Are American political differences due to regional cultural attitutes of settlers

In The Maps That Show That City vs. Country Is Not Our Political Fault Line Colin Woodard argues that the divide in American politics can best be explained by the different European cultures that settled various areas of the USA.

Sectionalism isn’t, and never has been, as simple as North versus South or an effete and domineering East against a rugged, freedom-minded West. Rather, our true regional fissures can be traced back to the contrasting ideals of the distinct European colonial cultures that first took root on the eastern and southern rims of what is now the United States, and then spread across much of the continent in mutually exclusive settlement bands, laying down the institutions, symbols and cultural norms later arrivals would encounter and, by and large, assimilate into.

Kansas vs California: a tale of tax

In Donnie, We’re Not In Kansas Anymore David Cay Johnston compares the impact of tax cuts in Kansas and tax rises in California on their respective economies.

Since the tax changes, the California economy has grown 1.7 times faster than the Kansas economy. Perhaps even more significant, California grew its share of the national economy from 13.8 % of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product to 14.2%. Kansas stayed flat at 0.8% of national GDP.

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Further west, in tax-raising California, jobs increased much faster. While jobs grew in Kansas by 3.8%, in California the lift was 11.8%.

Fake News and Pizzagate

In Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal Amanda Robb examines the "web of conspiracy theorists, Russian operatives, Trump campaigners and Twitter bots who manufactured the 'news' that Hillary Clinton ran a pizza-restaurant child-sex ring".

The making of Dylann Roof

A powerful piece of writing by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah: A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof.

“What are you?” a member of the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston asked at the trial of the white man who killed eight of her fellow black parishioners and their pastor. “What kind of subhuman miscreant could commit such evil?... What happened to you, Dylann?”
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah spent months in South Carolina searching for an answer to those questions—speaking with Roof’s mother, father, friends, former teachers, and victims’ family members, all in an effort to unlock what went into creating one of the coldest killers of our time.

The rise of the alt-right

In If you want to know how the alt-right upended American politics, read Kill All Normies Sean Illing interviews Irish academic and author Angela Nagle on her book Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right.

The GOP and Authoritarianism

Jonathan Chait on how The GOP’s Age of Authoritarianism Has Only Just Begun. Note this was written before Trump won the US election.

Why aren't people protesting against gerrymandering?

Brian Klaas poses the question Gerrymandering is the biggest obstacle to genuine democracy in the United States. So why is no one protesting?

Most of the 2016 USA election results were pretty typical

In Why did the 2016 election look so much like the 2012 election? Ezra Klein reports on work shoing that most voters in the USA vote according to partisan identity, not policies or candidates.

A few months ago, I stopped by Larry Bartels’s office at Vanderbilt University. Bartels, alongside Christopher Achen, is the author of Democracy for Realists, which I’d become a bit obsessed with. The book argues that decades of social science evidence has shattered the idealistic case made for how voters in democracies act, and the reality is that “even the most informed voters typically make choices not on the basis of policy preferences or ideology, but on the basis of who they are — their social identities.”
I sat down with Bartels shortly after the 2016 election, and I had a dozen ideas for how his book helped explain the unusual results. But he wasn’t buying my premise. To him, the election looked pretty typical.
The Democratic candidate won 89 percent of Democratic voters, and the Republican candidate won 90 percent of Republican voters. The Democrat won minorities, women, and the young; the Republican won whites, men, and the old. The Democrat won a few percentage points more of the two-party vote than the Republican, just as had happened four years before, and four years before that. If you had known nothing about the candidates or conditions in the 2016 election but had been asked to predict the results, these might well have been the results you’d predicted. So what was there to explain?

Most of Trump's supporters were well off

Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu write in It’s time to bust the myth: Most Trump voters were not working class that most of Trump's supporters were relatively affluent:

Among people who said they voted for Trump in the general election, 35 percent had household incomes under $50,000 per year (the figure was also 35 percent among non-Hispanic whites), almost exactly the percentage in NBC’s March 2016 survey. Trump’s voters weren’t overwhelmingly poor. In the general election, like the primary, about two thirds of Trump supporters came from the better-off half of the economy.

Trump's win and misleading maps

One of the interesting features of the 2016 US presidential elections is that Trump won most of the counties (2,649 to 503 according to Time), but Clinton won the most votes (by around 3 million). When you see a map showing the counties Trump won, you see a sea of red. According to an article from Chris Wilson of Time, cited below, if you add up the size of the counties, Trump won something like 75.6% of the US's land mass, excluding water. Reportedly Trump loves this map because it seems to show his "yuge" victory.  The thing is, most of these counties have small populations. This tends to be because they're predominately rural. On the other hand Clinton won most of the urban counties with large populations. So the map is in many ways misleading.

In Here's the Election Map President Trump Should Hang in the West Wing Chris Wilson provides us with an alternate map.

A simpler way is just to place a dot over each county that is proportional in area to the number of votes that the winner received, like so:

Here's a screen shot of the map:

Note, please visit the above site to see the full interactive map. It allows you to move the mouse over a dot to see the tally. Have a read of Wilson's article while you're there. He explains things much better than I do.

When is something terrorism?

I don't know. But apparently you're more likely to be a terrorist if you're Muslim, and have darker skin.


Arwa Mahdawi writes in How a neo-Nazi turned Islamist flipped terror narratives upside down

There are lots of ways to be a disaffected, disenfranchised young man. You can spout anonymous abuse online. You can shoot up a school. You can bomb abortion clinics in the name of being pro-life. You can kill black people peacefully praying at church, in the name of white supremacy. You can murder teenagers singing joyfully along at a pop concert, in the name of Isis and Allah.

What you are called, when you do those things, varies. Sometimes you’re a criminal. Sometimes you’re a terrorist. Sometimes you’re a mental health statistic. How you are treated, when you do those things, varies. Sometimes you’re headline news around the world for days; you make an ignominious mark on the history books. Sometimes you’re a few paragraphs in the local papers, and barely make it into the national press.

There are a few key variables which determine what you are called and how you are treated when you commit a deadly act designed to cause widespread fear. Namely: how many people you killed; where you killed them; whether you shouted “Allahu Akbar” as you killed them and the colour of your skin. The whiter your skin, it seems, the more likely you are to be classified as a criminal rather than a terrorist.

She then cites the case of the young white supremacist Dylann Roof who killed nine African Americans in a church in South Carolina. He was convicted on 33 federal charges. These included murder and hate crimes, but not terrorism.

Mahdawi then discusses Devon Arthurs. Arthurs had been a white supremacist but converted to Islam. He killed his two roommates because they reportedly disrespected his religion and, he claimed, were planning a terrorst act. Police investigations in the caes led to the subsequent arrest of another roommate, Brandon Russell. Russell, a Florida national guardsman had been storing explosives in his garage and a photo of Timothy McVeigh in his bedroom. He's facing a charge of “possessing an unregistered destructive device and unlawful storage of explosive material”.

Mahdawi then looks at the statistics on domestic terrorism in the US:

According a recent report, A Dark and Constant Rage, from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), rightwing extremists have been responsible for planning at least 150 acts of terror in the United States over the past 25 years. They’ve killed 255 people in these attacks and injured 600 more. White supremacists and anti-government extremists are the biggest subset of rightwing extremists (which also includes groups such as anti-abortionists and anti-immigrant extremists) and are responsible for 85% of these incidents.

However, as the ADL points out, while “rightwing extremists have been one of the largest and most consistent sources of domestic terror incidents in the United States for many years”, this fact “has not gotten the attention it deserves.” What’s more, “it has garnered far less notice than … Islamic terrorism”.

Can you imagine how much more press Brandon Russell’s basement full of explosives would have received if it had belonged to a man called Mohammed with a picture of a 9/11 bomber in his bedroom?

Rightwing terrorism doesn’t just get less media attention than Islamist terrorism – it gets less attention in policy. As the ADL report notes, the US still doesn’t have a federal domestic terrorism statute and “federal spending on training law enforcement on issues such as rightwing violence and terrorism is extremely low”. This is clearly ridiculous. 

Then there's the case of Jeremy Joseph Christian. Jason Wilson reports on this case in Suspect in Portland double murder posted white supremacist material online:

Police in Portland, Oregon, have charged a white supremacist with a double murder and hate crimes, after he allegedly cut the throats of two passengers and stabbed another on a commuter train late on Friday afternoon.

According to police, while riding the MAX train in suburban northeast Portland, Jeremy Joseph Christian, 35, began “yelling various remarks that would best be characterized as hate speech toward a variety of ethnicities and religions”.

When fellow passengers attempted to intervene, Christian stabbed three of them.

Two of them died.

So would this be terrorism if Christian had been a Muslim and had shouted Allah Akbar as he stabbed the three people? 

Features of working class Trump voters

In 12 Features of White Working-Class Trump Voters Confirm Depressed and Traumatized Multitudes Voted for Him Steven Rosenfeld identifies some of the features that were more common amongst working class Trump voters than amongst the general public.

Looking to the past, not the future. Feeling lost, resenting immigrants. Feeling broke, picked on. Self-medicating, rejecting education. Wanting a rule-breaking leader to end the misery.

These are some of the characteristics of white working-class voters who were three times more likely to support Donald Trump in the 2016 election, according to an expanded analysis of more than 3,000 people surveyed before and after the election by PRRI/The Atlantic of white Americans who are marked by “cultural dislocation.”

News Organisations Inadvertently Spreading False Facts Even as They Refute Them

In How News Organizations Inadvertently Spread "Alternative Facts" Gleb Tsipursky explains that many readers will tend to believe President Donald Trump's claims, even when they aren't true, because of the way the media presents them.

Behavioral science suggests that despite Trump offering no substantive facts for his claim, the mainstream media’s current coverage will get him what he craves. Fortunately, we can use the same research to reframe the narrative to help truth trump Trump’s evidence-free accusations.

This is because many people only glance at the headlines rather than reading the full reports. Tsipursky suggests an alternate way of presenting the stories:

Reframing the media coverage of Trump’s claims, using techniques informed by behavioral science, would disincentivize Trump from making such baseless statements, instead of rewarding him. Rather than focusing on relating the details of the specific claims made by Trump, news headlines and introductory paragraphs could foreground the pattern of our President systematically making accusations lacking evidence.

For instance, in the case of this specific news item, AP News could have run the headline “Trump Delivers Another Accusation Without Evidence, This Time Against Obama.” CNN could have introduced the story by focusing on Trump’s pattern of making serial allegations of immoral and illegal actions by his political opponents without any evidence, focusing this time on his predecessor. Then, deeper in the article where the shallow skimmers do not reach, the story could have detailed the allegations made by Trump. This style of media coverage would make Trump less inclined to make such claims, as he would not get the impact he wants.

4chan and Trump

Dale Beran writes about 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump.

Trump’s younger supporters know he’s an incompetent joke; in fact, that’s why they support him.

Attitudes to immigration and diversity in America

In Immigrant Shock: Can California Predict the Nation’s Future? Emily Badger writes about parallels between the political backlash against growing diversity in California between 1980 and 2000, and in other communities at the moment. The backlash is most notable in smaller communities where changes are more noticeable.

Sociological studies suggest that increasing contact between groups can yield familiarity and tolerance. But it can also unnerve, especially in communities where that rapid change is most visible — and when politicians stand to gain by exploiting it. California lashed out at diversity before embracing it.

However, this only becomes a political issue if a politician attempts to exploit the change, as Pete Wilson did in California in 1994, and as Donald Trump is doing now.

California’s example suggests that the very demographic trend Democrats believe will benefit them in the long run could aid Republicans in the near term. At least, that remains true so long as Republican candidates like Mr. Trump or Mr. Wilson position themselves in opposition to immigration or policies perceived as aiding minorities.

Mr. Trump fared particularly well in the parts of the country where demographic change is accelerating. Scholars say that it’s the change in diversity that helps explain how a community responds. So an influx of Hispanics into Chicago may not be noticeable, but a few new immigrant families into small-town Pennsylvania is.

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A Wall Street Journal analysis found during the primaries that the most rapidly diversifying counties in a cluster of Midwestern states were more likely to vote for Mr. Trump.

In the general election, voters were more likely to shift to Mr. Trump in the counties with the strongest growth in the Hispanic and nonwhite populations since 2000, according to research from a coming book by Ryan Enos, a Harvard political scientist. It appears in survey data, Mr. Enos argues, that this shift in 2016 was driven by whites who had previously voted Democratic — and who don’t appear to have responded in the same way to rising diversity before Mr. Trump’s campaign.

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“When I talk to people about their concerns about immigration, they often talk about language,” said Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.“They talk about being uncomfortable having to ‘press 1 for English,’ or seeing Spanish-language signs. They talk about the feeling of dispossession that comes from having lived for a long time in a community and seeing it change.”

One noticable point from the article, this is much more of an issue where there's segregation.

There is no neat tipping point, no level of diversity beyond which the backlash inevitably gives way to greater tolerance. The volume of political bluster matters. So does the level of segregation, because diversity doesn’t necessarily mean communities are integrating. So does the kind of contact that occurs when different groups bump up against one another.

Research from the 1950s found that integrated military units reduced prejudice and stereotyping. And studies since then have shown that soldiers have more interracial friendships than typical civilians (as veterans, they’re also more likely to buy homes in more integrated areas). But soldiers engage in a rare kind of contact: They live together, eat together and work together on common goals.

That’s a different kind of contact than occurs when we pass strangers in the supermarket aisle, or encounter Spanish-language signs. And even in the most demographically diverse cities, there is often little integration of schools, neighborhoods and workplaces.

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In Mr. Enos’s earlier work, he found that white voters in the most segregated counties nationally were five to six percentage points less likely to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 than white voters in the least segregated places, with a similar effect within states. That suggests that the nature of contact matters not just for disarming prejudice but for shaping politics. And often, when new groups come into a community, they immediately segregate.

It's interesting that attitudes soften over time:

In another study, Mr. Enos found that the mere presence of a few Spanish speakers on a train platform was enough to raise anti-immigrant sentiment among commuters in the white, liberal Boston suburbs. But as the same Spanish speakers kept appearing over two weeks, those attitudes softened. The commuters began to smile at one another.

To reiterate, this only becomes an issue when you have a politician trying to exploit it. I think this also helps explain the Brexit vote.

Steve Bannon appointed to the National Security Council

David Ferguson writes that Trump boots top officials — but includes Steve Bannon — in reshuffled National Security Council.

The Post reported that Bannon has been given a regular seat on the National Security Council’s principals committee, which will include the nation’s highest ranking security officials, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State.

Unlike previous presidential administrations, Trump’s Saturday memo specified that the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs will only attend principals committee meetings that pertain to their specific “responsibilities and expertise.”

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The former Goldman Sachs executive presided over the expansion of Breitbart.com from a fringe right-wing web community to a sprawling hub of the so-called “alt-right,” a collection of white nationalists, racists, anti-feminists and neo-Nazis.

On the council, Bannon will be privy to some of the country’s most highly classified military and intelligence secrets. Typically membership on the council is reserved to the president and key administrators and is, as columnist and author Dan Froomkin said Saturday night “off limits to political hacks.”

Does Bannon want to destroy the US Government?

Ronald Radosh writes that Steve Bannon, Trump's Top Guy, Told Me He Was 'A Leninist' Who Wants To ‘Destroy the State’.

German genocide in Southwest Africa and the Holocaust

In Germany’s extermination program for black Africans, a template for the Holocaust Edwin Black documents how many of the techniques the NAZIs used against Jews were first deployed by Germany against the native people of Southwest Africa.

'Subhumans,' 'cattle car transports,' even the 'Final Solution' - all these and other Nazi concepts have their sinister antecedents in Africa in the early 1900s. And the list of the prominent Germans there who went on to shape Nazism is long and execrable.

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Decades before the Nazis turned to the Jews, German colonialists in Southwest Africa – now Namibia – dehumanized, built death camps for, and slaughtered tens of thousands of tribespeople in a systematic genocide. Here, Edwin Black reveals the full horrors of an eerie and odious precursor of the Shoah, and its legacy in the US

Black also describes eugenics and forced sterialisations in the US prior to World War II. It seems that proponents of eugenics in Germany and the US were influenced by each other.

Black also mentions the an unintended consequence of the eugenics and discrimination programs in Germany and the US. Many highly skilled German Jews migrated from Germany to the US because of NAZI victimisation. However, at the time there was considerable anti-semetic feelings in the USA. Jews as well as blacks were often discriminated against. So many German Jewish academics ended up as teachers at black colleges.

The influx of German-Jewish academics offered an unexpected stimulus to many African Americans’ educational experiences during the formative years of the pre-Civil Rights era. Refugee professors helped set the stage for the intellectual movement to come.

Among the students who credit the inspiration of German-Jewish professors is Joyce Ladner, who went on to organize civil rights protests with Medgar Evers and who would later rise to the leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] and the Congress on Racial Equality [CORE].

Ladner’s mentor was Ernst Borinski, a Jewish sociologist who arrived from Germany in 1938 and eventually taught at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. His sociology student Ladner excelled and ultimately became a board member of the American Sociological Association as well as interim president of Howard University. In 1996, Washingtonian Magazine named her “Washingtonian of the Year.”

As for Borinski, he is remembered for fighting Jim Crow all his years in Mississippi. When he died, he was buried on the Tougaloo Campus.

His tombstone reads simply: “Ernst Borinski, Inspiring Teacher.” Ladner remembered Borinski’s devotion to overturning segregation, recalling his “affinity with blacks because they experienced a similar persecution.” The Mississippi chapter of the ACLU still grants the “Ernst Borinski Civil Libertarian of the Year Award.”

Another African American student is Dr. Joycelyn Elders, who went from being mentored by a German-Jewish professor to a distinguished career in medicine. In 1993, she became Surgeon General of the United States. Later, Elders reflected on the indispensable years as student of a German-Jewish émigré. “I can read almost any German scientific literature,” Elders told the Wall Street Journal. “The German-Jewish professors had a tremendous impact on young blacks in the South,” summed up African American attorney Jim McWilliams, who attended Talladega College. “They exposed us to new music, art, and academic programs.”

Did Putin use the left and the right against Clinton?

In How Putin Played the Far Left Casey Michel argues that Russia assisted both the far left and alt-right in order to undermine support for Hillary Clinton.

Nate Silver on what reporters got wrong about the US 2016 presidential election.

In The Real Story Of 2016 Nate Silver details "What reporters — and lots of data geeks, too — missed about the election, and what they’re still getting wrong."