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What Trump’s Surging Popularity Says About the GOP Base

The word “fascist” has been abused by the left over the years. But a look at Trump’s rhetoric shows scary parallels.

2015-07-27 chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: Salon, via AlterNet

Author: Connor Lynch

Emphasis Mine

(N.B.: about 30 years ago I read in the Humanist magazine that religious fundamentalism appealed to those who liked simple answers to complex questions. Given that, we might expect that voter block to be drawn to the Donald…)

In the political discussion of today, there always comes a risk of being discounted as a crackpot when using a word like “fascist” to describe a political opponent. The word, much like “socialist,” has been so abused since the fall of fascism that it lost its meaning quite some time ago. Comparisons of modern leaders to Hitler tend to be completely void of any substance, and there is even an Internet adage, “Godwin’s law,” that says, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”

In a recent article by Jeffrey Tucker, however, it is argued, quite justly in my opinion, that Donald Trump, whether he knows it or not, is a fascist (or is at least acting like one). Much like Mussolini and Hitler, Trump is a demagogue dedicated to riling up the people (particularly conservatives) with race baiting, traditionalism and strongman tough and, according to polls, it’s working — for now. Tucker writes:

“Trump has tapped into it, absorbing unto his own political ambitions every conceivable resentment (race, class, sex, religion, economic) and promising a new order of things under his mighty hand.”

No doubt about it, Donald Trump has decided to stir the pot, and, as Tucker says, he seems to be running for a CEO position, rather than president of a nation. Trump discusses Iran and Mexico as if they were competing corporations, and says that, as president, or CEO, he will drive them into the ground, make them file for bankruptcy — something Trump legitimately knows a thing or two about. Trump, of course, is largely taken as a joke, and most rational commentators assume he is doing this for publicity — which he is certainly getting.

The thing is, his style — full of race baiting, xenophobia and belligerent nationalism — is not unique to Trump; he is simply the most blatant and vocal about it. There’s a reason he’s leading in the GOP polls: the party’s base likes what he’s saying. The people are angry about illegal immigrants murdering white women (anyone who has followed Bill O’Reilly over the past week knows what I’m talking about), homosexuals destroying the tradition of marriage, and so on. Much like fascism reacted to modernity and social progress in the early 20th century, right-wingers are reacting angrily to social progress of the new century. (Of course, there has been no economic progress, which is why the left is also angry.)

So is the GOP becoming the new fascist party? That might be an exaggeration, but it does share many similar features, and Trump, with his demagogic style, is simply exposing how very similar the passions of the GOP base are to the passions of fascism of the early 20th century.

The modern GOP is a party of unwavering and dogmatic patriotism mixed with traditionalism and intolerance. The social progression we have been witnessing over the past decade in America, most clearly with the acceptance of the LGBT community, seems to be triggering a reactionary movement on the right. We see this most recently with the religious freedom controversies and the angry protests of the Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling. Fascism of the early 20th century was also largely a negative reaction to modernity (in a social sense at least; fascists did tend to worship technology). Communism, which was the ultimate evil to fascists, promoted the destruction of traditional institutions such as the family, the bourgeois state and organized religion. In some ways, fascism was the conservative answer to communism — the defender of tradition.

It was also a very contradictory ideology, as Umberto Eco describes in his essay, “Ur-Fascism: “Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions. Can one conceive of a truly totalitarian movement that was able to combine monarchy with revolution, the Royal Army with Mussolini’s personal milizia, the grant of privileges to the Church with state education extolling violence, absolute state control with a free market?”

The modern GOP is also somewhat contradictory. Its followers, for example, promote free market ideals and despise welfare for the poor, while exclaiming the worship of Jesus Christ, whose teachings are almost socialistic.

Overall, however, the GOP has a pretty straightforward idea of its platform. Like fascism, tradition is holy — the tradition of marriage, family values, Christian ideals. Controversy over the confederate flag has also been based largely on tradition — a tradition that the South cannot give up. Another similarity is its belligerence. After news of the Iran deal agreement came out last week, the GOP faithfuls were outraged that America would actually practice diplomacy with an Islamic country in the Middle East. President Obama responded to criticism from the right by saying,

“I challenge those who are objecting to this agreement to, Number One, read the agreement, explain specifically where they think… and then present an alternative. If the alternative is we should bring Iran to heel through military force, then those critics should say so.”

The GOP alternative would indeed be military force, as it has been many times before. (This is not to say the Democratic party is not also a belligerent force, which it is. But clearly not as outright hawkish as the GOP).

Beyond these values, the GOP tends to preach and practice intolerance, xenophobia, nationalism and anti-democratic values (i.e., voter suppression). In many ways, the GOP is anti-enlightenment, and embraces passion over reason. The dangerous denial of climate change and other scientific facts seems to come out of the corrupt alliance of anti-intellectual traditionalism and corporate influence (i.e., oil and gas).

Now, the fact of the matter is that fascism died in the mid-20th century. The GOP are obviously not fascists, but they share a family resemblance. As stated above, the base have many similar passions — traditionalism, nationalism, intolerance towards immigrants or minorities. They react with hostility towards the social progress of others and largely believe in a ‘survival of the fittest’ ideology.

Giovanni Gentile, the “philosopher of fascism” and ghostwriter for Mussolini, said of the definition of fascism in the Encyclopedia of Italiana: “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” This definition may very well fit the GOP ideology: a kind of corporate fascism, where large corporations have the ultimate power; where the politicians spew a hateful, intolerant ideology based on “traditional” values, on a platform funded by corporate interests, elected by the people to serve those very corporate interests; and deny environmental degradation because it would be unprofitable for the funders to do anything about it, using the anti-intellectual hostility to convince the people that it is nothing more than a left-wing conspiracy.

Donald Trump is no doubt a wealthy buffoon — but he is a buffoon who understands the underlying passions of the GOP base. Fascist leaders also understood these passions, and knew how to exploit them for political gain. These passions may seem irrational, but they should not be underestimated.

Conor Lynch is a writer and journalist living in New York City. His work has appeared on Salon, The Hill, AlterNet, and openDemocracy. Follow him on Twitter.

See: http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/what-trumps-surging-popularity-says-about-gop-base?akid=13333.123424.h42YOV&rd=1&src=newsletter1039927&t=5

How Did This Monster Get Created? The Decades of GOP Lies That Brought Us Donald Trump

Donald Trump did not happen overnight. He’s the product of a dangerous, cynical GOP strategy that dates back years.

2015-07-20 chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: Salon, Via AlterNet

Author: Heather Cox Richardson

Emphasis Mine

How did America get to such a place that someone like Donald Trump can command a lead in the Republican primaries? Trump is the product of a deliberate Republican strategy, adopted by Richard Nixon’s people in 1968, to attract voters with an apocalyptic redemption story rather than reasoned argument. It has taken almost 50 years, but we have finally arrived at the culmination of postmodern politics in which Republican leaders use words to create their own reality.

After World War II, President Dwight Eisenhower and men like New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller led the Republican Party with policies based in reasoned argument. They used the government to regulate the economy and to promote social welfare, much as Democrats did, although with a philosophy that emphasized social unity rather than class conflict. The policies of these “Me Too” Republicans infuriated Movement Conservatives on the far right, who insisted that all government activism was communism. In 1964, Movement Conservative spokesman Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination when Rockefeller’s womanizing spectacularly imploded his candidacy. Movement Conservatives used their hero’s nomination to advance a new kind of politics.

America’s moderate consensus was enormously popular, but Phyllis Schlafly, the president of the Illinois Federation of Republican Women, flat-out denied that reality. In her famous book “A Choice Not an Echo,” she insisted that studies showing that voters who opposed Goldwater’s extremism were part of a “propaganda machine” that used fake polls, radio and newspapers to destroy anyone but the chosen candidates of an elite cabal. She explained that all government activism outside of military buildup was a conspiracy to bankrupt regular Americans. Financiers and banking interests fed off expensive policies pushed by an educated Eastern elite, and together these men were dragging America into the web of communism.

The world was really quite simple, Schlafly insisted, and it could be understood without any fancy education. It was divided in two, black and white, Communism and Freedom. Eggheads complained that Goldwater “had one-sentence solutions” for complicated problems, she wrote, but simple solutions were the answer. What should America do about communism? Stop it! The very fact that establishment Republicans opposed Goldwater’s nomination proved that he was the right man for the job. He was the “grass roots” candidate, the candidate for the little guy who voted his principles, not because he wanted a payoff.

Goldwater’s candidacy crashed and burned, leaving Republicans in trouble in 1968. To candidate Richard Nixon was left the task of pulling together mainstream Eisenhower Republicans and upstart Movement Conservatives. How could his team attract support for an unlikable candidate who needed to bridge a fundamental ideological gulf? Nixon’s handlers used new media to play to Schlafly’s script. They ignored people’s brains and went for their guts.

“Voters are basically lazy,” one Nixon media adviser wrote. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we… seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable….” Nixon’s people hired advertising executive Harry Treleaven, who believed the new medium of television had changed the nature of politics. For him, politicians were no longer policy wonks; they were actors with a narrative.

Under Treleaven, Nixon’s people ignored policy positions and instead used television to create a candidate with a simple message: America was on the brink of disaster, and only Nixon could save it. They hired a brilliant young photographer to put together a series of television ads from stock photographs strung together to create a sense of doom; at the end a voice intoned “Nixon” over an iconic image of the nation. At the end of every ad ran the words: “Vote like your whole world depended on it.”

The campaign also hired a young television producer named Roger Ailes to stage “town hall” events for the candidate. Ailes hand-picked “regular” people to question Nixon in carefully managed shows from which the press was excluded. Ailes arranged applause, the set, Nixon’s answers, the camera angles, the crowd cheering the candidate, the careful shading of Nixon’s makeup. “Let’s face it,” he said. “A lot of people think Nixon is dull. Think he’s a bore, a pain in the ass.” But carefully managed television could “make them forget all that.”

It did. And so, after 1968, Republicans increasingly relied on their apocalyptic redemption story. America was in terrible trouble, because grasping minorities, women and workers wanted government policies that would suck tax dollars from hardworking white people. Democrats backed those policies because they would do anything to buy votes. It was up to Republicans to restore America to its former glory. In a time of dramatic economic and social upheaval, this story reassured voters left behind in the new conditions that the answers to their problems were simple, and that coming up with those answers required no great education or thought. It simply required the right principles.

The Movement Conservative story was never based in reality. Facts repeatedly gave way to the narrative that America was on the ropes because of Democratic social welfare policies that sucked tax dollars and threatened the nation’s safety. Ronald Reagan’s Welfare Queen represented the misuse of tax dollars for lazy African-Americans, for example, but he also incorrectly insisted that President Carter had slashed the nation’s military budget, and warned in his inaugural address that the nation was in a crisis that rivaled the Great Depression, a crisis created by government activism.

To avoid niggling fact-checkers, in 1987, President Reagan’s FCC abandoned the Fairness Doctrine, a decision that meant that public broadcasters were no longer required to provide their audience with opposing viewpoints. Within a year, talk radio had taken off, with hosts like Rush Limbaugh hammering home the vision of a nation gone to ruin, awaiting redemption from the latest Movement Conservative candidate. In 1992, Limbaugh began to broadcast a television show, produced by Roger Ailes, to take the story to viewers. By 1994, the show was carried by 225 television stations. Two years later, Ailes would become the CEO of a new media channel, Fox News, which used the same formula—albeit updated—that Ailes had used to package Nixon’s story almost 30 years before.

By the time of the George W. Bush administration, the Movement Conservatives had erased the line between image and reality. In 2004, a senior adviser to Bush famously dismissed “the reality-based community” to journalist Ron Suskind. Gone were the days when politicians could find solutions based on their observations of the careful study of discernible reality. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore…. When we act, we create our own reality…. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do,” he said.

This disregard for fact in favor of narrative appears to have become so accepted in the Republican Party that it is now openly driving Republican presidential candidates. Trump’s celebrity candidacy follows the formula. According to him, America is in free fall, with GDP below zero, unemployment at 18-20 percent, and the country overrun by minorities—his venom reserved primarily for Mexicans who, he says, are drug dealers, criminals and rapists.

“Our enemies are getting stronger and stronger by the day and we as a country are getting weaker.” Politicians can’t “make America great again” because they are “controlled fully by the lobbyists, by the donors, and by the special interests.” Trump promises to be a “great leader” who has simple answers: He will bring back jobs, make sure Iran doesn’t get nuclear weapons, reduce the debt, in short, find a way to do everything fast and well. “Sadly,” he says, “the American dream is dead. But if I get elected president I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before.”

Trump is the most cartoonish of the Republican candidates, but he is far from being the only one to bend reality to image. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker told a group of Republican donors that British Prime Minister David Cameron had said he had no faith in President Obama’s leadership, a claim Cameron categorically denied. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal insists he has slashed spending 26 percent, a claim professor Robert Mann has eviscerated. Journalist Tom Moran at the Newark Star-Ledger says simply of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, “he lies.”

Perhaps most disturbing is that Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Scott Walker and surgeon Ben Carson, Republican candidates all, have taken to attributing false quotations to the Founding Fathers. They deny the reality of America’s founding principles and claim instead that America was conceived in the image that they have constructed, the same image that has given us Donald Trump as a leading candidate for the presidency.

Heather Cox Richardson teaches nineteenth-century American history at Boston College.

See: http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/how-did-monster-get-created-decades-gop-lies-brought-us-donald-trump?akid=13314.123424.z3bgZg&rd=1&src=newsletter1039595&t=7

America Is Ready for Socialism! Massive Majorities Back Bernie Sanders on the Issues and Disdain Donald Trump

Trump channels the right’s angry Fox News id. But Sanders speaks to America’s soul — and our values.

2015-07-15 chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: Salon, via Alternet

Author: Paul Rosenberg

Emphasis Mine

Donald Trump is throwing the GOP primary into chaos by channeling the GOP’s id, spinning out wild fantasies of the Mexican government deliberately sending a flood of rapists and murderers across the border. But Bernie Sanders is disrupting Hillary Clinton’s coronation on the Democratic side by channeling the party’s soul, with a specifically issue-based focus.

In a way, both men are vividly illustrating a basic asymmetry that runs through American politics—between left and right, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican—which was first comprehensively described by public opinion researchers Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril in their landmark 1967 book, The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion, and which political scientist Matt Grossman discussed in a recent Salon interview. Free and Cantril found that half the population was ideologically conservative, in the sense of preferring a smaller, more limited government, while about two-thirds was operationally liberal, in the sense of wanting to spend more on specifically identified government programs.

Subsequent research has intensified this division. Conservatives win by making broad, sweeping appeals, which can often have little relationship with the facts (Iraq’s WMDs, “voter fraud,” global warming denialism, etc.). Liberals win by focusing on how to fix specific problems. Thus “government spending” in general is seen as a negative, but spending on most specific programs is strongly supported. The pattern is clear: The more practical the question, the more liberal the answers. That’s just how U.S. politics works.

Trump takes the conservative side of this formula to an extreme, making broad, ludicrous false claims in his narcissistically self-confident manner. What’s grabbing headlines now are his false claims about illegal immigrant crime, but he remains completely detached from reality regarding Obama’s citizenship as well—an act of broad stigmatization that also typifies conservative thought. When NBC’s Katy Tur brought up his birtherism, Trump treated her with disdain: “Well, I don’t know. According to you it’s not true.” When she responded straightforwardly, “He released his birth certificate,” Trump doubled down on the disdain, “You know, if you believe that, that’s fine. I don’t care. It’s an old subject.”

Bernie Sanders is the exact opposite of Trump. As a proud self-described democratic socialist, he willingly makes himself a target for the kind of demonization that Trump hands out like candy, and he responds to attacks—actual and potential—by doubling down on policy specifics, where he correctly feels he’s on very firm ground. In a recent interview with John Nichols in the Nation, Sanders sketched out his response to such attacks, which are now routinely leveled indiscriminately: Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, often criticizes President Obama, incorrectly, for trying to push “European-style socialism,” and McConnell says the American people don’t want it. First of all, of course, Obama is not trying to push European-style socialism. Second of all, I happen to believe that, if the American people understood the significant accomplishments that have taken place under social-democratic governments, democratic-socialist governments, labor governments throughout Europe, they would be shocked to know about those accomplishments. One of the goals of this campaign is to advance that understanding…. How many Americans know that in virtually every European country, when you have a baby, you get guaranteed time off and, depending on the country, significant financial benefits as well. Do the American people know that? I doubt it. Do the American people even know that we’re the only major Western industrialized country that doesn’t guarantee healthcare for all? Most people don’t know that. Do the American people know that in many countries throughout Europe, public colleges and universities are either tuition-free or very inexpensive?

I have always believed that the countries in Scandinavia have not gotten the kind of honest recognition they deserve for the extraordinary achievements they have made.

Sanders is right to think that Scandanavian socialism would be popular here in the U.S., if only people knew more about it. And he’s right to make spreading that awareness a goal of his campaign. In fact, on a wide range of issue specifics Sanders lines up with strong majorities of public opinion—and has for decades.

You can get a strong sense of this from the results of the “Big Ideas” poll commissioned by the Progressive Change Institute in January, which has thus far gotten far less attention than it deserves. (Full disclosure: I’m a former blogmate with Adam Green, co-founder of PCI’s affiliate, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.) PCI first solicited ideas online through an open submission process (more than 2,600 specific proposals were submitted) and then let people vote on them (more than a million votes were cast). This bottom-up process was then tested out in a national poll. The following all received 70% support or more:

Allow Government to Negotiate Drug Prices (79%)
Give Students the Same Low Interest Rates as Big Banks (78%)
Universal Pre-Kindergarten (77%)
Fair Trade that Protect Workers, the Environment, and Jobs (75%)
End Tax Loopholes for Corporations that Ship Jobs Overseas (74%)
End Gerrymandering (73%)
Let Homeowners Pay Down Mortgage With 401k (72%)
Debt-Free College at All Public Universities (Message A) (71%)
Infrastructure Jobs Program — $400 Billion / Year (71%)
Require NSA to Get Warrants (71%)
Disclose Corporate Spending on Politics/Lobbying (71%)

Medicare Buy-In for All (71%)
Close Offshore Corporate Tax Loopholes (70%)
Green New Deal — Millions Of Clean-Energy Jobs (70%)
Full Employment Act (70%)
Expand Social Security Benefits (70%)

All of the above are in line with Bernie Sanders’ politics and all are extremely popular, with support across the political spectrum. For example, the infrastructure jobs program (a key element of Sanders’ platform) had 91% support from Democrats, 61% from independents and even 55% support from Republicans—compared to only 28% who were opposed. Donald Trump can only dream of being that popular among Republicans.

One could easily write a whole story about Sanders’ strength on issues based on this one poll alone. It’s astonishing to see all these ideas brought together which have strong support among the American people, but which can barely get the time of day in the top-down world of U.S. politics today. And that, arguably, goes straight to the heart of what the Sanders campaign is all about—opening up the political process to popular ideas that just happen to be not so popular with the billionaire class, and the political system that caters so slavishly to them.

But that’s not to say there’s no other evidence of how popular Sanders’ views are. At the American Prospect, Peter Drier recently pulled together a broad sampling of the evidence that Sanders represents majority views on a core set of issues. For example, one of the European-style socialist practices that’s particularly popular is paid leave:

Eighty percent of Americans favor requiring employers to offer paid leave to parents of new children and employees caring for sick family members. Even more (85 percent) favor requiring employers to offer paid leave to employees who are ill.

Drier broke the issues down as follows: big business, progressive taxation, inequality and poverty, money in politics, minimum wage and workers’ rights, health care and social security, higher education, same-sex marriage. His general method was to cite a number of different sources illustrating different aspects of the issue.

Regarding big business, to take one example, Drier notes that 74 percent of Americans believe corporations have too much influence on American life and politics today (New York Times/CBS News), 60 percent of Americans—including 75 percent of Democrats—believe that “the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy” (Pew), and 58% of Americans said they support breaking up “big banks like Citigroup” (the PCI poll, cited by the Wall Street Journal), which Drier points out is “a key plank of Sanders’ platform and the goal of a bill that Sanders sponsored in the Senate.” He also notes that 73% of Americans favor tougher rules for Wall Street financial companies (Lake Research), and finally, that 64% favor regulating greenhouse gas emissions and requiring utilities to generate more power from “clean” low-carbon sources (Duke University).

What this shows is that Sanders is not simply cherry-picking a few popular ideas here and there. He’s tapping into a broadly shared set of inter-related attitudes and ideas about closely related issues Although these views and ideas are usually sidelined in most political discourse, the convergence of attitudes into a coherent policy texture is remarkably consistent. And this gets to a primary problem with America’s political system: liberal policy views form a coherent whole, every bit as much as conservative ones do, but they are far less publicly recognized, articulated, discussed and explored—despite the fact that they are wildly popular!

As I’ve noted before here at Salon, Free and Cantril commented on this situation in the last section of their book “The Need for a Restatement of American Ideology” almost 50 years ago:

The paradox of a large majority of Americans qualifying as operational liberals while at the same time a majority hold to a conservative ideology has been repeatedly emphasized in this study. We have described this state of affairs as mildly schizoid, with people believing in one set of principles abstractly while acting according to another set of principles in their political behavior. But the principles according to which the majority of Americans actually behave politically have not yet been adequately formulated in modern terms

There is little doubt that the time has come for a restatement of American ideology to bring it in line with what the great majority of people want and approve. Such a statement, with the right symbols incorporated, would focus people’s wants, hopes, and beliefs, and provide a guide and platform to enable the American people to implement their political desires in a more intelligent, direct, and consistent manner.

That restatement has never come about, but on-the-ground support for liberal policies remains as strong as ever, despite decades of mostly unanswered ideological assault in the media. Part of the problem is that conservative ideology expresses an idealized sense of individual possibility, so it’s relatively easy for people to access. Liberal ideology comes from a much more reflective place, one that encompasses thinking about society as a whole, and seeing oneself as part of a larger social fabric. Shortly after Free and Cantril wrote, the philosopher John Rawls proposed thinking in terms of a society conceived behind a “veil of ignorance”: if we had no idea where we were to fall in the scheme of things, what kind of social order would we consider fair and just? Such a framework makes perfect sense when we act as citizens, and openly invites us to act philosophically, in a way that promotes the flourishing of our whole society.

In 2011, Michael I. Norton of and Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University published a study (which Drier cites) that took a Rawlsian perspective. “Following the philosopher John Rawls (1971), we asked Americans to construct distributions of wealth they deem just,” they wrote. The results were a resounding confirmation of Bernie Sanders’ politics. As they explained in their abstract, they aimed to insert the desires of “regular” Americans into policy debates about the optimal level of wealth inequality by asking them first to estimate the current wealth distribution, and then construct their ideal. As they explained their results:

First, respondents dramatically underestimated the current level of wealth inequality. Second, respondents constructed ideal wealth distributions that were far more equitable than even their erroneously low estimates of the actual distribution. Most important from a policy perspective, we observed a surprising level of consensus: All demographic groups—even those not usually associated with wealth redistribution, such as Republicans and the wealthy—desired a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.

In their study, they gave people a choice between three alternatives, broken down into quintiles: the current wealth distribution in the U.S., a completely equal wealth distribution, and between the two, a wealth distribution equal to the income distribution of Sweden—one of those Scandinavian socialist countries that Bernie Sanders loves to share information about. Lo and behold, as the authors wrote in a section heading, “Americans Prefer Sweden.”

More precisely, Americans preferred Sweden over the U.S. by 92-8%. They also preferred complete equality, but less overwhelmingly: 77-23%. And they preferred Sweden over complete equality—but just barely, 51-49%. Not surprisingly, with such landslide numbers, it included everyone, the authors noted. “In addition, this overwhelming preference for the Sweden distribution over the United States distribution was robust across gender (females: 92.7%, males: 90.6%), preferred candidate in the 2004 election (Bush voters: 90.2%; Kerry voters: 93.5%) and income (less than $50,000: 92.1%; $50,001–$100,000: 91.7%; more than $100,000: 89.1%).” As the reference to Bush and Kerry gives away, although published in 2011, the original research was done well before the financial collapse—so this emphatically was not a response to the Great Recession.

If the overwhelming majority of Americans thinks that Sweden represents a better social order than America, then it’s hardly surprising that large numbers of them also agree with Sanders on a broad range of economic issues, as both PCI and Peter Drier lay out. And it’s not surprising that they agree on broader policies related to wealth and the exercise of political power, as well as policies making life better for the middle class, and helping more people to get into it. In fact, the only thing surprising about Bernie Sanders’ popularity is that people find it surprising. After all, the evidence has been all around us for a very long time now.

Does that mean Bernie Sanders ought to be taken a lot more seriously than he has been so far? Absolutely. Does it mean he’ll be president? Matt Grossman doesn’t think so. “Bernie Sanders has a long and uphill battle and, if history is any guide, little chance to win the Democratic nomination,” Grossman said. “It is true that he has focused on specific issue positions that are popular with the American public and an enduringly appealing Democratic message of taking on the rich and big business, but no candidate has won the Democratic nomination by avowedly running to the left of the other candidates since George McGovern. Democratic leaders are traditionally more concerned about maintaining a moderate image than Republicans (and more convinced that it matters for electability).”

But the question of why that asymmetric response has been so—much less if it is right—is well worth contemplating. Indeed a 2013 paper by Adam Bonica, Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal underscored the broader underlying question: “Why Hasn’t Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality?” They present a sophisticated analysis, which considers five possible explanations:

first, an ideological shift toward free market capitalism; second, the combination of immigration and low turnout of the poor has produced an electorate more wealthy than the population as a whole; third, rising affluence has reduced the share of the public that’s attracted to government for social insurance; fourth, the rich have been able to increasingly influence politics “through campaign contributions, lobbying, and revolving door employment of politicians and bureaucrats;” and fifth, the political process is distorted by institutions that reduce accountability, such as gerrymandering and a multitude of institutional veto/pivot points.

Just reading through this brief summary of their explanation is enough to make the average voter tune out—which is precisely the point. The political system is anything but transparently responsive to the majority will. In the end, they conclude, “Overall, the kinds of government policies that could have ameliorated the sharp rise in inequality have been immobilized by a combination of greater polarization, lack of voter participation, feedback from high-income campaign contributors, and political institutions that must overcome a series of key pivots before making significant changes.”

What this means, in effect, is that the political system is in a state of drift, so far as the needs, interests and values of most ordinary Americans are concerned. All the super majority issue positions that Sanders may hold are irrelevant, because the American people as a whole are irrelevant. Such is the sorry state of our democracy.

This was further confirmed by a 2014 paper, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page. In it, they used a dataset measuring key variables for 1,779 policy issues, and concluded that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

That is what’s meant by “politics as usual,” and that’s precisely what Bernie Sanders has spent his whole life working to change. As the campaign unfolds, and more and more people become aware of how

Eighty percent of Americans favor requiring employers to offer paid leave to parents of new children and employees caring for sick family members. Even more (85 percent) favor requiring employers to offer paid leave to employees who are ill.

Drier broke the issues down as follows: big business, progressive taxation, inequality and poverty, money in politics, minimum wage and workers’ rights, health care and social security, higher education, same-sex marriage. His general method was to cite a number of different sources illustrating different aspects of the issue.

Regarding big business, to take one example, Drier notes that 74 percent of Americans believe corporations have too much influence on American life and politics today (New York Times/CBS News), 60 percent of Americans—including 75 percent of Democrats—believe that “the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy” (Pew), and 58% of Americans said they support breaking up “big banks like Citigroup” (the PCI poll, cited by the Wall Street Journal), which Drier points out is “a key plank of Sanders’ platform and the goal of a bill that Sanders sponsored in the Senate.” He also notes that 73% of Americans favor tougher rules for Wall Street financial companies (Lake Research), and finally, that 64% favor regulating greenhouse gas emissions and requiring utilities to generate more power from “clean” low-carbon sources (Duke University).

What this shows is that Sanders is not simply cherry-picking a few popular ideas here and there. He’s tapping into a broadly shared set of inter-related attitudes and ideas about closely related issues Although these views and ideas are usually sidelined in most political discourse, the convergence of attitudes into a coherent policy texture is remarkably consistent. And this gets to a primary problem with America’s political system: liberal policy views form a coherent whole, every bit as much as conservative ones do, but they are far less publicly recognized, articulated, discussed and explored—despite the fact that they are wildly popular!

As I’ve noted before here at Salon, Free and Cantril commented on this situation in the last section of their book “The Need for a Restatement of American Ideology” almost 50 years ago:

The paradox of a large majority of Americans qualifying as operational liberals while at the same time a majority hold to a conservative ideology has been repeatedly emphasized in this study. We have described this state of affairs as mildly schizoid, with people believing in one set of principles abstractly while acting according to another set of principles in their political behavior. But the principles according to which the majority of Americans actually behave politically have not yet been adequately formulated in modern terms …

There is little doubt that the time has come for a restatement of American ideology to bring it in line with what the great majority of people want and approve. Such a statement, with the right symbols incorporated, would focus people’s wants, hopes, and beliefs, and provide a guide and platform to enable the American people to implement their political desires in a more intelligent, direct, and consistent manner.

That restatement has never come about, but on-the-ground support for liberal policies remains as strong as ever, despite decades of mostly unanswered ideological assault in the media. Part of the problem is that conservative ideology expresses an idealized sense of individual possibility, so it’s relatively easy for people to access. Liberal ideology comes from a much more reflective place, one that encompasses thinking about society as a whole, and seeing oneself as part of a larger social fabric. Shortly after Free and Cantril wrote, the philosopher John Rawls proposed thinking in terms of a society conceived behind a “veil of ignorance”: if we had no idea where we were to fall in the scheme of things, what kind of social order would we consider fair and just? Such a framework makes perfect sense when we act as citizens, and openly invites us to act philosophically, in a way that promotes the flourishing of our whole society.

In 2011, Michael I. Norton of and Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University published a study (which Drier cites) that took a Rawlsian perspective. “Following the philosopher John Rawls (1971), we asked Americans to construct distributions of wealth they deem just,” they wrote. The results were a resounding confirmation of Bernie Sanders’ politics. As they explained in their abstract, they aimed to insert the desires of “regular” Americans into policy debates about the optimal level of wealth inequality by asking them first to estimate the current wealth distribution, and then construct their ideal. As they explained their results:

First, respondents dramatically underestimated the current level of wealth inequality. Second, respondents constructed ideal wealth distributions that were far more equitable than even their erroneously low estimates of the actual distribution. Most important from a policy perspective, we observed a surprising level of consensus: All demographic groups—even those not usually associated with wealth redistribution, such as Republicans and the wealthy—desired a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.

In their study, they gave people a choice between three alternatives, broken down into quintiles: the current wealth distribution in the U.S., a completely equal wealth distribution, and between the two, a wealth distribution equal to the income distribution of Sweden—one of those Scandinavian socialist countries that Bernie Sanders loves to share information about. Lo and behold, as the authors wrote in a section heading, “Americans Prefer Sweden.”

More precisely, Americans preferred Sweden over the U.S. by 92-8%. They also preferred complete equality, but less overwhelmingly: 77-23%. And they preferred Sweden over complete equality—but just barely, 51-49%. Not surprisingly, with such landslide numbers, it included everyone, the authors noted. “In addition, this overwhelming preference for the Sweden distribution over the United States distribution was robust across gender (females: 92.7%, males: 90.6%), preferred candidate in the 2004 election (Bush voters: 90.2%; Kerry voters: 93.5%) and income (less than $50,000: 92.1%; $50,001–$100,000: 91.7%; more than $100,000: 89.1%).” As the reference to Bush and Kerry gives away, although published in 2011, the original research was done well before the financial collapse—so this emphatically was not a response to the Great Recession.

If the overwhelming majority of Americans thinks that Sweden represents a better social order than America, then it’s hardly surprising that large numbers of them also agree with Sanders on a broad range of economic issues, as both PCI and Peter Drier lay out. And it’s not surprising that they agree on broader policies related to wealth and the exercise of political power, as well as policies making life better for the middle class, and helping more people to get into it. In fact, the only thing surprising about Bernie Sanders’ popularity is that people find it surprising. After all, the evidence has been all around us for a very long time now.

Does that mean Bernie Sanders ought to be taken a lot more seriously than he has been so far? Absolutely. Does it mean he’ll be president? Matt Grossman doesn’t think so. “Bernie Sanders has a long and uphill battle and, if history is any guide, little chance to win the Democratic nomination,” Grossman said. “It is true that he has focused on specific issue positions that are popular with the American public and an enduringly appealing Democratic message of taking on the rich and big business, but no candidate has won the Democratic nomination by avowedly running to the left of the other candidates since George McGovern. Democratic leaders are traditionally more concerned about maintaining a moderate image than Republicans (and more convinced that it matters for electability).”

But the question of why that asymmetric response has been so—much less if it is right—is well worth contemplating. Indeed a 2013 paper by Adam Bonica, Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal underscored the broader underlying question: “Why Hasn’t Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality?” They present a sophisticated analysis, which considers five possible explanations: first, an ideological shift toward free market capitalism; second, the combination of immigration and low turnout of the poor has produced an electorate more wealthy than the population as a whole; third, rising affluence has reduced the share of the public that’s attracted to government for social insurance; fourth, the rich have been able to increasingly influence politics “through campaign contributions, lobbying, and revolving door employment of politicians and bureaucrats;” and fifth, the political process is distorted by institutions that reduce accountability, such as gerrymandering and a multitude of institutional veto/pivot points.

Just reading through this brief summary of their explanation is enough to make the average voter tune out—which is precisely the point. The political system is anything but transparently responsive to the majority will. In the end, they conclude, “Overall, the kinds of government policies that could have ameliorated the sharp rise in inequality have been immobilized by a combination of greater polarization, lack of voter participation, feedback from high-income campaign contributors, and political institutions that must overcome a series of key pivots before making significant changes.”

What this means, in effect, is that the political system is in a state of drift, so far as the needs, interests and values of most ordinary Americans are concerned. All the supermajority issue positions that Sanders may hold are irrelevant, because the American people as a whole are irrelevant. Such is the sorry state of our democracy.

This was further confirmed by a 2014 paper, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page. In it, they used a dataset measuring key variables for 1,779 policy issues, and concluded that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

That is what’s meant by “politics as usual,” and that’s precisely what Bernie Sanders has spent his whole life working to change. As the campaign unfolds, and more and more people become aware of how well Sanders represents their views on fundamental issues, the focus on changing political structures of power will inevitably come to deepen—as Sanders, of course, already knows that it must.

In the Nation interview referred to above, Sanders began by responding to the question, “Are we at one of those pivot points—as we saw in the 1930s—where our politics could open up and take the country in a much more progressive direction?” And he responded as follows:

Obviously, we’re not in the midst of a massive depression, as we were in the 1930s. But I think the discontent of the American people is far, far greater than the pundits understand. Do you know what real African-American youth unemployment is? It’s over 50 percent. Families with a member 55 or older have literally nothing saved for retirement. Workers are worried about their jobs ending up in China. They’re worried about being fired when they’re age 50 and being replaced at half-wages by somebody who is 25. They’re disgusted with the degree that billionaires are able to buy elections. They are frightened by the fact that we have a Republican Party that refuses to even recognize the reality of climate change, let alone address this huge issue.

In 1936, when Roosevelt ran for reelection, he welcomed the

hatred of what he called “the economic royalists”—today, they’re the billionaire class—and I’m prepared to do that as well. That’s the kind of language the American people are ready to hear.

Ultimately, the question is not “Will Bernie Sanders be elected president?” We’ve had many men elected president who have done little to impact the long arc of our nation’s course through history. The real question is, “Will the Sanders campaign change the course of American history?” And that question is one that every citizen can help answer, by how they engage in the months ahead.

Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English. Follow him on Twitter at @PaulHRosenberg.

See: http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/america-ready-socialism-massive-majorities-back-bernie-sanders-issues-and-disdain?akid=13298.123424.NqSiKA&rd=1&src=newsletter1039265&t=5