Below are six causes for optimism. But I should stress, as I have since The Reactionary Mind, that the reason I think the right has not much of a future is that it has won. If you consider its great animating energies since the New Deal—anti-labor, anti-civil rights, and anti-feminism—the right has achieved a considerable amount of success. Either in destroying or beating back these movements. So the hopefulness you read below, it needs to be remembered, is built on the ruins of the left. It reflects a considerable pessimism and arises from a sober realism about where we are right now. 1. An ABC News poll has Trump at 38% of the popular vote. It’s only one poll, and I haven’t been paying much attention […]

In the past few weeks, as the campaign has intensified, I’ve gotten a lot of questions (and pushback) about why I keep arguing for the non-newness of Donald Trump, why I keep resurrecting the multiple precedents for his candidacy against those who would argue for its novelty and innovations. Part of the reason, of course, is that it is an offense against history and memory to pretend that the GOP of the past was somehow a party of reasonable men, clear-headed and basically decent moderates who were taking the car out for a Sunday spin when it got suddenly hijacked by crazies and yahoos. For years, I’ve been making the claim that the GOP radicals and extremists of today are consistent with conservatives […]

So much of liberals’ orientation these past five decades has been shaped by the rise of the right; by the sense that the US is really, truly, in its heart of hearts, a center/right country; that the people who elected Nixon, Reagan, and Bush really are the permanent majority. But a lot of demographic research is showing that this is radically changing among younger voters. Not just what we’re seeing in the Democratic Party, where younger voters are moving, galloping, to the left, but also among younger Republican voters, who are far less conservative than their Republican elders. As this Vox piece reports: Piles of research had already indicated that the youngest generation is much more liberal than its predecessors. But it […]