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Recently published in Journal of Social and Political Psychology by Thomas F. Pettigrew seeks to understand the psychological profile of Trump supporters:
The Trump movement is not singular within the United States (the Know Nothing movement in the 1850s, the Wallace movement in the 1960s, and the more recent Tea Party Movement). Moreover, other democracies have seen similar movements (e.g., Austria's Freedom Party, Belgium's Vlaams Blok, France's National Front, Germany's Alternative for Germany Party (AfD), and Britain's U.K. Independence Party (UKIP).
In virtually all these cases, the tinder especially involved male nativists and populists who were less educated than the general population. But this core was joined by other types of voters as well. Five highly interrelated characteristics stand out that are central to a social psychological analysis – authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, outgroup prejudice, the absence of intergroup contact and relative deprivation.No one factor describes Trump's supporters. But an array of factors – many of them reflecting five major social psychological phenomena can help to account for this extraordinary political event: authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, prejudice, relative deprivation, and intergroup contact.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 07 2017, @04:19AM (14 children)
Ralph Nader is a really smart guy.
He has also run for president as a 3rd-party candidate 4 times.
He now says that that's not the best bet.
If you look at the election return numbers, he's clearly right.
(You have to go back to Lincoln to see one of the Big 2 parties getting bumped.)
Ralph says that getting involved in the existing Big 2 is the best plan.
Do what the Tea Party did and take over the party that you think needs improvement, making sure that the right people get nominated and the right platform gets adopted.
If you want real change, showing up at the polls occasionally is not enough.
Thom Hartmann closes his radio/TV program with
"Remember: Democracy begins with you. Get out there. Get active. Tag. You're it."
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by rylyeh on Thursday December 07 2017, @07:11AM (5 children)
All a 'Third Party' needs to become a major political force is a charismatic, maverick leader who can out-think the other parties by thinking out of the box to solve concrete problems.
Those of like mind will flock to the new 'Third Party' when this happens. 🚀
"a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 07 2017, @10:54AM
I noticed that you didn't give an example that followed your model and was successful.
Another thing that Ralph Nader notes is that thinking that you can easily grab the top spot and that the world will fall in line behind you is just silly.
It takes LOT AND LOTS of -LOCAL- organizations to get things going.
That is, precinct-level operations.
You need a bunch of folks from your party on town councils, on county commissions, in state assemblies, and in Congress before you will ever get traction for your agenda at the national level.
I mention the "bottom-up" thing a lot here.
This is very much a case where that applies.
Having a guy who connects with the masses is a big plus, but it takes organization to move the ball down the field.
One guy going it alone is gonna get creamed.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by redneckmother on Thursday December 07 2017, @04:56PM (3 children)
Oh. Too bad Bernie Sanders didn't run as a 3rd party candidate.
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday December 07 2017, @09:01PM (2 children)
As a non-American it strikes me as weird that you talk about third parties.
I live in a country of about 4 million people that until recently had eight parties in Parliament.
We have proportional voting though. We also have sane(ish) campaign finance rules and an independent electoral comision that sets the electorate boundaries.
I'm going to continue to assume that a country of 350 million or so that winds up represented by only two parties is not really a democracy at all, unless someone can convince me otherwise.
(The whole big-tent party argument is not compelling).
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 07 2017, @11:23PM
Even as the same teachers glossing over it tell us we need to study our history classes lest we be doomed to repeat the past.
America has *NEVER* since the *BEGINNING* been by the people, for the people. It was always for the merchants and landowners. The regular colonists, farmers, and common man were regularly fucked over, including as veterans of the revolutionary war.
While there have been some some 'apparent' political shifts over the years, it was usually infighting between the different merchant/landowner/media mogul/faux aristocrat class influencing the voters in ways that were financially beneficial to them. Either by pushing legislation benefitting them, causing controversy benefitting them, or by weakening opponents through erosion of their economic base (see both the whiskey tax and slavery, which favored the genteel class over the working class, and the industrialists over the plantation owners.) In the end it shoudl err on the side of the individual, but only so long as the individual was making a good faith effort and not doing anything intended to obviously defraud the party investing in them.
One of the details often overlooked in regards to slavery is that during the early colonial period slavery *WAS* illegal. However indentured servitude was not. Which thanks to weak labor laws and enforcement, combined with an uneducated working class seeking opportunities in the new world lead to some people being contractually bound into servitude by immoral people who found ways to defraud their indentured servants from agreed upon contractual terms that would have allowed them to buy our their contracts after a few years, fulfilling the economic investment in bringing them to the new world, while providing sufficient repayment to hire a replacement worker at the end of their term. The same thing happened with company towns, factory jobs, slavery itself (losing all semblance of contractual labor), and continues even today with military service and a variety of 'foreign held corporation' jobs that work around American labor laws by being flagged in other countries (see various maritime industries for current examples.)
The real problem faced both then and today is the same: Using legal minutae to distract from the simple question: Is a certain business relationship mutually beneficial, or disadvantaging to one, usually weaker, party? If the answer is yes and results in said party being unable to move on within 2-5 years (perhaps longer, but only in the case of trade professions requiring 10 or more years of experience, and only if the investment can be terminated at 2 year intervals if either party is unsatisfied with no financial balance remaining between them.)
(Score: 1) by rylyeh on Sunday December 10 2017, @03:47AM
Yes, it is quite apparent that the US suffers form an overwhelming lack of imagination when it comes to politics as well as education, etc.
"a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by FatPhil on Thursday December 07 2017, @10:01AM (7 children)
Awww, how cute. Make them feel like they're important, eh?, humaans love flattery like that.
"Remember: flying begins with you. Get out there. Get flapping."
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 07 2017, @11:05AM (5 children)
The example of The Tea Party was already given.
Surely you noticed how they hijacked the GOP.
It's completely do-able.
The first step is showing up and signing up.
...and the Democratic Socialists[1] of America have been working on the superdelegates thing.
[1] I really hate redundant names.
...and they aren't about the collective ownership of the means of production either.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Thursday December 07 2017, @03:37PM (2 children)
Once democracy has begun, can it *continue* with the help of you being active.
The USA's approximation to democracy is so dysfunctional it's naive to call it a democracy. With the dysfunctional electoral college system as it currently is, it's not even a democratically elected oligarchy. And you're the poster-child for Duverger's law to boot (in large part due to the flaws in the system that make it undemocratic), which almost guarantees the stable equilibrium.
The USA needs the miracle still. (Ever worse and worse presidents might be the impetus required, but you're only at the President Comacho level currently, there's plenty worse possible.)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 07 2017, @09:25PM (1 child)
The USA's approximation to democracy is so dysfunctional it's naive to call it a democracy
Amen.
I find the term Oligarchy to be appropriate.
It's the way the place was set up.
...with just enough of a veneer to convince the suckers that they count.
The term The 99 Percent, coined by Occupy, puts a fine point on how much power Joe Average has--if he'd use it collectively against his actual oppressors.
Duverger's law
Didn't know that it had a name.
Yeah. You may have seen me advocating here for Ranked Choice Voting.
All the really great places have that.
Way more democratic.
President Comacho
s/Comacho/Camacho
...but, yeah.
you're
I keep forgetting that you're in .fi.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Friday December 08 2017, @07:13AM
One thing I like about Estonia is that, at least for municipal elections, a lot of the time when you vote for person X, and they reach a mandate level, they you are represented by person X precisely, not just some party person X has chosen to affiliate themself to. A full 43% of the representatives are independent or ad hoc coalitions (representing 27% of the voters)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_municipal_elections,_2017
Duverger's Law still hasn't kicked in here, even though the 5% cutoff for any representation at all (in Tallinn, with 79 seats, even 2% of the vote is surely enough to prove there should be representation) does encourage it somewhat. (I'm one of those idealists who believes that if 2% of Tallinn's population is extremist racist whackjobs then, as long as they don't interfere with the smooth-running of democracy, they should be represented.}
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 07 2017, @05:41PM (1 child)
I'm not sure that the Tea Party hijacked the republicans, so much as gave notice to the party bosses that they couldn't just arbitrarily ignore their constituency.
In a way, it was a populist democratic wave in the republican base. They demanded purity, not a total policy base change. Their slogan was that they were going RINO-hunting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 07 2017, @09:08PM
Disagree strongly.
The Tea Party was a bunch of White suckers, funded by the Koch brothers.
They put the Republican mantra Increase inequality via tax cuts for the rich on steroids, i.e. working against their own best interest.
(The main GOP mechanism doesn't do Joe Average a bit of good, BTW.
The latest scam is big tax cuts for billionaires and corporations that are permanent and tiny tax cuts for a small number of folks--with the latter expiring quickly, after which Joe Average's share of costs goes up while programs that benefit him have been cut.)
their constituency
Last count I saw said that 29 percent of USAians say they approve of the #GOPTaxScam.
(...and the poll was taken while the Repugs were still scribbling things into the margins of the bill).
That number doesn't seem to indicate to me that they're serving their base in an acceptable way.
It certainly doesn't sound "populist".
Republicanism[1] only works if your goal is to further empower The Ownership Class (The Oligarchy).
If you're looking to shift power to Joe Average, you bet on the wrong horse.
[1] ...and voting Democrat wasn't significantly better last time around--and for a lot of elections before that.
Neoliberals of all stripes suck.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Thursday December 07 2017, @06:28PM
"Remember: flying begins with you. Get out there. Get flapping."
Ummm....you are aware that humans have the ability to fly now, right? All because a couple guys got out there...