigned her a large share of the blame,” said Paul Starr, a senior health policy adviser in the Clinton White House. When Newsweek ran a cover story about how Bill turned to her for advice on a nominee that required Senate confirmation (the shock of the leader of the free world asking a woman for advice!), the magazine presumed that this was a sign of his weakness and her overreach—even calling her “First Lady Plus.” Several media outlets questioned whether Hillary was, in effect, an unelected second President. Martin Amis, writing forThe Sunday Times of London, encapsulated many of these criticisms and labels in his scathing review of her book It Takes a Village: called her a bitch. Rush Limbaugh called her a feminazi. One New York weekly called her a scumbag. , in The New York Times, called her a congenital liar. And the President himself, it is rumoured, calls her the First Liability. Rumour goes on to add that Hillary Rodham Clinton is a communist and a carpetbagger, a wowser and a fraud, a floozie and a dyke. It has been repeatedly suggested that she had an affair with her financial conspirator Vincent Foster, who died, mysteriously, in 1993. At this stage, we don't want to know whether Hillary slept with Vincent Foster. We want to know if she killed him. When the Whitewater scandal unfolded in 1992, the media showed difficulty in distinguishing between Bill’s and Hillary’s actions related to that company’s failure. Even as multiple, separate investigations ran for years, none found a connection between Bill’s or Hillary’s stake in Whitewater and the illegal loans and fraud that convicted their partners, Susan and James McDougal. Whitewater became an umbrella term for whatever other scandal the far right attempted to attach to her, whether it be Filegate, Travelgate, the suicide of , the Benghazi attack, or her use of a private email server when she served as Secretary of State. This is why some have pointed out that dismissing Hillary Clinton as being “untrustworthy” or “corrupt” is problematic—because these labels don’t necessarily point to real evidence against her. Instead, they are born of reactionary rhetoric used to marginalize her politically and to distract people from the last thirty years of failed Republican domestic and foreign policies. Then there are the copious insensitive remarks people made about her each time news broke about another affair of Bill’s. She is, after all, the eponymous “good wife” who inspired a long-running CBS series (also, as her email dump revealed, she’s a fan). I’m not saying that Hillary Clinton is incapable of corruption, but it behooves me to mention this: In thirty years of intense searching for corruption, nothing concrete has been found. It’s possible that Clinton has some very good friends in the Democratic Party to protect her, but many of these investigations have been conducted by people with

9/20/16 55 no party allegiance or who have outright hostility to the party, including Kenneth Starr and Representative Trey Gowdy, the persistent investigator into the Benghazi attacks. Conspiracy theories are fascinating—if you’d like to lose a whole afternoon, read up on the theories behind Vince Foster’s death—but they’re as unrealistic and empty as believing in UFOs and . Applying them to whether Clinton is a good candidate for the White House is ultimately offensive. For example, the “coin toss” gotchamoment from the Iowa Caucus that turned out to be satire but was taken as fact is a direct extension of these earlier accusations against her character, predicated on the assertion that she is capable of rigging an election (and one that she didn’t even need to win, like the Iowa caucus). That history and context frames our current understanding of her. But here are five other ways I see sexism playing into our understanding of Hillary Clinton: • Sexism limits how she speaks, behaves in public, and dresses. Even as she’s tried to make fun of her favored blue pantsuits, she’s not allowed to yell or ramble, as Sanders does, lest she be viewed as “aggressive.” More recently, even though she carefully avoided declaring victory the night of the Iowa caucus, instead saying she was breathing a sigh of relief, many people interpreted her words as just such a declaration and then disparaged her by calling her a liar. If this is the meme on people’s Facebook feeds, then we are nowhere near a substantive conversation leading into a critical election.

• Sexism dismisses her experience. Eight years as the Senator from New York, four years as Secretary of State, eight years as First Lady, and decades of work on minor’s rights (she worked on clarifying the law around emancipated minor statuses) and women’s rights—and instead of talking about how this positions her to serve well on both domestic and foreign policy issues, ponders if her experience is “a liability.” And in part she is framed as having too much history because…

• Sexism insists on linking her to Bill Clinton’s weaknesses. Clinton herself has tried to tie her potential presidency to her husband’s successes, like the economic growth of the 1990s, which is difficult without also taking on his disastrous 1996 welfare reform law, his failed trade policies, and his abominable “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy for military personnel. But linking women to their husbands is a tried-and-true sexist practice that discounts women’s autonomy and reinforces outmoded ways of thinking about compulsory heterosexuality and male authority. Using Bill Clinton’s administration to demarcate how Hillary would perform as president is patently sexist, and undermines the concept of a critical approach: that a person who is being careful on the issues may shift her stance over time. Obama was applauded when he “evolved” on marriage, so it’s not like there isn’t a recent precedent for changing one’s mind. Also, Clinton has effectively pushed Sanders more to the left on his gun control policy, so why isn’t he being castigated as a weak flip- flopper?

• Sexism hypercriticizes women for things men do with impunity. She receives too much money from Wall Street, critics argue. The numbers add up to approximately 7.2 percent of the funds backing Clinton, to her campaign, and to the outside super PAC groups (which she doesn’t control). That far surpasses Bernie Sanders’ donations from financial groups—he disavows super PACS and has received only $47,187 from the securities and investment industry—but it’s far, far short of the dollars and percentages given to several of her GOP rivals. We still should ask: is it sexist to single out Clinton on grounds that should mark many of her colleagues? Perhaps the Sanders campaign would take a similar tack against, say, Ted Cruz, if they each receive their party’s nominations?

• Sexism rejects pragmatism as less significant than idealism. In 2007, progressives were swept up in Barack Obama’s campaign of “hope and change” and “yes we can,” and were not excited by Clinton’s more practical “ready to lead” message. In 2016, Sanders’s mantra is about a “political revolution” in contrast with the pragmatism of the Clinton camp, so it feels like the same dynamic at play. But why ispragmatism marked as bad or lesser than idealism, especially after seven years of such extreme congressional gridlock that we’ve endured a multi-week government shutdown and more than fifty votes to overturn the Affordable Care Act— except that it is Hillary Clinton’s approach?

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My point here is not that you should vote for Hillary Clinton. This is not an ALL CAPS decree that she’d be a good president—everyone should decide for themselves who they want to vote for. But when reading about the candidates during this mean season, we should keep in mind how gender affects criticism. Clinton’s political tenure and time as Secretary of State should certainly be held to high standards, as she is seeking the highest political office in the country. There are very legitimate questions to ask of her campaign around, say, Middle East foreign policy—how have the most recent events in Syria affected her earlier ideas about responding to their crisis, or what is her plan with Vladimir Putin’s aggressive annexation of eastern Ukraine? How does she plan to differentiate her administration’s priorities from those of President Obama? What is her plan for bringing Congress back into a working relationship with the White House? Can she (or any presidential candidate) articulate an intersectional political agenda and a plan for bringing those priorities to the Executive Branch? I would love to see the candidates get down to brass tacks as they’ve done in some of the earlier debates.

“Take This Test to See How Biased You are Against Having a Woman as President” by Soraya Chemaly, Huffington Post (4/4/16) Last week, Vox writer Emily Crockett wrote a great article about gender bias in how we think about leadership. She reviewed the results of new political science research. “One experiment,” she wrote, “just found that Clinton’s gender could cost her as much as 24 points against Trump among male voters, and 8 points overall.” Crockett went on to explain gender role expectations and threats, and the role that they play in voter perceptions. Studies reveal that simply asking questions that raise issues about challenges to traditional gender norms prime voters to feel threatened by powerful women who violate those norms. That effect, called gender priming, is far subtler than some alternatives, like the impact of overtly and graphically sexually objectifying women politicians to undermine their credibility or morality. Studies show, conclusively, the role that gender, gender role expectations and traditional party structures play in suppressing women’s leadership, particularly in electoral politics. A new one, Barriers and Bias: The Status of Women in Leadership, recently released by the American Association of University Women, takes a detailed look, covering gender and race, at the reasons women continue to be so greatly underrepresented in leadership roles in all sectors. A similar 2015 study of more than 19,000 high school students, Leaning Out, Teen Girls and Leadership Biases, revealed how early this discrimination is already at play. Almost a quarter of teen girls — 23 percent — preferred male to female political leaders. That number was a staggering 40 percent for teen boys. While twice the percentage of girls said they preferred female political leaders than boys, the numbers were low — eight percent of girls, four percent of boys. Fifty-six expressed no preference. Race was also highly salient. All students were most likely to support their white male peers in positions of leadership and least likely to support their white female peers. SO, HERE’S THE TEST. How’d you score? My results “suggest a slight association of Female with Supporter and Male with Leader.” And, I identify as a woman and a feminist, which increases the odds that I would not be biased against women leaders significantly. Men who aren’t feminists have the highest resistance to the idea. A large segment of Millennial men are even more conservative than Genxers and routinely underestimate women and their professional and political abilities. Five primary factors contribute to this problem:  Enduring discrimination, otherwise known as sexism  Ambient environmental family, school or work hostility  Profuse negative stereotypes about women in leadership  Gender biases that associate power, authority and leadership with masculinity  Institutional intractability that perpetuates the status quo

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Your gender and race don’t mean you can’t be biases against your gender and race. In-group biases are common. Most people would balk at the suggestion that they are overtly sexist. Some admit to prejudices, and acknowledge that they have unconscious biases. When faced with a specific candidate, like Hillary Clinton, however, the most common response to why a person might not support her candidacy rarely takes these realities into account. “It’s not because she’s a woman, it’s because INSERT REASON HERE.” Excuses for not wanting Clinton to be president sound incredibly familiar to those mentioned for not wanting other women to be leaders. “She’s not the right woman.” “It’s not the right time.” “She’s not credible.” “She’s not trustworthy.” “I can’t put my finger on it, but...” “I can’t stand her husband,” and more. There are legitimate reasons for not supporting Clinton, but they are, almost inevitably, only partially complete. She pays a very high price, as a candidate, for her lady genes. There are reasons why the U.S. ranks 95th in the world for women’s national legislative political representation, and has never had a woman president, and it isn’t because women aren’t credible, able, trustworthy, moral, or have problematic spouses. In the last ‘80s, Mahzarin R. Banaji, who was then an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University, found a way to study the implicit biases that we all have. At the time she was involved in a memory experiment, the end of which involved asking subjects, based on a list of names, which people were famous. The subjects routinely and incorrectly made “ordinary” men “famous” ones, but did not do the same when encountering women’s names. Banaji was curious: Would the same thing happen if she changed male names like “Sebastian” and “Peter,” to “Susannah” and “Penelope.” In her initial experiments, she found that female names were far less likely to achieve fame in the same way. People, entirely unconsciously, herself included, did not treat women the same way they treated men. They could not say why and did not consider the simple change in gender to be the cause of the evident differences. These biases don’t only hurt the people we are “othering,” but also can undermine people’s own sense of self and their abilities, a phenomenon called stereotype threat, defined by researchers in 1995 as “the risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one’s group.” So, for example, when African American students have to indicate their race on a test booklet, their test scores drop. The same thing happens when girls and women are asked to indicate that they are female. Simply removing the request for people to identify themselves prior to taking an AP calculus test improved test scores. Banaji’s work has, over the years, expanded to study other forms of common and unconscious bias and is, today, coming to some meaningful fruition. Banaji and two other professors, Tony Greenwald (University of Washington) and Brian Nosek (University of Virginia) started a nonprofit, Project Implicit, in 2001. While it’s very difficult, impossible, to entirely eliminate bias, it is possible to acknowledge it and reduce its effects at home and at work. Research suggests several approaches, including self-monitoring and evaluation and anti-bias training and education that work to create positive outcomes. There are also tech approaches. For example, Gap Jumpers offsets biases through blind interviewing and hiring processes. Of course, you’d have to want those outcomes to willingly participate.

“How Gender Bias Plays a Role in Elections” by Jacqueline Howard Huffington Post (11/12/15) Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Carly Fiorina will have a more challenging time than their male opponents convincing voters that they’re qualified to lead our country — and it’s all because of how gender bias emerges in the voting booth. Female candidates have to be more qualified than their male opponents to succeed in an election because many voters have a hard time seeing women as leaders, according to research conducted by Dr. Cecilia Hyunjung Mo, an assistant professor of political science at Vanderbilt University. “Based upon my research, Hillary Clinton and Carly Fiorina have the challenge of clearly demonstrating to voters that they are more qualified than their male counterparts,” she told The Huffington Post. “And they have the additional challenge of figuring out how to be more qualified in the ways that matter to most voters today.”

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Even if voters explicitly say that they are happy to have a female president, the research shows that their unconscious biases still can influence their candidate preferences, Mo said in the video below, released. . . on Monday. For the research, published in the June edition of the journal Political Behavior, Mo asked 407 men and women in Florida to take the Implicit Association Test, a social psychology metric that measures the strength of a person’s automatic associations and hidden biases. In the test, participants had to pair traditionally male or female names and images with words such as “leader” or “assistant.” Mo specifically decided to survey Florida residents because the percentage of female elected officials in Florida at the time of the research was similar to the national percentage: 23 percent of officeholders in Florida were women, versus 24 percent nationally. Next, Mo asked the men and women in the group individually how they would vote in hypothetical elections involving two candidates. Some of the elections included a female candidate who was equally or more qualified than her male opponent. Mo compared the participants’ scores on the Implicit Association Test to how they voted in the hypothetical elections. She found that the average person who struggled to associate female names with leadership-themed words was more likely to vote for a male candidate — even if the person explicitly said that they would support a female candidate and even if the female candidate was equally qualified for the job. People of color weren’t used, as that would have introduced a racial bias that could have skewed the research results. On the bright side, Mo noted that the influence of biases had less influence if the female candidate was clearly more qualified than the male opponent. “Which is great news,” Mo said. “However, if winning female candidates have to be more qualified on average than winning male candidates, then bias against women candidates is not necessarily an artifact of the past.” Mo’s work is an example of how we’re more likely to express sexism and racism in our unconscious thinking and behavior than in acts of overt bigotry, columnist Nicholas Kristof pointed out in an op-ed for The New York Times in June. “This affects the candidates we vote for, the employees we hire, the people we do business with,” he wrote. “I suspect unconscious bias has been far more of a factor for President Obama than overt racism and will also be a challenge for Hillary Rodham Clinton.” This affects the candidates we vote for, the employees we hire, the people we do business with. Mo noted that previous research on racial biases in presidential elections — such as the 2008-2009 American National Election Study, which also included an Implicit Association Test — has shown similar results. In one of her previous studies, she found that the average voter more easily associated a white person’s face with positive words than a black person’s face. “Those who particularly struggled to associate black faces with positive words were less likely to have voted for President Obama,” she said. What can be done to reduce the unfair biases that voters may bring to the voting booth? Mo told HuffPost that to overcome these unconscious biases, we need to increase the representation of women and racial minorities in politics. By doing so, voters will see minorities in leadership positions more frequently, which can shift the way that their minds associate women and racial minorities with leadership. “People are, in part, where they are because they haven’t seen a lot of female leaders,” Mo said. “What’s amazing is that many individuals, when they were given information about qualification differences, did choose the woman.” So elections may be more fair if voters are provided with more information about each candidate before and during voting. When voters are not provided additional information about a candidate, they may only use the simple cues that they do have — such as that candidate’s sex or race — to make political judgments. Being informed about candidates may “override the role that traits like candidate sex or race may play in their electability,” Mo told HuffPost. “Additionally, it will help for people to be aware of their potential hidden biases.”

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 E Pluribus Unum?  Return to Top A Wider Ideological Gap between More and Less Educated Adults Complete Report PDF Political polarization update Two years ago, Pew Research Center found that Republicans and Democrats were more divided along ideological lines than at any point in the previous two decades. But growing ideological distance is not confined to partisanship. There are also growing ideological divisions along educational and generational lines. Highly educated adults – particularly those who have attended graduate school – are far more likely than those with less education to take predominantly liberal positions across a range of political values. And these differences have increased over the past two decades. More than half of those with postgraduate experience (54%) have either consistently liberal political values (31%) or mostly liberal values (23%), based on an analysis of their opinions about the role and performance of government, social issues, the environment and other topics. Fewer than half as many postgrads – roughly 12% of the public in 2015– have either consistently conservative (10%) or mostly conservative (14%) values. About one-in-five (22%) express a mix of liberal and conservative opinions. Among adults who have completed college but have not attended graduate school (approximately 16% of the public), 44% have consistently or mostly liberal political values, while 29% have at least mostly conservative values; 27% have mixed ideological views. By contrast, among the majority of adults who do not have a college degree (72% of the public in 2015), far fewer express liberal opinions. About a third of those who have some college experience but do not have a bachelor’s degree (36%) have consistently liberal or mostly liberal political values, as do just 26% of those with no more than a high school degree. Roughly a quarter in each of these groups (28% of those with some college experience, 26% of those with no more than a high school education) have consistently conservative or mostly conservative values. Taking a roughly equal mix of liberal and conservative positions is far more prevalent among those with less education than those with at least a college degree. For instance, nearly half (48%) of those with a high school degree or less education express a mix of conservative and liberal opinions. That compares with just 22% of those with postgraduate experience. Over the past decade, ideological differences across generations also have widened. Millennials remain more liberal than older generations – 45% express consistently liberal or mostly liberal views, which is little changed from 2004 (41%). In contrast, growing shares of the oldest cohorts – Boomers and Silents – have conservative political values. About a third of Boomers (36%) and 40% of Silents have at least mostly conservative attitudes, up from 21% and 23%, respectively, in 2004.

This analysis is based on a survey conducted last fall among more than 6,000 adults, and draws from data on Pew Research Center surveys going back to 1994. Responses to 10 political values questions – covering opinions about government performance, the social safety net, the environment, immigration, homosexuality and other topics – were combined to create a scale of ideological consistency: Interactive: US Political Polarization: 1994-2015.

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More highly educated adults have consistently liberal views As Pew Research Center’s 2014 report on political polarization found, the share of the overall public that is ideologically consistent – that is, the share that takes either consistently liberal or consistently conservative positions opinions across the 10 values – is relatively modest, but has grown substantially over time, especially over the past decade. In the new study, nearly a quarter of Americans (23%) have either consistently liberal (13%) or consistently conservative views (10%). In 2004, just 11% were either consistently liberal (8%) or consistently conservative (3%). Much of the growth in ideological consistency has come among better educated adults – including a striking rise in the share who have across-the-board liberal views, which is consistent with the growing share of postgraduates who identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party . Currently, about a third of those with postgraduate experience (31%) give down- the-line liberal responses across the 10 items, up from 19% in 2004 and just 7% in 1994. Among college graduates with no postgraduate experience, 24% have consistently liberal values, compared with 13% in 2004 and 5% a decade earlier. Among postgrads and college graduates, the shares expressing consistently conservative views also have grown since 2004, from 4% to 10% among postgrads and from 4% to 11% among college graduates. But among both groups, consistently conservative views are at the about the same levels as they had been in 1994. In contrast with Americans with a college degree, among those with less education smaller shares express ideologically consistent views and those who do are about as likely to be consistently conservative (11% of those with some college experience, 8% of those with no more than a high school education) as they are to be consistently liberal (12% of some college, 5% of high school or less). Larger shares take a mix of liberal and conservative positions: Roughly half of those with no more than a high school education (48%) are ideologically mixed, along with 36% of those with some college experience. By contrast, only about a quarter of more educated Americans have ideologically mixed views. Across all educational categories – and among the public generally – the shares of Americans who take a roughly equal number of liberal and conservative positions have declined over the past two decades. But the declines have been more pronounced among postgraduates (from 38% to 22%) and college graduates (45% to 27%), than among those with some college experience (from 43% to 36%) or those with a high school degree or less education (from 53% to 48%). Republicans and Democrats, moving apart Overall, 38% of the public expresses a mix of liberal and conservative positions. In both 1994 and 2004, nearly half (49%) had mixed attitudes. As our 2014 polarization study found, Republicans and Democrats increasingly are on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum. Currently, 60% of Democrats and Democratic leaners have consistently liberal or mostly liberal political values, double the share in

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1994 (30%) and 11 percentage points higher than in 2004. And the share of Democrats with consistently liberal views has increased from just 5% in 1994 to 13% in 2004 and 27% currently. The share of Republicans and Republican leaners with at least mostly conservative values fell from 45% in 1994 to 31% in 2004, but has rebounded since then. In the new study, slightly more than half of Republicans (53%) express consistently or mostly conservative attitudes. The share with consistently conservative political values has increased from just 6% in 2004 to 22% currently. Democrats and Republicans more ideologically divided Today, an overwhelming share of Republicans (93%) is more conservative than the median Democrat, while a nearly identical share of Democrats (94%) is more liberal than the median Republican. Two decades ago, a much smaller majority of Republicans (64%) were to the right of the median Democrat, while 70% of Democrats were to the left of the median Republican. . . . Generations and ideological consistency There are wide generational differences in political values, based on the 10-item scale. Millennials continue to be considerably more liberal than older generations. (For more on ideological differences across generations, see“The GOP’s Millennial Problem Runs Deep.”) Among Millennials, 45% express consistently liberal (16%) or mostly liberal views (29%), compared with just 15% who have conservative attitudes. Four-in-ten Millennials have a mix of conservative and liberal views. Across older generations, fewer have liberal political values. About a third of Gen Xers (36%) have at least mostly liberal attitudes, while 23% have mostly conservative attitudes; 41% are mixed ideologically. Among Boomers, more have conservative (36%) than liberal (30%) attitudes; 34% have mixed views. And among Silents, 40% are conservative – including 21% who are consistently conservative – while 26% are liberal and 34% express a mix of conservative and liberal views. Notably, while there are wider ideological differences among Democrats than Republicans by levels of educational attainment, Republicans are more deeply divided along generational lines. Sizable majorities of older Republicans – 64% of Boomers and 69% of Silents – have at least mostly conservative attitudes across the 10-item scale. More than a quarter of Republican Boomers (28%) and 38% of Republican Silents give down-the-line conservative responses. Both groups have become substantially more conservative over the past decade. By contrast, only about half of Gen X Republicans (49%) express consistently or mostly conservative views – although that share has roughly doubled, from 24%, since 2004. Only about a third of Millennial Republicans (34%) express at least mostly conservative views, just half the share among Silent Republicans. There are smaller generational differences among Democrats, although Millennial Democrats (66%) are somewhat more likely than those in older generations to have liberal political values. Nearly identical shares across each cohort of Democrats – 28% of Millennials, 27% of Gen Xers and Boomers, and 23% of Silents – express consistently liberal views. Among the three older cohorts of Democrats, the numbers with consistently liberal attitudes has increased substantially over the past two decades.

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Partisan divides have widened on many political values As noted in the 2014 report, partisan divisions have increased over the past two decades on most of the measures that make up the 10-item ideological consistency scale. In some cases, such as in opinions about the economic effect of stricter environmental laws, the differences were fairly modest 20 years ago; at that time, 39% of Republicans and 29% of Democrats said stricter environmental laws cost too many jobs and hurt the economy. In 2015, more than half of Republicans (54%) and just 22% of Democrats expressed this view. On immigration and homosexuality, overall attitudes have shifted in a more liberal direction over the past 20 years. Still, partisan differences on both issues remain substantial and, in the case of immigration, have increased dramatically since the mid-1990s. In 1994, 64% of Republicans and 62% of Democrats said immigrants were a burden on the country because they took jobs and health care. In fall 2015, 53% of Republicans said immigrants were a burden on the country, compared with just 24% of Democrats. (The partisan gap has widened even more since then: in a survey last month, 56% of Republicans viewed immigrants as a burden on the country; just 17% of Democrats said the same.) On two measures related to government performance, partisan differences narrowed considerably between 1994 and 2004, before resurfacing in recent years. The share of Republicans saying government regulation of business did more harm than good fell from 64% in 1994, during the Clinton administration, to 45% in 2004, during George W. Bush’s presidency. In the fall of 2015, 68% of Republicans said government of regulation of business did more harm than good. Democrats’ views on government regulation of business have shown far less change over this period: in 1994, 46% said government regulation did more harm than good. That fell to 38% in 2004 and 34% in 2015. A similar pattern is evident in changes in partisan views of whether government is wasteful and inefficient.

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Partisan differences over issues, by education and generation As noted, Democrats with differing levels of education are more ideologically divided than Republicans, with some of the widest gaps on opinions about government regulation of business and race. Republicans are more divided along generational lines, especially in attitudes on homosexuality and immigration.

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Feelings about partisans and the parties Pew Research Center Partisans’ dislike of the opposing party is part and parcel of American politics, but recent years have witnessed a growing intensity in these feelings. For the first time in more than two decades of Pew Research Center surveys, majorities of partisans have not only an unfavorable view of the other party, but a very unfavorable one. Today, 55% of Democrats and 58% of Republicans view the other party in deeply negative terms. Intensely negative ratings of the opposing party were far less common in the past, even in presidential election years: In 2000 only about a quarter of both Democrats (23%) and Republicans (26%) had a very unfavorable view of the other party; by 2012 that had risen to more than four-in-ten. In just the two years since Pew Research Center documented this trend in “Political Polarization in the American Public” in 2014, the share rating the other party very unfavorably has increased by 12 percentage points in both parties. This strong dislike translates into an even greater sense of risk for many on both sides of the aisle. As in 2014, most of those who view the other party very unfavorably say that the opposing party’s policies “are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.” Still, a larger share now says this: 45% of Republicans now say that Democratic policies threaten the nation, while 41% of Democrats view GOP policies in equally stark terms (up from 31% in 2014). Views of the opposing party have grown colder over time As others have documented, data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) also show an increase in negative feelings about the opposing party. For decades the ANES have asked Republicans and Democrats to rate their feelings toward their own party and the other on a 0-to-100 thermometer scale (a slightly different “feeling thermometer” is used throughout the rest of this report). 1 Since 1964, Republicans’ and Democrats’ feelings toward the other party have grown much colder. The share of both parties with cold feelings toward the opposing party has steadily increased over the past five decades, from around 30% in 1964, to about 45% in 1984, to roughly six-in-ten in 2004; at the time of the most recent ANES in 2012, nearly 80% of Democrats and Republicans alike gave the other party a cold rating. A significant part of the growth in cold feelings has been the growth of very cold (0-24) feelings for the other side. In 1964, just 10% of Republicans and 14% of Democrats said they felt very cold toward the other side. In 2012, 44% of Republicans and 50% of Democrats were very cold. Over this same period, Americans’ overall warmth toward their own party has been largely stable, but intensely warm feelings are lower than they were in the 1960s and early 1970s.

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Feelings toward partisans In the current survey, when asked to rate a number of groups on a “feeling thermometer” between 0 and 100 – where 0 is the coldest, most negative rating and 100 represents the warmest, most positive – Democrats give Republicans an average rating of just 31, and Republicans give Democrats a similarly low rating of 29. Democrats feel colder toward Republicans than they do toward any other group asked about. Even elected officials in Washington receive an average rating 15 degrees warmer (46) than Republicans. Republicans rate Democrats (29) just as poorly as they do elected officials in Washington (30). Ratings of members of one’s own party are substantially warmer, though a sizable partisan gap in feelings about one’s own party is evident: On average, Democrats rate members of their own party a 76 on the 0-100 scale, while Republicans give an average 68 rating to their co-partisans. Although the average rating Republicans and Democrats give to one another is roughly the same, Republicans are somewhat more likely than Democrats to choose a rating for the opposing party that is “cold” (0-49 on the 0-100 scale): 69% of Republicans rate their feelings for Democrats as cold, compared with 61% of Democrats who say this about Republicans. And Democrats are somewhat more likely than Republicans to give members of their own party “warm” ratings (51-100 on the 0-100 scale). Three-quarters of Democrats (75%) give a warm rating to Democrats; about two-thirds of Republicans (67%) feel warmly toward Republicans. Much of the difference comes from a 13-percentage-point gap between the shares of Democrats (52%) and Republicans (39%) who give their co-partisans a “very warm” rating (a rating of 76 or higher). Compared with self-identified partisans, independents who lean to a party largely share the negative views of the other party, but hold decidedly colder views of the party they lean toward. Though roughly seven-in-ten Republicans (69%) are cold toward Democrats, that falls to 57% among Republican leaners. Nearly as many Democratic leaners as Democrats have cold feelings about Republicans (55% vs. 61%). And while 75% of Democrats give members of their own party a warm rating, just 45% of Democratic leaners give Democrats a warm rating. A similar 29-point gap exists between Republicans (67%) and Republican leaners (38%) in their warm ratings of Republicans. Politically engaged feel more negatively about those on ‘other side’ Partisans who are highly engaged in politics – those who nearly always vote and have either donated money to or volunteered for a campaign in the past year – feel more coldly toward members of the other party and more warmly toward members of their own party than people who are less engaged in politics. Highly engaged Democrats are more likely than less engaged Democrats to express cold feelings about members of the GOP: 76% give Republicans a cold rating, including 51% who give a very cold rating. In

9/20/16 66 comparison, 60% of those who are moderately engaged (regular voters who do not volunteer or give money) give a cold rating, along with 56% of those with lower levels of political engagement. The relationship between political engagement and coldness toward those affiliated with the opposing party is less striking among Republicans. Highly engaged Republicans are more likely than those who are moderately engaged to express very cold feelings toward Democrats (56% vs. 42%), but are only modestly more likely to express cold views overall (75%, compared with about seven-in-ten among the less engaged). Engagement is related to warmth toward one’s own side to similar degrees in both parties: 90% of highly engaged Democrats express warm feelings for Democrats, while smaller shares of the moderately engaged (74%) and least engaged (71%) say the same. Two-thirds of highly engaged Democrats (66%) go so far as to give a very warm rating, compared with about half of less engaged Democrats. Among Republicans, there is a similar 17-point gap in warm ratings between the most and least engaged (76% vs. 59%, respectively). More ideological in both parties are colder to the opposition Over the past several decades, not only have views of the opposing party become more deeply negative, but both parties’ members have become more consistently ideological. The current survey finds that ideologically consistent partisans – Democrats with political values that are consistently liberal and Republicans with values that are consistently conservative – hold some of the most negative views of the other party. 2 Among Republicans, 82% of those with consistently conservative political values say they have cold feelings toward Democrats, compared with 72% of those who have values that are mostly conservative and 62% of Republicans who take about an equal number of conservative and liberal positions. The pattern is similar – and somewhat more pronounced – among Democrats. Eight-in-ten Democrats who take down-the-line liberal positions feel coldly toward Republicans, on par with the share of consistently conservative Republicans who feel coldly toward Democrats. Far fewer Democrats with mostly liberal positions (61%) feel coldly toward Republicans, and just 47% of Democrats with ideologically mixed views rate members of the GOP coldly. Among Democrats, those with consistently liberal views are warmer to their party than other Democrats: 86% express warm views of Democrats, compared with 77% of those with mostly liberal views and 68% among those who are ideologically mixed in their views. But among Republicans, the link between ideology and warmth toward their own party is somewhat weaker. While Republicans with mostly conservative views are more likely to feel warmly toward Republicans than those with mixed views (75% vs. 61%), all Republicans are about as likely to feel very warmly towards their co-partisans: 39% of those with consistently conservative views, 42% with mostly conservative views and 38% with ideologically mixed views feel very warmly toward other Republicans.

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Ideology can be measured using one’s political values or based on what people consider themselves to be. Though these measures are correlated, they can differ (for example, not all of those who have consistently liberal political values call themselves liberal). But, as with ideology based on political values, self-identification is also associated with antipathy toward the opposing party. Republicans who self-identify as more conservative are colder toward Democrats and warmer toward Republicans than those who think of themselves as less conservative. A similar pattern is seen among Democrats, with those who are more liberal expressing colder views of the GOP’s membership than those who identify as less liberal. Antipathy and presidential approval As Republicans and Democrats have grown more negative in their views of the other party, so too have their evaluations of presidents representing the other party become more critical. Partisan divisions over presidential performance are wider now than at any point since the 1950s, and this growing gap is largely the result of increasing disapproval from the opposition party. With seven of the eight years of his term completed, Barack Obama’s average approval since taking office stands at just 14% among Republicans, while his average approval among Democrats is 81%. During George W. Bush’s time in office, his average overall approval rating among Democrats was just 23%; on average 81% of Republicans approved of Bush’s performance. (These are averages for the full Bush administration. During his final year in office, an average of just 8% of Democrats approved of his performance, along with 63% of Republicans). Bush’s and Obama’s polarized job approval ratings stand in contrast to public ratings of previous modern presidents. For example, on average 31% of Democrats approved of Ronald Reagan’s job performance throughout his presidency, while he garnered similar ratings to Obama’s among those in his own party (83% average approval). Just over a quarter of Republicans (27% on average) approved of Bill Clinton’s job performance during his time in office. And going back to Dwight Eisenhower’s administration, nearly half of Democrats (49%), along with 88% of Republicans, said they approved of the job the GOP president was doing in office.

The roots of partisanship Pew Research Center Why do people choose to identify as a Republican or a Democrat? For Republicans, about as many (68%) cite as a major reason the harm that Democratic policies inflict on the country as cite the beneficial impact of GOP policies (64%). The balance of views among Democrats is only slightly more positive: 68% say a major reason they belong to their party is that Democratic policies are good for the country. However, concern over Republican policies also looms large: 62% say a major reason for their party choice is that “the Republican Party’s policies are harmful to the country.”

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For members of both parties, other factors rank far behind the parties’ policies among reasons for choosing a party. Roughly four-in-ten Democrats (41%) and Republicans (38%) say a major reason for identifying with their party is that they “have a lot in common” with the people who belong to the parties. Fewer people – 31% of Democrats and 26% of Republicans – say the lack of common ground with members of the opposing party is a main reason why they are a Democrat or Republican. Just 31% of Democrats cite long-standing ties with the party – “ever since I can remember I’ve been a Democrat” – as a major reason for identifying with the party. Even fewer Republicans (23%) cite this as a major reason they belong to the GOP.

For independents who lean to the Republican and Democratic parties, the main motivation for leaning to their party is the harm that the opposing party’s policies cause the country. More than half of Republican leaners (55%) and 51% of Democratic leaners say harm from the opposing party’s policies are a major reason for leaning to their party. No other factor comes close – just 30% of Republican leaners and 34% of Democratic leaners cite the positive effects from their preferred party’s policies as a major reason. When asked why they lean but do not identify with their party, about half of Republican leaners (52%) cite frustration with GOP leaders as a major reason; another 40% say they disagree with the party on some important issues. These factors are cited less frequently by Democratic leaners: Just 28% say frustration with the Democratic Party’s leaders is a major reason they do not identify as Democrats, and 33% cite disagreements on key issues as a major reason. Wearing the party label, somewhat uneasily Far more Republicans and Democrats strongly reject the other party’s label than enthusiastically embrace their own. A wide majority of Republicans (86%) say that the term “Republican” describes them at least fairly well, but only 27% say the term describes them very well. However, more than twice as many Republicans (67%) say the term “Democrat” describes them not at all well.

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A similar pattern is seen among Democrats. Fully 88% of Democrats say the term “Democrat” describes them at least fairly well, but just a third (33%) say the party label describes them very well. As with Republicans, far more Democrats (63%) say the opposing party’s label describes them not at well than say their own party’s name describes them very well. Large shares of Democrats and Republicans credit their own parties with representing their interests at least fairly well. However, while 37% of Democrats say the Democratic Party represents their interests very well, only about half as many Republicans (19%) say the same about their party. Overwhelming shares in both parties say the opposing party does not represent their interests well, with about half in each saying the other party does not do at all well in this regard (52% of Republicans, 51% of Democrats). In another sign of their dissatisfaction with the Republican Party, fewer than half of Republican leaners (45%) say the GOP does well in representing their interests, while the Democratic Party does not do a good job. But nearly as many Republican leaners (39%) say neither party does well in representing their interests. Democratic leaners are more likely to say their party does well in representing their interests: 57% say this, compared with just 26% who say neither party does a good job. Party shifting rare, more common among Republicans than Democrats Most partisans say they have always thought of themselves as belonging to their current party, but about a third of Republicans (32%) say that at one point they thought of themselves as Democrats, while 22% of Democrats say they previously considered themselves Republicans. However, relatively small numbers in each party – 8% of Republicans and 7% of Democrats – say they have thought of themselves as members of the other party in the past decade. Young people are more likely than older adults to have thought of themselves as members of the opposite party in the past 10 years. Among Republicans, 16% of those under 35 say they thought of themselves as Democrats in the past decade, compared with 6% of those 35 and older. The pattern is similar among Democrats: 15% of those younger than 35 vs. 4% of older Democrats were Republicans in the past decade. Among independents who lean to the Republican and Democratic parties, most at one time thought of themselves as members of the party to which they currently lean. About six-in-ten Republican leaners (61%) say they once considered themselves Republicans, including 41% who thought of themselves as Republicans in the past decade. Similarly, 58% of Democratic-leaning independents say they once thought of themselves as Democrats (40% in the past decade). About a third of Republican-leaning independents (35%) say in the past they thought of themselves as Democrats, while a comparable share of Democratic leaners say they once viewed themselves as Republicans.

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“The Impact of Immigration on American Society: Looking Backward to the Future” by Charles Hirschman (7/28/06) Introduction Even as most Americans celebrate their heritage and identity as a “nation of immigrants,” there is deep ambivalence about future immigration. There is a strong base of support for continued immigration as a necessary ingredient for economic growth and as an essential element of a cosmopolitan society among many Americans. Almost 60 million people— more than one fifth of the total population of the United States—are immigrants or the children of immigrants. For most of this community, immigration policy is not an abstract ideology but a means of family reunification and an affirmation that they are part of the “American dream.” On the other side, there is a substantial share, perhaps a majority, of Americans who are opposed to a continuation of large scale immigration. Many opponents of immigration are old stock Americans who have all but forgotten their immigrant ancestors. They often live in small towns or in suburban areas, and many have relatively little contact with immigrant families in their neighborhoods, churches, and friendship networks. Beyond the debate over the economic consequences of immigration, there is also an emotional dimension that shapes sentiments toward immigration. Many Americans, like people everywhere, are more comfortable with the familiar than with change. They fear that newcomers with different languages, religions, and cultures are reluctant to assimilate to American society and to learn English. Although many of the perceptions and fears of old stock Americans about new immigrants are rooted in ignorance and prejudice, the fears of many Americans about the future are not entirely irrational. With globalization and massive industrial restructuring dominating many traditional sources of employment (both blue collar and white collar), many native born citizens are fearful about their (and their children’s) future. The news media often cite examples of industries that seek out low cost immigrant workers to replace native born workers. Some sectors, such as harvesting vegetables and fruits in agriculture, have very few native born Americans seeking jobs in them, but immigrants are also disproportionately employed in many other sectors, including meatpacking, construction, hospitals, and even in many areas of advanced study in research universities. These examples are fodder for unscrupulous political leaders who seek to exploit popular fears for their own ends. While it is not possible to predict the role of immigration in America’s future, it is instructive to study the past. The current debates and hostility surrounding immigrants echo throughout American history. What is most surprising is that almost all popular fears about immigration and even the judgments of “experts” about the negative impact of immigrants have been proven false by history. Not only have almost all immigrants (or their descendants) assimilated over time, but they have broadened American society in many positive ways. In this review, I discuss the popular fears about immigrants by old stock Americans and the historical record of immigrant contributions to the evolution of the industrial economy, political reform, and even to the development of American culture. A Short Overview of Immigration Immigration to North America began with Spanish settlers in the 16th century, and French and English settlers in the 17th century. In the century before the American revolution, there was a major wave of free and indentured labor from England and other parts of Europe as well as large scale importation of slaves from Africa and the Caribbean. Although some level of immigration has been continuous throughout American history, there have been two epochal periods: the 1880 to 1924 Age of Mass Migration, primarily from Southern and Eastern Europe, and the Post 1965 Wave of Immigration, primarily from Latin America and Asia (Min 2002, Portes and Rumbaut 1996). Each of these eras added more than 25 million immigrants, and the current wave is far from finished. During some of the peak years of immigration in the early 1900s, about one million immigrants arrived annually, which was more than one percent of the total U.S. population at the time. In the early 21st century, there have been a few years with more than one million legal immigrants, but with a total U.S. population of almost 300 million, the relative impact is much less than it was in the early years of the 20th century. The first impact of immigration is demographic. The 70 million immigrants who have arrived since the founding of the republic (formal records have only been kept since 1820) are responsible for the majority of the contemporary American population (Gibson 1992: 165). Most Americans have acquired a sense of historical continuity from America’s founding, but this is primarily the result of socialization and education, not descent. The one segment of

9/20/16 71 the American population with the longest record of historical settlement is African Americans. Almost all African Americans are the descendants of 17th- or 18th-century arrivals (Edmonston and Passell 1994: 61). Much of the historical debate over the consequences of immigration has focused on immigrant “origins”—where they came from. Early in the 20th century when immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe was at its peak, many old stock Americans sought to preserve the traditional image of the country as primarily composed of descendants from Northwest Europe, especially of English Protestant stock (Baltzell 1964). The immigration restrictions of the 1920s were calibrated to preserving the historic “national origins” of the American population (Higham 1988). The American population has, however, always been much more diverse than the “Anglo-centric” image of the 18th century. The first American census in 1790, shortly after the formation of the United States, counted nearly 4 million people, of whom at least 20% were of African descent (Gibson and Jung 2002). There are no official figures on the numbers of American Indians prior to the late 19th century, but they were the dominant population of the 18th century in most of the territories that eventually became the United States. Estimates of the non-English-origin population in 1790 range from 20 to 40 percent (Akenson 1984; McDonald and McDonald 1980; Purvis 1984). Each new wave of immigration to the United States has met with some degree of hostility and popular fears that immigrants will harm American society or will not conform to the prevailing “American way of life.” In 1751, Benjamin Franklin complained about the “Palatine Boors” who were trying to Germanize the province of Pennsylvania and refused to learn English (Archdeacon 1983: 20). Throughout the 19th century, Irish and German Americans, especially Catholics, were not considered to be fully American in terms of culture or status by old stock Americans. In May 1844, there were three days of rioting in Kensington, an Irish suburb of Philadelphia, which culminated in the burning of two Catholic churches and other property (Archdeacon 1983: 81). This case was one incident of many during the 1840s and 1850s—the heyday of the “Know Nothing Movement”—when Catholic churches and convents were destroyed and priests were attacked by Protestant mobs (Daniels 1991: 267-268). The hostility of old line Americans to “foreigners” accelerated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as racial ideology and anti-Semitism also became part of American consciousness. The rising tide of nativism—the fear of foreigners—had deep roots in anti-Catholicism and a fear of foreign radicals. The new dominant element of this ideology in the late 19th century was the belief in the inherent superiority of the Anglo-Saxon “race” (Higham 1988: Chapter 1). These beliefs and the link to immigration restriction had widespread support among many well-educated elites. The Immigration Restriction League, founded by young Harvard-educated Boston Brahmins in 1894, advocated a literacy test to slow the tide of immigration (Bernard 1980: 492). It was thought that a literacy test would reduce immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, which was sending an “alarming number of illiterates, paupers, criminals, and madmen who endangered American character and citizenship” (Higham 1988: 103). Cities, where most immigrants settled, were derided and feared as places filled with dangerous people and radical ideas (Hawley 1972: 521). These sentiments were often formulated by intellectuals, but they resonated with many white Americans who were reared in rather parochial and homogenous rural and small town environments. While some reformers, such as Jane Addams, went to work to alleviate the many problems of urban slums, others such as Henry Adams, the descendant of two American presidents and a noted man of letters, expressed virulent nativism and anti-Semitism (Baltzell 1964: 111). The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first step toward a closed society. From the 1880s to the 1920s, a diverse set of groups, ranging from the old line New England elites to the Progressive Movement in the Midwest and to the Ku Klux Klan led a campaign to halt immigration from undesirable immigrants from Europe (Higham 1988; Jones 1992: Chapter 9). In the early decades of the 20th century the nascent pseudo-science of Eugenics was used to support claims of the inferiority of the new immigrants relative to old stock Americans. Passing the national origins quotas in the early 1920s was intended to exclude everyone from Asia and Africa and to sharply lower the number of arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe. The period from 1924 to 1965, when a highly restrictive immigration policy was in place, was exceptional in American history. For those who were reared in this era, it might seem that the high levels of immigration experienced during the last three decades of the 20th century are unusual. However, high levels of immigration characterized most of the 18th and 19th centuries as well as the first two decades of the 20th.

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The impact of the 1965 Amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act, also known as the Hart-Cellar Act, was a surprise to policy makers and many experts. The primary intent of the 1965 Act was to repeal the national origin quotas enacted in the 1920s, which were considered discriminatory by the children and grandchildren of Southern and Eastern European immigrants. The advocates of reform in the 1960s were not pushing for a major new wave of immigration. Their expectation was that there would be a small increase of arrivals from Italy, Greece, and a few other European countries as families that were divided by the immigration restrictions of the 1920s were allowed to be reunited, but that no long-term increase would result (Reimers 1985: Chapter 3). The new criteria for admission under the 1965 Act were family reunification and scarce occupational skills (Keely 1979). The new preference system allowed highly skilled professionals, primarily doctors, nurses, and engineers from Asian countries, to immigrate and eventually to sponsor their families. About the same time, and largely independently of the 1965 Immigration Act, immigration from Latin America began to rise. Legal and undocumented migration from Mexico surged after a temporary farm worker program known as the Bracero Program was shut down in 1964 (Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002). Migration from Cuba arose from the tumult of Fidel Castro’s Revolution, as first elites and then professional and middle class families fled persecution and the imposition of socialism in the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning in the 1970s, there were several waves of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Hmong refugees following the collapse of American-supported regimes in Southeast Asia. In the 1980s, there were new refugees from Central American nations such as Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala (Lundquist and Massey 2005). Each of these streams of immigration as well as refugee inflows has spawned secondary waves of immigration as family members followed. By 2000, there were over 30 million foreign-born persons in the United States, of whom almost one third arrived in the prior decade. Adding together immigrants and their children (the second generation), more than 60 million people—or one in five Americans—have recent roots from other countries (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2005). Although the current levels of immigration are not equal—in relative terms—to the Age of Mass Migration in the early 20th century, the absolute numbers of contemporary immigrants far exceed that of any prior time in American history or the experience of any other country. American history cannot be separated from the history of immigration. As Handlin (1973: 3) puts it, “immigrants were American history.” During the middle decades of the 19th century, immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia played a major role in settling the frontier. Irish immigrants worked as laborers in cities and were the major source of labor in the construction of transportation networks, including canals, railroads, and roads. Some have estimated that the manpower advantage of the Union forces during the Civil War was largely due to immigrants who had settled in the northern states (Gallman 1977: 31). Immigrants have also played an important role in the transition to an urban industrial economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Immigrant workers have always been over-represented in skilled trades, mining, and as peddlers, merchants, and laborers in urban areas. Immigrants and their children were the majority of workers in the garment sweatshops of New York, the coal fields of Pennsylvania, and the stockyards of Chicago. The cities of America during the age of industrialization were primarily immigrant cities (Gibson and Jung 2006). The rapidly expanding industrial economy of the North and Midwest drew disproportionately on immigrant labor from 1880 to 1920 and then on African American workers from the South from 1920 to 1950. In 1900, about three quarters of the populations of many large cities were composed of immigrants and their children, including New York, Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, San Francisco, Buffalo, Milwaukee, and Detroit (Carpenter 1927: 27). Immigrants and their children remained the majority of the urban population, especially in the industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest until the 1920s (Carpenter 1927: 27; Eldridge and Thomas 1964: 206-209). Immigrants and their children have also played an important role in modern American politics, helping to form the Roosevelt coalition in the 1930s and again in the 1960s with the election of John F. Kennedy. The seeds of the 1932 Roosevelt coalition were established in 1928, when Al Smith, an Irish American (on his mother’s side) Catholic from New York City, attracted the immigrant urban vote to the Democratic Party. Although Herbert Hoover defeated Al Smith in 1928, a number of scholars have attributed the shift from the Republican dominance of the government in the 1920s to the New Deal coalition of the 1930s to the increasing share, turnout, and partisanship of the urban ethnic vote following several decades of mass immigration (Andersen 1979: 67-69; Baltzell 1964: 230; Clubb and Allen 1969; Degler 1964; Lubell 1952: 28).

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Although the age of mass immigration had ended in the 1920s, the children of immigrants formed 20 percent of the potential electorate in 1960 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1965: 8). The political leanings of the second generation can be inferred from research on the relationship between religion and political preferences. In the decades following the World War II era, white Protestants, especially middle class white Protestants outside the South, have been the base of the Republican Party, while Catholic and Jewish voters have been disproportionately Democratic (Hamilton 1972: chap. 5). The majority of early 20th-century Southern and Eastern European immigrants were Catholic or Jewish (Foner 2000: 11; Jones 1992: 192-95). The reform periods of the New Deal of the 1930s and the New Frontier (which lead to the Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson) were made possible by the mass migration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Immigrants and their descendants were also important in the development of popular American culture and in creating the positive image of immigration in the American mind. Immigrants and the second generation have played a remarkable role in the American creative arts, including writing, directing, producing, and acting in American films and plays for most of the first half of the 20th century (Buhle 2004; Gabler 1988; Most 2004; Phillips 1998; Winokur 1996). The majority of Hollywood film directors who have won two or more Academy Awards (Oscars) were either immigrants or the children of immigrants (Hirschman 2005: Table 4). Many of the most highly regarded composers and playwrights of Broadway were the children of immigrants, including George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, and Leonard Bernstein (Most 2004). These composers and lyricists who wrote much of the standard American songbook were largely second and third generation Jewish immigrants who were reared in ethnic enclaves, but their music has defined the quintessential American musical culture of the 20th century. Although first and second generation immigrant artists have always been anxious to assimilate to American society and to adopt “Anglo-sounding” names (Baltzell 1964), they have also broadened American culture to make it more receptive and open to outsiders. The Hollywood theme that “anyone can make it in America” is an Americanized version of the rags to riches story—one that is appealing to people who are striving for upward mobility. Many Hollywood and Broadway productions have also given us poignant accounts of outsiders who struggle to be understood and accepted. Perhaps it is not so surprising that the Statue of Liberty has become the preeminent national symbol of the United States (Kasinitz 2004: 279). Lessons from the 20th Century From our current vantage point, it is clear that popular beliefs and fears about immigrants in the early 20th century were completely mistaken. In the early 20th century, most elites and many social scientists thought that immigrants were overrunning American society. Based on the prevailing theories of the time (social Darwinism and Eugenics), immigrants were thought to be culturally and “racially” inferior to old stock Americans. The arguments used to restrict continued Southern and Eastern European immigration in the 20th century paralleled those made earlier to end Chinese and Japanese immigration (in 1882 and 1907, respectively). For three decades, the battle over immigration restriction was waged in the court of public opinion and in Congress. In 1910, the Dillingham Commission (a congressionally appointed commission named after Senator William P. Dillingham of Vermont) issued a 42-volume report, which assumed the racial inferiority of the new immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe relative to the old stock immigrants from Northwestern Europe (Bernard 1980: 492). Social Darwinism and scientific racism were in full flower with many leading scholars warning against allowing further immigration of “beaten members of beaten breeds” (Jones 1992: 228-230). When the passage of a literacy test in 1917 did not have the intended impact of slowing immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, Congress passed the Quota Act in 1921 to limit the number of annual immigrants from each country to three percent of the foreign-born of that nationality in the 1910 census (Bernard 1980: 492-493). These provisions were not strong enough for some restrictionists, who passed another immigration law in 1924 that pushed the quotas back to two percent of each nationality counted in the 1890 census, a date before the bulk of the new immigrants had arrived. Looking backward, we can see that the impacts of the Age of Mass Migration from 1880 to 1924 were almost entirely opposite to those anticipated by contemporary observers. Based on standard measures of socioeconomic achievement, residential location, and intermarriage, the children and grandchildren of the “new immigrants” of the early 20th century have almost completely assimilated into American society (Alba and Nee 2003). Even groups such as Italian Americans that were considered to be a “community in distress” as late as the 1930s have blended

9/20/16 74 into the American mosaic. A closer examination reveals that the “new immigrants” have remade American society in their image. The Anglo-centric core of the early 20th century has been largely replaced with a more cosmopolitan America that places Catholicism and Judaism on a par with Protestant denominations, and the Statue of Liberty has become the national symbol of a nation of immigrants. Perhaps the most important legacy of the Age of Mass Migration is that the children of Eastern and Southern European immigrants helped to pave the way for the New Deal of the 1930s, the Great Society of the 1960s, and the 1965 Immigration Act that allowed a new wave of immigration from Asia and Latin America to arrive. In his recent novel, The Plot Against America, Philip Roth poses the possibility that Charles Lindberg might have been elected president in 1940 and then established a cordial understanding with Nazi Germany. There was certainly a lot of virulent anti-Semitism in the United States at the time, and the hatred of Franklin Roosevelt by the WASP upper class could have led to elite support for a fascist alternative. However, as we look back to the 1930s, it appears that Jews and Catholics were “protected,” at least to some degree, by their alliance with many other segments of American society as part of the New Deal coalition. Ironically, the closure of the door to immigration after 1924 and the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to cities in the North and Midwest may have helped the children of Southern and Eastern European immigrants to climb up the socioeconomic ladder in the middle decades of the 20th century (Lieberson 1980). All of these groups remained in the Democratic Party well into the 1960s, and this unusually broad base discouraged political alliances based on race and nationality alone. The examples of the Dixiecrats of 1948, George Wallace in 1968, and the Southern Strategy of 1972 show that American politics are not immune to appeals to the “race card.” However, recent immigrants and their descendants, when allied with other reform groups, have played a major role in broadening democracy in American society. Looking to the Future The demographic challenges of 21st century America are not unique. Immigration, like race, seems to be a continuing source of tension in many societies around the globe. Immigration, especially clandestine immigration, is higher in the United States than in most other industrial countries, but the underlying dynamics are common to almost all industrial societies (Hirschman 2001). Recent legal immigration to the United States has fluctuated from 700,000 to 1,000,000 new permanent residents in recent years, but with an upward drift that is evident from a decadal perspective (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2006). Only about one half of legal immigrants are new arrivals to the country. The other half consists of adjustments of current residents who were able to obtain an immigrant visa because of a change in employment or family status. Many refugees are eventually able to obtain permanent resident immigrant visas. There is also a large but unknown number of undocumented (illegal) immigrants, perhaps upwards of 300,000 per year. The major policy discussion in the United States (and elsewhere) is focused on immigration control. There is wide agreement that clandestine immigration should be stopped and legal immigration should be tightly controlled. There are arguments over the numbers and types of immigrants to be admitted, but the idea that sovereign states can and should control population movements across borders is virtually unchallenged. However, there is a considerable body of research which shows that the motivations for international migration are huge and that the rewards to migrants, employers, and societies (both sending and receiving) are enormous (Massey 1999). These forces suggest that public policies of immigration control are unlikely to be successful. The mass media routinely report the extraordinary investments and ingenuity of Latin Americans, Chinese, and Africans who are seeking to migrate to North America and Europe. Many of these efforts lead to capture and humiliating treatment as criminals. In other instances, many migrants die when they are locked into shipping containers or attempt to traverse the deserts without sufficient water and other provisions. Yet they continue to come. The simple reason is that the economies of the South and North are increasingly integrated through flows of goods, capital, and labor. International migration is a functional component of modern societies, rich and poor, that resolves the uneven distribution of people and opportunities. Most migrants come, not to settle, but to support their families at home (Massey et al. 2002). Indeed the remittances from international migrants to developing countries far exceed the funds going to poor countries from foreign aid, direct capital investment, and manufacturing exports (Massey et al. 1998). The gains of international migration to the economies of advanced countries are also substantial. Most industrial economies do not have sufficient domestic supplies of low cost labor. If this pattern were found in only one country or in only a few sectors, then it might be

9/20/16 75 possible to consider a fairly narrow explanation in terms of political cultures or market rigidities. The demand for “cheaper immigrant labor,” however, spans many sectors (agriculture, manufacturing, construction, repair services, restaurants, and child care) in most industrial countries, including a number of rapidly growing developing countries. The demand for immigrant labor is not restricted to unskilled manual labor. The United States and other industrial countries have encountered a shortage of scientific and engineering workers, particularly in the high tech sector. This demand has been met, in part, by allowing many talented foreign students in American universities to convert their student visas to immigrant status. In spite of political pressures to control immigration, almost all policy changes have broadened the scope of legal immigration to allow settlement by refugees, agricultural workers, “illegal” immigrants with long residencies in the country, peoples in countries that have too few American citizen relatives to sponsor them, and workers in high demand by U.S. employers. Standard economic theory posits that domestic migration is a functional response to wage differentials between areas. Migration allows for workers to benefit from higher wages in growing areas and stimulates the economy to operate more efficiently by creating larger and more porous labor and consumer markets. Indeed the logic for lessening barriers to migration is similar to that of international free trade. Economic theory suggests that all countries benefit from the free flow of capital, goods, and technology across international borders. International migration is often excluded from discussions about expanding international trade (such as in the NAFTA debate), largely because of political considerations rather than economic theory. My reading of current trends and history suggests that the major policy issue for international migration is not immigration control, but the creation of opportunities for the socioeconomic advancement and social integration of immigrants and their descendants. Immigrants will continue to come in large numbers for the foreseeable future. If the borders are closed, they are likely to find clandestine ways of entry—the economic incentives of both the sending and receiving societies are overwhelming. However, it is an open question whether the immigrants will be accepted as full members of the receiving society. American society, even with all of its failings, may offer a model of how immigrants and their children have prospered and also contributed to society. Even the idea of what it means to be an American has evolved as each immigrant wave has broadened the outlook of all Americans. An awareness of this history can help to inform the contemporary debate over the significance of current and future immigration in other societies. References Akenson, Donald H. 1984. “Why the Accepted Estimates of the American People, 1790, Are Unacceptable.” William and Mary Quarterly 41: 102-119. Alba, Richard and Victor Nee. 2003. Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration. Cambridge: Press. Andersen, Kristi. 1979. The Creation of a Democratic Majority. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Archdeacon, Thomas J. 1983. Becoming American: An Ethnic History. New York: The Free Press. Baltzell, E. Digby. 1964. The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America. NY: Vintage Books. Bernard, William S. 1980. “Immigration: History of U.S. Policy.” Pp. 486-495 in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, edited by Stephan Thernstrom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Buhle, Paul. 2004. From the Lower East Side to Hollywood. London: Verso. Carpenter, Niles. 1927. Immigrants and Their Children. Census Monograph. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Clubb, Jerome M. and Howard W. Allen. 1969. “The Cities and the Election of 1928: Partisan Realignment?” The American Historical Review 74: 1205-1220. Daniels, Roger. 1991. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. New York: HarperPerennial. Degler, Carl N. 1964. “American Political Parties and the Rise of the City: An Interpretation.” The Journal of American History 51: 41-59. Edmonston, Barry and Jeffrey Passel, eds. 1994. Immigration and Ethnicity: The Integration of America’s Newest Arrivals. Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press. Eldridge, Hope T. and Dorothy Swaine Thomas. 1964. Population Redistribution and Economic Growth, United States, 1870–1950. Vol. III. Demographic Analyses and Interrelations. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. Foner, Nancy. 2000. From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gabler, Neal. 1988. An Empire of Their Own: How Jews Invented Hollywood. New York: Anchor Books. Gallman, Robert E. 1977. “Human Capital in the First 80 Years of the Republic; How Much Did America Owe the Rest of the World?”The American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 67 (February): 27-31. Gibson, Campbell. 1992. “The Contribution of Immigration to the Growth and Ethnic Diversity of the American Population.”Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 136: 157-175.

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Gibson, Campbell and Kay Jung. 2002. “Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1790 to 1990, for the United States, Regions, Divisions, and States.” Population Division Working Paper No. 56. Washington, DC: Population Division, U.S. Bureau of the Census. ---. 2006. Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign Born Population of the United States: 1850 to 2000. Population Division Working Paper No. 81. Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census. Hamilton, Richard F. 1972. Class and Politics in the United States. New York: John Wiley. Handlin, Oscar. 1973 (orig. pub. 1951). The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People. Second edition. Boston: Little Brown and Company. Hawley, Amos. 1972. “Population Density and the City.” Demography 9: 521-529. Higham, John. 1988. (orig. pub. 1955). Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. Second edition. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Hirschman, Charles. 2001. “Immigration, Pubic Policy.” In Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (eds.) International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Vol. 11: 7221-7226. Oxford: Elsevier. Hirschman, Charles. 2005. “Immigration and the American Century” Demography 42 (November): 595-620. Jones, Madwyn Allen. 1992 (orig. pub. 1960). American Immigration. Second edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kasinitz, Philip. 2004. “Race, Assimilation, and ‘Second Generations,’ Past and Present.” Pp. 278-298 in Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States, edited by N. Foner and G. Fredrickson. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Keely, Charles. 1979. U.S. Immigration: A Policy Analysis. New York: The Population Council. Lieberson, Stanley. 1980. A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants Since 1880. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lubell, Samuel. 1952. The Future of American Politics. New York: Harper and Brothers. Lundquist, Jennifer H., and Douglas S. Massey. 2005. “The Contra War and Nicaraguan Migration to the United States.” Journal of Latin American Studies 37: 29-53. Massey, Douglas S. 1999. “International Migration at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century. The Role of the State.” Population and Development Review 25: 303-23. Massey, Douglas S., Joaquin Arnago, Graeme Hugo, Ali Kouaouci, Adela Pellegrino, and J. Edward Taylor. 1998. Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millennium. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Massey, Douglas S, Jorge Durand, and Noland J. Malone. 2002. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. McDonald, Forrest and Ellen Shapiro McDonald. 1980. “The Ethnic Origins of the American People, 1790.” William and Mary Quarterly 37: 179-199. Min, Pyong Gap, ed. 2002. Mass Migration to the United States: Classical and Contemporary Periods. Walnut Creek, CA: Altmira Press. Most, Andrea. 2004. Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Philips, Gene D. 1998. Exiles in Hollywood: Major European Film Directors in America. Bethlehem, PA: Leigh University Press. Portes, Alejandro and Ruben Rumbaut. 1996. Immigrant America: A Portrait. Second edition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Purvis, Thomas L. 1984. “The European Ancestry of the United States Population, 1790.” William and Mary Quarterly 41: 85-101. Reimers, David M. 1985. Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America. New York: Columbia University Press. U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1909. A Century of Population Growth, 1790–1900. Washington, DC. Government Printing Office. —. 1965. U.S. Census of Population: 1960. Subject Reports. Nativity and Parentage. PC(2)-1A. Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census. —. 2005. The Foreign-Born Population of the United States Current Population Survey - March 2004. Detailed Tables (PPL-176). Available at: http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/foreign/ppl-176.html on June 13,2005. U.S. Department of Homeland Security. 2006 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics: 2004. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics. Winokur, Mark. 1996. American Laughter: Immigrants, Ethnicity, and 1930s Hollywood Film. New York: St. Martins Press.

“What Makes People Vote Republican?” by John Haidt (9/8/08) Jonathan Haidt's Edge Bio Page ...the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer. What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro- business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists,

9/20/16 77 and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world. Diagnosis is a pleasure. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick. In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger. We can explain how Republicans exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting policies (such as the "war on terror" and repeal of the "death tax") that damage the national interest for partisan advantage. But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes seduction wearing a halo. Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is. ______

I began to study morality and culture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987. A then-prevalent definition of the moral domain, from the Berkeley psychologist Elliot Turiel, said that morality refers to "prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other." But if morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many ancient texts devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have sex with whom? There is no rational or health-related way to explain these laws. (Why are grasshoppers kosher but most locusts are not?) The emotion of disgust seemed to me like a more promising explanatory principle. The book of Leviticus makes a lot more sense when you think of ancient lawgivers first sorting everything into two categories: "disgusts me" (gay male sex, menstruation, pigs, swarming insects) and "disgusts me less" (gay female sex, urination, cows, grasshoppers ). For my dissertation research, I made up stories about people who did things that were disgusting or disrespectful yet perfectly harmless. For example, what do you think about a woman who can't find any rags in her house so she cuts up an old American flag and uses the pieces to clean her toilet, in private? Or how about a family whose dog is killed by a car, so they dismember the body and cook it for dinner? I read these stories to 180 young adults and 180 eleven- year-old children, half from higher social classes and half from lower, in the USA and in Brazil. I found that most of the people I interviewed said that the actions in these stories were morally wrong, even when nobody was harmed. Only one group—college students at Penn—consistently exemplified Turiel's definition of morality and overrode their own feelings of disgust to say that harmless acts were not wrong. (A few even praised the efficiency of recycling the flag and the dog). This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their gut-based condemnation. I often had to correct people when they said things like "it's wrong because… um…eating dog meat would make you sick" or "it's wrong to use the flag because… um… the rags might clog the toilet." These obviously post-hoc rationalizations illustrate the philosopher David Hume's dictum that reason is "the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them." This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion. The second conclusion was that the moral domain varies across cultures. Turiel's description of morality as being about justice, rights, and human welfare worked perfectly for the college students I interviewed at Penn, but it

9/20/16 78 simply did not capture the moral concerns of the less elite groups—the working-class people in both countries who were more likely to justify their judgments with talk about respect, duty, and family roles. ("Your dog is family, and you just don't eat family.") From this study I concluded that the anthropologist Richard Shweder was probably right in a 1987 critique of Turiel in which he claimed that the moral domain (not just specific rules) varies by culture. Drawing on Shweder's ideas, I would say that the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label "elitist." But how can Democrats learn to see—let alone respect—a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb? ______After graduate school I moved to the University of Chicago to work with Shweder, and while there I got a fellowship to do research in India. In September 1993 I traveled to Bhubaneswar, an ancient temple town 200 miles southwest of Calcutta. I brought with me two incompatible identities. On the one hand, I was a 29 year old liberal atheist who had spent his politically conscious life despising Republican presidents, and I was charged up by the culture wars that intensified in the 1990s. On the other hand, I wanted to be like those tolerant anthropologists I had read so much about. My first few weeks in Bhubaneswar were therefore filled with feelings of shock and confusion. I dined with men whose wives silently served us and then retreated to the kitchen. My hosts gave me a servant of my own and told me to stop thanking him when he served me. I watched people bathe in and cook with visibly polluted water that was held to be sacred. In short, I was immersed in a sex-segregated, hierarchically stratified, devoutly religious society, and I was committed to understanding it on its own terms, not on mine. It only took a few weeks for my shock to disappear, not because I was a natural anthropologist but because the normal human capacity for empathy kicked in. I liked these people who were hosting me, helping me, and teaching me. And once I liked them (remember that first principle of moral psychology) it was easy to take their perspective and to consider with an open mind the virtues they thought they were enacting. Rather than automatically rejecting the men as sexist oppressors and pitying the women, children, and servants as helpless victims, I was able to see a moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each extended family (including its servants) are intensely interdependent. In this world, equality and personal autonomy were not sacred values. Honoring elders, gods, and guests, and fulfilling one's role-based duties, were more important. Looking at America from this vantage point, what I saw now seemed overly individualistic and self-focused. For example, when I boarded the plane to fly back to Chicago I heard a loud voice saying "Look, you tell him that this is the compartment over MY seat, and I have a RIGHT to use it." Back in the United States the culture war was going strong, but I had lost my righteous passion. I could never have empathized with the Christian Right directly, but once I had stood outside of my home morality, once I had tried on the moral lenses of my Indian friends and interview subjects, I was able to think about conservative ideas with a newfound clinical detachment. They want more prayer and spanking in schools, and less sex education and access to abortion? I didn't think those steps would reduce AIDS and teen pregnancy, but I could see why the religious right wanted to "thicken up" the moral climate of schools and discourage the view that children should be as free as possible to act on their desires. Conservatives think that welfare programs and feminism increase rates of single motherhood and weaken the traditional social structures that compel men to support their own children? Hmm, that may be true, even if there are also many good effects of liberating women from dependence on men. I had escaped from my prior partisan mindset (reject first, ask rhetorical questions later), and began to think about liberal and conservative policies as manifestations of deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society. ______

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On Turiel's definition of morality ("justice, rights, and welfare"), Christian and Hindu communities don't look good. They restrict people's rights (especially sexual rights), encourage hierarchy and conformity to gender roles, and make people spend extraordinary amounts of time in prayer and ritual practices that seem to have nothing to do with "real" morality. But isn't it unfair to impose on all cultures a definition of morality drawn from the European Enlightenment tradition? Might we do better with an approach that defines moral systems by what they do rather than by what they value? Here's my alternative definition: morality is any system of interlocking values, practices, institutions, and psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible. It turns out that human societies have found several radically different approaches to suppressing selfishness, two of which are most relevant for understanding what Democrats don't understand about morality. First, imagine society as a social contract invented for our mutual benefit. All individuals are equal, and all should be left as free as possible to move, develop talents, and form relationships as they please. The patron saint of a contractual society is John Stuart Mill, who wrote (in On Liberty) that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." Mill's vision appeals to many liberals and libertarians; a Millian society at its best would be a peaceful, open, and creative place where diverse individuals respect each other's rights and band together voluntarily (as in Obama's calls for "unity") to help those in need or to change the laws for the common good. Psychologists have done extensive research on the moral mechanisms that are presupposed in a Millian society, and there are two that appear to be partly innate. First, people in all cultures are emotionally responsive to suffering and harm, particularly violent harm, and so nearly all cultures have norms or laws to protect individuals and to encourage care for the most vulnerable. Second, people in all cultures are emotionally responsive to issues of fairness and reciprocity, which often expand into notions of rights and justice. Philosophical efforts to justify liberal democracies and egalitarian social contracts invariably rely heavily on intuitions about fairness and reciprocity. But now imagine society not as an agreement among individuals but as something that emerged organically over time as people found ways of living together, binding themselves to each other, suppressing each other's selfishness, and punishing the deviants and free-riders who eternally threaten to undermine cooperative groups. The basic social unit is not the individual, it is the hierarchically structured family, which serves as a model for other institutions. Individuals in such societies are born into strong and constraining relationships that profoundly limit their autonomy. The patron saint of this more binding moral system is the sociologist Emile Durkheim, who warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness), and wrote, in 1897, that "Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him." A Durkheimian society at its best would be a stable network composed of many nested and overlapping groups that socialize, reshape, and care for individuals who, if left to their own devices, would pursue shallow, carnal, and selfish pleasures. A Durkheimian society would value self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one's groups over concerns for outgroups. A Durkheimian ethos can't be supported by the two moral foundations that hold up a Millian society (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity). My recent research shows that social conservatives do indeed rely upon those two foundations, but they also value virtues related to three additional psychological systems: ingroup/loyalty (involving mechanisms that evolved during the long human history of tribalism), authority/respect (involving ancient primate mechanisms for managing social rank, tempered by the obligation of superiors to protect and provide for subordinates), and purity/sanctity (a relatively new part of the moral mind, related to the evolution of disgust, that makes us see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble). These three systems support moralities that bind people into intensely interdependent groups that work together to reach common goals. Such moralities make it easier for individuals to forget themselves and coalesce temporarily into hives, a process that is thrilling, as anyone who has ever "lost" him or herself in a choir, protest march, or religious ritual can attest. In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at www.YourMorals.org.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider

9/20/16 80 switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment. In The Political Brain, Drew Westen points out that the Republicans have become the party of the sacred, appropriating not just the issues of God, faith, and religion, but also the sacred symbols of the nation such as the Flag and the military. The Democrats, in the process, have become the party of the profane—of secular life and material interests. Democrats often seem to think of voters as consumers; they rely on polls to choose a set of policy positions that will convince 51% of the electorate to buy. Most Democrats don't understand that politics is more like religion than it is like shopping. Religion and political leadership are so intertwined across eras and cultures because they are about the same thing: performing the miracle of converting unrelated individuals into a group. Durkheim long ago said that God is really society projected up into the heavens, a collective delusion that enables collectives to exist, suppress selfishness, and endure. The three Durkheimian foundations (ingroup, authority, and purity) play a crucial role in most religions. When they are banished entirely from political life, what remains is a nation of individuals striving to maximize utility while respecting the rules. What remains is a cold but fair social contract, which can easily degenerate into a nation of shoppers. The Democrats must find a way to close the sacredness gap that goes beyond occasional and strategic uses of the words "God" and "faith." But if Durkheim is right, then sacredness is really about society and its collective concerns. God is useful but not necessary. The Democrats could close much of the gap if they simply learned to see society not just as a collection of individuals—each with a panoply of rights--but as an entity in itself, an entity that needs some tending and caring. Our national motto is e pluribus unum ("from many, one"). Whenever Democrats support policies that weaken the integrity and identity of the collective (such as multiculturalism, bilingualism, and immigration), they show that they care more about pluribus than unum. They widen the sacredness gap. A useful heuristic would be to think about each issue, and about the Party itself, from the perspective of the three Durkheimian foundations. Might the Democrats expand their moral range without betraying their principles? Might they even find ways to improve their policies by incorporating and publicly praising some conservative insights? The ingroup/loyalty foundation supports virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice that can lead to dangerous nationalism, but in moderate doses a sense that "we are all one" is a recipe for high social capital and civic well- being. A recent study by Robert Putnam (titled E Pluribus Unum) found that ethnic diversity increases anomie and social isolation by decreasing people's sense of belonging to a shared community. Democrats should think carefully, therefore, about why they celebrate diversity. If the purpose of diversity programs is to fight racism and discrimination (worthy goals based on fairness concerns), then these goals might be better served by encouraging assimilation and a sense of shared identity. The purity/sanctity foundation is used heavily by the Christian right to condemn hedonism and sexual "deviance," but it can also be harnessed for progressive causes. Sanctity does not have to come from God; the psychology of this system is about overcoming our lower, grasping, carnal selves in order to live in a way that is higher, nobler, and more spiritual. Many liberals criticize the crassness and ugliness that our unrestrained free-market society has created. There is a long tradition of liberal anti-materialism often linked to a reverence for nature. Environmental and animal welfare issues are easily promoted using the language of harm/care, but such appeals might be more effective when supplemented with hints of purity/sanctity. The authority/respect foundation will be the hardest for Democrats to use. But even as liberal bumper stickers urge us to "question authority" and assert that "dissent is patriotic," Democrats can ask what needs this foundation serves, and then look for other ways to meet them. The authority foundation is all about maintaining social order, so any candidate seen to be "soft on crime" has disqualified himself, for many Americans, from being entrusted with the ultimate authority. Democrats would do well to read Durkheim and think about the quasi-religious importance of the criminal justice system. The miracle of turning individuals into groups can only be performed by groups that impose costs on cheaters and slackers. You can do this the authoritarian way (with strict rules and harsh penalties) or you can do it using the fairness/reciprocity foundation by stressing personal responsibility and the beneficence of the

9/20/16 81 nation towards those who "work hard and play by the rules." But if you don't do it at all—if you seem to tolerate or enable cheaters and slackers -- then you are committing a kind of sacrilege. If Democrats want to understand what makes people vote Republican, they must first understand the full spectrum of American moral concerns. They should then consider whether they can use more of that spectrum themselves. The Democrats would lose their souls if they ever abandoned their commitment to social justice, but social justice is about getting fair relationships among the parts of the nation. This often divisive struggle among the parts must be balanced by a clear and oft-repeated commitment to guarding the precious coherence of the whole. America lacks the long history, small size, ethnic homogeneity, and soccer mania that holds many other nations together, so our flag, our founding fathers, our military, and our common language take on a moral importance that many liberals find hard to fathom. Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three Durkheimian foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.

“Why Won’t They Listen?” by William Saletan. A review of The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, The New York Times (3/23/12) You’re smart. You’re liberal. You’re well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can’t understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they’re being duped. You’re wrong. This isn’t an accusation from the right. It’s a friendly warning from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who, until 2009, considered himself a partisan liberal. In “The Righteous Mind,” Haidt seeks to enrich liberalism, and political discourse generally, with a deeper awareness of human nature. Like other psychologists who have ventured into political coaching, such as George Lakoff and Drew Westen, Haidt argues that people are fundamentally intuitive, not rational. If you want to persuade others, you have to appeal to their sentiments. But Haidt is looking for more than victory. He’s looking for wisdom. That’s what makes “The Righteous Mind” well worth reading. Politics isn’t just about manipulating people who disagree with you. It’s about learning from them. Haidt seems to delight in mischief. Drawing on ethnography, evolutionary theory and experimental psychology, he sets out to trash the modern faith in reason. In Haidt’s retelling, all the fools, foils and villains of intellectual history are recast as heroes. David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who notoriously said reason was fit only to be “the slave of the passions,” was largely correct. E. O. Wilson, the ecologist who was branded a fascist for stressing the biological origins of human behavior, has been vindicated by the study of moral emotions. Even Glaucon, the cynic in Plato’s “Republic” who told Socrates that people would behave ethically only if they thought they were being watched, was “the guy who got it right.” To the question many people ask about politics — Why doesn’t the other side listen to reason? — Haidt replies: We were never designed to listen to reason. When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, their answers and brain activation patterns indicate that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve decided. The funniest and most painful illustrations are Haidt’s transcripts of interviews about bizarre scenarios. Is it wrong to have sex with a dead chicken? How about with your sister? Is it O.K. to defecate in a urinal? If your dog dies, why not eat it? Under interrogation, most subjects in psychology experiments agree these things are wrong. But none can explain why. The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others. Haidt shows, for example, how subjects relentlessly marshal arguments for the incest taboo, no matter how thoroughly an interrogator demolishes these arguments.

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To explain this persistence, Haidt invokes an evolutionary hypothesis: We compete for social status, and the key advantage in this struggle is the ability to influence others. Reason, in this view, evolved to help us spin, not to help us learn. So if you want to change people’s minds, Haidt concludes, don’t appeal to their reason. Appeal to reason’s boss: the underlying moral intuitions whose conclusions reason defends. Haidt’s account of reason is a bit too simple — his whole book, after all, is a deployment of reason to advance learning — and his advice sounds cynical. But set aside those objections for now, and go with him. If you follow Haidt through the tunnel of cynicism, you’ll find that what he’s really after is enlightenment. He wants to open your mind to the moral intuitions of other people. In the West, we think morality is all about harm, rights, fairness and consent. Does the guy own the chicken? Is the dog already dead? Is the sister of legal age? But step outside your neighborhood or your country, and you’ll discover that your perspective is highly anomalous. Haidt has read ethnographies, traveled the world and surveyed tens of thousands of people online. He and his colleagues have compiled a catalog of six fundamental ideas that commonly undergird moral systems: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity. Alongside these principles, he has found related themes that carry moral weight: divinity, community, hierarchy, tradition, sin and degradation. The worldviews Haidt discusses may differ from yours. They don’t start with the individual. They start with the group or the cosmic order. They exalt families, armies and communities. They assume that people should be treated differently according to social role or status — elders should be honored, subordinates should be protected. They suppress forms of self-expression that might weaken the social fabric. They assume interdependence, not autonomy. They prize order, not equality. These moral systems aren’t ignorant or backward. Haidt argues that they’re common in history and across the globe because they fit human nature. He compares them to cuisines. We acquire morality the same way we acquire food preferences: we start with what we’re given. If it tastes good, we stick with it. If it doesn’t, we reject it. People accept God, authority and karma because these ideas suit their moral taste buds. Haidt points to research showing that people punish cheaters, accept many hierarchies and don’t support equal distribution of benefits when contributions are unequal. You don’t have to go abroad to see these ideas. You can find them in the Republican Party. Social conservatives see welfare and feminism as threats to responsibility and family stability. The Tea Party hates redistribution because it interferes with letting people reap what they earn. Faith, patriotism, valor, chastity, law and order — these Republican themes touch all six moral foundations, whereas Democrats, in Haidt’s analysis, focus almost entirely on care and fighting oppression. This is Haidt’s startling message to the left: When it comes to morality, conservatives are more broad-minded than liberals. They serve a more varied diet. This is where Haidt diverges from other psychologists who have analyzed the left’s electoral failures. The usual argument of these psycho-pundits is that conservative politicians manipulate voters’ neural roots — playing on our craving for authority, for example — to trick people into voting against their interests. But Haidt treats electoral success as a kind of evolutionary fitness test. He figures that if voters like Republican messages, there’s something in Republican messages worth liking. He chides psychologists who try to “explain away” conservatism, treating it as a pathology. Conservatism thrives because it fits how people think, and that’s what validates it. Workers who vote Republican aren’t fools. In Haidt’s words, they’re “voting for their moral interests.” One of these interests is moral capital — norms, practices and institutions, like religion and family values, that facilitate cooperation by constraining individualism. Toward this end, Haidt applauds the left for regulating corporate greed. But he worries that in other ways, liberals dissolve moral capital too recklessly. Welfare programs that substitute public aid for spousal and parental support undermine the ecology of the family. Education policies that let students sue teachers erode classroom authority. Multicultural education weakens the cultural glue of assimilation. Haidt agrees that old ways must sometimes be re-examined and changed. He just wants liberals to proceed with caution and protect the social pillars sustained by tradition. Another aspect of human nature that conservatives understand better than liberals, according to Haidt, is parochial altruism, the inclination to care more about members of your group — particularly those who have made sacrifices for it —than about outsiders. Saving Darfur, submitting to the United Nations and paying taxes to educate children in another state may be noble, but they aren’t natural. What’s natural is giving to your church, helping your P.T.A. and rallying together as Americans against a foreign threat.

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How far should liberals go toward incorporating these principles? Haidt says the shift has to be more than symbolic, but he doesn’t lay out a specific policy agenda. Instead, he highlights broad areas of culture and politics — family and assimilation, for example — on which liberals should consider compromise. He urges conservatives to entertain liberal ideas in the same way. The purpose of such compromises isn’t just to win elections. It’s to make society and government fit human nature. The hardest part, Haidt finds, is getting liberals to open their minds. Anecdotally, he reports that when he talks about authority, loyalty and sanctity, many people in the audience spurn these ideas as the seeds of racism, sexism and homophobia. And in a survey of 2,000 Americans, Haidt found that self-described liberals, especially those who called themselves “very liberal,” were worse at predicting the moral judgments of moderates and conservatives than moderates and conservatives were at predicting the moral judgments of liberals. Liberals don’t understand conservative values. And they can’t recognize this failing, because they’re so convinced of their rationality, open- mindedness and enlightenment. Haidt isn’t just scolding liberals, however. He sees the left and right as yin and yang, each contributing insights to which the other should listen. In his view, for instance, liberals can teach conservatives to recognize and constrain predation by entrenched interests. Haidt believes in the power of reason, but the reasoning has to be interactive. It has to be other people’s reason engaging yours. We’re lousy at challenging our own beliefs, but we’re good at challenging each other’s. Haidt compares us to neurons in a giant brain, capable of “producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.” Our task, then, is to organize society so that reason and intuition interact in healthy ways. Haidt’s research suggests several broad guidelines. First, we need to help citizens develop sympathetic relationships so that they seek to understand one another instead of using reason to parry opposing views. Second, we need to create time for contemplation. Research shows that two minutes of reflection on a good argument can change a person’s mind. Third, we need to break up our ideological segregation. From 1976 to 2008, the proportion of Americans living in highly partisan counties increased from 27 percent to 48 percent. The Internet exacerbates this problem by helping each user find evidence that supports his views. How can we achieve these goals? Haidt offers a Web site,civilpolitics.org, on which he and his colleagues have listed steps that might help. One is holding open primaries so that people outside each party’s base can vote to nominate moderate candidates. Another is instant runoffs, so that candidates will benefit from broadening their appeal. A third idea is to alter redistricting so that parties are less able to gerrymander partisan congressional districts. Haidt also wants members of Congress to go back to the old practice of moving their families to Washington, so that they socialize with one another and build a friendly basis on which to cooperate. Many of Haidt’s proposals are vague, insufficient or hard to implement. And that’s O.K. He just wants to start a conversation about integrating a better understanding of human nature — our sentiments, sociality and morality — into the ways we debate and govern ourselves. At this, he succeeds. It’s a landmark contribution to humanity’s understanding of itself. But to whom is Haidt directing his advice? If intuitions are unreflective, and if reason is self-serving, then what part of us does he expect to regulate and orchestrate these faculties? This is the unspoken tension in Haidt’s book. As a scientist, he takes a passive, empirical view of human nature. He describes us as we have been, expecting no more. Based on evolution, he argues, universal love is implausible: “Parochial love . . . amplified by similarity” and a “sense of shared fate . . . may be the most we can accomplish.” But as an author and advocate, Haidt speaks to us rationally and universally, as though we’re capable of something greater. He seems unable to help himself, as though it’s in his nature to call on our capacity for reason and our sense of common humanity — and in our nature to understand it. You don’t have to believe in God to see this higher capacity as part of our nature. You just have to believe in evolution. Evolution itself has evolved: as humans became increasingly social, the struggle for survival, mating and progeny depended less on physical abilities and more on social abilities. In this way, a faculty produced by evolution — sociality — became the new engine of evolution. Why can’t reason do the same thing? Why can’t it emerge from its evolutionary origins as a spin doctor to become the new medium in which humans compete, cooperate and advance the fitness of their communities? Isn’t that what we see all around us? Look at the global spread of media, debate and democracy.

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Haidt is part of this process. He thinks he’s just articulating evolution. But in effect, he’s also trying to fix it. Traits we evolved in a dispersed world, like tribalism and righteousness, have become dangerously maladaptive in an era of rapid globalization. A pure scientist would let us purge these traits from the gene pool by fighting and killing one another. But Haidt wants to spare us this fate. He seeks a world in which “fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means.” To achieve this goal, he asks us to understand and overcome our instincts. He appeals to a power capable of circumspection, reflection and reform. If we can harness that power — wisdom — our substantive project will be to reconcile our national and international differences. Is income inequality immoral? Should government favor religion? Can we tolerate cultures of female subjugation? And how far should we trust our instincts? Should people who find homosexuality repugnant overcome that reaction? Haidt’s faith in moral taste receptors may not survive this scrutiny. Our taste for sanctity or authority, like our taste for sugar, could turn out to be a dangerous relic. But Haidt is right that we must learn what we have been, even if our nature is to transcend it.

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 Have our Problems Become too Complicated for Voters to Understand?  Return to Top “Democracies End When There is Too Much Democracy” by Andrew Sullivan (5/1/16)

And right now, America is a breeding ground for tyranny. As this dystopian election campaign has unfolded, my mind keeps being tugged by a passage in Plato’s Republic. It has unsettled — even surprised — me from the moment I first read it in graduate school. The passage is from the part of the dialogue where Socrates and his friends are talking about the nature of different political systems, how they change over time, and how one can slowly evolve into another. And Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.” What did Plato mean by that? Democracy, for him, I discovered, was a political system of maximal freedom and equality, where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery. And the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become. Its freedoms would multiply; its equality spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither; tolerance of any kind of inequality would come under intense threat; and multiculturalism and sexual freedom would create a city or a country like “a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues.” This rainbow-flag polity, Plato argues, is, for many people, the fairest of regimes. The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending. And when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy. There is no kowtowing to authority here, let alone to political experience or expertise. The very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher ... is frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The foreigner is equal to the citizen. And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment. He is usually of the elite but has a nature in tune with the time — given over to random pleasures and whims, feasting on plenty of food and sex, and reveling in the nonjudgment that is democracy’s civil religion. He makes his move by “taking over a particularly obedient mob” and attacking his wealthy peers as corrupt. If not stopped quickly, his appetite for attacking the rich on behalf of the people swells further. He is a traitor to his class — and soon, his elite enemies, shorn of popular legitimacy, find a way to appease him or are forced to flee. Eventually, he stands alone, promising to cut through the paralysis of democratic incoherence. It’s as if he were offering the addled, distracted, and self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from democracy’s endless choices and insecurities. He rides a backlash to excess—“too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery” — and offers himself as the personified answer to the internal conflicts of the democratic mess. He pledges, above all, to take on the increasingly despised elites. And as the people thrill to him as a kind of solution, a democracy willingly, even impetuously, repeals itself. And so, as I chitchatted over cocktails at a Washington office Christmas party in December, and saw, looming above our heads, the pulsating, angry televised face of Donald Trump on , I couldn’t help but feel a little nausea permeate my stomach. And as I watched frenzied Trump rallies on C-SPAN in the spring, and saw him lay waste to far more qualified political peers in the debates by simply calling them names, the nausea turned to dread. And when he seemed to condone physical violence as a response to political disagreement, alarm bells started to ring in my

9/20/16 86 head. Plato had planted a gnawing worry in my mind a few decades ago about the intrinsic danger of late-democratic life. It was increasingly hard not to see in Plato’s vision a murky reflection of our own hyperdemocratic times and in Trump a demagogic, tyrannical character plucked directly out of one of the first books about politics ever written. Could it be that the Donald has emerged from the populist circuses of pro wrestling and New York City tabloids, via reality television and Twitter, to prove not just Plato but also James Madison right, that democracies “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention … and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths”? Is he testing democracy’s singular weakness — its susceptibility to the demagogue — by blasting through the firewalls we once had in place to prevent such a person from seizing power? Or am I overreacting? Perhaps. The nausea comes and goes, and there have been days when the news algorithm has actually reassured me that “peak Trump” has arrived. But it hasn’t gone away, and neither has Trump. In the wake of his most recent primary triumphs, at a time when he is perilously close to winning enough delegates to grab the Republican nomination outright, I think we must confront this dread and be clear about what this election has already revealed about the fragility of our way of life and the threat late-stage democracy is beginning to pose to itself. Plato, of course, was not clairvoyant. His analysis of how democracy can turn into tyranny is a complex one more keyed toward ancient societies than our own (and contains more wrinkles and eddies than I can summarize here). His disdain for democratic life was fueled in no small part by the fact that a democracy had executed his mentor, Socrates. And he would, I think, have been astonished at how American democracy has been able to thrive with unprecedented stability over the last couple of centuries even as it has brought more and more people into its embrace. It remains, in my view, a miracle of constitutional craftsmanship and cultural resilience. There is no place I would rather live. But it is not immortal, nor should we assume it is immune to the forces that have endangered democracy so many times in human history. Part of American democracy’s stability is owed to the fact that the Founding Fathers had read their Plato. To guard our democracy from the tyranny of the majority and the passions of the mob, they constructed large, hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power. Voting rights were tightly circumscribed. The president and vice-president were not to be popularly elected but selected by an Electoral College, whose representatives were selected by the various states, often through state legislatures. The Senate’s structure (with two members from every state) was designed to temper the power of the more populous states, and its term of office (six years, compared with two for the House) was designed to cool and restrain temporary populist passions. The Supreme Court, picked by the president and confirmed by the Senate, was the final bulwark against any democratic furies that might percolate up from the House and threaten the Constitution. This separation of powers was designed precisely to create sturdy firewalls against democratic wildfires. Over the centuries, however, many of these undemocratic rules have been weakened or abolished. The franchise has been extended far beyond propertied white men. The presidency is now effectively elected through popular vote, with the Electoral College almost always reflecting the national democratic will. And these formal democratic advances were accompanied by informal ones, as the culture of democracy slowly took deeper root. For a very long time, only the elites of the political parties came to select their candidates at their quadrennial conventions, with the vote largely restricted to party officials from the various states (and often decided in, yes, smoke-filled rooms in large hotel suites). Beginning in the early 1900s, however, the parties began experimenting with primaries, and after the chaos of the 1968 Democratic convention, today’s far more democratic system became the norm. Direct democracy didn’t just elect Congress and the president anymore; it expanded the notion of who might be qualified for public office. Once, candidates built a career through experience in elected or Cabinet positions or as military commanders; they were effectively selected by peer review. That elitist sorting mechanism has slowly imploded. In 1940, Wendell Willkie, a businessman with no previous political office, won the Republican nomination for president, pledging to keep America out of war and boasting that his personal wealth inoculated him against corruption: “I will be under obligation to nobody except the people.” He lost badly to Franklin D. Roosevelt, but nonetheless, since then, nonpolitical candidates have proliferated, from Ross Perot and Jesse Jackson, to Steve Forbes and Herman Cain, to this year’s crop of Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and, of course, Donald J. Trump. This further widening of our democracy — our increased openness to being led by anyone; indeed, our accelerating preference for outsiders — is now almost complete.

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The barriers to the popular will, especially when it comes to choosing our president, are now almost nonexistent. In 2000, George W. Bush lost the popular vote and won the election thanks to Electoral College math and, more egregiously, to a partisan Supreme Court vote. Al Gore’s eventual concession spared the nation a constitutional crisis, but the episode generated widespread unease, not just among Democrats. And this year, the delegate system established by our political parties is also under assault. Trump has argued that the candidate with the most votes should get the Republican nomination, regardless of the rules in place. It now looks as if he won’t even need to win that argument — that he’ll bank enough delegates to secure the nomination uncontested — but he’s won it anyway. Fully half of Americans now believe the traditional nominating system is rigged. Many contend, of course, that American democracy is actually in retreat, close to being destroyed by the vastly more unequal economy of the last quarter-century and the ability of the very rich to purchase political influence. This is Bernie Sanders’s core critique. But the past few presidential elections have demonstrated that, in fact, money from the ultrarich has been mostly a dud. Barack Obama, whose 2008 campaign was propelled by small donors and empowered by the internet, blazed the trail of the modern-day insurrectionist, defeating the prohibitive favorite in the Democratic primary and later his Republican opponent (both pillars of their parties’ Establishments and backed by moneyed elites). In 2012, the fund-raising power behind Mitt Romney — avatar of the one percent — failed to dislodge Obama from office. And in this presidential cycle, the breakout candidates of both parties have soared without financial support from the elites. Sanders, who is sustaining his campaign all the way to California on the backs of small donors and large crowds, is, to put it bluntly, a walking refutation of his own argument. Trump, of course, is a largely self-funding billionaire — but like Willkie, he argues that his wealth uniquely enables him to resist the influence of the rich and their lobbyists. Those despairing over the influence of Big Money in American politics must also explain the swift, humiliating demise of Jeb Bush and the struggling Establishment campaign of Hillary Clinton. The evidence suggests that direct democracy, far from being throttled, is actually intensifying its grip on American politics. None of this is necessarily cause for alarm, even though it would be giving the Founding Fathers palpitations. The emergence of the first black president — unimaginable before our more inclusive democracy — is miraculous, a strengthening, rather than weakening, of the system. The days when party machines just fixed things or rigged elections are mercifully done with. The way in which outsider candidates, from Obama to Trump and Sanders, have brought millions of new people into the electoral process is an unmitigated advance. The inclusion of previously excluded voices helps, rather than impedes, our public deliberation. But it is precisely because of the great accomplishments of our democracy that we should be vigilant about its specific, unique vulnerability: its susceptibility, in stressful times, to the appeal of a shameless demagogue. What the 21st century added to this picture, it’s now blindingly obvious, was media democracy — in a truly revolutionary form. If late-stage political democracy has taken two centuries to ripen, the media equivalent took around two decades, swiftly erasing almost any elite moderation or control of our democratic discourse. The process had its origins in partisan talk radio at the end of the past century. The rise of the internet — an event so swift and pervasive its political effect is only now beginning to be understood — further democratized every source of information, dramatically expanded each outlet’s readership, and gave everyone a platform. All the old barriers to entry — the cost of print and paper and distribution — crumbled. So much of this was welcome. I relished it myself in the early aughts, starting a blog and soon reaching as many readers, if not more, as some small magazines do. Fusty old-media institutions, grown fat and lazy, deserved a drubbing. The early independent blogosphere corrected facts, exposed bias, earned scoops. And as the medium matured, and as Facebook and Twitter took hold, everyone became a kind of blogger. In ways no 20th-century journalist would have believed, we all now have our own virtual newspapers on our Facebook newsfeeds and Twitter timelines — picking stories from countless sources and creating a peer-to-peer media almost completely free of editing or interference by elites. This was bound to make politics more fluid. Political organizing — calling a meeting, fomenting a rally to advance a cause — used to be extremely laborious. Now you could bring together a virtual mass movement with a single webpage. It would take you a few seconds. The web was also uniquely capable of absorbing other forms of media, conflating genres and categories in ways never seen before. The distinction between politics and entertainment became fuzzier; election coverage became even more modeled on sportscasting; your Pornhub jostled right next to your mother’s Facebook page. The web’s algorithms all but removed any editorial judgment, and the effect soon had cable news abandoning even the pretense 9/20/16 88 of asking “Is this relevant?” or “Do we really need to cover this live?” in the rush toward ratings bonanzas. In the end, all these categories were reduced to one thing: traffic, measured far more accurately than any other medium had ever done before. And what mainly fuels this is precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness. Online debates become personal, emotional, and irresolvable almost as soon as they begin. Godwin’s Law — it’s only a matter of time before a comments section brings up Hitler — is a reflection of the collapse of the reasoned deliberation the Founders saw as indispensable to a functioning republic. Yes, occasional rational points still fly back and forth, but there are dramatically fewer elite arbiters to establish which of those points is actually true or valid or relevant. We have lost authoritative sources for even a common set of facts. And without such common empirical ground, the emotional component of politics becomes inflamed and reason retreats even further. The more emotive the candidate, the more supporters he or she will get. Politically, we lucked out at first. Obama would never have been nominated for the presidency, let alone elected, if he hadn’t harnessed the power of the web and the charisma of his media celebrity. But he was also, paradoxically, a very elite figure, a former state and U.S. senator, a product of Harvard Law School, and, as it turned out, blessed with a preternaturally rational and calm disposition. So he has masked, temporarily, the real risks in the system that his pioneering campaign revealed. Hence many Democrats’ frustration with him. Those who saw in his campaign the seeds of revolutionary change, who were drawn to him by their own messianic delusions, came to be bitterly disappointed by his governing moderation and pragmatism. The climate Obama thrived in, however, was also ripe for far less restrained opportunists. In 2008, Sarah Palin emerged as proof that an ardent Republican, branded as an outsider, tailor-made for reality TV, proud of her own ignorance about the world, and reaching an audience directly through online media, could also triumph in this new era. She was, it turned out, a John the Baptist for the true messiah of conservative populism, waiting patiently and strategically for his time to come. Trump, we now know, had been considering running for president for decades. Those who didn’t see him coming — or kept treating him as a joke — had not yet absorbed the precedents of Obama and Palin or the power of the new wide-open system to change the rules of the political game. Trump was as underrated for all of 2015 as Obama was in 2007 — and for the same reasons. He intuitively grasped the vanishing authority of American political and media elites, and he had long fashioned a public persona perfectly attuned to blast past them. Despite his immense wealth and inherited privilege, Trump had always cultivated a common touch. He did not hide his wealth in the late-20th century — he flaunted it in a way that connected with the masses. He lived the rich man’s life most working men dreamed of — endless glamour and women, for example — without sacrificing a way of talking about the world that would not be out of place on the construction sites he regularly toured. His was a cult of democratic aspiration. His 1987 book, The Art of the Deal, promised its readers a path to instant success; his appearances on “The Howard Stern Show” cemented his appeal. His friendship with Vince McMahon offered him an early entrée into the world of professional wrestling, with its fusion of sports and fantasy. He was a macho media superstar. One of the more amazing episodes in Sarah Palin’s early political life, in fact, bears this out. She popped up in the Anchorage Daily News as “a commercial fisherman from Wasilla” on April 3, 1996. Palin had told her husband she was going to Costco but had sneaked into J.C. Penney in Anchorage to see … one Ivana Trump, who, in the wake of her divorce, was touting her branded perfume. “We want to see Ivana,” Palin told the paper, “because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.” Trump assiduously cultivated this image and took to reality television as a natural. Each week, for 14 seasons of The Apprentice, he would look someone in the eye and tell them, “You’re fired!” The conversation most humane bosses fear to have with an employee was something Trump clearly relished, and the cruelty became entertainment. In retrospect, it is clear he was training — both himself and his viewers. If you want to understand why a figure so widely disliked nonetheless powers toward the election as if he were approaching a reality-TV-show finale, look no further. His television tactics, as applied to presidential debates, wiped out rivals used to a different game. And all

9/20/16 89 our reality-TV training has conditioned us to hope he’ll win — or at least stay in the game till the final round. In such a shame-free media environment, the assholes often win. In the end, you support them because they’re assholes. In Eric Hoffer’s classic 1951 tract, The True Believer, he sketches the dynamics of a genuine mass movement. He was thinking of the upheavals in Europe in the first half of the century, but the book remains sobering, especially now. Hoffer’s core insight was to locate the source of all truly mass movements in a collective sense of acute frustration. Not despair, or revolt, or resignation — but frustration simmering with rage. Mass movements, he notes (as did Tocqueville centuries before him), rarely arise when oppression or misery is at its worst (say, 2009); they tend to appear when the worst is behind us but the future seems not so much better (say, 2016). It is when a recovery finally gathers speed and some improvement is tangible but not yet widespread that the anger begins to rise. After the suffering of recession or unemployment, and despite hard work with stagnant or dwindling pay, the future stretches ahead with relief just out of reach. When those who helped create the last recession face no consequences but renewed fabulous wealth, the anger reaches a crescendo. The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find, although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able to ignore them. The jobs available to the working class no longer contain the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the sting out of their low and stagnant wages. The once- familiar avenues for socialization — the church, the union hall, the VFW — have become less vibrant and social isolation more common. Global economic forces have pummeled blue-collar workers more relentlessly than almost any other segment of society, forcing them to compete against hundreds of millions of equally skilled workers throughout the planet. No one asked them in the 1990s if this was the future they wanted. And the impact has been more brutal than many economists predicted. No wonder suicide and mortality rates among the white working poor are spiking dramatically. “It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the ‘new poor,’ who throb with the ferment of frustration,” Hoffer argues. Fundamentalist religion long provided some emotional support for those left behind (for one thing, it invites practitioners to defy the elites as unholy), but its influence has waned as modernity has penetrated almost everything and the great culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s have ended in a rout. The result has been a more diverse mainstream culture — but also, simultaneously, a subculture that is even more alienated and despised, and ever more infuriated and bloody-minded. This is an age in which a woman might succeed a black man as president, but also one in which a member of the white working class has declining options to make a decent living. This is a time when gay people can be married in 50 states, even as working-class families are hanging by a thread. It’s a period in which we have become far more aware of the historic injustices that still haunt African-Americans and yet we treat the desperate plight of today’s white working class as an afterthought. And so late-stage capitalism is creating a righteous, revolutionary anger that late-stage democracy has precious little ability to moderate or constrain — and has actually helped exacerbate. For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome. This is just one aspect of what Trump has masterfully signaled as “political correctness” run amok, or what might be better described as the newly rigid progressive passion for racial and sexual equality of outcome, rather than the liberal aspiration to mere equality of opportunity. Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well. A struggling white man in the heartland is now told to “check his privilege” by students at Ivy League colleges. Even if you agree that the privilege exists, it’s hard not to empathize with the object of this disdain. These working-class communities, already alienated, hear — how can they not? — the glib and easy dismissals of “white straight men” as the ultimate source of all our woes. They smell the condescension and the broad generalizations about them — all of which would be repellent if directed at racial minorities — and see themselves, in Hoffer’s words, “disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things.” And so they wait, and they steam, and they lash out. This was part of the emotional force of the tea party: not just the advancement of racial minorities, gays, and women but the simultaneous demonization of the white working-class world, its culture and way of life. Obama never intended this, but he became a symbol to many of this cultural marginalization. The Black Lives Matter left stoked the fires still further; so did the gay left, for whom the word

9/20/16 90 magnanimity seems unknown, even in the wake of stunning successes. And as the tea party swept through Washington in 2010, as its representatives repeatedly held the government budget hostage, threatened the very credit of the U.S., and refused to hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee, the American political and media Establishment mostly chose to interpret such behavior as something other than unprecedented. But Trump saw what others didn’t, just as Hoffer noted: “The frustrated individual and the true believer make better prognosticators than those who have reason to want the preservation of the status quo.” Mass movements, Hoffer argues, are distinguished by a “facility for make-believe … credulity, a readiness to attempt the impossible.” What, one wonders, could be more impossible than suddenly vetting every single visitor to the U.S. for traces of Islamic belief? What could be more make-believe than a big, beautiful wall stretching across the entire Mexican border, paid for by the Mexican government? What could be more credulous than arguing that we could pay off our national debt through a global trade war? In a conventional political party, and in a rational political discourse, such ideas would be laughed out of contention, their self-evident impossibility disqualifying them from serious consideration. In the emotional fervor of a democratic mass movement, however, these impossibilities become icons of hope, symbols of a new way of conducting politics. Their very impossibility is their appeal. But the most powerful engine for such a movement — the thing that gets it off the ground, shapes and solidifies and entrenches it — is always the evocation of hatred. It is, as Hoffer put it, “the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying elements.” And so Trump launched his campaign by calling undocumented Mexican immigrants a population largely of rapists and murderers. He moved on to Muslims, both at home and abroad. He has now added to these enemies — with sly brilliance — the Republican Establishment itself. And what makes Trump uniquely dangerous in the history of American politics — with far broader national appeal than, say, Huey Long or George Wallace — is his response to all three enemies. It’s the threat of blunt coercion and dominance. And so after demonizing most undocumented Mexican immigrants, he then vowed to round up and deport all 11 million of them by force. “They have to go” was the typically blunt phrase he used — and somehow people didn’t immediately recognize the monstrous historical echoes. The sheer scale of the police and military operation that this policy would entail boggles the mind. Worse, he emphasized, after the mass murder in San Bernardino, that even the Muslim-Americans you know intimately may turn around and massacre you at any juncture. “There’s something going on,” he declaimed ominously, giving legitimacy to the most hysterical and ugly of human impulses. To call this fascism doesn’t do justice to fascism. Fascism had, in some measure, an ideology and occasional coherence that Trump utterly lacks. But his movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of foreigners, its hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult, and its deep belief in violence and coercion in a democracy that has heretofore relied on debate and persuasion. This is the Weimar aspect of our current moment. Just as the English Civil War ended with a dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, and the French Revolution gave us Napoleon Bonaparte, and the unstable chaos of Russian democracy yielded to Vladimir Putin, and the most recent burst of Egyptian democracy set the conditions for General el-Sisi’s coup, so our paralyzed, emotional hyperdemocracy leads the stumbling, frustrated, angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump. His response to his third vaunted enemy, the RNC, is also laced with the threat of violence. There will be riots in Cleveland if he doesn’t get his way. The RNC will have “a rough time” if it doesn’t cooperate. “Paul Ryan, I don’t know him well, but I’m sure I’m going to get along great with him,” Trump has said. “And if I don’t? He’s gonna have to pay a big price, okay?” The past month has seen delegates to the Cleveland convention receiving death threats; one of Trump’s hatchet men, Roger Stone, has already threatened to publish the hotel rooms of delegates who refuse to vote for Trump. And what’s notable about Trump’s supporters is precisely what one would expect from members of a mass movement: their intense loyalty. Trump is their man, however inarticulate they are when explaining why. He’s tough, he’s real, and they’ve got his back, especially when he is attacked by all the people they have come to despise: liberal Democrats and traditional Republicans. At rallies, whenever a protester is hauled out, you can almost sense the rising rage of the collective identity venting itself against a lone dissenter and finding a catharsis of sorts in the brute force a mob can inflict on an individual. Trump tells the crowd he’d like to punch a protester in the face or have him carried out on a stretcher. No modern politician who has come this close to the presidency has championed violence in this way. It would be disqualifying if our hyperdemocracy hadn’t already abolished disqualifications.

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And while a critical element of 20th-century fascism — its organized street violence — is missing, you can begin to see it in embryonic form. The phalanx of bodyguards around Trump grows daily; plainclothes bouncers in the crowds have emerged as pseudo-cops to contain the incipient unrest his candidacy will only continue to provoke; supporters have attacked hecklers with sometimes stunning ferocity. Every time Trump legitimizes potential violence by his supporters by saying it comes from a love of country, he sows the seeds for serious civil unrest. Trump celebrates torture — the one true love of tyrants everywhere — not because it allegedly produces intelligence but because it has a demonstration effect. At his rallies he has recounted the mythical acts of one General John J. Pershing when confronted with an alleged outbreak of Islamist terrorism in the Philippines. Pershing, in Trump’s telling, lines up 50 Muslim prisoners, swishes a series of bullets in the corpses of freshly slaughtered pigs, and orders his men to put those bullets in their rifles and kill 49 of the captured Muslim men. He spares one captive solely so he can go back and tell his friends. End of the terrorism problem. In some ways, this story contains all the elements of Trump’s core appeal. The vexing problem of tackling jihadist terror? Torture and murder enough terrorists and they will simply go away. The complicated issue of undocumented workers, drawn by jobs many Americans won’t take? Deport every single one of them and build a wall to stop the rest. Fuck political correctness. As one of his supporters told an obtuse reporter at a rally when asked if he supported Trump: “Hell yeah! He’s no-bullshit. All balls. Fuck you all balls. That’s what I’m about.” And therein lies the appeal of tyrants from the beginning of time. Fuck you all balls. Irrationality with muscle. The racial aspect of this is also unmissable. When the enemy within is Mexican or Muslim, and your ranks are extremely white, you set up a rubric for a racial conflict. And what’s truly terrifying about Trump is that he does not seem to shrink from such a prospect; he relishes it. For, like all tyrants, he is utterly lacking in self-control. Sleeping a handful of hours a night, impulsively tweeting in the early hours, improvising madly on subjects he knows nothing about, Trump rants and raves as he surfs an entirely reactive media landscape. Once again, Plato had his temperament down: A tyrant is a man “not having control of himself [who] attempts to rule others”; a man flooded with fear and love and passion, while having little or no ability to restrain or moderate them; a “real slave to the greatest fawning,” a man who “throughout his entire life ... is full of fear, overflowing with convulsions and pains.” Sound familiar? Trump is as mercurial and as unpredictable and as emotional as the daily Twitter stream. And we are contemplating giving him access to the nuclear codes. Those who believe that Trump’s ugly, thuggish populism has no chance of ever making it to the White House seem to me to be missing this dynamic. Neo-fascist movements do not advance gradually by persuasion; they first transform the terms of the debate, create a new movement based on untrammeled emotion, take over existing institutions, and then ruthlessly exploit events. And so current poll numbers are only reassuring if you ignore the potential impact of sudden, external events — an economic downturn or a terror attack in a major city in the months before November. I have no doubt, for example, that Trump is sincere in his desire to “cut the head off” ISIS, whatever that can possibly mean. But it remains a fact that the interests of ISIS and the Trump campaign are now perfectly aligned. Fear is always the would-be tyrant’s greatest ally. And though Trump’s unfavorables are extraordinarily high (around 65 percent), he is already showing signs of changing his tune, pivoting (fitfully) to the more presidential mode he envisages deploying in the general election. I suspect this will, to some fools on the fence, come as a kind of relief, and may open their minds to him once more. Tyrants, like mob bosses, know the value of a smile: Precisely because of the fear he’s already generated, you desperately want to believe in his new warmth. It’s part of the good-cop-bad-cop routine that will be familiar to anyone who has studied the presidency of Vladimir Putin. With his appeal to his own base locked up, Trump may well also shift to more moderate stances on social issues like abortion (he already wants to amend the GOP platform to a less draconian position) or gay and even transgender rights. He is consistent in his inconsistency, because, for him, winning is what counts. He has had a real case against Ted Cruz — that the senator has no base outside ideological-conservative quarters and is even less likely to win a general election. More potently, Trump has a worryingly strong argument against Clinton herself — or “crooked Hillary,” as he now dubs her.

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His proposition is a simple one. Remember James Carville’s core question in the 1992 election: Change versus more of the same? That sentiment once elected Clinton’s husband; it could also elect her opponent this fall. If you like America as it is, vote Clinton. After all, she has been a member of the American political elite for a quarter-century. Clinton, moreover, has shown no ability to inspire or rally anyone but her longtime loyalists. She is lost in the new media and has struggled to put away a 74-year-old socialist who is barely a member of her party. Her own unfavorables are only 11 points lower than Trump’s (far higher than Obama’s, ’s, or Al Gore’s were at this point in the race), and the more she campaigns, the higher her unfavorables go (including in her own party). She has a Gore problem. The idea of welcoming her into your living room for the next four years can seem, at times, positively masochistic. It may be that demographics will save us. America is no longer an overwhelmingly white country, and Trump’s signature issue — illegal immigration — is the source of his strength but also of his weakness. Nonetheless, it’s worth noting how polling models have consistently misread the breadth of his support, especially in these past few weeks; he will likely bend over backward to include minorities in his fall campaign; and those convinced he cannot bring a whole new swath of white voters back into the political process should remember 2004, when Karl Rove helped engineer anti-gay-marriage state constitutional amendments that increased conservative voter turnout. All Trump needs is a sliver of minority votes inspired by the new energy of his campaign and the alleged dominance of the Obama coalition could crack (especially without Obama). Throughout the West these past few years, from France to Britain and Germany, the polls have kept missing the power of right-wing insurgency. Were Trump to win the White House, the defenses against him would be weak. He would likely bring a GOP majority in the House, and Republicans in the Senate would be subjected to almighty popular fury if they stood in his way. The 4-4 stalemate in the Supreme Court would break in Trump’s favor. (In large part, of course, this would be due to the GOP’s unprecedented decision to hold a vacancy open “for the people to decide,” another massive hyperdemocratic breach in our constitutional defenses.) And if Trump’s policies are checked by other branches of government, how might he react? Just look at his response to the rules of the GOP nomination process. He’s not interested in rules. And he barely understands the Constitution. In one revealing moment earlier this year, when asked what he would do if the military refused to obey an illegal order to torture a prisoner, Trump simply insisted that the man would obey: “They won’t refuse. They’re not going to refuse, believe me.” He later amended his remark, but it speaks volumes about his approach to power. Dick Cheney gave illegal orders to torture prisoners and coerced White House lawyers to cook up absurd “legal” defenses. Trump would make Cheney’s embrace of the dark side and untrammeled executive power look unambitious. In his 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis wrote a counterfactual about what would happen if fascism as it was then spreading across Europe were to triumph in America. It’s not a good novel, but it remains a resonant one. The imagined American fascist leader — a senator called Buzz Windrip — is a “Professional Common Man … But he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering among them, and they raised hands to him in worship.” He “was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic.” “ ‘I know the Press only too well,’ ” Windrip opines at one point. “ ‘Almost all editors hide away in spider-dens, men without thought of Family or Public Interest … plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions and fill their greedy pocketbooks.’ ” He is obsessed with the balance of trade and promises instant economic success: “ ‘I shall not be content till this country can produce every single thing we need … We shall have such a balance of trade as will go far to carry out my often-criticized yet completely sound idea of from $3000 to $5000 per year for every single family.’ ” However fantastical and empty his promises, he nonetheless mesmerizes the party faithful at the nominating convention (held in Cleveland!): “Something in the intensity with which Windrip looked at his audience, looked at all of them, his glance slowly taking them in from the highest-perched seat to the nearest, convinced them that he was talking to each individual, directly and solely; that he wanted to take each of them into his heart; that he was telling them the truths, the imperious and dangerous facts, that had been hidden from them.” And all the elites who stood in his way? Crippled by their own failures, demoralized by their crumbling stature, they first mock and then cave. As one lone journalist laments before the election (he finds himself in a concentration

9/20/16 93 camp afterward): “I’ve got to keep remembering … that Windrip is only the lightest cork on the whirlpool. He didn’t plot all this thing. With all the justified discontent there is against the smart politicians and the Plush Horses of Plutocracy — oh, if it hadn’t been one Windrip, it’d been another … We had it coming, we Respectables.” And, 81 years later, many of us did. An American elite that has presided over massive and increasing public debt, that failed to prevent 9/11, that chose a disastrous war in the Middle East, that allowed financial markets to nearly destroy the global economy, and that is now so bitterly divided the Congress is effectively moot in a constitutional democracy: “We Respectables” deserve a comeuppance. The vital and valid lesson of the Trump phenomenon is that if the elites cannot govern by compromise, someone outside will eventually try to govern by popular passion and brute force. But elites still matter in a democracy. They matter not because they are democracy’s enemy but because they provide the critical ingredient to save democracy from itself. The political Establishment may be battered and demoralized, deferential to the algorithms of the web and to the monosyllables of a gifted demagogue, but this is not the time to give up on America’s near-unique and stabilizing blend of democracy and elite responsibility. The country has endured far harsher times than the present without succumbing to rank demagoguery; it avoided the fascism that destroyed Europe; it has channeled extraordinary outpourings of democratic energy into constitutional order. It seems shocking to argue that we need elites in this democratic age — especially with vast inequalities of wealth and elite failures all around us. But we need them precisely to protect this precious democracy from its own destabilizing excesses. And so those Democrats who are gleefully predicting a Clinton landslide in November need to both check their complacency and understand that the Trump question really isn’t a cause for partisan Schadenfreude anymore. It’s much more dangerous than that. Those still backing the demagogue of the left, Bernie Sanders, might want to reflect that their critique of Clinton’s experience and expertise — and their facile conflation of that with corruption — is only playing into Trump’s hands. That it will fall to Clinton to temper her party’s ambitions will be uncomfortable to watch, since her willingness to compromise and equivocate is precisely what many Americans find so distrustful. And yet she may soon be all we have left to counter the threat. She needs to grasp the lethality of her foe, moderate the kind of identity politics that unwittingly empowers him, make an unapologetic case that experience and moderation are not vices, address much more directly the anxieties of the white working class—and Democrats must listen. More to the point, those Republicans desperately trying to use the long-standing rules of their own nominating process to thwart this monster deserve our passionate support, not our disdain. This is not the moment to remind them that they partly brought this on themselves. This is a moment to offer solidarity, especially as the odds are increasingly stacked against them. Ted Cruz and John Kasich face their decisive battle in Indiana on May 3. But they need to fight on, with any tactic at hand, all the way to the bitter end. The Republican delegates who are trying to protect their party from the whims of an outsider demagogue are, at this moment, doing what they ought to be doing to prevent civil and racial unrest, an international conflict, and a constitutional crisis. These GOP elites have every right to deploy whatever rules or procedural roadblocks they can muster, and they should refuse to be intimidated. And if they fail in Indiana or Cleveland, as they likely will, they need, quite simply, to disown their party’s candidate. They should resist any temptation to loyally back the nominee or to sit this election out. They must take the fight to Trump at every opportunity, unite with Democrats and Independents against him, and be prepared to sacrifice one election in order to save their party and their country. For Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him as such.

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“The Complexity Crisis” by Peggy Noonan (7/13/06) We are asking too much of our politicians. I am thinking about the huge and crushing number of issues we force politicians to understand and make decisions on. These are issues of great variety, complexity, and even in some cases, many cases in a way, unknowability. All of us, as good citizens, feel that we must know something about them, study them, come to conclusions. But there are too many, and they are too complicated, or the information on them is contradictory, or incomplete. For politicians it is the same but more so. They not only have to try to understand, complicated and demanding questions, they have to vote on them. We are asking our politicians, our senators and congressmen, to make judgments, decisions and policy on: stem cell research, SDI, Nato composition, G-8 agreements, the history and state of play of judicial and legislative actions regarding press freedoms, the history of Sunni-Shiites tensions, Kurds, tax rates, federal spending, hurricane prediction and response, the building of a library annex in Missoula, the most recent thinking on when human life begins, including the thinking of the theologians of antiquity on when the soul enters the body, chemical weaponry, the Supreme Court, U.S.-North Korean relations, bioethics, cloning, public college curriculums, India-Pakistan relations, the enduring Muslim-Hindu conflict, the constitutional implications of McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform, Homeland security, Securities and Exchange Commission authority, energy policy, environmental policy, nuclear proliferation, global warming, the stability of Venezuela's Chavez regime and its implications for U.S. oil prices, the future of Cuba after Castro, progress in gender bias as suggested by comparisons of the number of girls who pursued college-track studies in American public high schools circa 1950 to those on a college-track today, outsourcing, immigration, the comparative efficacy of charter and magnet schools, land use, Kelo, health care, HMO's, what to do with victims of child abuse, the history of marriage, the nature and origin of homosexuality, V- chips, foreign competition in the making of computer chips, fat levels in potato chips, national policy on the humanities, U.N. reform, and privacy law. And that was just this week. Just seven days in the modern political world. Lucky for us our congressmen and senators are smart as Einstein, good as Mother Teresa, knowledgeable as Henry Kissinger times Robert Kaplan, and wise as Solomon. Oh wait. We are asking too much. Of ourselves and of the mere mortals who lead us. With their areas of responsibility defined as the world, the universe and the cosmos, is it any wonder our politicians and network anchors--our most visible American leaders--tend to act like they have attention deficit disorder? In their professions attention deficit disorder is a plus. Why are we asking so much of them? Because everything comes down to law and law comes down to politicians. Because everyone's watching, and trying to pin everyone else down--"But Congressman, the little girl lived in your district and all the local authorities had been alerted, don't you think your office should have done something about the daily abuse to which she was being subjected?" And yet this is all good for politicians. Because it's good for business. Yes they are overwhelmed and yes they are out of their depth--how could they not be?--but the endless number of questions on which they must legislate leads to an endless number of lobbyists and groups willing to give them money and support in return for a vote. The Increasing Complexity of Everything is good for liberalism (government should be vital, large, demand and bestow much) and not conservatism (government should be smaller, less powerful, less demanding of the treasure and liberty of the citizenry). When everything is a big complicated morass, regular normal people, voters, constituents, become intellectually disheartened. They can also lose sight of core principles. A leftist who is Machiavellian in his impulses just might look at the lay of the land and think, Good, snow 'em under, they'll get confused. Keep hitting them with new issues and they'll start to make mistakes. They may stop us on gun control, but while they're busy fighting that we'll get Congress to mandate limits on CEO pay.

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One feels as a voter not argued into agreement or persuaded into support but complicated into submission. How do politicians themselves feel about it? I would like to think many of them, and I know some of them, occasionally have a drink with friends at night and let out their surprise and dismay. "I'm just a guy who loved politics! I buy my suits at Moe's Big and Tall! I'm not a theologian, I'm not a scientist! Don't make me make these decisions! I'm stupider than you understand!" That turns into: "I'm not Plato! I'm not Socrates! Do you really want me to pretend I am?" But a lot voters do seem to want them to pretend to higher wisdom than they possess. Which leads politicians to the third stage of surprise and dismay: "I just made American public policy on stem cell research, telling Harvard and Yale doctors what to do. Am I not Plato? Would you not like to kiss my hand?" This is the ego generated by people of whom impossible demands are made. What is the answer to all this? I don't know. But there must be one, even though it's probably complicated. I have only three thoughts. One: It is good to keep in mind, at such a time, that we must let as many questions devolve into the private sphere as possible. Not all can but many can, and on so many issues it's better to err on the side of individual freedom than the authority of the state. Two, in making big decisions do not lose simple common sense, which is common human sense, which is, for instance: If you start to clone humans it will have an ugly end. Three: Do not let go of your faith. Do not lose it. In the age in which too much is demanded of the slim wisdom of politicians, it is our only hope, and theirs.

“The Great Democracy Meltdown” by Kurlantzick, New Republic (5/8/11) Why the world is becoming less free. As the revolt that started this past winter in Tunisia spread to Egypt, Libya, and beyond, dissidents the world over were looking to the Middle East for inspiration. In China, online activists inspired by the Arab Spring called for a “jasmine revolution.” In Singapore, one of the quietest countries in the world, opposition members called for an “orchid evolution” in the run-up to this month’s national elections. Perhaps as a result, those watching from the West have been positively triumphalist in their predictions. The Middle East uprisings could herald “the greatest advance for human rights and freedom since the end of the cold war,” argued British Foreign Secretary William Hague. Indeed, at no point since the end of the cold war—when Francis Fukuyama penned his famous essay The End of History, positing that liberal democracy was the ultimate destination for every country—has there been so much optimism about the march of global freedom. If only things were so simple. The truth is that the Arab Spring is something of a smokescreen for what is taking place in the world as a whole. Around the globe, it is democratic meltdowns, not democratic revolutions, that are now the norm. (And even countries like Egypt and Tunisia, while certainly freer today than they were a year ago, are hardly guaranteed to replace their autocrats with real democracies.) In its most recent annual survey, the monitoring group Freedom House found that global freedom plummeted for the fifth year in a row, the longest continuous decline in nearly 40 years. It pointed out that most authoritarian nations had become even more repressive, that the decline in freedom was most pronounced among the “middle ground” of nations—countries that have begun democratizing but are not solid and stable democracies—and that the number of electoral democracies currently stands at its lowest point since 1995. Meanwhile, another recent survey, compiled by Germany’s Bertelsmann Foundation, spoke of a “gradual qualitative erosion” of democracy and concluded that the number of “highly defective democracies”—democracies so flawed that they are close to being failed states, autocracies, or both—had doubled between 2006 and 2010. The number of anecdotal examples is overwhelming. From Russia to Venezuela to Thailand to the Philippines, countries that once appeared to be developing into democracies today seem headed in the other direction. So many countries now remain stuck somewhere between authoritarianism and democracy, report Marc Plattner and Larry

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Diamond, co-editors of the Journal of Democracy, that “it no longer seems plausible to regard [this condition] simply as a temporary stage in the process of democratic transition.” Or as an activist from Burma—long one of the world’s most repressive countries—told me after moving to Thailand and watching that country’s democratic system disintegrate, “The other countries were supposed to change Burma. ... Now it seems like they are becoming like Burma.” Twenty or even ten years ago, the possibility of a global democratic recession seemed impossible. It was widely assumed that, as states grew wealthier, they would develop larger middle classes. And these middle classes, according to democracy theorists like Samuel Huntington, would push for ever-greater social, political, and economic freedoms. Human progress, which constantly marched forward, would spread democracy everywhere. For a time, this rosy line of thinking seemed warranted. In 1990, dictators still ruled most of Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia; by 2005, democracies had emerged across these continents, and some of the most powerful developing nations, including South Africa and Brazil, had become solid democracies. In 2005, for the first time in history, more than half the world’s people lived under democratic systems. Then, something odd and unexpected began to happen. It started when some of the leaders who had emerged in these countries seemed to morph into elected autocrats once they got into office. In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez is now essentially an elected dictator. In Ecuador, elected President Rafael Correa, who has displayed a strong authoritarian streak, recently won legislation that would grant him expansive new powers. In Kyrgyzstan, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who led the 2005 Tulip Revolution, soon proved himself nearly as authoritarian as his predecessor. And, in Russia, Vladimir Putin used the power he won in elections to essentially dismantle the country’s democracy. But it wasn’t just leaders who were driving these changes. In some cases, the people themselves seemed to acquiesce in their countries’ slide away from free and open government. In one study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, only 16 percent of Russians said it was “very important” that their nation be governed democratically. The regular Afrobarometer survey of the African continent has found declining levels of support for democracy in many key countries. And in Guatemala, Paraguay, Colombia, Peru, Honduras, and Nicaragua, either a minority or only a small majority of people think democracy is preferable to any other type of government. Even in East Asia, one of the most democratic regions of the world, polls show rising dissatisfaction with democracy. In fact, several countries in the region have developed what Yu-tzung Chang, Yunhan Zhu, and Chong-min Park, who studied data from the regular Asian Barometer surveys, have termed “authoritarian nostalgia.” “Few of the region’s former authoritarian regimes have been thoroughly discredited,” they write, noting that the region’s average score for commitment to democracy, judged by a range of responses to surveys, has recently fallen. But what about the middle class? Even if large segments of the population were uninterested in liberal democracy, weren’t members of the middle class supposed to act as agents of democratization, as Huntington had envisioned? Actually, the story has turned out to be quite a bit more complicated. In country after country, a familiar pattern has repeated itself: The middle class has indeed reacted negatively to populist leaders who appeared to be sliding into authoritarianism; but rather than work to defeat these leaders at the ballot box or strengthen the institutions that could hold them in check, they have ended up supporting military coups or other undemocratic measures. Thailand offers a clear example of this phenomenon. In 2001, Thaksin Shinawatra, a former telecommunications tycoon turned populist, was elected with the largest mandate in Thai history, mostly from the poor, who, as in many developing nations, still constitute a majority of the population. Over the next five years, Thaksin enacted several policies that clearly benefited the poor, including national health insurance, but he also began to strangle Thailand’s institutions, threatening reporters, unleashing a “war on drugs” that led to unexplained shootings of political opponents, and silencing the bureaucracy. In 2005, when the charismatic prime minister won another free election with an even larger mandate, the middle class revolted, demonstrating in the streets until they paralyzed Bangkok. Finally, in September 2006, the Thai military stepped in, ousting Thaksin. When I traveled around Bangkok following the coup, young, middle-class Thais, who a generation ago had fought against military rulers, were engaged in a love-in with the troops, snapping photos of soldiers posted throughout Bangkok like they were celebrities. The middle class in Thailand had plenty of company. In 2001, urban Filipinos poured into the streets to topple President Joseph Estrada, a former actor who rose to power on his appeal to the poor, and then allegedly used his office to rake in vast sums of money from underworld gambling tycoons. In Honduras in 2009, middle-class

9/20/16 97 opponents of populist President Manuel Zelaya began to protest his plans to extend his power by altering the constitution. When the military removed him in June of that year, the intervention was welcomed by many members of the urban middle class. An analysis of military coups in developing nations over the past two decades, conducted by my colleague David Silverman, found that, in nearly half of the cases—drawn from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East—middle-class men and women either agitated in advance for the coup, or, after the takeover, expressed their support in polls or prominent press coverage. Even as domestic politics in many developing nations has become less friendly to democratization, the international system too has changed, further weakening democratic hopes. The rising strength of authoritarian powers, principally China but also Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other states, has helped forestall democratization. Moscow and Beijing were clearly rattled by the “color revolutions” of the early and mid-2000s, and they developed a number of responses. First, they tried to delegitimize the revolts by arguing that they were not genuine popular movements but actually Western attempts at regime change. Then, in nations like Cambodia, Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Moldova, Moscow and Beijing intervened directly in attempts to reverse democratic gains. The Kremlin’s youth group, Nashi, known for its aggressive tactics against democracy activists, launched branches in other Central Asian nations. In Kyrgyzstan, Russian advisers helped a series of leaders emulate the Kremlin’s model of political control. In part because of this Russian influence, “[p]arliamentary democracy in Kyrgyzstan has been hobbled,” according to the International Crisis Group. China and Russia even created new “NGOs” that were supposedly focused on democracy promotion. But these organizations actually offered expertise and funding to foreign leaders to help them forestall new color revolutions. In Ukraine, an organization called the “Russian Press Club,” run by an adviser to Putin, posed as an NGO and helped facilitate Russia’s involvement in Ukrainian elections. But China and Russia are only part of the story. In many ways, the biggest culprits have actually been stable democracies. Consider the case of Myo, a Burmese publisher and activist who I met four years ago in a dingy noodle shop in Rangoon. The educated son of a relatively well-off Burmese family, he told me he had been working for a publishing company in Rangoon, but had to smuggle political messages into pieces he published in magazines that focused on safe topics like soccer or Burmese rap. “It’s kind of a game everyone here plays,” he explained, “but after a while it gets so tiring.” When I next met Myo, it was in Thailand two years later. He’d finally grown weary of trying to get his writing past the censors and left for India, then for Thailand. “I’d heard that, before, India had been very welcoming to Burmese activists, particularly after 1988,” Myo said, referring to a period of anti-government rioting in Burma. At one time, Indian officials had assisted Burmese democracy activists, and India’s defense minister from 1998 to 2004 was George Fernandes, a prominent human rights advocate who even gave some Burmese exiles shelter in his family compound. By the time Myo came to India, however, Delhi had stopped criticizing the Burmese junta. Instead, it had reversed itself and was engaging the generals under a policy called “Look East.” When Than Shwe, the Burmese junta’s leader, paid a state visit to India, he was taken to the burial site of Mahatma Gandhi, a cruelly ironic juxtaposition that Amnesty International’s Burma specialist called “entirely unpalatable.” For Myo, India’s chilly new pragmatism was a shock. “I expected China to work with Burma,” he said. “But to see it from India, it was so much more disappointing.” Like Myo, many Western officials had expected that stable developing-world democracies like India, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, and Turkey would emerge as powerful advocates for democracy and human rights abroad. But as they’ve gained power, these emerging democratic giants have acted more like cold-blooded realists. South Africa has for years tolerated Robert Mugabe’s brutal regime next door in Zimbabwe, and, in 2007, it even helped to block a U.N. resolution condemning the Burmese junta for human rights abuses. Brazil has cozied up to Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and to local autocrats like Cuba’s Castros. When a prominent Cuban political prisoner named Orlando Zapata Tamayo held a hunger strike and eventually died, former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva seemed to ridicule Tamayo’s struggle, likening the activist to a criminal who was trying to gain publicity. There are exceptions to this trend. Poland, for one, has used its influence to support reformers in other post-Soviet states like Belarus. But Poland is unusual, and by playing a limited—or hostile—role in international democracy promotion efforts, countries like South Africa or Brazil or Turkey have made it easier for autocratic leaders to paint democracy promotion as a Western phenomenon, and even to portray it as an illegal intervention.

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Why have regional democratic powers opted for this course? It seems hard to believe that a country with, say, Brazil or South Africa’s experience of brutal tyranny could actively abet dictators in other nations. But it now appears that the notion of absolute sovereignty, promoted by authoritarian states like China, has resonated with these democratic governments. Many of these emerging democratic powers were leading members of the non-aligned movement during the cold war and weathered Western efforts to foment coups in their countries. Today, they feel extremely uncomfortable joining any international coalition that could undermine other nations’ sovereignty, even if potentially for good reason. And many of these countries, such as Turkey and Indonesia and India, may simply be eager to avoid criticism of their own internal human rights abuses. Then there is the United States, still the most influential nation on earth. Its missteps, recently, have been serious. Barack Obama’s efforts to distance himself from the Bush administration—which greatly undermined America’s moral authority-have combined with the country’s weakened economic position to downgrade the importance of democracy promotion in U.S. foreign policy. While Obama has delivered several speeches mentioning democracy, he has little obvious passion for the issue. When several prominent Iranian dissidents came to Washington in the summer of 2009, following the uprising in their country, they could not obtain meetings with any senior Obama administration officials. Rabeeya Kadeer, the Uighur version of the Dalai Lama, met with Bush in 2008 but found herself shunted off to low-level State Department officials by the Obama administration. More substantively, the administration has shifted the focus of the federal bureaucracy. Though it has maintained significant budget levels for democracy promotion, it eliminated high-level positions on the National Security Council that, under Bush, had been devoted to democracy. The administration also appointed an assistant secretary for democracy, human rights, and labor who in his previous work had been mostly focused on cleaning up America’s own abuses. This was not a bad thing—the Bush administration indeed left major issues to resolve—but it meant that he had far less experience than many of his predecessors with democracy promotion abroad. To be fair, the White House has to grapple with an increasingly isolationist American public. In one poll taken in 2005, a majority of Americans said that the United States should play a role in promoting democracy elsewhere. By 2007, only 37 percent thought the United States should play this role. In a subsequent study, released in late 2009, nearly half of Americans told the Pew Research polling organization that the United States should “mind its own business” internationally and should let other nations work out their challenges or problems themselves. This was the highest percentage of isolationist sentiment recorded in a poll of the American public in four decades.

There is an obvious appeal to the constantly touted notion that the march of human freedom is inevitable. But not only is it simple-minded to treat history as a story with a preordained happy ending; it is also, for those who truly want to see democracy spread, extraordinarily dangerous. After all, if democracy is bound to triumph, then there’s no reason to work too hard at promoting it. This overconfidence can spread to developing nations themselves, lulling democrats into a false sense of security once an election has finally been held, and dissuading them from building the institutions that are necessary to keep a country free over the long-term. Democracy is not a simple thing: It’s a complex system of strong institutions and legal checks. Very few nations have mastered it fully. And sustaining it is a never-ending effort. Stopping the global democratic reversal, then, will require giving up the assumption that democracy will simply happen on its own—and instead figuring out what we can do to promote it. At the most basic level, the United States can be much less abashed in its rhetorical advocacy of democracy and much more consistent. Condemning autocracy in places like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia—where the United States has significant strategic interests—would help to counteract the notion that democracy is merely a concept the West wields to serve its own geopolitical aims. In addition, the United States and its allies should do more to make democracy promotion pay off for emerging powers. New democratic giants, like Brazil, should be granted more power in international institutions like the United Nations—if, that is, they show a commitment to helping expand human rights and free government around the globe. Right now, few of these lessons have been learned. Instead, we seem content to watch events unfold across the world and assume that things will work out for the best, because history is invariably headed in the direction of freedom. We should stop telling ourselves this comforting story and instead do what is needed to give democracy a fighting chance.

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“It’s complicated” by Samuel Arbesman aeon Human ingenuity has created a world that the mind cannot master. Have we finally reached our limits? Despite the vastness of the sky, airplanes occasionally crash into each other. To avoid these catastrophes, the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) was developed. TCAS alerts pilots to potential hazards, and tells them how to respond by using a series of complicated rules. In fact, this set of rules — developed over decades — is so complex, perhaps only a handful of individuals alive even understand it anymore. When a TCAS is developed, humans are pushed to the sidelines and, instead, simulation is used. If the system responds as expected after a number of test cases, it receives the engineer’s seal of approval and goes into use. While the problem of avoiding collisions is itself a complex question, the system we’ve built to handle this problem has essentially become too complicated for us to understand, and even experts sometimes react with surprise to its behaviour. This escalating complexity points to a larger phenomenon in modern life. When the systems designed to save our lives are hard to grasp, we have reached a technological threshold that bears examining. For centuries, humans have been creating ever-more complicated systems, from the machines we live with to the informational systems and laws that keep our global civilisation stitched together. Technology continues its fantastic pace of accelerating complexity — offering efficiencies and benefits that previous generations could not have imagined — but with this increasing sophistication and interconnectedness come complicated and messy effects that we can’t always anticipate. It’s one thing to recognise that technology continues to grow more complex, making the task of the experts who build and maintain our systems more complicated still, but it’s quite another to recognise that many of these systems are actually no longer completely understandable. We now live in a world filled with incomprehensible glitches and bugs. When we find a bug in a video game, it’s intriguing, but when we are surprised by the very infrastructure of our society, that should give us pause. One of the earliest signs of technology complicating human life was the advent of the railroads, which necessitated the development of standardised time zones in the United States, to co-ordinate the dozens of new trains that were criss-crossing the continent. And things have gotten orders of magnitude more complex since then in the realm of transportation. Automobiles have gone from mechanical contraptions of limited complexity to computational engines on wheels. Indeed, it’s estimated that the US has more than 300,000 intersections with traffic signals in its road system. And it’s not just the systems and networks these machines inhabit. During the past 200 years, the number of individual parts in our complicated machines — from airplanes to calculators — has increased exponentially. The encroachment of technological complication through increased computerisation has affected every aspect of our lives, from kitchen appliances to workout equipment. We are now living with the unintended consequences: a world we have created for ourselves that is too complicated for our humble human brains to handle. The nightmare scenario is not Skynet — a self-aware network declaring war on humanity — but messy systems so convoluted that nearly any glitch you can think of can happen. And they actually happen far more often than we would like.

Machines are interacting with each other in rich ways, essentially as algorithms trading among themselves, with humans on the sidelines We already see hints of the endpoint toward which we seem to be hurtling: a world where nearly self-contained technological ecosystems operate outside of human knowledge and understanding. As a scientific paper in Nature in September 2013 put it, there is a complete ‘machine ecology beyond human response time’ in the financial world, where stocks are traded in an eyeblink, and mini-crashes and spikes can occur on the order of a second or less. When we try to push our financial trades to the limits of the speed of light, it is time to recognise that machines are interacting with each other in rich ways, essentially as algorithms trading among themselves, with humans on the sidelines. It used to be taken for granted that there would be knowledge that no human could possibly attain. In his book The Guide for the Perplexed, the medieval scholar Moses Maimonides opined that ‘man’s intellect indubitably has a limit at which it stops’ and even enumerated several concepts he thought we would never grasp, including ‘the number of the stars of heaven’ and ‘whether that number is even or odd’. But then the Scientific Revolution

9/20/16 100 happened, and with it, a triumphalism of understanding. Hundreds of years later, we now know the exact number of objects in the night sky visible to the naked eye — it’s 9,110 (an even number). But ever since the Enlightenment, we have moved steadily toward the ‘Entanglement’, a term coined by the American computer scientist Danny Hillis. The Entanglement is the trend towards more interconnected and less comprehensible technological surroundings. Hillis argues that our machines, while subject to rational rules, are now too complicated to understand. Whether it’s the entirety of the internet or other large pieces of our infrastructure, understanding the whole — keeping it in your head — is no longer even close to possible. One example of this trend is our software’s increasing complexity, as measured by the number of lines of code it takes to write it. According to some estimates, the source code for the Windows operating system increased by an order of magnitude over the course of a decade, making it impossible for a single person to understand all the different parts at once. And remember Y2K? It’s true that the so-called Millennium Bug passed without serious complications, but the startling fact was that we couldn’t be sure what would happen on 1 January 2000 because the systems involved were too complex. Even our legal systems have grown irreconcilably messy. The US Code, itself a kind of technology, is more than 22 million words long and contains more than 80,000 links within it, between one section and another. This vast legal network is profoundly complicated, the functionality of which no person could understand in its entirety. Michael Mandel and Diana Carew, of the Progressive Policy Institute in WashingtonDC, have referred to this growth of legal systems as ‘regulatory accumulation’, wherein we keep adding more and more rules and regulations. Each law individually might make sense, but taken together they can be debilitating, and even interact in surprising and unexpected ways. We even see the interplay between legal complexity and computational complexity in the problematic rollout of a website for Obamacare. The glitches in this technological system can affect each of us. And this trend is accelerating. For instance, we now have 3D printers, vast machinery to help construct tunnels and bridges, and even software that helps with the design of new products and infrastructure, such as sophisticated computer-aided design (CAD) programs. One computational realm, evolutionary programming, even allows software to ‘evolve’ solutions to problems, while being agnostic on what shape that final solution could take. Need an equation to fit some data? Evolutionary programming can do that — even if you can’t understand the answer it comes up with. A number of years ago, a team of research scientists tried to improve the design of a certain kind of computer circuit. They created a simple task that the circuit needed to solve and then tried to evolve a potential solution. After many generations, the team eventually found a successful circuit design. But here’s the interesting part: there were parts of it that were disconnected from the main part of the circuit, but were essential for its function. Essentially, the evolutionary program took advantage of weird physical and electromagnetic phenomena that no engineer would ever think of using in order to make the circuit complete its task. In the words of the researchers: ‘Evolution was able to exploit this physical behaviour, even though it would be difficult to analyse.’ This evolutionary technique yielded a novel technological system, one that we have difficulty understanding, because we would never have come up with something like this on our own. In chess, a realm where computers are more powerful than humans and have the ability to win in ways that the human mind can’t always understand, these types of solutions are known as ‘computer moves’ — the moves that no human would ever do, the ones that are ugly but still get results. As the American economist Tyler Cowen noted in his book Average Is Over (2013), these types of moves often seem wrong, but they are very effective. Computers have exposed the fact that chess, at least when played at the highest levels, is too complicated, with too many moving parts for a person — even a grandmaster — to understand. intellectual surrender in the face of increasing complexity seems too extreme and even a bit cowardly, but what should we replace it with if we can’t understand our creations any more? So how do we respond to all of this technological impenetrability? One response is to simply give up, much like the comic strip character Calvin (friend to a philosophical tiger) who declared that everything from light bulbs to vacuum cleaners works via ‘magic’. Rather than confront the complicated truth of how wind works, Calvin resorts to calling it ‘trees sneezing’. This intellectual surrender in the face of increasing complexity seems too extreme and even a bit cowardly, but what should we replace it with if we can’t understand our creations any more?

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Perhaps we can replace it with the same kind of attitude we have towards weather. While we can’t actually control the weather or understand it in all of its nonlinear details, we can predict it reasonably well, adapt to it, and even prepare for it. And when the elements deliver us something unexpected, we muddle through as best as we can. So, just as we have weather models, we can begin to make models of our technological systems, even somewhat simplified ones. Playing with a simulation of the system we’re interested in — testing its limits and fiddling with its parameters, rather than understanding it completely — can be a powerful path to insight, and is a skill that needs cultivation. For example, the computer game SimCity, a model of sorts, gives its users insights into how a city works. Before SimCity, few outside the realm of urban planning and civil engineering had a clear mental model of how cities worked, and none were able to twiddle the knobs of urban life to produce counterfactual outcomes. We probably still can’t do that at the level of complexity of an actual city, but those who play these types of games do have a better understanding of the general effects of their actions. We need to get better at ‘playing’ simulations of the technological world more generally. This could conceivably be geared towards the direction our educational system needs to move, teaching students how to play with something, examining its bounds and how it works, at least ‘sort of’. We also need interpreters of what’s going on in these systems, a bit like TV meteorologists. Near the end of Average Is Over, Cowen speculates about these future interpreters. He says they ‘will hone their skills of seeking out, absorbing, and evaluating this information… They will be translators of the truths coming out of our networks of machines… At least for a while, they will be the only people left who will have a clear notion of what is going on.’ And when things get too complicated and we end up being surprised by the workings of the structures humanity has created? At that point, we will have to take a cue from those who turn up their collars to the unexpected wintry mix and sigh as they proceed outdoors: we will have to become a bit more humble. Those like Maimonides, who lived before the Enlightenment, recognised that there were bounds to what we could know, and it might be time to return to that way of thinking. Of course, we shouldn’t throw our hands up and say that just because we can’t understand something, there is nothing else to learn. But at the same time, it might be time to get reacquainted with our limits.

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 Predicting the Campaign Turnout  Return to Top Differences in Conservative and Liberal Brains - 2012 Presidential Election - ProCon.org 16 peer-reviewed studies show liberals and conservatives physiologically different In the 16 peer-reviewed scientific studies summarized below, researchers found that liberals and conservatives have different brain structures, different physiological responses to stimuli, and activate different neural mechanisms when confronted with similar situations. Each entry below cites the source document. The studies are arranged from most recent to oldest. We included all the peer-reviewed studies on this subject that we could find. If you know about others, please contact us with details.

1. People right-of-center politically spend more time looking at unpleasant images, and people left-of-center politically spend more time looking at pleasant images. "We report evidence that individual-level variation in people's physiological and attentional responses to aversive and appetitive stimuli are correlated with broad political orientations. Specifically, we find that greater orientation to aversive stimuli tends to be associated with right-of-centre and greater orientation to appetitive (pleasing) stimuli with left-of-centre political inclinations." Michael D. Dodd, et al, "The Left Rolls with the Good; The Right Confronts the Bad. Physiology and Cognition in Politics," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Mar. 5, 2012

2. Reliance on quick, efficient, and "low effort" thought processes yields conservative ideologies, while effortful and deliberate reasoning yields liberal ideologies. "...[P]olitical conservatism is promoted when people rely on low-effort thinking. When effortful, deliberate responding is disrupted or disengaged, thought processes become quick and efficient; these conditions promote conservative ideology… low-effort thought might promote political conservatism because its concepts are easier to process, and processing fluency increases attitude endorsement. Four studies support our assertion that low-effort thinking promotes political conservatism... Our findings suggest that conservative ways of thinking are basic, normal, and perhaps natural." Scott Eidelman, et al., "Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism," Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 2012

3. People who react strongly to disgusting images, such as a picture of someone eating worms, are more likely to self-identify as conservative. "People who believe they would be bothered by a range of hypothetical disgusting situations display an increased likelihood of displaying right-of- center rather than left-of-center political orientations… In this article, we demonstrate that individuals with marked involuntary physiological responses to disgusting images [measured by change in mean skin conductance], such as of a man eating a large mouthful of writhing worms, are more likely to self- identify as conservative and, especially, to oppose gay marriage than are individuals with more muted physiological responses to the same images." Kevin B. Smith, et al., "Disgust Sensitivity and the Neurophysiology of Left-Right Political Orientations," PLOS ONE, Oct. 19, 2011

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4. Liberals have more tolerance to uncertainty (bigger anterior cingulate cortex), and conservatives have more sensitivity to fear (bigger right amygdala). "In a large sample of young adults, we related self-reported political attitudes to gray matter volume using structural MRI [magnetic resonance imaging]. We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala...... [O]ur findings are consistent with the proposal that political orientation is associated with psychological processes for managing fear and uncertainty. The amygdala has many functions, including fear processing. Individuals with a larger amygdala are more sensitive to fear, which, taken together with our findings, might suggest the testable hypothesis that individuals with larger amagdala are more inclined to integrate conservative views into their belief systems... our finding of an association between anterior cingulate cortex [ACC] may be linked with tolerance to uncertainty. One of the functions of the anterior cingulate cortex is to monitor uncertainty and conflicts. Thus it is conceivable that individuals with a larger ACC have a higher capacity to tolerate uncertainty and conflicts, allowing them to accept more liberal views." Ryota Kanai, et.al, "Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults," Current Biology, Apr. 7, 2011

5. Conservatives have stronger motivations than liberals to preserve purity and cleanliness. "...[R]eminders of physical purity influence specific moral judgments regarding behaviors in the sexual domain as well as broad political attitudes...

...[E]nvironmental reminders of physical cleanliness shifted participants’ attitudes toward the conservative end of the political spectrum and altered their specific attitudes toward various moral acts...

Conservatives show a stronger tendency than liberals to feel disgust and find specific violations of sexual purity more offensive... When taken together, these two sets of results point to the possibility that political orientation may be, in some measure, shaped by the strength of an individual’s motivation to avoid physical contamination and that resulting vigilance for threats to purity may serve to reinforce a politically conservative stance toward the world." Erik G. Helzer and David A. Pizarro, PhD, "Dirty Liberals! Reminders of Physical Cleanliness Influence Moral and Political Attitudes," Psychological Science, Mar. 18, 2011

6. Liberals are more likely than conservatives to shift their attention in the direction of another person's gaze. "In the present study, we examine whether gaze cue effects [shifting ones attention in the direction of another's gaze] are moderated by political temperament, given that those on the political right tend to be more supportive of individualism—and less likely to be influenced by others—than those on the left. We find standard gaze cuing effects across all subjects, but systematic differences in these effects by political temperament. Liberals exhibit a very large gaze cuing effect while conservatives show no such effect at various SOAs [stimulus onset asynchrony]... Perhaps conservatives are less likely to trust others meaning that they are also less likely to trust a gaze cue..." Michael D. Dodd, et al., "The Politics of Attention: Gaze Cuing Effects Are Moderated by Political Temperament," Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, Jan. 2011

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7. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to interpret faces as threatening and expressing dominant emotions, while Democrats show greater emotional distress and lower life satisfaction. "Independent sample t-tests revealed group differences in the averaged threat interpretation scores of the 10 facial stimuli. Republican sympathizers were more likely to interpret the faces as signaling a threatening expression as compared to Democrat sympathizers. Group differences were also found for dominance perceptions, whereby Republican sympathizers were more likely to perceive the faces as expressing dominant emotions than were Democrat sympathizers... Collectively, when compared to Republican sympathizers, Democrat sympathizers showed greater psychological distress, more frequent histories of adverse life events such as interpersonal victimization experiences, fewer and less satisfying relationships, and lower perceptions of the trustworthiness of peers and intimate affiliates." Jacob M. Vigil, PhD, "Political Leanings Vary with Facial Expression Processing and Psychosocial Functioning," Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 2010

8. Conservatives and liberals react similarly to positive incentives, but conservatives have greater sensitivity to negative stimuli. "Our findings suggest that conservatives are sensitive to avoidance motivation [motivation through negative stimuli], which produces 'inhibition' responses manifested in greater rigidity... Based on the studies' findings, we would not expect differences between liberals and conservatives in responding to positive stimuli or incentives (i.e., approach cues), but we would expect greater inhibitory reactions by conservatives in response to negative, avoidant cues. Self-regulation appears to provide a useful perspective for understanding how one's political views may affect categorization processes and, more broadly, the association between political conservatism and rigidity." Mindi S. Rock, PhD, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, PhD, "Where Do We Draw Our Lines? Politics, Rigidity, and the Role of Self- Regulation," Social Psychological and Personality Science, Jan. 2010

9. Conservatives have more activity in their dorsolateral prefrontal cortices, the part of the brain that activates for complex social evaluations. "The conservatism dimension, which corresponds to the liberal-to-conservative criterion, was associated with activity in the right DLPFC [dorsolateral prefrontal cortex]... In this study, we speculate that activity in the DLPFC may reflect a role of this region in deliberative decision-making in complex social evaluations... The observation that this region was increasingly activated by conservative beliefs could be explained by claiming that conservative statements require more complex social judgments marked by greater between self- interest and sense of fairness... [W]e showed that the representation of complex political beliefs relies on three fundamental dimensions, each reflected in distinctive patterns of neural activation: The degree of individualism of political beliefs was linearly associated with activation in the medial PFC [prefrontal cortex] and TPJ [temporoparietal junction], the degree of conservatism with activation in the DLPFC, and the degree of radicalism with activation in the ventral striatum and PC/P [posterior cingulate/precuneus]. Our findings support the interpretation that the political belief system depends on a set of social cognitive processes including those that enable a person to judge themselves and other people, make decisions in ambivalent social situations, and comprehend motivational and emotional states." Giovanna Zamboni, et al., "Individualism, Conservatism, and Radicalism As Criteria for Processing Political Beliefs: A Parametric fMRI Study," Social Neuroscience, Sep. 2009

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10. Conservatism is focused on preventing negative outcomes, while liberalism is focused on advancing positive outcomes. "Political liberalism and conservatism differ in provide versus protect orientations, specifically providing for group members' welfare (political Left) and protecting the group from harm (political Right). These reflect the fundamental psychological distinction between approach and avoidance motivation. Conservatism is avoidance based; it is focused on preventing negative outcomes (e.g., societal losses) and seeks to regulate society via inhibition (restraints) in the interests of social order. Liberalism is approach based; it is focused on advancing positive outcomes (e.g., societal gains) and seeks to regulate society via activation (interventions) in the interests of social justice." Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, "To Provide or Protect: Motivational Bases of Political Liberalism and Conservatism," Psychological Inquiry: An International Journal for the Advancement of Psychological Theory, Aug. 2009

11. Genetics influence political attitudes during early adulthood and beyond. "The present research attempts to characterize how the transmission of political orientations develops over the life course... [G]enetic influences on political attitudes are absent prior to young adulthood. During childhood and adolescence, individual differences in political attitudes are accounted for by a variety of environmental influences... However, at the point of early adulthood (in the early 20s), for those who left their parental home, there is evidence of a sizeable genetic influence on political attitudes which remains stable throughout adult life." Peter K. Hatemi, et al.,"Genetic and Environmental Transmission of Political Attitudes Over a Life Time," The Journal of Politics, July 21, 2009

12. Conservatives learn better from negative stimuli than from positive stimuli and are more risk avoidant than liberals. "In this study, the relations among political ideology, exploratory behavior, and the formation of attitudes toward novel stimuli were explored. Participants played a computer game that required learning whether these stimuli produced positive or negative outcomes. Learning was dependent on participants’ decisions to sample novel stimuli... Political ideology correlated with exploration during the game, with conservatives sampling fewer targets than liberals. Moreover, more conservative individuals exhibited a stronger learning asymmetry, such that they learned negative stimuli better than positive... Relative to liberals, politically conservative individuals pursued a more avoidant strategy to the game… The reluctance to explore that characterizes more politically conservative individuals may protect them from experiencing negative situations, for they are likely to restrict approach to known positives." Natalie J. Shook, PhD, and Russell H. Fazio, PhD, "Political Ideology, Exploration of Novel Stimuli, and Attitude Formation," Experimental Social Psychology, Apr. 3, 2009

13. Individual political attitudes correlate with physiological traits, such as sensitivity to sudden noises and threatening visual images. "We present evidence that variations in political attitudes correlate with physiological traits... In a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment,

9/20/16 106 patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats... We do not label these collections of policy positions as either 'liberal' or 'conservative' because we measure only one aspect of ideologies and exclude other aspects such as positions on economic issues. We take no stance on whether these positions actually promote the stability and cohesion of the social unit; we only assert that, given the common frames of the modern American policy, those most concerned about social protection will tend to be attracted to the particular policy positions listed." Douglas R. Oxley, et al., "Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits," Science, Sep. 19, 2008

14. Liberals are more open-minded and creative whereas conservatives are more orderly and better organized. "We obtained consistent and converging evidence that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are robust, replicable, and behaviorally significant, especially with respect to social (vs. economic) dimensions of ideology. In general, liberals are more open-minded, creative, curious, and novelty seeking, whereas conservatives are more orderly, conventional, and better organized... A special advantage of our final two studies is that they show personality differences between liberals and conservatives not only on self-report trait measures but also on unobtrusive, nonverbal measures of interaction style and behavioral residue.” Dana R. Carney, et al., "The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives: Personality Profiles, Interaction Styles, and the Things They Leave Behind," International Society of Political Psychology, Oct. 23, 2008

15. When faced with a conflict, liberals are more likely than conservatives to alter their habitual response when cues indicate it is necessary. "[We] found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern... Our results are consistent with the view that political orientation, in part, reflects individual differences in the functioning of a general mechanism related to cognitive control and self-regulation. Stronger conservatism (versus liberalism) was associated with less neurocognitive sensitivity to response conflicts. At the behavioral level, conservatives were also more likely to make errors of commission. Although a liberal orientation was associated with better performance on the response-inhibition task examined here, conservatives would presumably perform better on tasks in which a more fixed response style is optimal." David M. Amodio, et al., "Neurocognitive Correlates of Liberalism and Conservatism,"Nature Neuroscience, Sep. 9, 2007

16. Conservatives sleep more soundly and have more mundane dreams, while liberals sleep more restlessly and have a more bizarre, active dream life. "Conservatives slept somewhat more soundly, with fewer remembered dreams. Liberals were more restless in their sleep and had a more active and varied dream life. In contrast to a previous study, liberals reported a somewhat greater proportion of bad dreams and nightmares. Consistent with earlier research, the dreams of conservatives were more mundane, whereas the dreams of liberals were more bizarre... Conservative men sleep a bit longer, with better quality sleep; they recall the fewest dreams, but have the most lucid awareness. Liberal women have the worst quality sleep, recall the greatest number and variety of dreams, and have the most dream references to homosexuality." Kelly Bulkeley, PhD, "Sleep and Dream patterns of Political Liberals and Conservatives," Dreaming, Sep. 2006 9/20/16 107

10 Iconic Presidental Campaign Ads that Changed Political Advertising. Videos of the ads cited below Presidential campaigns have a history of producing memorable television ads that have helped sway public opinion and win elections. But many of the old rules of campaigning have been broken in 2016's decidedly unusual election season—most often by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who's so far eschewed the idea of producing influential political ads and leaned on free media instead. Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, has dominated ad spending so far, swamping the GOP's candidate by a 15-to-1 margin. According to SMG Delta, Clinton and groups supporting her have bought $45M in ads for the general election, compared with $3M spent in support of Trump—none of which came from the Trump campaign itself. While Trump may not be convinced, Clinton is a firm believer in the power of political advertising on TV, which dates to the medium's earliest days. The most memorable spots (think Reagan’s “Morning in America”) have tended to come from winning campaigns—but not always. From inspiring and positive to brutally negative and even, perhaps, unfair, here are 10 of the most iconic presidential spots, from Eisenhower to Obama. 1952: Eisenhower Answers America As TV exploded into the American home following World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower became the first presidential candidate to effectively use the medium to win the White House. The “Eisenhower Answers America” spots created by Ted Bates and Company were simple—a voter asks a question, and Eisenhower responds, at one point turning from the questioner to the camera. The ads were used in 12 key states in the weeks leading up to Election Day and focused on high prices, the Korean War and gridlock in Washington. It was the first time a campaign used short, strategic television ads instead of buying program-length blocks of air time. The Museum of the Moving Image, noting the spots were created by Rosser Reeves, whose credits also include M&M’s timeless “Melts in your mouth, not in your hands” campaign, reports Reeves “convinced Eisenhower that spots placed immediately before or after such popular programs as I Love Lucy would reach more viewers, and at a much lower cost, than half-hour speeches.” 1964: The "Daisy" Ad Perhaps the most famous political ad to ever run on television, Lyndon Johnson’s "Daisy" spot is blunt and unforgettable. It ran just once—on NBC on Sept. 7, 1964, a Monday night—but was later replayed in its entirety on CBS's and ABC's evening newscasts. In the ad, which was created by Doyle Dane Bernbach and media consultant Tony Schwartz, a young girl picks the petals off a daisy as an ominous countdown is heard. It ends with a nuclear explosion and mushroom cloud meant to suggest Johnson’s opponent, Barry Goldwater, was too dangerous to be president. “Vote for President Johnson on Nov. 3,” says the somber narrator. “The stakes are too high for you to stay home." As The New York Times wrote in its 2008 obituary of Schwartz, the ad “was credited with contributing to Johnson’s landslide victory at the polls in November.” 1968: "Laughter" Tony Schwartz, who produced the "Daisy" ad, created another memorable spot four years later for Hubert Humphrey, who was running against Richard Nixon and his running mate, Spiro Agnew. In the ad, the camera pulls back slowly as a man laughs harder and harder until the shot reveals a television with "Agnew for Vice President" on the screen. The ad ends with a message: "This would be funny if it weren’t so serious." While memorable, the spot fell short of its goal. Nixon and Agnew won 301 Electoral College votes to capture the 1968 presidential election. 1984: "Morning in America" Ronald Reagan, who in 1980 asked voters the effective question “Can we afford four more years?” to dispatch President Jimmy Carter, produced one of the most iconic and positive ads four years later with "Morning in America," which told voters things were finally looking up. "It’s morning again in America," said the narrator. "Today, more Americans will go to work than ever before in our history … under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder, and stronger, and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?” The refreshingly optimistic ad helped Reagan get reelected in a landslide, picking up 49 of 50 states to defeat Walter Mondale. 9/20/16 108

1988: "Revolving Door" Perhaps one of the harshest negative ads in all of presidential politics, the "Revolving Door" ad George H. W. Bush ran against Michael Dukakis is credited with severely damaging Dukakis’ campaign. Showing a revolving door set into a prison wall, the narrator says of Dukakis, "His revolving door prison policy gave weekend furloughs to first-degree murderers not eligible for parole. While out, many committed other crimes, like kidnapping and rape. … Now, Michael Dukakis says he wants to do for America what he’s done for Massachusetts. America can’t afford that risk." That line was repeated in another memorable Bush ad, "Tank Ride," which showed images of Dukakis riding around in a tank wearing a helmet with his name on it, as the narrator lists military weapons programs Dukakis opposed. After the election, a New York Times survey named "Revolving Door" the single most influential ad of the campaign, particularly among women, many of whom said watching the spot caused them to view Bush as "stronger on crime" and the candidate who would keep them safer. 2004: "Windsurfing" George W. Bush produced this devastating ad against John Kerry by portraying the Democrat as a flip-flopper in an unusually effective way—he showed Kerry windsurfing and constantly changing direction with every change in the wind. "John Kerry. Whichever way the wind blows," the narrator says. The ad had the secondary effect of showing Kerry in an unflattering light—not just in a bathing suit, but also as an elitist windsurfer. 2004: “Sellout” Better known as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth spot, this series of attack ads on John Kerry led to a new entry in the political advertising lexicon: swiftboating, a verb now defined by the Oxford dictionary as targeting a politician or public figure "with a campaign of personal attacks." The brutal ads featured former Navy colleagues of Kerry—each saying at the start, “I served with John Kerry"— attacking his character, accusing him of lying about his record in Vietnam and being untrustworthy and unfit for the presidency. The impact of "Sellout" was amplified by media coverage as the ad dominated the news cycle in August 2004. Polls showed veterans viewed Kerry less favorably following the release of the Swift Boat ads. 2008: “3 AM.” Clinton’s primary campaign featured a memorable ad depicting sleeping children in the middle of the night. A phone is ringing, and the narrator asks parents who they want to answer that call at the White House in the event of an international crisis. The ad spawned dozens of parodies, including the obligatory SNL skit, and has been used against Clinton since its release, most recently in 2015, when Republican Rand Paul accused Clinton of “missing the 3 a.m. phone call” on Benghazi 2008: “Yes, We Can” This spot for Barack Obama unveiled yet another new kind of presidential ad—a nearly four-minute spot that combines the candidate’s own words with the singing of pop stars and celebrities. The web spot turns Obama's speech in New Hampshire following the first in the nation primary, into a music video by will.i.am. Uploaded in February, the song won an Emmy Award that summer. Describing its impact that year, the Huffington Post wrote the spot was "a perfect example of the types of content that never would have seen the light of day just four years ago—where could you have bought enough TV airtime to air a 4:30 television ad? How could you possibly have gotten enough nationwide exposure to make it possible?" With the widespread availability of broadband internet, people were no longer limited to watching campaign content on TV 2012: “47 Percent” Four years later, President Obama used a piece of undercover video to deliver a harsh blow to his opponent, Mitt Romney, portraying him as an uncaring elitist. Romney had been recorded during a closed-door meeting describing Obama’s supporters as "the 47 percent" of Americans who were "victims" looking for handouts. They "will vote for this president no matter what. … My job is not to worry about those people." The "47 percent" joined "Fired Big Bird" and "Binders Full of Women" as memes that dominated the election cycle and harmed Romney's image

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2016 Presidential Election Circus: Is Social Media the Cause? Candidates have discovered the quickest way to make news is to put out a statement or comment in a social media post and avoid paying for ad space. (TNS) -- In 12 months, the country has collectively spent more than 1,284 years reading about Donald Trump on social media. The Republican presidential candidate's reach is unprecedented, according to the latest data from SocialFlow, a social media management company whose software handles news dissemination for many of the country's top media organizations, including the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. If he sought similar attention by buying ads, Trump's social reach would cost $380 million. Instead, he's getting it for free in tweets, likes and shares -- although not all of it is positive. Social media's influence in this presidential election is stronger than it has ever been, experts said, and the information cycle it has created will shape campaigns for years to come. There are many reasons social media has become such a powerful influence. More people than ever get their news mainly from social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat. Candidates have discovered the quickest way to make news is to put out a statement or comment in a social media post. "It's really opened the floodgates of candidates being able to tap into this ecosystem of voters and news consumers who are getting information about these candidates 24/7," said Patrick Ruffini, Republican political strategist and founder of Engage, a digital media firm. "This election cycle is the first I've seen (where) candidates realize social media is their direct pipeline into mainstream media coverage and to voters." This creates what Ruffini calls a "feedback loop," wherein candidates' posts on social media make news, and then those news stories get circulated through social media, building momentum and generating even more chatter. "This is the first true social media election," said Frank Speiser, SocialFlow's co-founder and chief product officer. "Before it was an auxiliary method of communication. But now (candidates) can put messages out there and get folks on social media to act on your behalf by just sharing it around. You don't have to buy access to reach millions of people anymore." Facebook now boasts nearly 1.6 billion monthly active users, up 60 percent from 2012, the year of the last election, when it crossed the 1 billion mark. Twitter today has 385 million monthly active users, up from 185 million in 2012. The way politicians use social media is also markedly different. In 2012, they tended to favor short, calculated statements -- maybe once a day -- that were highly controlled and sanitized, Ruffini said. They would retweet followers or thank supporters. But it was hardly the first place they went to espouse an opinion or issue a policy proposal. "Four years ago," Ruffini said, "social media politics was really boring." SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY Today, social media has evolved from afterthought to strategy, he said, thanks largely to Trump's habitual social- media-first proclamations. Candidates have begun using sites like Twitter and Facebook as a direct line to voters. It seems to be paying off, particularly among younger voters. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, nearly two-thirds said social media is the most helpful means of learning new things about politics, according to a study released last year by the Pew Research Center. By contrast, only half of Gen- Xers and 40 percent of Baby Boomers agreed with that statement. Overall, Pew found, 44 percent of American adults said they had learned something new in the past week about the election from social media. "That's a pretty large share," said Jesse Holcomb, the associate director of research at Pew. "Our data suggest that social media is a critical gateway to information about the campaign -- particularly for younger adults."

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Other candidates, like Democratic hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, have ramped up their social media presence to compete for time and eyeballs. But research shows they are falling far short of the reach Trump has amassed. Clinton has garnered just shy of $100 million in free exposure via social media by SocialFlow's estimate. The only area where she trumps the Republican front-runner is in her rate of engagement -- how many people like, share or click through to stories about the former secretary of state, where she runs marginally ahead. CONVOLUTED MESSAGES Since the beginning of the election, SocialFlow said, the nation has spent roughly 874 years on social media reading about Sanders and Clinton combined -- a third less than the time people have devoted to Trump on the same networks. The reason for this, Speiser said, likely lies in Trump's bombast and convoluted messaging. "One thing that Trump does is he will combine two or three issues in a single statement or proposal. Now, he may be muddling them, but it doesn't matter because it activates groups that are interested in all of the above," Speiser said. "Like how he'll conflate crime and gun violence with immigration. It may not be true, but the fact that he says it excites groups whose top issues are crime or guns or immigration." In December, when Trump announced his proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the United States, the news generated more social media engagement than any other news about the election since the race began, SocialFlow said. (While Trump made the remarks in a speech in South Carolina, not on social media, they nonetheless immediately found a home online.) Trump's comments remain the single most-responded-to news event since then with roughly 230,000 likes -- more than 788 times the average number Trump-related stories tend to receive. By January, SocialFlow said, Trump had become the most talked-about person on the planet. "Trump, by himself, has eclipsed all the conversation around (the Islamic State), terrorism, the economy and other important issues," Speiser said. "The conversation around him is greater than the top 10 other election issues combined." The data SocialFlow collects don't indicate whether the comments being made are positive or negative -- or whether people "favorite" or "like" a story because they actually like it, or if they're simply noting it. Some people even ironically "hate-like" social media posts. SocialFlow's analysis also doesn't take into account posts by citizens that do not link to a news story or the candidates' own posts -- unless those posts generate press coverage. 'STORY OF THE ELECTION' If researchers took those elements into account, Ruffini and Speiser said they would expect that Trump's recorded reach would grow. "It's just going to get bigger in the main election," Ruffini said. "The amount of free media exposure given to Trump -- whether that's on social media or more traditional news media -- I think is absolutely the story of the election. We've just never seen anything like it before."

Can Social Media Impact the 2016 Presidential Election as Much as Obama’s 2012 Campaign? There are swathes of undecided voters who simply don’t know what to think, especially amongst the young. Although young people are the second biggest voting demographic, they consistently have the lowest turnout on election day. How do you get to the highest office in world politics? That’s the question that every young Senator, Mayor or Billionaire wants to know the answer to. Unfortunately for them, only a tiny minority of them will even come close to the oval office, but for those who do, they’ll have to pull out every trick in the book to convince the American public they’re up the job.

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In the past, TV debates, posters, leaflets and live speaking events were just some of the opportunities they had to get their message across. While all of these still exist, one method has, over the past ten years, started to blow them all out of the water. 73% of Americans are now on social media and that’s an upward trend that shows no signs of stopping. The last US election was prominent for its innovative and effective use of social media campaigning. With all this year’s prospective candidates spending time and money on digital campaigns, though, voters now expect engaging social content as a given. So, how important a role has social media played in past elections and can it really help propel a candidate towards The White House? How can it be used? Social is in its purest form, a platform. A method with the potential to reach millions of people, and in politics, that’s half the battle. Platforms lend themselves well to imagery which can be hugely more effective than dry, disengaging text. It’s cliché to say a picture’s says a thousand words, but imagery can really help a campaign in ways that nothing else can. Not only can candidates use images of the campaign trail to give insight on their successes, but they can share snappy campaign imagery, videos, and concise campaign messages in a way that appeals visually to a generation of users who have an average attention span less than that of a goldfish When it comes to social media, you have to take age in to account to. While a large majority of Americans use social, virtually all of 18-34 years olds use it. 98% admitted in a recent study that they had used a social platform at least once in the past month, so if, for example like Bernie Sanders, your demographic includes a large chunk of young non- voters, social can help you reach out to them. 2012 Election and Barack Obama The current President, Barack Obama, used social media to significant effect in the 2012 presidential election. His spend on the digital side of the campaign actually ended up growing to around $47 million, ten times that of his Republican rival Mitt Romney. As a result, Obama posted a lot more online and not only that, got his returns with huge interaction numbers. .In a sample taken from June that year, Obama had accrued almost double Romney’s Facebook ‘likes’ (1,124,275 v 633,597). His victorious Facebook post in the afterglow of his presidential election was a simple image of Obama and his wife with the caption ‘Four more years’. This has still had the most interaction of any one post in history, with over 4.4 million likes on Facebook to date. Over the course of the month he also managed to get almost 20 times the amount of retweets on Twitter, which is surely because he posted 404 times, compared to Romney’s 16. Donald Trump: Courting controversy Trump has always been a fan of social media and actively uses it to promote his television show The Apprentice. The medium suits his campaign style perfectly, with his often controversial sound snippets that are easily shareable. Much of Trump’s campaign is built around ‘virability’ and he shares a lot of videos on Facebook. His inflammatory use of Twitter has always been a trademark of the man and goes a long way to explaining his huge online audience. Trump has more followers than any of the other candidates on either side by a mile. He dwarfs both his Republican rivals on every front. Even if you were to combine Ted Cruz’s and Marco Rubio’s entire social following, they wouldn’t even reach close to the 6.3 million Twitter followers he has.

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Trump has more followers than any of the other candidates on either side by a mile. He dwarfs both his Republican rivals on every front. Even if you were to combine Ted Cruz’s and Marco Rubio’s entire social following, they wouldn’t even reach close to the 6.3 million Twitter followers he has. Bernie Sanders: Youth influence Sanders’ social media feeds are evidently mainly run by younger interns, as the ‘BS’ signature is hardly ever left after posts. This seems to have been a smart move by the Senator as his posts have led to great interaction. He’s also seen a boost in Facebook page likes, seeing a 20% increase in the past 30 days, more than both Trump and Clinton. One of the most liked Instagram photo of this year’s candidates, so far, was an image taken from Bernie Sanders’ Instagram. It features the candidacy hopeful on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine. Sander’s use of Instagram is intriguing, as it’s not something he’d used prior to the campaign. However, it’s again testament to the work of his young campaign team, who have an insight in to young culture that stuffy campaign advisors often don’t. Hilary Clinton: Celebrity Endorsed Has a very engaged following and also benefited greatly from celebrity endorsements on platforms like Instagram. Most notably got in a selfie with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West and received full backing from the couple. Other stars including Lena Dunham and Amy Poehler have also publicly backed her. If we look at this year’s candidates, Hillary had by far the most engagement on one post on Twitter to. Her post, which shared a link to an interview with One Direction where they discussed climate issues, was retweeted nearly 60,000 times A shoehorned mention of One Direction may have been obvious and shrewd, but because it was relevant, it worked. Her post managed to capitalize on the band’s substantial social media fame by involving them in political and environmental issues that she is already very vocal about as part of her campaign. Can it really help change people’s minds on politics? You never know what might change someone’s mind. Something like an image, as we’ve seen time and time again, can change the world. In general, social media tends to be very insular. Voters will go online to meet other likeminded people and express their views, which are often, but not always too entrenched to be swayed by a single Facebook post. Although interaction is great, it’s not always a sign of success. The amount of followers you have is certainly not directly attributable to the amount of support you have. Especially on Twitter, users often follow users they may not agree with just to keep up to date with what they’re saying. However, social can give you a significant platform to share your views and ideas. There are swathes of undecided voters who simply don’t know what to think, especially amongst the young. Although young people are the second biggest voting demographic, they consistently have the lowest turnout on election day. If presidential candidates can take advantage of social media and get their message in front of this lost generation, then it can be an important tool that will help them make their way to The White House.

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 What Did America Say?  Return to Top Demography Favors the Democrats We know that the racial identity of the average American is changing, and with this demographic shift comes monumental political consequences. We already witnessed the effects of this in the 2008 presidential election, for example, when young and minority voters carried Barack Obama to victory. That year, it seemed, a switch flipped in favor of the Democratic party. And if voting preferences and turnout trends continue as they have been in the past seveal elections, America’s increasingly diverse electorate isn’t going to make it easy to flip this switch back. That’s according to a comprehensive new report put together by the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the Center for American Progress. In it, authors Ruy Teixeira, Rob Griffin, and William Frey simulate six possible scenarios based on past voting patterns and project a range of outcomes for the presidential election this year, and subsequent ones through 2032. “If nothing changes, in terms of party strategies and party appeals, I think it’s a fair statement to say...that [demography] favors the Democrats,” Teixeira said at a panel discussion about the report this week. “What it means is that all else cannot remain equal, because I don’t really believe that the parties are going to remain static. Demography is not destiny in the sense that it pre-ordains certain kinds of outcomes. It pre-ordains certain kinds of shifts in strategy.” The electorate that voted for President Obama in 2012 looked significantly different from the one that elected George W. Bush for his first term at the beginning of the century. In 2012, the share of minorities among eligible voters was 29 percent, up from 23 percent in 2000 (above). If that doesn’t seem like a significant difference, consider this: In 2000, only eight states and the District of Columbia had higher than a 30 percent share of minority voters; In 2012, the number of such states grew to 17 (plus D.C.). With each election year non-white political clout is strengthening, in some states more than others. The voter turnout rate among minorities also jumped up in the last two elections. During the 2012 election, black voter turnout was actually higher than white turnout for the first time in history (pictured above). Latinos and Asians also came out to vote at higher levels in the last two presidential elections than in any other since 1992. Minorities generally tend to vote for Democrats, so higher turnout is generally beneficial for them. One trend that’s been working against the Democrats is that the country’s white population has been growing older. This is good news for Republicans because older, white Americans are generally more likely to vote, and vote conservative. Plus, they still remain the dominant voting bloc in most states. So who will win in 2016? This election year, a complex set of demographic factors are at play. Latino voters, in particular, have reached record high numbers. Single women, too, may have considerable political sway this time around. On the flip side, the fact that many low-income Americans are not feeling the economic recovery could depress voter enthusiasm, as Anna Greenberg, a political consultant at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, noted. These factors are important to keep in mind while looking at the six hypothetical scenarios below, which the researchers designed to estimate the direction of the popular and the electoral college votes in this election:  Scenarios A, B, and C assume that voters of each age group, race, and state will show roughly the same turnout rates and partisan preferences as they did in 2012, 2008, and 2004, respectively. The next three are modifications of scenario A:  Scenario D, or the “maximum minority turnout” scenario assumes that Hispanics and Asians will turn out to vote at the same rate as their white counterparts did in 2012.  Scenario E assumes that a higher share of Hispanics, Asians, and other “new minorities” will support the GOP within all age groups and states than they did in 2012.

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 Scenario F is what Brookings’ Frey, who co-authored the report, calls the “Donald Trump Dream” scenario. In this one, a higher share of white voters will support the Republican candidate than they did in 2012. The graph below shows the resulting differences in the share of popular votes between the two parties for each of the above scenarios in the 2016 presidential election. The “Donald Trump Dream”—scenario F— is the only one that would lead to a clear Republican win in 2016. Even scenario C, which mirrors the voting patterns of the 2004 election Bush won, doesn’t favor the GOP here. That said, Democrats would win the popular vote in this scenario by only a hair—the margin of victory here would be even lower than what it was for Bush in 2000. And here are the electoral college vote tallies generated by the simulation for each scenario, alongside maps showing red, blue, and swing states: What’s interesting here is that in scenario C, Republicans—who lose the popular vote—win the electoral college vote. (This mirrors Bush’s win in 2000.) Electoral college vote tallies for all other scenarios show the same outcomes as those projected for the popular votes. Where you can really see the effect of America’s shifting demographics is the change in swing states. Take scenario A, for example, in which Americans vote in exactly the same way they did in the last election. Nevada, which was a swing state in 2012, now turns blue. Georgia, which has traditionally been red, becomes a swing state. That Asian and Latino populations are fanning inwards from traditional immigrant hubs along the coast, and that the black population is migrating to the South to opportunity-rich cities like , play a role in these outcomes. Of course, a Republican win is definitely conceivable in 2016 and future elections. After all, whatever Trump is doing certainly seems to be working to get out the white vote, at least in the primaries. But alienating minority workers is likely not going to be a longterm solution for the GOP, Frey says. Because even the edge Republicans have in their most favorable scenario—the “Donald Trump’s Dream” or scenario F—will shrink and eventually disappear at some point over the next two decades. Frey estimates that even in scenario F, the popular vote will flip in favor of Democrats by the 2028 election and the electoral college vote will be theirs by 2032. “Demographic change is going to have large effects on elections going forward,” Teixeira concluded at the report’s presentation Thursday. “I think the way scenarios play out suggest that a one-dimensional strategy on the part of either party is going to produce some problems. So it shouldn’t be ‘either-or’… it should be ‘both- and.’”

America’s electoral future: How changing demographics could impact presidential elections from 2016 to 2032. American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institution, and Center for American Progress (2/15/16) Elections, Politics and Public Opinion Results from the past two presidential elections provide evidence that the changing demography of the electorate— with its increased racial diversity—can affect election outcomes in ways that could not have been anticipated even a decade ago. A solid case can be made that the nation’s racial minority populations put President Barack Obama over the top in both 2008 and 2012. But racial diversity is not the only demographic change that may have an effect on future presidential elections. In addition to greater diversity—which is primarily affecting the younger part of the electorate—the older part of the voting population is growing more rapidly as the huge Baby Boom generation ages. These demographic shifts—toward both a more racially diverse younger electorate and a larger older electorate— certainly should change the playing field in terms of how the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as their candidates, appeal to these shifting voting blocs, which often have different interests. And the pace of demographic change varies across geography, with some fast-growing states such as Arizona, Texas, and Florida seeing the effects of the nation’s rising diversity much more sharply than others. Yet even slow growing states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan will experience significant rising diversity in the coming years and, importantly, an aging of their electorates driven by large contingents of Baby Boom residents. These state-level demographic

9/20/16 115 changes will leave strong imprints on the voting populations captured by the all-important Electoral College, forcing parties and candidates to recalibrate their strategies for success. This report explores how these demographic changes could shape the electorate, as well as potential outcomes in the next five presidential elections using national and state demographic projections produced by the States of Change project. In a 2015report and interactive, this project presented a time series of long-term projections of race and age profiles for the populations and eligible electorates of all 50 states to 2060. This report focuses on what those projections imply for the presidential elections of 2016, 2020, 2024, 2028, and 2032. Of course, shaping these outcomes is not the same as determining them. While the force of demography is important, election results also depend on economic conditions, candidates, and the extent to which those candidates are able to generate enthusiasm that can be measured in voter turnout and candidate preference. The analyses presented here build alternative scenarios for the election years mentioned above. Each scenario assumes the same projected demography of eligible voters, or EVs, for that year but makes different assumptions about voter turnout and candidate preference. This report considers six main scenarios. Scenario A, here called the 2012 Forward scenario, assumes that for each age, race, and state group, voter turnout rates and Democratic/Republican candidate preferences in 2012 will continue for EV populations that are projected into the future. Scenario B, the 2008 Forward scenario, assumes that the even more Democrat-favorable turnout and candidate preference rates by age, race, and state group of the 2008 election will apply to future EV populations. Scenario C, the 2004 Forward scenario, assumes that the relatively Republican-favorable 2004 turnout rates and candidate preferences by age, race, and state will obtain among future EVs. Scenario D is the Maximum Minority Turnout scenario. Like scenario A, it assumes that the candidate preferences of voters will follow those of 2012. But unlike A, it assumes that the turnout of Hispanics, Asians, and other races by age rises to the turnout level of whites by age in every state. African American turnout is not adjusted since it was slightly higher than white turnout in 2012. This simulation shows the likely outcomes that would result if the efforts to encourage the turnout of newer minorities—Hispanics, Asians, and other nonblack minorities—are extremely successful. Scenarios E and F adjust scenario A to assume greater Republican voter preferences for different groups. Scenario E, the High GOP Hispanic/Asian Support scenario, assumes that Republican support from voters of each nonblack or new minority group—Hispanics, Asians, and those of other races—will increase by 7.5 percentage points for all age categories of those groups in every state. Note that raising the support rate for Republicans by 7.5 points among new minorities reduces the Democrats’ support rate among these groups by the same amount, thereby improving the margin for Republicans by 15 points in total. Scenario F, the More GOP White Support scenario, changes the voting preferences of the white electorate, adjusting scenario A in order to increase the level of Republican support from white voters of all age categories in every state by 5 points—thereby raising the GOP margin among all categories of white voters by 10 points. Notably, these are simulations—not predictions. For example, when running the 2016 election simulation as if voter turnout and preferences were the same as in 2012—scenario A—the authors are not expressing the belief that this is a likely event. e goal of this report is to display the potential political effects of demographic change. As such, the results this report presents offer a range of outcomes that can be expected under different assumptions as the nation’s demography changes, but they are not predictions about actual future events.

How Demographics Will Shape the 2016 Election is a tool for the true political junkie because it can be used to project how small changes in particular demographic groups would affect results on a state by state basis. Republicans contend that the 2016 election will be about Americans’ desire for change after eight years of a Democratic president. Democrats hope the election will tell a different story of change: a continued march toward a more diverse electorate that is ever more hostile to the GOP’s Electoral College fortunes.

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We’ve built an interactive tool to help you draw your own conclusions about whether, as is often said, demographics truly are destiny. You can use it to see how changes in turnout and partisanship within five demographic groups would affect the outcome of the 2016 election. Paying homage to the BBC’s iconic tracker of vote swings in British parliamentary elections, we’re calling it the 2016 Swing-O-Matic. Check it out: Think Latino voters will be more Republican-leaning in 2016? Check out how that would affect the election. » To build a baseline model of the 2016 presidential election, we started with the results of the 2012 election, looking at support for Mitt Romney vs. President Obama by five demographic groups: whites with college degrees, whites without college degrees, African-Americans, Latinos and Asians/others. We then adjusted the size of those demographic groups based on four years of population change.1 From there, you can choose your own adventure: When you adjust each group’s national turnout and party breakdown, the Swing-O-Matic automatically recalculates each state’s election results, along with the outcome of the Electoral College and national popular vote. A bit of background and three initial takeaways There’s no question that recent demographic trends have aided Democrats enormously. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 56 percent of all white voters and won election in a 44-state landslide. In 2012, GOP nominee Mitt Romney carried 59 percent of all white voters yet lost decisively. What happened? African-Americans, Latinos, Asians and other non-whites — all overwhelmingly Democratic-leaning groups — rose from 12 percent of voters in 1980 to 28 percent in 2012. Yet analyses that focus only on race and ethnicity ignore an even more rapid demographic shift driving Democratic success: educational attainment. This is why we have split non-Hispanic white voters into two groups. In both 2008 and 2012, Republicans’ best group by far — of the five we examined — was white voters without college degrees. The GOP carried that group by 14 percentage points in 2008 and a whopping 26 points in 2012. However, these voters — who skew older and more rural — decline 3 percentage points every four years as a share of the overall electorate. In contrast, white degree-holders — who still lean Republican but are much likelier to support Democrats than whites without a degree — rise a percentage point every four years. In other words, Democrats’ coalition of non-white, young and well-educated voters continues to expand every election, while Republicans’ coalition of white, older and less-educated voters keeps shrinking. It’s no wonder that some pundits have suggested Democrats have an emerging “stranglehold on the Electoral College” because of favorable trends in states like Colorado, Florida, Nevada, and Virginia, right? It’s true that if every demographic group were to carry its 2012 levels of turnout and party support into 2016, Democrats’ lead in the national popular vote would expand from 3.9 percentage points to 5.1 points based on population trends alone. But, as FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver and others have argued, Democrats’ advantage in the Electoral College is much more tenuous than it’s often portrayed. Here are a few initial takeaways from our interactive (let us know what else you find@FiveThirtyEight): 1) A small shift in the national vote is all it would take for Republicans to break through Democrats’ supposed “Blue Wall.” If all five of our groups were to shift just 3 percentage points toward the GOP in 2016, Republicans would “flip” Colorado, Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin and win 315 electoral votes — almost a mirror image of the 2012 outcome. 2) The power of the Latino vote is frequently overstated. Even if Latino andAsian/other turnout were to plummet to zero, Democrats would still win the Electoral College 283 to 255 — despite losing the popular vote by 2.1 percentage points. That’s because Latino and Asian voters are heavily concentrated in non-competitive states like California, New York and Texas. 3) Sky-high African-American support and engagement is crucial for Democrats. Suppose African-American voters were to return to pre-Obama, 2004 levels of turnout and partisanship (turnout down from 66 percent to 60 percent and support for Democrats down from 93 percent to 88 percent). In that scenario, Democrats would lose Florida, and their overall margin of victory would be cut by more than half in Ohio and Virginia, giving them almost no room for error with other groups.

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 The Politics of Print, Radio, TV and the Internet  Return to Top Why the Media Love Presidents & Presidents Hate the Media (2000) You have had the same experience that I have. Perhaps it was at a memorial service, at which one person spoke of the deceased as a father, another as a husband, another as a coworker, and another as a best friend. Or maybe it was at the rehearsal dinner for a wedding, with toasts from people who knew the bride or groom as children, as friends, as students. In each case, the words that were spoken were about the same person. But they offered different, complementary accounts. I say this to prepare you for what is coming in the next few pages. This essay is going to end up being about the relationship between the presidency and the news media. But first we need to consider how the news media developed in this country. And we need to do so in two different, but complementary ways. The first account is of the news media themselves. Until the 1920’s, the news media consisted entirely of print media: newspapers and magazines. What Americans knew about the world of national politics and government, they knew because they read it. They read about the president, of course, but they could just as easily read about Congress and the Supreme Court. Partly as result of this, presidents did not dominate the public space. The journalist Fred Barnes recently remarked that in the contemporary national news media, every question boils down to one: “How is the president doing?” That simply was not the case during most of our history. Then came radio. In 1920, there were two radio stations in the United States, one in Pittsburgh and one in Detroit. Two years later there were 500 stations. Five years after that, the NBC and CBS national radio networks were up and running.(So, by then was VQR.) Radio wrought a tremendous transformation in American political life, perhaps greater than the transformation later wrought by television. Radio brought politics and government directly into people’s homes. In particular, radio brought them one member of the government, the president. Why the president and not Congress or the Supreme Court? Congress speaks with many voices, and it does so in ways that radio did not like: cacophonously, and according to no script. The Supreme Court does not speak at all, at least not for the broadcast media. But the president speaks with one voice, and almost always in a scripted, coherent way. It took a while for presidents to master the new medium. Herbert Hoover tended to shout his speeches into the radio microphone as if, for all his training and experience as an engineer, he really could not believe that his voice would be heard around the country if he spoke normally. Franklin D.Roosevelt was the first to grasp fully not only the technology of radio, but also the setting in which people listened to radio. When the president spoke over the airwaves, he was heard not by great masses of voters in an arena, but by families in their living rooms. And so FDR developed the Fireside Chat, in which he spoke to Americans in a conversational voice, as if he had just dropped in to tell them what was going on in Washington. Television added pictures to the spoken word. The 1950’s were for television what the 1920’s had been for radio: in 1950, 90 percent of American homes did not have a television set; by 1960, 90 percent did. But more than just adding pictures, television placed a premium on pictures, as became apparent in 1960 during the first truly national television event, the September 26 presidential debate between John F.Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Not many people can remember a thing that was said during that debate, but almost everyone remembers what they saw. There was Nixon, utterly inattentive to the demands of television, haphazardly made up and wearing a light grey suit that, on the black-and-white television screen, faded into the light blue background. What viewers saw of him, therefore, seemed spectral, ghostlike—a pale, seemingly disembodied face floating in the middle of the screen. Kennedy, on the other hand, was expertly made up and wore a dark suit that stood out crisply against the background. He also did something that Nixon did not do: he talked directly into the camera—that is, directly to the audience at home— instead of to Nixon or the panelists who were asking the questions. JFK was to television what FDR was to radio. He was the first president, for example, to allow the television networks to broadcast his press conferences live. At the time, this seemed an incredible act of confidence and courage. Insiders knew that the president’s aides had prepared him in advance for every possible question. But here is what the television showed: on the one side, the president, dramatically alone, like a gladiator in the arena; on the

9/20/16 118 other side, a crowd of reporters hurling what appeared to be sharp verbal spears at him, which he fended off with seemingly heroic grace and skill. Ronald Reagan represented a further step up the evolutionary ladder of media and politics. He was a professional actor who for many years had earned his living by relating appealingly to audiences through the camera lens. This made him unusual but hardly unique. Every president in the television age must have an actor’s skills. Some have the skills of the talk-show host: they are quick-witted and think well on their feet, like Kennedy and Bill Clinton. Others, such as Reagan, do best with a prepared text. But a politician cannot rise to the top of the political system nowadays without learning to be good on television. It is part of the presidential job description. Newspapers, radio, television—in recent years, cable television has joined the ranks of the news media. Its main effect has been to segment the television audience, and the internet has segmented that audience even further. Political junkies can have all the politics they want, all of the time. For everyone else, the media can be a politics- free zone. It used to be that if the president gave a speech or held a news conference, for example, every broadcast network would cover it live, and the television audience had no choice but to watch. Now the networks are more likely to say: let people watch the speech on CNN or C-SPAN.Presidents have to work very hard both to get on the air and to attract an audience. That is why the State of the Union address has become so important—it is the one speech that every network will telecast every year. Indeed, one could argue that Clinton’s presidency was saved by three State of the Union addresses: the one he gave in 1995, soon after the Republicans gained control of Congress; the one in 1998, right after the news broke about Monica Lewinsky; and the one he gave in 1999, on the first day of his impeachment trial in the Senate. Each of these speeches was a rhetorical tour de force that successfully drew attention to the president’s strengths as a political leader and away from his weaknesses as a man. Thus ends the first account of how the news media have evolved: newspapers to radio to television to cable and the internet; the printed word to sound and then pictures. II The second account of how the news media have developed has to do with the approaches to politics that the media—print, broadcast, and telecast—have taken over the years. Once again the story begins in the 19th century, then rapidly fast-forwards into modern times. The political press of the 19th century was literally conceived in partisanship: the capitol’s first newspaper, The National Intelligencer,was founded in 1800 because President-elect Thomas Jefferson pressed the idea on an editor, Samuel Harrison Smith. No one doubted that the Intelligencer was the house organ of the Jeffersonian party or that the paper would be rewarded for its loyalty with all of the government’s printing business. Nor was it any surprise that the change of political parties that followed Andrew Jackson’s election in 1828 produced a new paper (The Globe) edited by a member of Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet, Amos Kendall, or that this paper would henceforth receive such subsidies as the government had to give. Washington correspondents from newspapers around the country were as unabashedly partisan during the 1800’s as the Washington newspapers themselves. As Bernard A.Weisberger points out in his book Reporters for the Union, a journalist might describe one senator as having “a fawning, sinister smile; a keen, snaky eye; . . .his whole air and mien suggesting a subdued combination of Judas Iscariot with Uriah Heep.” The speech of a senator who shared the reporter’s partisan views, however, was “full of marrow and grit, and enunciated with a courage which did one’s heart good to hear.” No one complained about biased coverage because no one expected anything different. Partisan journalism survived as the dominant approach to covering political news until the end of the 19th century. But around that time, two forces, both related to the rise of a national economy, began to militate for change in the ethic of partisan journalism. First, a large class of readers developed who were educated and interested in receiving accounts of political news that did not try to make up their minds for them. Second, wire services such as the —which, as the telegraph spread, were serving more and more newspapers in every part of the country—decided that partisanship was bad business. In the course of pleasing one party’s newspapers, the wire services would displease not only the other party’s, but also all of those readers who wanted their news unleavened with overt political bias. A digression. I have just mentioned a word that is crucial to any understanding of the news media in this country: business. With rare exception, American media organizations are privately owned businesses with their gaze fixed

9/20/16 119 on the bottom line. What is more, they are retail businesses that only make money by giving customers what they want. Thus, when we look at a television screen, we are looking in a mirror. And when we complain about what we see on television, the only answer is, Let’s vote with our remote controls. In any event (end of digression), a century ago, when more and more people started demanding unbiased political news, a new paradigm emerged in the news media: objective journalism. No paper embodied this approach better than The New York Times.When Adolph Ochs bought the Times in 1896, its circulation was 9,000, Yet, writes David Halberstam in The Powers That Be, Ochs “wanted as little partisanship as possible.” Even as William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York Worldgained renown by fanning the flames of rebellion in Cuba into the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Times’smore subdued appeal to educated readers raised its circulation almost tenfold by 1900.Soon it became the standard by which all American newspapers were judged. The ethic of objective journalism could be stated simply: the business of the press is to report the news, not to make or evaluate it “Reporters and editors were to check their personal opinions and judgments at the newsroom door and report neutrally, with an emphasis on qualities such as providing balance and getting the facts straight. The main subject of objective journalism’s political coverage was the sayings and doings of public officials. The kind of stories objective journalism typically produced were summaries of congressional debates, with long quotations from both sides of the issue, and presidential campaign dispatches that told readers what the candidate said, the weather, and the size of the crowd, the latter based on the police chiefs official estimate. Objective journalism was a useful corrective to the partisan press, and it still is what most people want most of the time from the news media. But over the years, objective journalism’s limits as a way of telling the public what it needs to know about politics and government have been revealed. The major problem with confining journalists to neutral and nonjudgmental reporting on the words and actions of public officials became clear in 1950 when Senator Joseph McCarthy began his freeswinging campaign against the State Department’s imagined” 205 card-carrying Communists. “Although most reporters knew better, they felt constrained to write stories that summarized McCarthy’s charges and left it at that. In this case, Douglass Cater observed in The Fourth Branch of Government: The extent of the communications failure McCarthyism presented can be measured by the fact that few of the reporters who regularly covered McCarthy believed him. Most came to hate and fear him as a cynical liar who was willing to wreak untold havoc to satisfy his own power drive. But though they feared him, it was not intimidation that caused the press to serve as the instrument for McCarthy’s rise. Rather it was the inherent vulnerabilities—the” frozen patterns of the press—which McCarthy discovered and played upon with unerring skill. “Straight” news, the absolute commandment of most mass media journalism, had become astrait jacket to crush the initiative and the independence of the reporter. An additional limit on truth produced by the norms of objective journalism grew out of its stimulus-response character. If the rules require that stories be written on a subject only after a public official has spoken or acted, then the news media have ceded control of the definition of news to those who are its objects. An incident in Peter Maas’s biography of New York City policeman Frank Serpico illustrates the problem. David Burnham, a reporter for the Times,wrote a story about police corruption based on what he had learned from Officer Serpico and others. The editors sat on it: Serpico was not a public official, and if they ran the story, they feared, it might seem as if they were making the news, not reporting it. As it happened, Burnham met Mayor John Lindsay’s press secretary at a party and told him what he had learned about the police department. Two days later, the mayor announced an official investigation. Only, then, when given the stimulus—a public official had acted—did the Times respond by running Burnham’s story. Watergate, more than anything else, brought home the limits of objective journalism. While White House aides plotted their crimes within a hundred feet of the press room, White House correspondents stayed busy writing up the day’s presidential announcements or tagging along on the president’s latest trip. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, two police reporters, broke the story for The Washington Post.Not a single Watergate story was uncovered by the White House press corps—they were too busy doing their jobs as objective journalists. The news media’s answer to the limitations of objective journalism that Watergate revealed so dramatically was investigative journalism. The investigative model was the mirror image of two qualities of objective journalism. If

9/20/16 120 objective reporters looked at what officials said and did publicly, investigative journalists would look at what they said and did behind closed doors. If objective reporting moved in response to official behavior, investigative journalism would take it upon itself to be the stimulus. Investigators would go after stories, not wait for them. The triumphs of investigative journalism are legendary and legion. But, like its partisan and objective forebears, the investigative model has limits as a way of telling readers what they need to know about the political system. First among these limits is the emphasis on scandal. Not only is scandal not typical of government, it is not typical of the problems of government. Most of government’s failings have little to do with bribery or sex or even fraud and venality. They are much more deeply rooted in the hidebound lassitude of political institutions and in the public’s excessive and contradictory expectations. These are subjects that investigative journalism, as much as objective journalism, shuns. III Why spend so much time and space explaining the forms of the news media that have appeared over the years and the varying approaches that the news media have taken in their coverage of government and politics? My defense is the defense of the oceanographer who explains why he focuses on the 99.999999999 percent of the ocean that lies below the surface instead of the waves on top. The waves are more visible. Superficially, at least, the waves are more interesting. They are certainly more exciting. Yet the waves are hardly characteristic of the ocean as a whole, and it is the ocean that an oceanographer wants to understand. Similarly, we need to understand the deep and unchanging relationship between the presidency and the press, not the superficial one. At first glance, this seems a fool’s errand. Nothing appears more changeable than the relationship between the president and the news media. Political scientists, in their search for order, have described a cycle in press-president relations that they say recurs in every administration: first an alliance phase, during which journalists and the White House have a shared interest in promoting “gee whiz” stories about the new president’s personality and policy agenda; then a change to competition(the novelty wears off and the coverage becomes more critical); and finally, a term-ending period of detachment, or virtual cold war between the president and the news media. Other observers are more likely to find changes and variations in press relations from president to president: Carter’s were terrible, Reagan’s were good (but not as good as Kennedy’s), etc. Still other analysts characterize each president’s relationship with the press in the frenzied manner of a fight announcer. During Clinton’s first year in office, for example, he was described by media critics as, in roughly this order, up (the inauguration), down (the controversy about gays and lesbians in the military), up (his economic plan), down (his $200 haircut), up (his appointment of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court), down (his unpopular budget), up (NAFTA passed), and so on. Finally, some analysts of the relationship between the president and the news media emphasize the latest changes in techniques and technology, especially those involving cable television and the internet. These analysts find the Clinton era significant because of the new strategies of communication that the White House has employed, such as televised “town hall” meetings, hour-long prime-time chats on CNN with Larry King, the NAFTA debate between Vice President Al Gore and Ross Perot, and a busy White House home page on the World Wide Web. One can find pieces of the truth in all of these analyses. But, change of various kinds notwithstanding, the media’s treatment of President Clinton—and of all recent presidents—has been more constant than variable. In particular, two main elements in media coverage of the presidency have generally been constant: first, a superficial cynicism, and second, an underlying exaltation of presidential strength. Or, if you will, waves of cynicism atop a deep ocean of exaltation. IV Cynicism first. Historically, journalistic cynicism toward the presidency can be traced to the era of Watergate and its precursor, Vietnam. White House reporters felt that a breach of trust occurred in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s: they had been lied to repeatedly by presidents and their aides and, by reporting those lies in good faith in their newspapers and news broadcasts, they had been used. The political scientist Stephen Hess describes “the residue of that era” among the Washington journalists he interviewed for a major study as “distrust of public institutions and politicians in general.” That distrust has carried over into such routine events as the presidential press secretary’s

9/20/16 121 daily news briefing where, according to a former Newsweek editor, “reporters vie with each other to see who can ask the toughest questions and never let Watergate happen to us again.” But a more deeply rooted and important source of cynicism plagues journalists. It is the “status frustration” of the White House press corps. This frustration has developed out of the large and growing gap between the reporters’ social and professional status, which is exalted, and the job itself, which is degrading. Of the high status of the presidential press corps, little needs to be said. The White House correspondent is part of the whole social circle of Supreme Court justices, cabinet secretaries, K Street lobbyists, and prominent members of Congress. Professionally, the presidency is among a small handful of what Hess calls “high-prestige beats” in Washington; some list it first in the media pecking order. White House reporters are usually guaranteed prominent placement for their daily dispatches and tend to be high on the list of journalists who are invited to give paid lectures and write magazine articles or books. The presidential beat is also a gateway to better things in the profession. Halberstam describes it as “an institutional ticket. The guy who gets to the White House goes on to some bigger job,” such as editor, columnist, or television anchor. Ask yourself: what were Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Leslie Stahl, Judy Woodruff, Sam Donaldson, Chris Wallace, and Brian Williams doing before they became network anchors? In stark contrast to these external indicators of success and prestige for the White House correspondent is the job itself, which has been aptly described as the “body watch.” The body, of course, is the president’s, and the purpose of the watch is to find out everything he does in his waking hours, both officially and privately. To do that means staying near. As one White House reporter put it, “the worst thing in the world that could happen to you is for the president of the United States to choke on a piece of meat, and for you not to be there.” An executive producer for a television network says, even more starkly, “We cover the president expecting he will die.” Staying near “the body,” however, is a goal that usually can be achieved only in the most technical sense. To be sure, the White House press room is just yards away from the Oval Office, but the distance is seldom spanned. Reporters not only are forbidden to roam the halls of the Executive Mansion in the time-honored modus operandi of their profession, but their free access even to the office of the president’s press secretary is limited to his assistants’ outer sanctums. Charged by their editors to body-watch the president, reporters typically must rely on the secondhand reports of the press secretary, who comes out once a day to brief them, or on other presidential aides or visitors to the Oval Office, who may choose to speak to them or not. When reporters are allowed to see the president, it is almost always from behind a barrier and with clear injunctions spelling out what they cannot say and do. Members of the White House press corps enjoy high status in part because they are so visible, but the irony, according to the media scholars Michael Grossman and Martha Kumar, is that “they are visible because of the large amount of time they spend waiting for something to happen— for the briefing to start, for the president to appear for a White House ceremony in the Rose Garden, for a visitor to arrive, for a statement or a transcript to be released.” They are like Milton’s army, of which the poet said, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” The frustration that journalists feel in a job whose main activities are stenographic is enormous. A briefing room full of White House reporters when the press secretary appears is not unlike a classroom full of junior high school students who have just been told that a substitute teacher is on the way. In their daily reports to the public, in which professional and editorial standards forbid overtly hostile displays, status frustration, joined to the hangover from Vietnam, Watergate, and other recent scandals, shows up in more subtle form. As one study of the subject records, television reporters now typically present news about the White House along with a tag line that casts doubt on the credibility of what has been said or on the reliability of the person who has said it. “The administration claims its plans will work, but the true result is still to be seen.This is Dan Daring, ABC News.” Thus do reporters indicate to their viewers that a cynical approach is a realistic approach when analyzing the motives of the president and his advisers. Cynicism boils over into overtly negative coverage when a president’s honesty comes to be doubted. Nixon and Watergate; Ford and the Nixon pardon; Carter’s reluctance to fire the scandal-tainted budget director Bert Lance; Reagan, Bush, and Iran-contra—in all of these cases from the 1970’s and 1980’s, suspicion of presidential wrongdoing seemed to provide journalists with a license to place a black hat on the president’s head and white hats on their own. Not surprisingly, reporters took out after the Clintons when questions were raised about the propriety of their investment in the Whitewater real estate development during his tenure as governor of Arkansas.

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“Monicagate”—or, as the on-line magazine Slateinsisted on calling it, “Flytrap”—was hardly the beginning of Clinton’s scandal-related problems with the news media. V The title of this essay includes the phrase “Why Presidents Hate the Media.” The explanation should by now be apparent: presidents hate what they cannot control, and they cannot control the cynical attitudes or the investigative energies of the press corps. But what about the other half of the title: “Why the Media Love Presidents”? To be sure, if love is a feeling, then clearly that statement is wrong. But if love describes action, it turns out to be right. The press’s cynicism and investigative zeal notwithstanding, in the absence of scandal, presidents still receive mostly favorable coverage in the news media. As the journalist and former White House staffer James Fallows writes in his excellent book, Breaking the News, “The ‘toughness’ of today’s media is mainly a toughness of demeanor rather than a real toughness of reporting.” Strong evidence exists to support this conclusion. In their study of howTime magazine and The New ‘York Times have covered the presidency since 1953, Grossman and Kumar found that about twice as many stories were favorable to the president as were unfavorable. This was true not only for the period as a whole but also for most of its post-Watergate years. Their study of a decade of “CBS Evening News” coverage yielded similar results. Yet, if anything, this two-to-one ratio in favor of the presidency understates the true situation. Flattering pictures of presidents in Time, the Times, and CBS outnumbered unflattering ones by margins of 33—1, 34—1, and 6—1, respectively. As for local and regional media, they tend to be even more supportive of presidents than the national media. Still more pertinent to the issue of journalists’ treatment of the presidency are the kinds of actions by presidents that generate the most favorable coverage. According to Grossman and Kumar, reporters respond enthusiastically to presidential actions that convey strength, especially those in which the president appears decisive, seems to be in command, or is praised by others for his leadership. In sum, when strong action—or the appearance of strong action— comes from the White House, journalists tend to file stories that applaud it. The extent to which this tendency continues is evidenced by the titles of the most influential book on Reagan and the press, Mark Herksgaard’s On Bended Knee, and the corresponding book by Howard Kurtz about Clinton’s media relations, Spin Cycle. A puzzle remains: why do reporters who are cynical about presidents continue to cover them favorably? The most important reason is occupational necessity. White House correspondents must file at least one story every day, usually more. Because of the severe limitations that are placed on reporters’ ability to gather information independently, the president or the press secretary is in a good position to define the agenda they cover. “They have this huge built-in element of control over you,” explains one White House correspondent. “You’re locked into this little press room with only a telephone connecting you to the rest of the White House, and they have the option of taking your calls or not. All you get is staged events—press conferences, briefings, photo opportunities.” Another reporter observes that “every day when [the press secretary] gets out there he determines with his opening statement what the news is going to be for that day.” Editors demand more than a daily story from their White House correspondents; they also expect the occasional exclusive (or “scoop”) to give them a leg up on the competition. These almost always come about through leaks of information by members of the White House staff. Such leaks usually are intended to make the president look good: the personal success of presidential assistants, after all, is tied very closely to the political success of the president. But according to the late Peter Lisagor of the (also late) Chicago Daily News,reporters have little choice but to use what they get: “The competition and competitive pressure is such that guys have to get a story. If they get something that someone else might not have—no matter how self-serving [for the president] it may seem and no matter how hardnosed they may feel themselves to be—they may often go with the story.” White House reporters are especially afraid of falling behind their competitors. As one said, “when you’re covering something else and you get beat [on a story], no one knows. When you’re covering the White House and you get beat, your editor calls you at home.” Considerations other than occupational necessity contribute to reporters’ favorable portrayal of a powerful presidency. For example, their worldview, or implicit conception of how the political system works, greatly affects

9/20/16 123 how they perform their job. “Journalists define the center of government action as the executive,” note the political scientists David Paletz and Robert Entman, and “personalize the institution as one man.” A recent study of network evening news programs found that, depending on the year, they devoted three to 13 times as much attention to the president as to Congress. Favorable or unfavorable presidential coverage may be less important than the coverage itself. Simply by dwelling on the presidency, the media reinforce images of its strength and importance. We are about to elect a new president. The lessons of this analysis for Clinton’s successor in his dealings with the news media are clear. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, however grudgingly it may do so. Don’t fondle it either. Don’t obsess about it. Above all, don’t avoid it. Instead, act strongly and honestly as president and favorable press coverage will follow as a matter of course, whether cynical reporters like it or not. Michael Nelson Michael Nelson is professor of political science at Rhodes College. A former editor of The Washington Monthly, he has published twenty books on the American presidency, national elections, and higher education. In recent years he has written articles for VQR about Abraham Lincoln, C. S. Lewis, Garrison Keilloir, Frank Sinatra, Ward Just, Stephen Carter, Robert Caro, and other subjects. More than forty of his articles have been anthologized in works of political science, history, and English composition.

The First Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln (1861) Fellow-Citizens of the United States:

IN compliance with a custom as old as the Government itself, I appear before you to address you briefly and to take in your presence the oath prescribed by the Constitution of the United States to be taken by the President "before he enters on the execution of this office." I do not consider it necessary at present for me to discuss those matters of administration about which there is no special anxiety or excitement. Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of a Republican Administration their property and their peace and personal security are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that—I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. Those who nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had made this and many similar declarations and had never recanted them; and more than this, they placed in the platform for my acceptance, and as a law to themselves and to me, the clear and emphatic resolution which I now read: Resolved, That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend; and we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes. I now reiterate these sentiments, and in doing so I only press upon the public attention the most conclusive evidence of which the case is susceptible that the property, peace, and security of no section are to be in any wise endangered by the now incoming Administration. I add, too, that all the protection which, consistently with the Constitution and the laws, can be given will be cheerfully given to all the States when lawfully demanded, for whatever cause—as cheerfully to one section as to another. There is much controversy about the delivering up of fugitives from service or labor. The clause I now read is as plainly written in the Constitution as any other of its provisions:

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No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due. It is scarcely questioned that this provision was intended by those who made it for the reclaiming of what we call fugitive slaves; and the intention of the lawgiver is the law. All members of Congress swear their support to the whole Constitution—to this provision as much as to any other. To the proposition, then, that slaves whose cases come within the terms of this clause "shall be delivered up" their oaths are unanimous. Now, if they would make the effort in good temper, could they not with nearly equal unanimity frame and pass a law by means of which to keep good that unanimous oath? . . . . It is seventy-two years since the first inauguration of a President under our National Constitution. During that period fifteen different and greatly distinguished citizens have in succession administered the executive branch of the Government. They have conducted it through many perils, and generally with great success. Yet, with all this scope of precedent, I now enter upon the same task for the brief constitutional term of four years under great and peculiar difficulty. A disruption of the Federal Union, heretofore only menaced, is now formidably attempted. I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself. Again: If the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it—break it, so to speak—but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it? Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was "to form a more perfect Union." But if destruction of the Union by one or by a part only of the States be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity. It follows from these views that no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances. I therefore consider that in view of the Constitution and the laws the Union is unbroken, and to the extent of my ability, I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States. Doing this I deem to be only a simple duty on my part, and I shall perform it so far as practicable unless my rightful masters, the American people, shall withhold the requisite means or in some authoritative manner direct the contrary. I trust this will not be regarded as a menace, but only as the declared purpose of the Union that it will constitutionally defend and maintain itself. In doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere. Where hostility to the United States in any interior locality shall be so great and universal as to prevent competent resident citizens from holding the Federal offices, there will be no attempt to force obnoxious strangers among the people for that object. While the strict legal right may exist in the Government to enforce the exercise of these offices, the attempt to do so would be so irritating and so nearly impracticable withal that I deem it better to forego for the time the uses of such offices.

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The mails, unless repelled, will continue to be furnished in all parts of the Union. So far as possible the people everywhere shall have that sense of perfect security which is most favorable to calm thought and reflection. The course here indicated will be followed unless current events and experience shall show a modification or change to be proper, and in every case and exigency my best discretion will be exercised, according to circumstances actually existing and with a view and a hope of a peaceful solution of the national troubles and the restoration of fraternal sympathies and affections. That there are persons in one section or another who seek to destroy the Union at all events and are glad of any pretext to do it I will neither affirm nor deny; but if there be such, I need address no word to them. To those, however, who really love the Union may I not speak? Before entering upon so grave a matter as the destruction of our national fabric, with all its benefits, its memories, and its hopes, would it not be wise to ascertain precisely why we do it? Will you hazard so desperate a step while there is any possibility that any portion of the ills you fly from have no real existence? Will you, while the certain ills you fly to are greater than all the real ones you fly from, will you risk the commission of so fearful a mistake? All profess to be content in the Union if all constitutional rights can be maintained. Is it true, then, that any right plainly written in the Constitution has been denied? I think not. Happily, the human mind is so constituted that no party can reach to the audacity of doing this. Think, if you can, of a single instance in which a plainly written provision of the Constitution has ever been denied. If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might in a moral point of view justify revolution; certainly would if such right were a vital one. But such is not our case. All the vital rights of minorities and of individuals are so plainly assured to them by affirmations and negations, guaranties and prohibitions, in the Constitution that controversies never arise concerning them. But no organic law can ever be framed with a provision specifically applicable to every question which may occur in practical administration. No foresight can anticipate nor any document of reasonable length contain express provisions for all possible questions. Shall fugitives from labor be surrendered by national or by State authority? The Constitution does not expressly say.May Congress prohibit slavery in the Territories? The Constitution does not expressly say.Must Congress protect slavery in the Territories? The Constitution does not expressly say. . . . . One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute. The fugitive-slave clause of the Constitution and the law for the suppression of the foreign slave trade are each as well enforced, perhaps, as any law can ever be in a community where the moral sense of the people imperfectly supports the law itself. The great body of the people abide by the dry legal obligation in both cases, and a few break over in each. This, I think, can not be perfectly cured, and it would be worse in both casesafter the separation of the sections than before. The foreign slave trade, now imperfectly suppressed, would be ultimately revived without restriction in one section, while fugitive slaves, now only partially surrendered, would not be surrendered at all by the other. Physically speaking, we can not separate. We can not remove our respective sections from each other nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other, but the different parts of our country can not do this. They can not but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them. Is it possible, then, to make that intercourse more advantageous or more satisfactory after separation than before? Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can among friends? Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions, as to terms of intercourse, are again upon you. This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. I can not be ignorant of the fact that many worthy and patriotic citizens are desirous of having the National Constitution amended. While I make no recommendation of amendments, I fully recognize the rightful authority of the people over the whole subject, to be exercised in either of the modes prescribed in the instrument itself; and I should, under existing circumstances, favor rather than oppose a fair opportunity being afforded the people to act upon it. I will venture to add that to me the convention mode seems preferable, in that it

9/20/16 126 allows amendments to originate with the people themselves, instead of only permitting them to take or reject propositions originated by others, not especially chosen for the purpose, and which might not be precisely such as they would wish to either accept or refuse. I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution—which amendment, however, I have not seen—has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable. . . . . By the frame of the Government under which we live this same people have wisely given their public servants but little power for mischief, and have with equal wisdom provided for the return of that little to their own hands at very short intervals. While the people retain their virtue and vigilance no Administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can very seriously injure the Government in the short space of four years. My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you in hot haste to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it. Such of you as are now dissatisfied still have the old Constitution unimpaired, and, on the sensitive point, the laws of your own framing under it; while the new Administration will have no immediate power, if it would, to change either. If it were admitted that you who are dissatisfied hold the right side in the dispute, there still is no single good reason for precipitate action. Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulty. In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it." I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

The First Inaugural Address of Theodore Roosevelt (1905) MY fellow-citizens, no people on earth have more cause to be thankful than ours, and this is said reverently, in no spirit of boastfulness in our own strength, but with gratitude to the Giver of Good who has blessed us with the conditions which have enabled us to achieve so large a measure of well-being and of happiness. To us as a people it has been granted to lay the foundations of our national life in a new continent. We are the heirs of the ages, and yet we have had to pay few of the penalties which in old countries are exacted by the dead hand of a bygone civilization. We have not been obliged to fight for our existence against any alien race; and yet our life has called for the vigor and effort without which the manlier and hardier virtues wither away. Under such conditions it would be our own fault if we failed; and the success which we have had in the past, the success which we confidently believe the future will bring, should cause in us no feeling of vainglory, but rather a deep and abiding realization of all which life has offered us; a full acknowledgment of the responsibility which is ours; and a fixed determination to show that under a free government a mighty people can thrive best, alike as regards the things of the body and the things of the soul Much has been given us, and much will rightfully be expected from us. We have duties to others and duties to ourselves; and we can shirk neither. We have become a great nation, forced by the fact of its greatness into relations with the other nations of the earth, and we must behave as beseems a people with such responsibilities. Toward all other nations, large and small, our attitude must be one of cordial and sincere friendship. We must show not only in our words, but in our deeds, that we are earnestly desirous of securing their good will by acting toward them in a spirit of just and generous recognition of all their rights. But justice and generosity in a nation, as in an individual,

9/20/16 127 count most when shown not by the weak but by the strong. While ever careful to refrain from wrongdoing others, we must be no less insistent that we are not wronged ourselves. We wish peace, but we wish the peace of justice, the peace of righteousness. We wish it because we think it is right and not because we are afraid. No weak nation that acts manfully and justly should ever have cause to fear us, and no strong power should ever be able to single us out as a subject for insolent aggression. Our relations with the other powers of the world are important; but still more important are our relations among ourselves. Such growth in wealth, in population, and in power as this nation has seen during the century and a quarter of its national life is inevitably accompanied by a like growth in the problems which are ever before every nation that rises to greatness. Power invariably means both responsibility and danger. Our forefathers faced certain perils which we have outgrown. We now face other perils, the very existence of which it was impossible that they should foresee. Modern life is both complex and intense, and the tremendous changes wrought by the extraordinary industrial development of the last half century are felt in every fiber of our social and political being. Never before have men tried so vast and formidable an experiment as that of administering the affairs of a continent under the forms of a Democratic republic. The conditions which have told for our marvelous material well-being, which have developed to a very high degree our energy, self-reliance, and individual initiative, have also brought the care and anxiety inseparable from the accumulation of great wealth in industrial centers. Upon the success of our experiment much depends, not only as regards our own welfare, but as regards the welfare of mankind. If we fail, the cause of free self-government throughout the world will rock to its foundations, and therefore our responsibility is heavy, to ourselves, to the world as it is to-day, and to the generations yet unborn. There is no good reason why we should fear the future, but there is every reason why we should face it seriously, neither hiding from ourselves the gravity of the problems before us nor fearing to approach these problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them aright. Yet, after all, though the problems are new, though the tasks set before us differ from the tasks set before our fathers who founded and preserved this Republic, the spirit in which these tasks must be undertaken and these problems faced, if our duty is to be well done, remains essentially unchanged. We know that self-government is difficult. We know that no people needs such high traits of character as that people which seeks to govern its affairs aright through the freely expressed will of the freemen who compose it. But we have faith that we shall not prove false to the memories of the men of the mighty past. They did their work, they left us the splendid heritage we now enjoy. We in our turn have an assured confidence that we shall be able to leave this heritage unwasted and enlarged to our children and our children's children. To do so we must show, not merely in great crises, but in the everyday affairs of life, the qualities of practical intelligence, of courage, of hardihood, and endurance, and above all the power of devotion to a lofty ideal, which made great the men who founded this Republic in the days of Washington, which made great the men who preserved this Republic in the days of Abraham Lincoln.

The First Inaugural Address of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933) This is a day of national consecration. And I am certain that on this day my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency, I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our people impels. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure, as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life, a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. And I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days. In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunk to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds

9/20/16 128 is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; and the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone. More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment. And yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered, because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily, this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True, they have tried. But their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They only know the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish. Yes, the money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of that restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit. Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy, the moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days, my friends, will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves, to our fellow men. Recognition of that falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, and on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live. Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This Nation is asking for action, and action now. Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing great -- greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our great natural resources. Hand in hand with that we must frankly recognize the overbalance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land. Yes, the task can be helped by definite efforts to raise the values of agricultural products, and with this the power to purchase the output of our cities. It can be helped by preventing realistically the tragedy of the growing loss through foreclosure of our small homes and our farms. It can be helped by insistence that the Federal, the State, and the local governments act forthwith on the demand that their cost be drastically reduced. It can be helped by the unifying of relief activities which today are often scattered, uneconomical, unequal. It can be helped by national planning for and supervision of all forms of transportation and of communications and other utilities that have a definitely public character. There are many ways in which it can be helped, but it can never be helped by merely talking about it. We must act. We must act quickly.

And finally, in our progress towards a resumption of work, we require two safeguards against a return of the evils of

9/20/16 129 the old order. There must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments. There must be an end to speculation with other people's money. And there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency. These, my friends, are the lines of attack. I shall presently urge upon a new Congress in special session detailed measures for their fulfillment, and I shall seek the immediate assistance of the 48 States. Through this program of action we address ourselves to putting our own national house in order and making income balance outgo. Our international trade relations, though vastly important, are in point of time, and necessity, secondary to the establishment of a sound national economy. I favor, as a practical policy, the putting of first things first. I shall spare no effort to restore world trade by international economic readjustment; but the emergency at home cannot wait on that accomplishment. The basic thought that guides these specific means of national recovery is not narrowly nationalistic. It is the insistence, as a first consideration, upon the interdependence of the various elements in and parts of the United States of America -- a recognition of the old and permanently important manifestation of the American spirit of the pioneer. It is the way to recovery. It is the immediate way. It is the strongest assurance that recovery will endure. In the field of world policy, I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor: the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others; the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors. If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize, as we have never realized before, our interdependence on each other; that we cannot merely take, but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress can be made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and our property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at the larger good. This, I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will bind upon us, bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in times of armed strife. With this pledge taken, I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems. Action in this image, action to this end is feasible under the form of government which we have inherited from our ancestors. Our Constitution is so simple, so practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form. That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has ever seen. It has met every stress of vast expansion of territory, of foreign wars, of bitter internal strife, of world relations. And it is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly equal, wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure. I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption. But, in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis -- broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

For the trust reposed in me, I will return the courage and the devotion that befit the time. I can do no less. We face the arduous days that lie before us in the warm courage of national unity; with the clear consciousness of seeking old and precious moral values; with the clean satisfaction that comes from the stern performance of duty by old and young alike. We aim at the assurance of a rounded, a permanent national life. We do not distrust the -- the future of essential democracy. The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action. They have asked for discipline and

9/20/16 130 direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In the spirit of the gift I take it. In this dedication -- In this dedication of a Nation, we humbly ask the blessing of God. May He protect each and every one of us. May He guide me in the days to come.

The Inaugural Address of John F. Kennedy (1961) Vice President Johnson, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Chief Justice, President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, President Truman, reverend clergy, fellow citizens:

We observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom -- symbolizing an end, as well as a beginning - - signifying renewal, as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three-quarters ago. The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe -- the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God. We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans -- born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge -- and more.

To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided there is little we can do -- for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder. To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom -- and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside. To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required -- not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge: to convert our good words into good deeds, in a new alliance for progress, to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty. But this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of hostile powers. Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. And let every other power know that this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house. To that world assembly of sovereign states, the United Nations, our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace, we renew our pledge of support -- to prevent it from becoming

9/20/16 131 merely a forum for invective, to strengthen its shield of the new and the weak, and to enlarge the area in which its writ may run. Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction. We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed. But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course -- both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind's final war. So let us begin anew -- remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate. Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us. Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms, and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations. Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce. Let both sides unite to heed, in all corners of the earth, the command of Isaiah -- to "undo the heavy burdens, and [to] let the oppressed go free." And, if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor -- not a new balance of power, but a new world of law -- where the strong are just, and the weak secure, and the peace preserved. All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days; nor in the life of this Administration; nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin. In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe. Now the trumpet summons us again -- not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need -- not as a call to battle, though embattled we are -- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation,"² a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself. Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort? In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility -- I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it. And the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.

My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.

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The First Inaugural Address of Ronald Reagan (1981) Thank you. Thank you. Senator Hatfield, Mr. Chief Justice, Mr. President, Vice President Bush, Vice President Mondale, Senator Baker, Speaker O’Neill, Reverend Moomaw, and my fellow citizens: To a few of us here today this is a solemn and most momentous occasion. And, yet, in the history of our nation it is a commonplace occurrence. The orderly transfer of authority as called for in the Constitution routinely takes place as it has for almost two centuries and few of us stop to think how unique we really are. In the eyes of many in the world, this every-four-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle. Mr. President, I want our fellow citizens to know how much you did to carry on this tradition. By your gracious cooperation in the transition process you have shown a watching world that we are a united people pledged to maintaining a political system which guarantees individual liberty to a greater degree than any other. And I thank you and your people for all your help in maintaining the continuity which is the bulwark of our republic. The business of our nation goes forward. These United States are confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions. We suffer from the longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history. It distorts our economic decisions, penalizes thrift, and crushes the struggling young and the fixed-income elderly alike. It threatens to shatter the lives of millions of our people. Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, human misery and personal indignity. Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor by a tax system which penalizes successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity. But great as our tax burden is, it has not kept pace with public spending. For decades we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children’s future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals. You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why then should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation? We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding -- we’re going to begin to act beginning today. The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we as Americans have the capacity now, as we have had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom. In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together -- in and out of government -- must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable with no one group singled out to pay a higher price. We hear much of special interest groups. Well our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries, or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we’re sick -- professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truck drivers. They are, in short, “We the People.” This breed called Americans. Well, this Administration’s objective will be a healthy, vigorous, growing economy that provides equal opportunities for all Americans with no barriers born of bigotry or discrimination. Putting America back to work means putting all Americans back to work. Ending inflation means freeing all Americans from the terror of runaway living costs. All must share in the productive work of this “new beginning,” and all must share in the bounty of a revived economy.

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With the idealism and fair play which are the core of our system and our strength, we can have a strong and prosperous America at peace with itself and the world. So as we begin, let us take inventory. We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the earth. Our Government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed. It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the states or to the people. All of us -- all of us need to be reminded that the Federal Government did not create the states; the states created the Federal Government. Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it’s not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work -- work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it. If we look to the answer as to why for so many years we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on earth, it was because here in this land we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before. Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on earth. The price for this freedom at times has been high, but we have never been unwilling to pay that price. It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of Government. It is time for us to realize that we are too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams. We're not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline. I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing. So with all the creative energy at our command, let us begin an era of national renewal. Let us renew our determination, our courage, and our strength. And let us renew our faith and our hope. We have every right to dream heroic dreams. Those who say that we’re in a time when there are no heroes -- they just don’t know where to look. You can see heroes every day going in and out of factory gates. Others, a handful in number, produce enough food to feed all of us and then the world beyond. You meet heroes across a counter -- and they’re on both sides of that counter. There are entrepreneurs with faith in themselves and faith in an idea who create new jobs, new wealth and opportunity. There are individuals and families whose taxes support the Government and whose voluntary gifts support church, charity, culture, art, and education. Their patriotism is quiet but deep. Their values sustain our national life. Now I have used the words “they” and “their” in speaking of these heroes. I could say “you” and “your” because I’m addressing the heroes of whom I speak -- you, the citizens of this blessed land. Your dreams, your hopes, your goals are going to be the dreams, the hopes, and the goals of this Administration, so help me God. We shall reflect the compassion that is so much a part of your make-up. How can we love our country and not love our countrymen -- and loving them reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they’re sick, and provide opportunity to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory? Can we solve the problems confronting us? Well the answer is an unequivocal and emphatic "Yes." To paraphrase Winston Churchill, I did not take the oath I’ve just taken with the intention of presiding over the dissolution of the world’s strongest economy. In the days ahead, I will propose removing the roadblocks that have slowed our economy and reduced productivity. Steps will be taken aimed at restoring the balance between the various levels of government. Progress may be slow -- measured in inches and feet, not miles -- but we will progress. It is time to reawaken this industrial giant, to get government back within its means, and to lighten our punitive tax burden. And these will be our first priorities, and on these principles there will be no compromise. On the eve or our struggle for independence a man who might’ve been one of the greatest among the Founding Fathers, Dr. Joseph Warren, president of the Massachusetts Congress, said to his fellow Americans,

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"Our country is in danger, but not to be despaired of. On you depend the fortunes of America. You are to decide the important question upon which rest the happiness and the liberty of millions yet unborn. Act worthy of yourselves." Well I believe we, the Americans of today, are ready to act worthy of ourselves, ready to do what must be done to insure happiness and liberty for ourselves, our children, and our children’s children. And as we renew ourselves here in our own land, we will be seen as having greater strength throughout the world. We will again be the exemplar of freedom and a beacon of hope for those who do not now have freedom. To those neighbors and allies who share our freedom, we will strengthen our historic ties and assure them of our support and firm commitment. We will match loyalty with loyalty. We will strive for mutually beneficial relations. We will not use our friendship to impose on their sovereignty, for our own sovereignty is not for sale. As for the enemies of freedom, those who are potential adversaries, they will be reminded that peace is the highest aspiration of the American people. We will negotiate for it, sacrifice for it; we will not surrender for it -- now or ever. Our forbearance should never be misunderstood. Our reluctance for conflict should not be misjudged as a failure of will. When action is required to preserve our national security, we will act. We will maintain sufficient strength to prevail if need be, knowing that if we do so, we have the best chance of never having to use that strength. Above all we must realize that no arsenal or no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have. It is a weapon that we as Americans do have. Let that be understood by those who practice terrorism and prey upon their neighbors. I am -- I'm told that tens of thousands of prayer meetings are being held on this day; and for that I am deeply grateful. We are a nation under God, and I believe God intended for us to be free. It would be fitting and good, I think, if on each inaugural day in future years it should be declared a day of prayer. This is the first time in our history that this ceremony has been held, as you’ve been told, on this West Front of the Capitol. Standing here, one faces a magnificent vista, opening up on this city’s special beauty and history. At the end of this open mall are those shrines to the giants on whose shoulders we stand. Directly in front of me, the monument to a monumental man. George Washington, father of our country. A man of humility who came to greatness reluctantly. He led America out of revolutionary victory into infant nationhood. Off to one side, the stately memorial to Thomas Jefferson. The Declaration of Independence flames with his eloquence. And then beyond the Reflecting Pool, the dignified columns of the Lincoln Memorial. Whoever would understand in his heart the meaning of America will find it in the life of Abraham Lincoln. Beyond those moments -- those monuments to heroism is the Potomac River, and on the far shore the sloping hills of Arlington National Cemetery, with its row upon row of simple white markers bearing crosses or Stars of David. They add up to only a tiny fraction of the price that has been paid for our freedom. Each one of those markers is a monument to the kind of hero I spoke of earlier. Their lives ended in places called Belleau Wood, the Argonne, Omaha Beach, Salerno, and halfway around the world on Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Pork Chop Hill, the Chosin Reservoir, and in a hundred rice paddies and jungles of a place called Vietnam. Under one such a marker lies a young man, Martin Treptow, who left his job in a small town barber shop in 1917 to go to France with the famed Rainbow Division. There, on the Western front, he was killed trying to carry a message between battalions under heavy fire. We're told that on his body was found a diary. On the flyleaf under the heading, “My Pledge,” he had written these words: "America must win this war. Therefore, I will work; I will save; I will sacrifice; I will endure; I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone." The crisis we are facing today does not require of us the kind of sacrifice that Martin Treptow and so many thousands of others were called upon to make. It does require, however, our best effort, and our willingness to believe in ourselves and to believe in our capacity to perform great deeds; to believe that together with God’s help we can and will resolve the problems which now confront us. And after all, why shouldn’t we believe that? We are Americans. God bless you and thank you. Thank you very much. 9/20/16 135

 What Has Politics Come to Represent over Our Lifetimes?  Return to Top Comparing Millennials to Other Generations | Pew Research Center This webpage provides an interactive tabulation of differences among generations by ethnicity, marriage rates, levels of education, income, labor force participation and other demographic factors.

The Generations Defined

The Big Generation Gap at the Polls Is Echoed in Attitudes on Budget Tradeoffs | Pew Research Center by Kim Parker But Public Sees Only Modest Conflict between Young and Old Overview The record generation gap that played out at the voting booth in the last two presidential elections is echoed by large differences by age in attitudes about the tradeoff between reducing the federal deficit and preserving entitlements for older adults, according to a new nationwide Pew Research Center survey. Older adults by a lopsided margin (66%-21%) say that protecting Social Security and Medicare benefits is more important than reducing the federal budget deficit. Younger adults are much more evenly divided on the subject, with 48% saying that the programs for older adults are the higher priority and 41% saying deficit reduction. The age differences are even more pronounced in response to a survey question about whether the federal government should give a higher priority to programs that benefit older adults or younger adults. Respondents ages 65 and older choose the former by a three-to-one ratio; adults ages 18 to 29 choose the latter by a three-to-two ratio. In effect, each age group endorses priorities that reflect its generational self-interest. But to do so, each generation–especially older adults–takes a position on these young vs. old policy questions that runs contrary to its broader beliefs about the proper role of government. In general, older adults favor a government that is smaller both in size and scope, while young adults want to see a bigger government that takes on more problems. The National Exit Poll conducted on Election Day asked voters which came closest to their view: Government should do more to solve problems, or government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals. Voters ages 18 to 29 lean heavily toward a more activist government. Roughly six-in-ten (59%) say government should do more to solve problems while only 37% say government is doing too much. By contrast, only about one-third of voters ages

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65 and older (35%) favor a more activist government, while a majority (58%) say government should do less. In spite of these wide gaps between young and old in policy views, the new survey, which was conducted Nov. 28 to Dec. 5, 2012, finds no indication of a broader generational war. Relatively few adults of any age group (28% overall) perceive strong conflicts between young people and older people. In fact, generational conflict ranks at the bottom of a list of potential group conflicts in the U.S. Conflicts between Democrats and Republicans, rich and poor, immigrants and non immigrants and blacks and whites are judged to be much more acute. And within families, intergenerational commitments remain strong. The vast majority (84%) of adults ages 18 to 29 say adult children have a responsibility to provide financial assistance to an elderly parent if he or she needs it. And nearly six-in-ten (58%) say it is very likely that, at some point in the future, they will be responsible for caring for an aging parent or another elderly family member. To be sure, young adults worry about the long-term financial impact if changes are not made to Social Security and Medicare. Fully half (52%) of those ages 18 to 29 say that keeping the benefits from these programs at their current levels will place too much of a financial burden on younger generations. Only about one-third (35%) of adults ages 65 and older agree. But the young are no more likely than other age groups to embrace potential reforms to these programs that might ease the future financial burden. Solid majorities of young, middle-aged and older adults favor increasing payroll taxes on higher income earners to raise revenues for Social Security. Similarly, the idea of reducing Social Security and Medicare benefits for higher-income seniors is broadly popular across age groups. However, when it comes to increasing the age at which adults become eligible for Social Security, a proposal that does not receive majority support overall, older adults are more supportive than any other age group. The intersection of politics and generation is complicated on these issues. Young adults tend to be the most Democratic in terms of their party identification, and they voted for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election by a 60%-to- 37% margin. Older Americans voted for Romney over Obama by a 56%-to-44% margin. The age gap in voting in the 2008 presidential election between Obama and John McCain was even wider, as 66% of voters younger than 30 supported Obama compared with 45% of voters 65 and older. In spite of their strong leaning to Obama and the Democratic Party, the views of young adults line up more closely with those of Republicans when they are asked what is more important: taking steps to reduce the federal budget deficit or keeping Social Security and Medicare benefits as they are. Republicans are evenly divided over this, as are young adults: 45% of Republicans say deficit reduction is more important while 42% choose preserving benefits. Independents and Democrats, on the other hand, strongly favor maintaining entitlement benefits at their current levels over reducing the deficit. Old and Young Competing for Limited Federal Dollars The proper role and scope of government was the subject of heated debate in the recent presidential election. The public has grown more skeptical about the government’s reach in this era of weak economic growth and strained resources. Still, there is majority support for government intervention on behalf of the neediest citizens. In the current survey, 57% of respondents agreed that it is the responsibility of government to take care of those who can’t take care of themselves, 37% disagreed. There is broad agreement across age groups on this issue. Among those younger than 30, 60% agree the government has the responsibility to care for those who need assistance. Some 58% of those ages 30 to 64 agree with this as do

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54% of those ages 65 and older. Roughly one-in-five from each age group completely agrees that the government has this responsibility. In allocating its resources, the public clearly believes the government should give a higher priority to programs that benefit older adults (47%) rather than those that benefit younger adults (27%), although a significant share (17%) volunteers that both types of programs are equally important. Adults younger than 30 have much different views on this issue than do their older counterparts. Only 34% of those ages 18 to 29 say programs that benefit older adults should be given a higher priority. This compares with 47% of those ages 30 to 49, and 48% of those ages 65 and older. Adults ages 50 to 64, most of whom are part of the Baby Boom generation, are more likely than any other age group to say the government should concentrate its resources on programs that benefit older adults. Fully 59% say these programs should be a higher priority, while only 15% say programs that benefit younger adults should be given a higher priority. Many in this age group have parents who are currently relying on these programs (56% have at least one living parent ages 65 or older),1 and many are on the cusp of retirement themselves. There are also significant differences by race. By about a two-to-one margin (50%- 24%) whites believe programs that benefit older adults, rather than young adults, should be given a higher priority. Blacks are more evenly divided. Four-in-ten say programs that benefit older adults should be given higher priority, 33% say programs that benefit the young deserve more attention, and another 26% say both are equally important. Republicans, Democrats and independents all say, on balance, programs that benefit older adults should be a higher priority than those that benefit the young. Of these three groups, Republicans are the most likely to prioritize programs that benefit the old (58% among Republicans vs. 44% of Democrats and 45% of independents).

The Family Safety Net Regardless of attitudes about the government’s role, a majority of adults from all age groups believe that adult children have an obligation to support their aging parents. Overall, 75% of the public says adult children have a responsibility to provide financial assistance to an elderly parent if he or she needs it. Only 23% say this is not a responsibility. Young adults are more likely than middle-aged or older adults to say providing financial assistance to an elderly parent in need is a responsibility. Among those ages 18 to 29, 84% say this is a responsibility. The share who views this as a responsibility goes down gradually with age. Some 77% of those ages 30 to 49 say adult children have a responsibility to provide financial assistance to an elderly parent in need; 72% of those ages 50 to 64 say the same as do 67% of those ages 65 and older. Many adults are already providing financial support to their aging parents. Overall, 32% of all adults with at least one parent ages 65 or older say they have given financial support to their parent in the past 12 months. Adults of all ages are much more reluctant to say parents have a responsibility to support their grown children. Overall, 52% say parents have a responsibility to provide financial assistance to an adult child if he or she needs it; 44% say this is not a responsibility. This compares with 75% overall who say adult children have a responsibility to assist their aging parents.

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Among young adults, many of whom may have found themselves in this very situation, 53% say parents have the responsibility to provide for their adult children, if their children need the support; 44% say parents do not have this responsibility. Young adults’ views on this issue are nearly identical to those of their parents’ generation. Among adults ages 50 to 64, 54% say parents have a responsibility to provide for their adult children, while 43% say this is not a responsibility. Adults ages 65 and older have similar views: 57% say this is a responsibility and 35% say it is not. Adults ages 30 to 49 are somewhat less likely to say this is a responsibility: 47% say it is and 51% say it is not. Deficit Reduction vs. Maintaining Entitlement Benefits While young and older adults have similar views on the responsibilities family members have to one another, their views differ sharply on some key policy issues relating to generational responsibility. Overall, when faced with the tradeoff of taking steps to reduce the budget deficit or keeping Social Security and Medicare benefits as they are now, the public favors keeping benefits as they are now by a margin of 56% to 32%. Young adults are closely divided on this issue: 41% say deficit reduction is more important while 48% favor keeping Social Security and Medicare benefits at their current levels. Among those ages 65 and older, fully two-thirds (66%) choose preserving entitlement benefits, while 21% say reducing the deficit is more important. There are sharp differences on this issue along party lines as well. Republicans are evenly divided over which goal is more important: 45% say taking steps to reduce the budget deficit is more important, while 42% choose keeping Social Security and Medicare benefits at their current levels. Democrats lean heavily toward preserving these entitlement benefits. By a more than three-to-one margin (69% to 21%), Democrats say keeping benefits where they are now is more important than reducing the deficit. The Future of Social Security and Medicare The public’s views on the future of these large entitlement programs are somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, a majority says keeping benefits as they are now should be a priority, on the other hand, fully half question whether that approach is even tenable. Among all adults, 51% say it is not likely that there will be enough money in these programs to maintain current benefit levels in the future. Only 45% say it is likely there will be enough money to do this. Views about the future solvency of these programs are closely linked to policy preferences. Those who favor deficit reduction over maintaining current benefit levels are among the most likely to doubt there will be enough money in these programs going forward: 69% of those who say reducing the deficit is more important than preserving Social Security and Medicare benefits also say it is not likely these programs will have enough money in the future to provide benefits at the current levels. Those who favor maintaining benefits over reducing the deficit are much more confident about the future of these programs: 56% say it is likely there will be enough money in the future to provide benefits at their current levels, while 40% say the money is not likely to be there. Perceptions of the future solvency of Social Security and Medicare also differ by age. On balance, young adults are skeptical that there will be enough money in the future if current benefits levels are maintained. Among those younger than 30, 41% say it’s likely there will be enough money, while 54% say this is unlikely. Adults ages 30 to 49 have the most negative view in this regard: 61% say it is not likely that there will be enough money in the future to provide benefits at their current levels (including 25% who say this is “not at all likely”). Those ages 50 to 64 are about evenly divided on this issue: 51% say it’s likely these programs will have enough money in the future and 45% say it is not likely. And those ages 65 and older are the least concerned about the future solvency of these programs. A slight majority (55%) says it is likely there will be enough

9/20/16 139 money in the future if current benefits levels are maintained, while 37% say this is unlikely. There is a sharp partisan divide in perceptions about whether, in the future, benefits can be maintained at their current levels. Roughly two-thirds of Republicans (65%) say it’s not likely there will be enough money in these programs in the future to provide benefits at their current levels; only 33% of Republicans say there will be enough money. Democrats are much more confident: 59% say there will be enough money in the future to pay out benefits at their current levels, while 37% say there will not. Related to the ability of Social Security and Medicare to continue to provide benefits at their current levels is the question of whether future spending will place an undue burden on younger generations. The public is divided over this issue. Some 44% of all adults say keeping benefits at their current levels will put too much of a financial burden on younger generations. Roughly the same proportion (45%) say continued spending will not adversely impact the young. Again, views on this issue are closely related to age. However, here the gap is between those younger than 50 and those ages 50 and older. Among those ages 18 to 49, 50% say keeping spending at current levels will place too much of a burden on younger generations, while 40% say it will not. Among those ages 50 and older, only 38% say keeping benefits as they are now will burden the young, while 52% say it will not. Support for Entitlement Reforms The public has mixed views on some potential reforms to the Social Security and Medicare programs. In general, there is broad support for reforms that involve reducing benefits for higher-income seniors, and most adults favor the idea of asking wealthier Americans to pay more in payroll taxes. There is much less support for the idea of raising the age at which people can begin to receive either of these benefits. Half of the poll’s respondents were asked about reforms to address financial concerns about the Social Security program, and the other half were asked about reforms to help shore up the Medicare program. Of the three proposals for changing Social Security tested in the survey, the most popular is the idea of raising payroll taxes on high-income earners. Two-thirds of all adults favor this proposal, while 29% oppose it. A smaller majority of adults (55%) say they would favor reducing Social Security benefits for seniors with higher incomes; 39% oppose this proposal. When asked about gradually raising the age at which people can begin to receive Social Security benefits, only 38% were in favor, while a majority (56%) opposed this idea. The public has a similar set of views on possible reforms to the Medicare program. Six-in-ten adults say they would favor reducing Medicare benefits for high-income seniors (33% oppose this). At the same time, only about one-third of adults (35%) say they would favor gradually raising the age of eligibility for receiving Medicare. Majorities of young, middle-aged and older Americans support raising payroll taxes on high-income earners. There is no significant difference of opinion between adults ages 18 to 29 and those ages 65 and older on this issue – 64% of young adults favor this proposal as do 67% of older adults. Among those ages 30 to 64, a similar share (66%) favors this. When it comes to reducing Social Security and Medicare benefits for higher-income seniors, similar shares from each age group say they are in favor. Some 53% of those ages 18 to 29 favor reducing Social Security benefits for seniors with higher incomes; 57% of those ages 30 to 64 favor this proposal as do 53% of older adults.

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There is less agreement on the issue of raising the age of eligibility for Social Security. Older adults stand out in terms of their relative support for this proposal. Among those ages 65 and older, 49% say they would favor gradually raising the age at which adults can begin to receive benefits. This compares with 34% among those 18-29, 40% among those 30-49 and 34% among 50- to 64-year-olds. Similarly, younger adults are more likely than their older counterparts to oppose raising the age of eligibility for Medicare. While only half of adults ages 65 and older oppose this proposal, about six- in-ten of those younger than 65 oppose it. Partisanship and Entitlement Reform If there’s one thing Republicans, Democrats and independents may be able to agree on in tackling entitlement reform it’s the idea of reducing benefits – both Social Security and Medicare – for the wealthiest older Americans. About half or more from each partisan group favor reducing Social Security benefits for wealthier adults, and roughly six-in-ten from each group favor the same for Medicare benefits. While solid majorities of Democrats (77%) and independents (70%) support raising payroll taxes on high-income earners to help shore up the Social Security program, only 46% of Republicans would support this measure. Republicans and independents are more supportive than Democrats of proposals to raise the age of eligibility for Social Security or Medicare. Even so, these proposals do not garner majority support from any party group. Adults with at least one living parent ages 65 or older include those who do not have any living parents but have a stepparent ages 65 or older who played an important role in their life.

Generation X: America’s neglected ‘middle child’ | Pew Research Center Generation X has a gripe with pulse takers, keepers and population counters. We keep squeezing them out of the frame. This overlooked generation currently ranges in age from 34 to 49, which may be one reason they’re so often missing from stories about demographic, social and political change. They’re smack in the middle innings of life, which tend to be short on drama and scant of theme. But there are other explanations that have nothing to do with their stage of the life cycle. Gen Xers are bookended by two much larger generations – the Baby Boomers ahead and the Millennials behind – that are strikingly different from one another. And in most of the ways we take stock of generations – their racial and ethnic makeup; their political, social and religious values; their economic and educational circumstances; their technology usage – Gen Xers are a low-slung, straight-line bridge between two noisy behemoths. The charts below tell the tale. To be fair, there are a few metrics that don’t fit this straightforward pattern of generational evolution. For example, over the course of their voting lives, older Gen Xers have tended to be more Republican than both older Boomers and younger Millennials. Also, Xers are more pessimistic than both of those larger generations that they’ll have enough money for their retirement – though some of that negativity is doubtless tied to the economic stresses of middle age.

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Gen Xers also stand out in another way. In 2010 when Pew Research asked adults of all ages if they thought their own generation was unique, about six-in-ten Boomers and Millennials said yes. But only about half of Gen Xers said the same. And even among those who did, there was very little consensus about why they are distinctive. One reason Xers have trouble defining their own generational persona could be that they’ve rarely been doted on by the media. By contrast, Baby Boomers have been a source of media fascination from the get-go (witness their name). And Millennials, the “everybody-gets-a-trophy” generation, have been the subject of endless stories about their racial diversity, their political and social liberalism, their voracious technology use, and their grim economic circumstances. Gen Xers have also gotten the short end of basic generational arithmetic. Due partly to their parents’ relatively low fertility rates, there are fewer of them (65 million) than Boomers (77 million) or Millennials (an estimated 83 million assuming a roughly 20-year age span and including those who have yet to reach adulthood). But there’s another reason that Xers are a small generation: They’ve been deemed to span just 16 years, while most generations are credited with lasting for about 20 years. How come? No one really knows. Generational boundaries are fuzzy, arbitrary and culture-driven. Once fixed by the mysterious forces of the zeitgeist, they tend to firm up over time. One final slight: Even their name is a retread. World War II photographer Robert Capa first coined the term Generation X in a photo essay about the young adults of the 1950s, but the label didn’t stick the first time around. It was revived thirty years later by Canadian author Douglas Coupland, whose coming of age novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, was set in Southern California. For Xers, there’s one silver lining in all this. From everything we know about them, they’re savvy, skeptical and self-reliant; they’re not into preening or pampering, and they just might not give much of a hoot what others think of them. Or whether others think of them at all.

How to Fix Washington: Elect Generation X - POLITICO Magazine House Speaker Paul Ryan may dream of leading a more harmonious, more substantive GOP, but that’s not going to happen until he gets a majority in Congress—and, no, I’m not talking about the Republican Party. I’m talking about Generation X. It might sound odd, but the generational composition of Congress has an enormous impact on the country. Building on William Strauss and Neil Howe’s groundbreaking generational theory, original research authored by my consultancy First Person Politics shows that each new generation to win a majority in Congress brings about a large- scale shift in the national political culture. These shifts, determined by each generation’s unique character, unfold over 20- to 25-year time spans, which makes them difficult to recognize for those immersed in the 24/7 news cycle. But they are as predictable as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. Some shifts are good for the country; others not so much. Consider the generation currently in charge—the baby boomers (born 1943-60), whose time in power has been marked by rising extremism and polarization as well as historically low productivity. Luckily for the country, our research shows that a Generation X Congress is likely to be a very different kind of governing body—one that will have its own issues, to be sure, but that will cope well in crises and be more productive and more flexible than its forebears. We still have several years before this new normal will take effect. Ryan might hold the gavel, but Generation X (born 1961-81) currently holds only about 37 percent of the seats in the House and a quarter of the seats in the Senate. Projections show that Gen X is unlikely to win its first majority in the House until the 2018 election cycle. And it could happen as late as 2024 if Gen Xers shy away from running or if incumbents in their late 70s and 80s continue to postpone retirement. Until then (unless voters in 2016 unexpectedly decide it’s time to retire members of Congress over age 55), Ryan will be managing a chamber and a caucus still controlled by baby boomers—who will prevent him from inaugurating a new era of productivity and pragmatism. ***

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When some generations come to power, they transform the nation for the better. The so-called Greatest Generation (born 1901-24) obtained its first congressional majority in 1953, coinciding with the start of the Eisenhower administration. Leaders from this generation built our national highway system, founded Medicare and Medicaid, established groundbreaking environmental protections and passed historic civil rights laws. At the height of their power in the 1960s and early 1970s, congresses led by leaders such as Lyndon Johnson, Carl Albert and Mike Mansfield were among the most ambitious and accomplished in our nation’s history. Some generational transformations are visible only in retrospect, and their merits remain open to debate. The silent generation (born 1925-42) won its first majority in the 1976 elections. The year its members assumed power, 1977, seems unremarkable except to those who know their history. Consider the explosion of inequality over the past few decades, the declining influence of labor and the rise of the business lobby in Washington, along with the Republican Party’s long march to the right. All of these trends trace their origins to political and policy changes that started in the year 1977. Newly empowered members of what we’ve dubbed the “http://www.firstpersonpolitics.com/sound-of- silents-how-the-silent-majority-put-big-money-in-charge-of-washington/silent majority” helped initiate every one of them. On a more constructive note, the silent generation’s technocratic skill, parliamentary savvy and conciliatory style set a new gold standard for leadership in Washington in the 1980s. Ted Kennedy, George Mitchell and John McCain—all legislators known for their ability to work with members of the opposing party—come from this generation. But the era of policy complexity, objective expertise and negotiated compromise the silent generation once championed didn’t last. The anti-establishment baby-boom generation acquired its first congressional majority in 1995. The 1994 wave election, known as the “Republican Revolution,” ended four decades of uninterrupted Democratic control of the House and swept boomers into power. Speaker Newt Gingrich and the freshmen class of 1995 inaugurated the present era of ideological and partisan polarization, government shutdowns, leveraged brinkmanship and gridlocked, do-nothing congresses. These trends, driven by the intense concentration of radical boomer individualism within the Republican Party, have reached new extremes as boomer power in Washington has peaked in the past few It’s true that Ryan and the most recalcitrant congressional factions managed to pass a spending bill in December without shutting down the government, though they came close several times. But, the spending bill enraged the Republican conservative base, and Ryan is walking on thin ice. I’m not optimistic that the kind of changes he—and undoubtedly many others—would like to see will take hold until a new generation takes power. One man—even the most powerful man in the chamber—isn’t enough to challenge the congressional character of the boomer majority, which, as with any generation at the height of its power, is too entrenched to allow a new political culture to emerge. Still, this highly destructive political culture is in its terminal phase, which makes us wonder: What will come next? To see what kinds of changes might be in store for Congress over the next few decades, it’s instructive to examine the last time a generation similar to Gen X in character and temperament came to power. According to Strauss and Howe’s generational theory, there are four basic types of generations: idealist, reactive, civic and adaptive. Idealist generations are expressive, narcissistic and principled; reactive generations are competitive, cynical and tough; civic generations are cooperative, ambitious and rational; and adaptive generations are anxious, sensitive and sophisticated. A generation’s “type” is established in childhood, determined by the prevailing attitudes towards childrearing at the time. By the time a generation reaches adolescence, has its first coming of age experiences and begins to form its political consciousness, the cohort’s instincts and

9/20/16 143 expectations toward authority are already very deeply engrained—as are a wide variety of other characteristics and predilections with lasting implications for the generation’s long-term development and civic potential. In short, generations are formed by the way they are born and raised, endowed in childhood with generation-wide traits that reveal themselves in an astonishing variety of ways throughout a cohort’s life cycle.

Generations and Partisanship | Pew Research Center

A Different Look at Generations and Partisanship Over the past decade, there has been a pronounced age gap in American politics. Younger Americans have been the Democratic Party’s strongest supporters in both vote preferences and partisanship, while older Americans have been the most reliably Republican. The Pew Research Center’s report earlier this month on partisan identification found that 51% of Millennials (18-33 years old in 2014) identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, while 35% identify as Republicans or lean Republican. By contrast, 47% of those in the Silent Generation (ages 69-86 in 2014) say they are Republican or lean Republican; 43% affiliate with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic. The partisan leanings of Baby Boomers and Generation X fall in between; both generations favor the Democratic Party, but to a lesser extent than Millennials. As the Pew Research Center has often noted, it is not always the case that younger generations are more Democratic. Two decades ago, the youngest adults – Generation X – were the most Republican age cohort on balance, while the oldest – the Greatest Generation– were the most Democratic. In 1994, 47% of Gen Xers (then ages 18-29) identified with or leaned toward the Republican Party, while 42% identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic. And members of the Greatest Generation (then ages 67-81) — favored the Democratic Party over the GOP (49% to 42%). As illustrated in more detail in a 2011 Pew Research Center report on generations, the political climate of early adulthood may continue to influence the political tilt of a generation throughout its life span. For example, members of the Greatest Generation, who came of age during the Great Depression and the Franklin Roosevelt administration, carried strong Democratic tendencies throughout their adulthood. But generations cover a long period of time. Generations typically encompass a cohort of people born over a 15- to- 18-year span; for example, the Baby Boom generation includes people born between 1946 and 1964. As a result, the formative political experiences of the youngest and oldest members of each generation can differ considerably, and these differences may be reflected in divergent political attitudes and partisanship within generations. Using the more than 25,000 interviews conducted over the course of 2014 that allowed for a deep dive into party identification released April 7, we are able to see variations within generations as well as between them. The accompanying graph shows partisan leanings in 2014 for adults based on the year they were born. The line shows the percentage identifying or leaning Democratic minus the percentage identifying or leaning Republican. The further left the line on the graph, the larger the Democratic advantage for that year; the further right, the larger the Republican advantage.

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The overall pattern reflects generational differences in party identification. Millennials generally are more likely than other generations to lean Democratic. The Silent Generation is more likely to lean Republican. The partisan preferences of the two generations in between – Generation X and the Baby Boomers – are closer to the average partisan leanings of the public; in Pew Research Center political surveys conducted in 2014, Democrats had an 8.8% overall advantage in leaned party identification. But the differences within generations are as notable as the differences among them. Older Baby Boomers have consistently had a more Democratic imprint than younger Boomers. Older Boomers were born in the late 1940s and early 1950s and came of voting age in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during Richard Nixon’s presidency. Younger Boomers were born later (in the mid-to-late 1950s and early 1960s) and largely came of age in the 1970s and early 1980s, during the presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Older Gen Xers are more Republican (and less Democratic) than younger Gen Xers, whose strong Democratic leanings more closely resemble those of older Millennials. Millennials of all ages favor the Democratic Party by large margins, though the party’s advantage in leaned identification is greater among the oldest Millennials. Among Millennials born between 1981 and 1986 (28 to 33 in 2014), the Democratic Party leads by 18 points (51% Dem/lean Dem, 33% Rep/lean Rep). Among the youngest adult Millennials (18 to 23 in 2014) the Democratic Party’s advantage is a still sizeable, though slightly narrower, 14 points (51% Dem/lean Dem, 37% Rep/lean Rep). To some extent, the more Democratic tendencies of younger generations reflect differences in racial and ethnic composition, with non-whites, who tend to be more Democratic in their partisan affiliation and vote choices, making up a greater share of those in younger generations. The accompanying graph shows partisan leanings in 2014 for whites based on their year of birth. Overall, Republicans held an 8.6% lead in leaned partisan identification among whites; this advantage is seen across all generations of whites – except Millennials. However, while older white Millennials are substantially more Democratic than whites in other generations, the partisan balance among the youngest white Millennials is closer to the average balance among whites of all ages. How Generations Vote Differences in vote preferences within generations are as wide as – if not wider than – the differences in partisan affiliation. For example, over the last several decades, as measured in Pew Research Center pre-election surveys, older Boomers have consistently been more likely to vote Democratic than younger members of that generation, while older Gen Xers have consistently been more

9/20/16 145 supportive of Republican candidates than younger Gen Xers. Although the combined sample sizes in these pre- election polls do not allow for examination by individual year of birth, cohorts that comprise a few years – based on the president when each cohort turned 18 – are revealing. In the last presidential election, for instance, Boomers who came of age during the Nixon administration (born between 1951 and 1956) favored Barack Obama over Mitt Romney to a greater degree than people who were slightly older or younger. Those who came of age during the Clinton administration (those born 1975 to 1982, mostly younger Xers) were significantly more likely to favor Obama than the national average, while those who turned 18 during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush (primarily older Xers and younger Boomers) were more Republican in their preferences. As of the 2012 election, both older and younger Millennials favored Obama by wide margins. Those who came of age during Bush’s presidency (those born 1983 to 1990, older Millennials) favored Obama over Romney by 19 percentage points more than the national average. Those who came of age during Obama’s first term (born 1991 to 1994, mostly younger Millennials) voted for Obama by an even wider margin. The youngest adult Millennials today (those currently ages 18-20, born 1995 to 1997) have come of age during Obama’s second term, and were not old enough to vote in the 2012 election

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 The American Dream—In Living Color  Return to Top moralfoundations.org Moral Foundations Theory was created by a group of social and cultural psychologists (see us here) to understand why morality varies so much across cultures yet still shows so many similarities and recurrent themes. In brief, the theory proposes that several innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of “intuitive ethics.” Each culture then constructs virtues, narratives, and institutions on top of these foundations, thereby creating the unique moralities we see around the world, and conflicting within nations too. The five foundations for which we think the evidence is best are: 1) Care/harm: This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance. 2) Fairness/cheating: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy. [Note: In our original conception, Fairness included concerns about equality, which are more strongly endorsed by political liberals. However, as we reformulated the theory in 2011 based on new data, we emphasize proportionality, which is endorsed by everyone, but is more strongly endorsed by conservatives] 3) Loyalty/betrayal: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it's "one for all, and all for one." 4) Authority/subversion: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions. 5) Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions). We think there are several other very good candidates for "foundationhood," especially: 6) Liberty/oppression: This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty. Its intuitions are often in tension with those of the authority foundation. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor. We report some preliminary work on this potential foundation inthis paper, on the psychology of and liberty. Much of our present research involves applying the theory to political "cultures" such as those of liberals and conservatives. The current American culture war, we have found, can be seen as arising from the fact that liberals try to create a morality relying primarily on the Care/harm foundation, with additional support from the Fairness/cheating and Liberty/oppression foundations. Conservatives, especially religious conservatives, use all six foundations, including Loyatly/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation. The culture war in the 1990s and early 2000s centered on the legitimacy of these latter three foundations. In 2009, with the rise of the Tea Party, the culture war shifted away from social issues such as abortion and homosexuality, and became more about differing conceptions of fairness (equality vs. proportionality) and liberty (is government the oppressor or defender?). The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are both populist movements that talk a great deal about fairness and liberty, but in very different ways, as you can see here, for the Tea Party, and here, for OWS. You can find out your own moral foundations profile at www.YourMorals.org. The theory was first developed from a simultaneous review of current evolutionary thinking about morality and cross-cultural research on virtues (reported in Haidt & Joseph, 2004 [request paper]). The theory is an extension of Richard Shweder's theory of the "three ethics" commonly used around the world when people talk about morality. (See this article: Shweder, R. A., Much, N. C., Mahapatra, M., & Park, L.[1997]. The "big three" of morality (autonomy, community, and divinity), and the "big three" explanations of suffering.) The theory was also strongly influenced by Alan Fiske's relational models theory.

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To learn more about MFT:  For the most complete and accessible overview of the theory, read The Righteous Mind,  If you just want to read about the foundations theselves, here is Chapter 7 of The Righteous Mind.  For a more academic overview of the theory, including the criteria for calling something a "foundation," see this review paper.  To see all of our academic articles, visit our Publications page  To get an overview of MFT and how it applies to American politics, watch the video below (or view it here if it doesn't play below)

Do you live in a bubble? A quiz Do you live in a bubble? There exists a new upper class that’s completely disconnected from the average white American and American culture at large, argues Charles Murray, a libertarian political scientist and author. Take this 25-question quiz, based on a similar one published in Murray’s 2012 book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010,” to find out just how thick your bubble is. Share this quiz on social media to see how your score compares with your friend group. What does your bubble score say about you? Charles Murray explains. The scoring of the archetypes reflects a few realities about socioeconomic background and the bubble. If you grew up in a working-class neighborhood, you are going to have a high score even if you are now an investment banker living on Park Avenue. Your present life may be completely encased in the bubble, but you brought a lot of experience into the bubble that will always be part of your understanding of the world. Growing up in a middle-class neighborhood also scores points for you on several questions, and this too is reflected in the real-world experiences that people bring to their adult lives in the new upper class. But middle class covers a wide variety of environments, and the degree to which people who grew up in the middle class seal themselves off from that world after they reach the new upper class also varies widely, which is reflected in the wide range of possible scores. Having grown up in an upper-middle-class neighborhood inevitably means some restriction to your exposure to average American life. If you grew up in an exclusive part of town such as Chicago’s North Shore or Northwest Washington, you or your parents had to take proactive steps to force you out of the bubble. That sort of thing happens, but even then it is often artificial. For example, your parents made you help out in a soup kitchen during high school, and you volunteered for Habitat for Humanity during college. In those cases, you might have had brief exposure to some of the most downtrodden people and disorganized neighborhoods, but you still have little idea what life is like in an ordinary working-class or middle-class neighborhood.

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