Whites

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      It’s No Surprise That Donald Trump Is Being Charged Under a Reconstruction-Era Law

      by

      Of the four charges included in the latest federal indictment of Donald Trump, one — violating Section 241 of Title 18 of the United States Code — seemed to surprise many. It shouldn’t have.That statute dates back to Reconstruction, as Congress responded to the Confederacy’s white-power insurrection against the United States. Reconstruction sought not only to restore the Union after the Civil War, but also to build guardrails against such an authoritarian faction ever again being able to subvert the Republic.It’s therefore appropriate that Section 241 and other Reconstruction-era laws are precisely those that the American legal system is turning to in response to a former president who stoked the flames of an insurrection in which a violent mob stormed the Capitol in an effort to undermine the democratic process. One of the rioters, later sentenced to three years in prison, carried a Confederate flag into the Capitol, an indelible image captured in photographs and widely circulated.Congress enacted Section 241 as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1870 (also known as the Enforcement Act for its role in enforcing the terms of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, crucial to providing Black people with the rights and protections of citizenship). The law addressed the rise of white supremacist groups after the Civil War, especially the Ku Klux Klan, which organized citizens and public officials to intimidate freed Black people to suppress their participation in the political process. It empowered federal agents to stop these conspirators from depriving any Americans, in particular Black Americans, of the right to have a say in their government.The Justice Department has charged Mr. Trump with doing exactly that: the government asserts in its detailed 45-page indictment that through his attempts “to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election,” Mr. Trump conspired to “injure, oppress, threaten and intimidate” voters in exercising their “right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.”Bringing civil rights charges against the former president is not overreach by the Justice Department, as some have suggested. By enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1870, the department is doing the very thing the law was designed to do by prosecuting a political leader who, while in office and after, sought to cancel the votes of millions to hold power.In 1871, with Klan violence continuing, Congress passed two more bills to enforce the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, known as the Ku Klux Klan acts. Among other things, these laws empowered citizens to sue anyone who conspired to intimidate or retaliate against them for exercising their political rights.Armed with these laws, the Justice Department oversaw the arrest and conviction of hundreds of Klansmen, and by 1873 the group had been effectively (though temporarily) crushed. While Section 241 has regularly been used ever since to police civil rights violations, with the end of Reconstruction in 1877, Klan Act litigation brought by private parties declined precipitously, according to our research, until in recent years.In July 2017, our organization, Protect Democracy, filed a Klan Act lawsuit against the 2016 Trump campaign over what we asserted was its role in Russian efforts to compromise the political rights of Americans. While that suit did not succeed, it was the beginning of a spate of private Klan Act litigation unseen in more than 100 years.Several lawsuits have been filed by our group and others. Among the results: A restraining order was issued against armed groups that surrounded ballot drop boxes in ways that intimidated voters; the Proud Boys were ordered to pay more than $1 million in damages for desecrating the property of a Black church; and a jury ordered 17 white nationalist leaders and organizations to pay more than $26 million in damages to nine people who suffered physical or emotional injuries at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in 2017. Still pending are lawsuits seeking damages against those responsible for Jan. 6, against those who organized a car caravan that threatened to drive a campaign bus off the highway and against Mr. Trump and others for seeking to deprive Black voters from having their votes counted in the 2020 election.Other Reconstruction-era laws are also in the center of debates today. Congress recently reformed the Electoral Count Act, passed in response to the contested presidential election of 1876, after Mr. Trump and his allies sought to use the law’s ambiguities to overturn the 2020 election. The former president has also pledged, if re-elected, to abolish the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. That guarantee was ratified in 1868 to reverse the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision holding that African Americans were not citizens.Yet another 14th Amendment provision, Section 3’s prohibition on those who have engaged in insurrection against the United States from holding power again, was recently applied for the first time since Reconstruction to bar from office a New Mexico county commissioner who breached the barricades outside the Capitol on Jan. 6. And recently, our organization filed a voting rights lawsuit under the 1870 law that readmitted Virginia to the Union. The Virginia Readmission Act limited the circumstances in which the state could disenfranchise its citizens, and our lawsuit argues that the state’s lifetime ban on voting by anyone convicted of any felony violates that law.These battles are the newest iterations of the Reconstruction-era clashes. Just as the integration of freed Black people into our democracy in the 1870s was met with fierce resistance, so too did the election of the nation’s first Black president give rise to a revival of open bigotry. And just as the enactment of laws in the 1870s to enforce equal citizenship were met with intransigence, so too today should we expect to see their enforcement resisted.The outcome of these legal clashes will determine the future of the country’s experiment in self-government. Either these laws will finally be fully realized and usher in a true multiracial democracy or the 150-year resistance to Reconstruction will prevail and white Americans reluctant to share power will reinforce their dominance over a diversifying nation. Authoritarianism rather than democracy would then be the order of the day.Ian Bassin is a co-founder and the executive director of the group Protect Democracy and a former associate White House counsel. Kristy Parker is counsel at Protect Democracy and the former deputy chief of the criminal section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 200 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Is the Surge to the Left Among Young Voters a Trump Blip or the Real Deal?

      by

      There is a lot about the American electorate that we are only now beginning to see. These developments have profound implications for the future of both the Republican and the Democratic coalitions.Two key Democratic constituencies — the young and the religiously unobservant — have substantially increased as a share of the electorate.This shift is striking.In 2012, for example, white evangelicals — a hard-core Republican constituency — made up the same proportion of the electorate as the religiously unaffiliated: agnostics, atheists and the nonreligious. Both groups stood at roughly 19 percent of the population.By 2022, according to the Public Religion Research Institute (better known as P.R.R.I.), the percentage of white evangelicals had fallen to 13.6 percent, while those with little or no interest in religion and more progressive inclinations had surged to 26.8 percent of the population.Defying the adage among practitioners and scholars of politics that voters become more conservative as they age — millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) and Gen Z (those born in 1997 and afterward) have in fact become decidedly more Democratic over time, according to data compiled by the Cooperative Election Study.The graphic below, which is derived from the study, shows a significant increase in voting for House Democratic candidates among Millennials and Gen Z. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      The Unsettling Truth About Trump’s First Great Victory

      by

      Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory continues to confound election experts. How could American voters put such a fractious figure into the White House?This is more than an academic question. For the third time, Trump is the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.Three books, published in the years following Trump’s election — “Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America” by John Sides of Vanderbilt, Michael Tesler of the University of California-Irvine and Lynn Vavreck of U.C.L.A.; “White Identity Politics” by Ashley Jardina of George Mason University; and “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity” by Lilliana Mason of Johns Hopkins — shed light on Trump’s improbable political longevity.Each points to the centrality of racial animosity.Sides, Tesler and Vavreck, for example, cite 2016 American National Election Studies data that asked four questions in order to explore dimensions of white identity: “the importance of white identity, how much whites are being discriminated against, the likelihood that whites are losing jobs to nonwhites, and the importance of whites working together to change laws unfair to whites.”The authors combine these questions into a “scale capturing the strength of white identity and found that it was strongly related to Republicans’ support for Donald Trump.”“Strongly related” is an understatement. On a 17-point scale ranking the strength of Republican primary voters’ white identity from lowest to highest, support for Trump grew consistently at each step — from 2 percent at the bottom to 81 percent at the highest level.Now, this earlier scholarship notwithstanding, three political scientists are presenting an alternative interpretation of the 2016 election. In their Feb. 28 paper “Measuring the Contribution of Voting Blocs to Election Outcomes,” Justin Grimmer of Stanford, William Marble of the University of Pennsylvania and Cole Tanigawa-Lau, also of Stanford, write:We assess claims that Donald Trump received a particularly large number of votes from individuals with antagonistic attitudes toward racial outgroups (Sides, Tesler and Vavreck, 2017; Mason, Wronski and Kane, 2021). Using the ANES, however, we show that in 2016 Trump’s largest gains in support, compared to Mitt Romney in 2012, came from whites with moderate racial resentment. This result holds despite the fact that the relationship between vote choice and racial resentment was stronger in 2016 and 2020 than in other elections.How could these two seemingly contradictory statements both be true? Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau write:Decomposing the change in support observed in the ANES data, we show that respondents in 2016 and 2020 reported more moderate views, on average, than in previous elections. As a result, Trump improved the most over previous Republicans by capturing the votes of a larger number of people who report racially moderate views.In an email, Marble provided more detail:Whites with high levels of racial resentment supported Trump at a historically high rate compared to prior Republican presidential candidates. Yet, between 2012 and 2016, the number of people who scored at the high end of the racial resentment scale declined significantly. As a result, there were simply fewer high racial resentment voters for Trump to win in 2016 and 2020 than there were in earlier eras. At the same time, the number of people scoring at moderate levels of racial resentment increased. Trump was not as popular among this voting bloc, compared to those with high racial resentment. But because this group is larger, whites with moderate racial resentment scores ended up contributing more net votes to Trump.I asked Grimmer to explain the significance of his work with Marble and Tanigawa-Lau.Responding by email, Grimmer wrote:Our findings provide an important correction to a popular narrative about how Trump won office. Hillary Clinton argued that Trump supporters could be placed in a “basket of deplorables.” And election-night pundits and even some academics have claimed that Trump’s victory was the result of appealing to white Americans’ racist and xenophobic attitudes. We show this conventional wisdom is (at best) incomplete. Trump’s supporters were less xenophobic than prior Republican candidates’, less sexist, had lower animus to minority groups, and lower levels of racial resentment. Far from deplorables, Trump voters were, on average, more tolerant and understanding than voters for prior Republican candidates.The data, Grimmer continued,point to two important and undeniable facts. First, analyses focused on vote choice alone cannot tell us where candidates receive support. We must know the size of groups and who turns out to vote. And we cannot confuse candidates’ rhetoric with the voters who support them, because voters might support the candidate despite the rhetoric, not because of it.I asked Sides, Tesler and Vavreck for their assessment of the Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau paper. They provided a one-paragraph response affirming, in the phrase “identity-inflected issues,” the crucial role of racial resentment:There are of course many complexities in characterizing changes in aggregate election outcomes over time. Several pieces of research into the 2016 election, including our book, “Identity Crisis,” and this interesting paper by Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau, find that people’s vote choices in that election were more strongly related to their views on “identity-inflected issues” than they had been in prior elections. That is why our book argues that these issues are central to how we interpret the outcome in 2016.John Kane, a political scientist at N.Y.U. and a co-author with Lilliana Mason and Julie Wronski of “Activating Animus: The Uniquely Social Roots of Trump Support,” which was cited in the Grimmer paper, suggested that the Grimmer paper in fact provides a key corrective to the debate over the 2016 election. In an email, Kane pointed to a key section that reads:Trump’s surprising win in 2016 was not due to a large increase in Republican votes among the most racially resentful Americans. Instead, Trump’s support grew the most, relative to prior Republican candidates’, among whites with relatively moderate racial resentment scores. This potentially surprising finding is explained by the shifting distribution of racial resentment in the population.Grimmer’s point, Kane wrote, isto highlight the fact that, if we don’t account for a group’s size in the population (e.g., how many racially resentful people there are) and how many of them actually turn out to vote, we could incorrectly infer that certain groups have become more or less supportive of particular parties over time. I fully agree with this point and really do think it’s extremely important for people to understand.That said, Kane continued,The point about Trump voters being less racially resentful on average than voters for previous Republican candidates, while likely true, should, I think, be interpreted as a statement about why it’s important to be mindful of over-time changes in groups’ sizes in the population, and NOT as a statement about Trump being successful in attracting racially liberal voters (indeed, those lowest in racial resentment turned away from him, per Grimmer-Marble-Tanigawa-Lau’s own findings).Other scholars who have explored issues of race and politics were generally supportive of the Grimmer paper.Andrew Engelhardt, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, wrote by email:I find this argument persuasive because understanding election outcomes requires not just understanding what contributes to vote choice (e.g., racial group attachments, racial prejudice), but also how many people with that particular attitude turned out to vote and what share of the electorate that group makes up.The Grimmer paper, Engelhardt continued, “encourages us to take a step back and focus on the big picture for understanding elections: where do most votes come from and are these patterns consistent across elections?” Along these lines, according to Engelhardt,Discussion of racial resentment driving support for Trump could miss how folks low in racial resentment were actually critical to the election outcome. The paper makes just this clarifying point, noting, for instance, that White Democrats low in racial resentment were even more influential in contributing votes to Clinton in 2016 than to Obama in 2012. Change between 2012 and 2016 is not exclusively due to the behavior of the most prejudiced.“I like this piece,” Alexander George Theodoridis, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, wrote. “It is a nice reminder for scholars and, especially, the media, that it is important to think carefully about base rates.”In his email, Theodoridis argued:Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016 was a stress test for Republican partisanship, and Republican partisanship passed with flying colors. The election was close enough for Trump to win because the vast majority of G.O.P. voters found the idea of either sitting it out or voting for a Democrat they had spent 20+ years disliking so distasteful that Trump’s limitations, liabilities and overt racism and misogyny were not a deal-breaker.Theodoridis noted that his oneminor methodological and measurement critique is that this sort of analysis has to take seriously what the racial resentment scale actually means. It may be that race is actually quite salient for those in the middle part of the scale, but they are just less overtly racist than those at the top of the scale. Also, the meaning of the racial resentment scale changes over time in ways that are not independent of politics, and especially of presidential politics. Position on the scale is not immutable in the way some descriptive characteristics may be.Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, was explicitly supportive of the Grimmer-Marble-Tanigawa-Lau methodology. Writing by email, Westwood argued:It is an interesting academic exercise to predict who will win the vote within a specific group, but it is more fundamental to elections to understand how many voters candidates will gain from each group. The limitation in Sides-Vavreck-Mason-Jardina is that they find a strong relationship between racial attitudes and Trump support, but while predictive of individual vote choice these results lead to relatively few total votes for Trump.Westwood contends thatthe important contribution from Grimmer et al is that there was a big change in the attitudes of the white electorate. A small number of whites with high levels of racial resentment did support Trump in 2016 at a higher rate than in prior elections, but the bulk of support for Trump came from more moderate whites. Trump managed to pull in support from racists, but he was able to pull in much more support from economically disadvantaged whites.The Grimmer paper, according to Westwood, has significant implications for those making “general claims about the future Republican Party,” specifically challenging those who believethat Republicans can continue to win by appealing to white Americans’ worst attitudes and instincts. While it is true Trump support is largest for the most racist voters, this group is a shrinking part of the electorate. Republicans, as Grimmer et al. show, must figure out how to appeal to moderate whites who hold more moderate attitudes in order to win. Racist appeals can win votes, but it is critical to remember that this number is smaller than the votes gained by speaking on economic concerns of moderate white voters (many of whom were uncomfortable with Trump’s racist rhetoric and were voting solely based on economic policy).Trump, Westwood concluded, “found support from both racists and moderates, but with the pool of racists voters shrinking, it is clear this is not a path to future victory.”Other scholars were more cautious in their response to the Grimmer paper. Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, commented by email:The 2016 presidential election included ballots cast by more than 128 million Americans, and so any one narrative used to explain that election will be partial and incomplete. So I think it’s critical to avoid the idea that there is a single skeleton key that can explain all the varied undercurrents that led to Trump’s 2016 victory, or that any one paper will provide a definitive explanation. That said, I published an article in 2021 in Political Behavior titled “The Activation of Prejudice and Presidential Voting,” which I entirely stand by.Hopkins said his paper demonstrates thatwhite Americans’ prejudice against Black Americans was more predictive of their vote choice in 2016 than it had been in 2012. Importantly, it also shows that levels of prejudice against Black Americans were more predictive of voting in the 2016 G.O.P. primary than in the 2016 general election. But Grimmer and colleagues are looking at a different question using different data, so I don’t consider the analyses to be contradictory.One clear benefit emerging from the continuing study of Trump’s 2016 victory is a better understanding of the complexity and nuance of what brought it about.Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, pointed out in an email that the presence of racial resentment among Republican voters emerged long before Trump ran for president, while such resentment among Democratic voters has been sharply declining:I think what Justin Grimmer would say is that racial resentment didn’t do more for Trump than it did for Romney. The highly racially resentful have, with reason, been voting for Republicans for a long time. Trump’s more explicit use of race didn’t make supporters more racially resentful. Levels of racial resentment among Republicans are no higher now than they were before Trump. In fact, they are slightly lower. And the highly racially resentful already knew full well that their home was in the G.O.P.While the focus of attention has been on those who fall at the high end of the distribution on racial resentment, Hetherington wrote,Almost all the change has taken place among Democrats, as they moved to lower and lower levels of resentment. In a statistical sense, the fact that there are now so many more people at the low end of the distribution than before will produce a larger coefficient for the effect of racial resentment on voting behavior. Put another way, racial resentment has a bigger effect. But that does not mean that those high in racial resentment are now even more likely to vote for Republicans or that there are more people high in resentment. In this case, I think it reflects that there are more people low in resentment than before and that they are even less likely to vote for Republicans than before. So the low end of the scale is doing the work.I began my examination of the Grimmer paper concerned that he and his co-authors might be drawing large conclusions from statistical oddities. After further examining the data and going over the commentary of the scholars I contacted, my own view is that Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau have made a significant contribution to understanding the Trump phenomenon.Most important, they make the case that explanations of Trump’s victory pointing to the role of those at the extremes on measures of racial resentment and sexism, while informative, are in their own way too comforting, fostering the belief that Trump’s triumph was the product of voters who have drifted far from the American mainstream.In fact, the new analysis suggests that Trumpism has found fertile ground across a broad swath of the electorate, including many firmly in the mainstream. That Trump could capture the hearts and minds of these voters suggests that whatever he represents beyond racial resentment — anger, chaos, nihilism, hostility — is more powerful than many recognize or acknowledge. Restoring American politics to an even keel will be far tougher than many of us realize.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      America’s Toxic Gun Culture Is Invading Our Politics

      by

      .g-seriestitle-wrapper {
      width: 600px;
      margin: 0px auto;
      max-width: 100%;
      font-family: nyt-imperial;
      font-size: 16px;
      color: #696969;
      font-weight: 100;
      font-style: italic;
      line-height: 23px;
      border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc;
      padding-bottom: 15px;
      }

      section#violentextremism-seriestext {
      margin: 0px auto 15px;
      }

      .g-seriestitle-wrapper a:link, .g-seriestitle-wrapper a:visited {
      color: inherit;
      text-decoration: underline;
      text-decoration-thickness: 1px;
      text-underline-offset: 2px;
      text-decoration-color: #bbb;
      }

      This editorial is the fifth in a series, “The Danger Within,” urging readers to understand the danger of extremist violence and possible solutions. Read more about the series in a note from Kathleen Kingsbury, the Times Opinion editor.

      A year ago, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky posted a Christmas photo on Twitter. In it, Mr. Massie, his wife and five children pose in front of their ornament-bedecked tree. Each person is wearing a big grin and holding an assault weapon. “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo,” Mr. Massie wrote on Twitter.The photo was posted on Dec. 4, just four days after a mass shooting at a school in Oxford, Mich., that left four students dead and seven other people injured.The grotesque timing led many Democrats and several Republicans to criticize Mr. Massie for sharing the photo. Others lauded it and nearly 80,000 people liked his tweet. “That’s my kind of Christmas card!” wrote Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who then posted a photo of her four sons brandishing similar weapons.These weapons, lightweight and endlessly customizable, aren’t often used in the way their devotees imagine — to defend themselves and their families. (In a recent comprehensive survey, only 13 percent of all defensive use of guns involved any type of rifle.) Nevertheless, in the 18 years since the end of the federal assault weapons ban, the country has been flooded with an estimated 25 million AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles, making them one of the most popular in the United States. When used in mass shootings, the AR-15 makes those acts of violence far more deadly. It has become the gun of choice for mass killers, from Las Vegas to Uvalde, Sandy Hook to Buffalo.The AR-15 has also become a potent talisman for right-wing politicians and many of their voters. That’s a particularly disturbing trend at a time when violent political rhetoric and actual political violence in the United States are rising.Addressing violent right-wing extremism is a challenge on many fronts: This board has argued for stronger enforcement of state anti-militia laws, better tracking of extremists in law enforcement and the military, and stronger international cooperation to tackle it as a transnational issue. Most important, there is a civil war raging inside the Republican Party between those who support democracy and peaceful politics and those who support far-right extremism. That conflict has repercussions for all of us, and the fetishization of guns is a pervasive part of it.The prominence of guns in campaign ads is a good barometer of their political potency. Democrats have sometimes used guns in ads — in 2010, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, running for the Senate, shot a hole through a copy of the cap-and-trade climate bill with a single-shot hunting rifle. Since then, guns have all but disappeared from Democratic messaging. But in the most recent midterm elections, Republican politicians ran more than 100 ads featuring guns and more than a dozen that featured semiautomatic military-style rifles.In one of the most violent of those ads, Eric Greitens, a Republican candidate for Senate in Missouri and a former Navy SEAL, kicks in the door of a house and barges in with a group of men dressed in tactical gear and holding assault rifles. Mr. Greitens boasts that the group is hunting RINOs — a derogatory term for “Republicans in name only.” The ad continues, “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”Twitter flagged the ad, Facebook banned it for violating its terms of service, and Mr. Greitens lost his race for office. He may have been playacting in the ad, but many other heavily armed people with far-right political views are not. Openly carried assault rifles have become an all too common feature of political events around the country and are having a chilling effect on the exercise of political speech.This intimidating display of weaponry isn’t a bipartisan phenomenon: A recent New York Times analysis examined more than 700 demonstrations where people openly carrying guns showed up. At about 77 percent of the protests, those who were armed “represented right-wing views, such as opposition to L.G.B.T.Q. rights and abortion access, hostility to racial justice rallies and support for former President Donald J. Trump’s lie of winning the 2020 election.”As we’ve seen at libraries that host drag queen book readings, Juneteenth celebrations and Pride marches, the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms is fast running up against the First Amendment’s right to peaceably assemble. Securing that right, and addressing political violence in general, requires addressing the armed intimidation that has become commonplace in public places and the gun culture that makes it possible.A growing number of American civilians have an unhealthy obsession with “tactical culture” and rifles like the AR-15. It’s a fringe movement among the 81 million American gun owners, but it is one of several alarming trends that have coincided with the increase in political violence in this country, along with the spread of far-right extremist groups, an explosion of anti-government sentiment and the embrace of deranged conspiracy theories by many Republican politicians. Understanding how these currents feed one another is crucial to understanding and reversing political violence and right-wing extremism.The American gun industry has reaped an estimated $1 billion in sales over the past decade from AR-15-style guns, and it has done so by using and cultivating their status as near mythical emblems of power, hyper-patriotism and manhood. Earlier this year, an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform found that the gun industry explicitly markets its products by touting their military pedigree and making “covert references to violent white supremacists like the Boogaloo Boys.” These tactics “prey on young men’s insecurities by claiming their weapons will put them ‘at the top of the testosterone food chain.’”This marketing and those sales come at a significant cost to America’s social fabric.In his recent book “Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America,” Ryan Busse, a former firearms company executive, described attending a Black Lives Matter rally with his son in Montana in 2020. At the rally, dozens of armed men, some of them wearing insignia from two paramilitary groups — the 3 Percenters and the Oath Keepers — appeared, carrying assault rifles. After one of the armed men assaulted his 12-year-old son, Mr. Busse had his epiphany.“For years prior to this protest, advertising executives in the gun industry had been encouraging the ‘tactical lifestyle,’” Mr. Busse wrote. The gun industry created a culture that “glorified weapons of war and encouraged followers to ‘own the libs.’”The formula is a simple one: More rage, more fear, more gun sales.A portion of those proceeds are then funneled back into politics through millions of dollars in direct contributions, lobbying and spending on outside groups, most often in support of Republicans.All told, gun rights groups spent a record $15.8 million on lobbying in 2021 and $2 million in the first quarter of 2022, the transparency group OpenSecrets reported. “From 1989 to 2022, gun rights groups contributed $50.5 million to federal candidates and party committees,” the group found. “Of that, 99 percent of direct contributions went to Republicans.” More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      The Republican Party and the Scourge of Extremist Violence

      by

      .g-seriestitle-wrapper {
      width: 600px;
      margin: 0px auto;
      max-width: 100%;
      font-family: nyt-imperial;
      font-size: 16px;
      color: #696969;
      font-weight: 100;
      font-style: italic;
      line-height: 23px;
      border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc;
      padding-bottom: 15px;
      }

      section#violentextremism-seriestext {
      margin: 0px auto 15px;
      }

      .g-seriestitle-wrapper a:link, .g-seriestitle-wrapper a:visited {
      color: inherit;
      text-decoration: underline;
      text-decoration-thickness: 1px;
      text-underline-offset: 2px;
      text-decoration-color: #bbb;
      }

      This editorial is the fourth in a series, The Danger Within, urging readers to understand the danger of extremist violence — and offering possible solutions. Read more about the series in a note from Kathleen Kingsbury, the Times Opinion editor.

      On Oct. 12, 2018, a crowd of Proud Boys arrived at the Metropolitan Republican Club in Manhattan. They had come to the Upper East Side club from around the country for a speech by the group’s founder, Gavin McInnes. It was a high point for the Proud Boys — which until that point had been known best as an all-male right-wing street-fighting group — in their embrace by mainstream politics.The Metropolitan Republican Club is an emblem of the Republican establishment. It was founded in 1902 by supporters of Theodore Roosevelt, and it’s where New York City Republicans such as Fiorello La Guardia and Rudy Giuliani announced their campaigns. But the presidency of Donald Trump whipped a faction of the Metropolitan Republican Club into “an ecstatic frenzy,” said John William Schiffbauer, a Republican consultant who used to work for the state G.O.P. on the second floor of the club.The McInnes invitation was controversial, even before a group of Proud Boys left the building and violently confronted protesters who had gathered outside. Two of the Proud Boys were later convicted of attempted assault and riot and given four years in prison. The judge who sentenced them explained the relatively long prison term: “I know enough about history to know what happened in Europe in the ’30s when political street brawls were allowed to go ahead without any type of check from the criminal justice system,” he said. Seven others pleaded guilty in the episode.And yet Republicans at the New York club have not distanced themselves from the Proud Boys. Soon after the incident, a candidate named Ian Reilly, who, former club members say, had a lead role in planning the speech, won the next club presidency. He did so in part by recruiting followers of far-right figures, such as Milo Yiannopoulos, to pack the club’s ranks at the last minute. A similar group of men repeated the strategy at the New York Young Republicans Club, filling it with far-right members, too.Many moderate Republicans have quit the clubs in disgust. Looking back, Mr. Schiffbauer said, Oct. 12, 2018, was a “proto” Jan. 6.In conflicts like this one —  not all of them played out so publicly — there is a fight underway for the soul of the Republican Party. On one side are Mr. Trump and his followers, including extremist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. On the other side stand those in the party who remain committed to the principle that politics, even the most contentious politics, must operate within the constraints of peaceful democracy. It is vital that this pro-democracy faction win out over the extremists and push the fringes back to the fringes.It has happened before. The Republican Party successfully drove the paranoid extremists of the John Birch Society out of public life in the 1960s. Party leaders could do so again for the current crop of conspiracy peddlers. Voters may do it for them, as they did in so many races in this year’s midterm elections. But this internal Republican Party struggle is important for reasons far greater than the tally in a win/loss column. A healthy democracy requires both political parties to be fully committed to the rule of law and not to entertain or even tacitly encourage violence or violent speech. A large faction of one party in our country fails that test, and that has consequences for all of us.Extremist violence is the country’s top domestic terrorist threat, according to a three-year investigation by the Democratic staff members of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, which reported its findings last week. “Over the past two decades, acts of domestic terrorism have dramatically increased,” the committee said in its report. “National security agencies now identify domestic terrorism as the most persistent and lethal terrorist threat to the homeland. This increase in domestic terror attacks has been predominantly perpetrated by white supremacist and anti-government extremist individuals and groups.” While there have been recent episodes of violent left-wing extremism, for the past few years, political violence has come primarily from the right.This year has been marked by several high-profile acts of political violence: an attempted break-in at an F.B.I. office in Ohio; the attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the speaker of the House; the mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo by a white supremacist; an armed threat against Justice Brett Kavanaugh; a foiled plan to attack a synagogue in New York. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      John Fetterman and the Fight for White Working-Class Voters

      by

      Nina Feldman and Dan Powell and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherFor the Democrats to hold on to power in Washington, they have to do what President Biden did in Pennsylvania two years ago: Break the Republican Party’s grip on the white working-class vote, once the core of the Democratic base. In tomorrow’s midterm election, no race better encapsulates that challenge than the Pennsylvania Senate candidacy of John Fetterman.Is the plan working or is this crucial group of voters now a lost cause for the Democrats?On today’s episodeShane Goldmacher, a national political reporter for The New York Times.John Fetterman, the Democratic Senate candidate for Pennsylvania, embodies the party’s hope of winning back white working-class voters.Christopher Dolan/The Times-Tribune, via Associated PressBackground readingAmong white working-class voters in places like northeast Pennsylvania, the Democratic Party has both the furthest to fall and the most to gain.In the final days of the Pennsylvania Senate race, Mr. Fetterman has acknowledged that his recovery from a stroke remains a work in progress, leaning into the issue with a mix of humor, sarcasm and notes of empathy. There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Shane Goldmacher More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      The Battle for Blue-Collar White Voters Raging in Biden’s Birthplace

      by

      SCRANTON, Pa. — The fate of the Democratic Party in northeastern Pennsylvania lies in the hands of people like Steve Papp.A 30-year veteran carpenter, he describes his job almost poetically as “hanging out with your brothers, building America.” But there has been a harder labor in his life of late: selling his fellow carpenters, iron workers and masons on a Democratic Party that he sees as the protector of a “union way of life” but that they see as being increasingly out of step with their cultural values.“The guys aren’t hearing the message,” Mr. Papp said.Perhaps no place in the nation offers a more symbolic and consequential test of whether Democrats can win back some of the white working-class vote than Pennsylvania — and particularly the state’s northeastern corner, the birthplace of President Biden, where years of economic decline have scarred the coal-rich landscape. This region is where a pivotal Senate race could be decided, where two seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs and where a crucial governorship hangs in the balance.No single constituency, of course, will determine the outcome of these races in a state as big as Pennsylvania, let alone the 2022 midterms. Turning out Black voters in cities is critical for Democrats. Gaining ground in the swingy suburbs is a must for Republicans. But it is among white working-class voters in rural areas and smaller towns — places like Sugarloaf Township, where Mr. Papp lives — where the Democratic Party has, in some ways, both the furthest to fall and the most to gain.A highway sign outside Scranton, Pa.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesSitting in the Scranton carpenters’ union hall, where Democratic lawn signs leaned up against the walls, Mr. Papp said that he often brought stickers to the job site for those he converted, but that he had recently been giving away fewer than he would like. He ticked through what he feels he has been up against. Talk radio. Social media. The Fox News megaphone. “Misinformation and lies,” as he put it, about the Black Lives Matter movement and the L.G.B.T.Q. community.“It’s about cultural issues and social issues,” Mr. Papp lamented. “People don’t even care about their economics. They want to hate.”Republicans counter that Democratic elites are the ones alienating the working class by advocating a “woke” cultural agenda and by treating them as deplorables. And they also argue that the current economy overseen by Democrats has been the issue pushing voters toward the right.The stakes are far higher than one corner of one state in one election.White blue-collar voters are a large and crucial constituency in a number of top Senate battlegrounds this year, including in Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire and Ohio. And the need for Democrats to lose by less is already an urgent concern for party strategists heading into 2024, when Donald J. Trump, who accelerated the movement of blue-collar voters of all races away from Democrats, has signaled he plans to run again.Lt. Gov. John Fetterman boarding Air Force One after a meeting with President Biden.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesOne study from Pew Research Center showed that as recently as 2007, white voters without a college degree were about evenly divided in their party affiliations. But by 2020, Republicans had opened up an advantage of 59 percent over Democrats’ 35 percent.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Governor’s Races: Democrats and Republicans are heading into the final stretch of more than a dozen competitive contests for governor. Some battleground races could also determine who controls the Senate.Biden’s Agenda at Risk: If Republicans capture one or both chambers of Congress, the president’s opportunities on several issues will shrink. Here are some major areas where the two sides would clash.Ohio Senate Race: Polls show Representative Tim Ryan competing within the margin of error against his G.O.P. opponent, J.D. Vance. Mr. Ryan said the race would be “the upset of the night,” but there is still a cold reality tilting against Democrats.“You can’t get destroyed,” Christopher Borick, the director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion in Pennsylvania, said of the task in front of Democrats. “Cutting into Republican gains in the Trump era among white working-class voters is essential.”There are, quite simply, a lot of white voters without college degrees in America. Another Pew study found that such voters accounted for 42 percent of all voters in the 2020 presidential election. And, by some estimates, they could make up nearly half the vote in Pennsylvania this year.Luzerne County, just south of Scranton, had been reliably Democratic for years and years. Then, suddenly, in 2016, Mr. Trump won Luzerne in a nearly 20-point landslide. He won it again in 2020, but by 5 points fewer. There are Obama-Trump voters here, and Obama-Trump-Biden voters, too. The region may have tacked to the right politically in recent years, but it is still a place where the phrase “Irish Catholic Democrat” was long treated as almost a single word, and where it might be more possible to nudge at least some ancestral Democrats back toward the party.The Roosevelt Beer Hall in Dunmore, Pa.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesScranton, a former coal town nestled in the scenic Wyoming Valley, has become synonymous with this voting bloc. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, who hopes to become the next House speaker, visited the region this fall to unveil the Republican agenda, and both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump traveled to the area for events kicking off the fall campaign.This year, the Pennsylvania Senate race looms especially large.The Democratic nominee, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, was seemingly engineered for the task of appealing to the working class. A bald and burly man with a political persona that revolves around Carhartt sweatshirts and tattoos, Mr. Fetterman has vowed from the start to compete in even the reddest corners of Pennsylvania. He is running against Mehmet Oz, a wealthy, out-of-state television celebrity who, according to polls, has been viewed skeptically from the start by the Republican base, and who talked of buying crudités at the grocery in a widely ridiculed video.Yet local Democrats said Mr. Fetterman was still facing an uphill climb among white working-class voters in the region, even before his halting debate performance as he recovers from a stroke. For those Democrats concerned about competing for the state’s biggest voting bloc, the success or failure of Mr. Fetterman’s candidacy has become an almost existential question: If not him and here, then who and where?Mr. Fetterman’s strategy to cut into Republican margins in red counties is displayed on his lawn signs: “Every county. Every vote.” But Republicans have worked relentlessly to undercut the blue-collar image Mr. Fetterman honed as the former mayor of Braddock, a downtrodden former steel town just outside Pittsburgh.Chris Tigue, a self-employed painter.Ruth Fremson/The New York Times“It’s a costume,” Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, said in one segment last month. Republicans have highlighted Mr. Fetterman’s Harvard degree, his middle-class suburban upbringing, the financial support he received from his parents into his 40s and, most recently, a barrage of advertising that has cast him as a soft-on-crime liberal.Both sides are targeting voters like Chris Tigue, a 39-year-old who runs a one-man painting company and lives in Dunmore, a town bordering Scranton known for its enormous landfill. Mr. Tigue, a registered Republican, has gone on a political journey that may seem uncommon in most of the country but is more familiar here.He voted twice for Barack Obama. Then he voted twice for Donald Trump.As Mr. Tigue sat outside Roosevelt Beer Garden, a watering hole where the portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt on the wall was a reminder of the area’s Democratic heritage, he explained that Mr. Fetterman had won him back, not just because of his working class “curb appeal,” but because of his stances on abortion and medical cannabis.Mr. Tigue said he was voting for Mr. Fetterman knowing that Mr. Fetterman would probably support the president’s economic agenda in the Senate, a prospect he called “a little scary.” But he said he was looking past that fact. “I’m focusing on the person,” he said.Justin Taylor, the mayor of nearby Carbondale, is another Obama-Trump voter. Elected as a 25-year-old Democrat almost two decades ago, he endorsed Mr. Trump in 2020 and grew increasingly more Republican, just like the city he serves.Mayor Justin Taylor of Carbondale, Pa., at the Anthracite Center, a former bank he converted into an event space.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesToday, he is adamantly opposed to Mr. Fetterman, calling him a liberal caricature and the kind of candidate the left thinks will appeal to the people of Carbondale, a shrinking town of under 10,000 people that was founded on anthracite coal. “I think, quite honestly, he is an empty Carhartt sweatshirt and the people who are working class in Pennsylvania see that,” Mr. Taylor said.Mr. Taylor is still technically a registered Democrat, he said, but he feels judged by his own party. “The Democratic Party forces it down your throat,” he said, “and they make you a bigot, they make you a racist, they make you a homophobe if you don’t understand a concept, or you don’t 100 percent agree.”Still, Mr. Taylor said he might not vote in the Senate race at all. Of his fellow Fetterman doubters, and of Oz skeptics, he asked, “Do they stay home? That becomes the big question.”Northeastern Pennsylvania is also home to two bellwether House races with embattled Democratic incumbents.One race features Representative Matt Cartwright, who is the rarest of political survivors — the only House Democrat nationwide running this year who held a district that Mr. Trump carried in both 2016 and 2020. The other includes Representative Susan Wild, who is defending a swing district that contains one of only two Pennsylvania counties that Mr. Biden flipped in 2020.Representative Matt Cartwright, left. Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesThe union hall of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners Local 445. Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesTo emphasize his cross-partisan appeal, Mr. Cartwright has run an ad this year featuring endorsements from one man in a Trump hat and another in a Biden shirt. In an interview, he said the area’s long-term economic downturn, which he traced to the free-trade deals of the 1990s, had caused many people to work multiple jobs, sapping morale and even affecting the region’s psyche.“When something like that happens, who do you vote for?” Mr. Cartwright said. “You vote for the change candidate. And that’s what we saw a lot of. They voted for Obama twice. They voted for Trump twice. And my own view of it is when they vote that way, it’s a cry for help.”Demographic shifts in politics happen in both directions. As Democrats have hemorrhaged white working-class voters, they have made large gains with college-educated white voters who were once the financial and electoral base of Republicans. In Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia suburbs have become strongly Democratic, while the state’s less populated areas have become more Republican.Alexis McFarland Kelly, a 59-year-old former owner of a gourmet market near Scranton, is the kind of voter Democrats are newly winning over. Raised as a Republican, she was often warned by her father, a business owner, and her grandfather, a corporate vice president, of the excesses of labor and the left. But now, she is planning to vote for Mr. Fetterman.Her biggest misgiving is the hoodie-wearing persona that might appeal to the working class. “I just wish he’d put a suit on once in a while,” she said.Last year, she went to the local Department of Motor Vehicles and declared that she wanted to change her party registration to become a Democrat. The clerk was shocked. “She basically dropped her pen and said, ‘What?! A Democrat!’” Ms. Kelly recalled. “‘Everyone is going the other way.’”Nina Feldman More