Thoughts about the primary elections.
Scott Winship in the National Review
I believe that Trumpism is being driven primarily by cultural anxiety -- by dissatisfaction with cultural change and perceived cultural decline. "Make America Great Again" is clearly about fear of national decline, but it is not primarily about economic decline. Trumps complaint is that "we never win anymore," not a narrow protest that other nations are taking away our jobs or that wages are stagnant. It taps into fears that something has gone wrong -- with our economy but also with our position on the international stage, with our values, with our families, and with the maintenance of law and order.
Further, it could not be more obvious that Trump voters are mostly indifferent to policy. Trump's appeal is in his brash confidence, his celebrity, and his refusal to bow to the political correctness that is newly ascendant.
I have rarely, if ever, seen a conventional smile from Senator Cruz. In a natural smile the corners of the mouth go up; these muscles we can control voluntarily as well. But muscles circling the eyes are involuntary only; they make the eyes narrow, forming crow's feet at the outside corners," he continued. "No matter the emotional coloring of Senator Cruz's outward rhetoric, his mouth typically tightens into the same straight line. If it deviates from this, the corners of his mouth bend down, not upwards.
Nice summary of how the Republican Party has tried and failed to stop Donald Trump.
Should Mr. Trump clinch the presidential nomination, it would represent a rout of historic proportions for the institutional Republican Party, and could set off an internal rift unseen in either party for a half-century, since white Southerners abandoned the Democratic Party EN Masse during the civil rights movement.
Scott Adams (Dilbert author) posts on understanding Trump's rise (starting 8/13/2015)
Ezra Klein
Sanders's "promises runs against our party's best traditions of evidence-based policy making and undermines our reputation as the party of responsible arithmetic," wrote four Democratic ex-chairs of the White House's Council of Economic Advisers. "These are numbers we would describe as deep voodoo if they came from a tax-cutting Republican," agreed Paul Krugman.
Amidst this onslaught, Steve Randy Waldman has penned what is, I think, the best defense of Sanders. He admits that the campaign's policy proposals are sketchy and the economic projections it's circulating are fantastical. But he argues that none of that really matters.
The president's "role is to define priorities that must later be translated into well-crafted policy details," he says. "In a democratic polity, wonks are the help."
My worry about Sanders, watching him in this campaign, is that he isn't very interested in learning the weak points in his ideas, that he hasn't surrounded himself with people who police the limits between what they wish were true and what the best evidence says is true, that he doesn't seek out counterarguments to his instincts, that he's attracted to strategies that align with his hopes for American politics rather than what we know about American politics. And these tendencies, if they persist, can turn good values into bad policies and an inspiring candidate into a bad president.
Trump and Sanders are popular not just because they're expressing
people's anger but because they offer timely critiques of
American capitalism.
...
Trump has called for abolishing the carried-interest tax loophole
for hedge-fund and private-equity managers. He's vowed to protect
Social Security. He's called for restrictions on highly skilled
immigrants. Most important, he's rejected free-trade ideology,
suggesting that the U.S. may need to slap tariffs on Chinese goods
to protect American jobs. These views put Trump at odds not only
with the leadership of the Republican Party but also with the main
thrust of economic thinking since the nineteen-eighties, which has
been to embrace globalization.