This conversation explains a vital reason why Trump is so popular on the right

Craig and Robinson dubbed this effect “group-status threat”: When whites felt like their control over society was slipping, they were more likely to embrace anti-minority ideas and support policies that might slow the rate of demographic change (like immigration restrictionism). When whites feel like the privileged status of their group in society is threatened, they will want to do something to preserve it.

This study wasn’t a one-off: As my colleague Brian Resnick documents, study after study has confirmed that white status threat is a major force driving white Americans to the right on issues of race and tolerance. And since the Republican Party has become overwhelmingly white, this has an effect on the party as a whole. A July poll found that 50 percent of Republicans felt that “increased racial diversity” had a negative impact on the United States, while only 43 percent thought the effect was positive.

The University of Maryland’s Janelle Wong looked at the political attitudes of white evangelicals like Sheila and found that status threat is the key reason why they, as a group, have been so overwhelmingly supportive of Trump.

“Rank-and-file white evangelicals have the most negative attitudes toward immigrants of all U.S. religious groups,” Wong writes at the Monkey Cage. “Their conservative reaction to demographic change is at the heart of their political agenda.”

Link here.

The U.S. Needs to Face Up to Its Long History of Election Meddling

What many Russians, but few Americans, know is that 20 years before Russia tried to swing an American presidential election, America tried to swing a presidential election in Russia. The year was 1996. Boris Yeltsin was seeking a second term, and Bill Clinton desperately wanted to help. “I want this guy to win so bad,” he told Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, “it hurts.”

Clinton liked Yeltsin personally. He considered him Russia’s best hope for embracing democracy and capitalism. And he appreciated Yeltsin’s acquiescence during nato’s march eastward, into the former Soviet bloc.

Unfortunately for Clinton, ordinary Russians appreciated their leader far less. Yeltsin’s “shock-therapy” economic reforms had reduced the government’s safety net, and produced a spike in unemployment and inflation. Between 1990 and 1994, the average life expectancy among Russian men had dropped by an astonishing six years. When Yeltsin began his reelection campaign in January 1996, his approval rating stood at 6 percent, lower than Stalin’s.

So the Clinton administration sprang into action. It lobbied the International Monetary Fund to give Russia a $10 billion loan, some of which Yeltsin distributed to woo voters. Upon arriving in a given city, he often announced, “My pockets are full.”

Three American political consultants—including Richard Dresner, a veteran of Clinton’s campaigns in Arkansas—went to work on Yeltsin’s reelection bid. Every week, Dresner sent the White House the Yeltsin campaign’s internal polling. And before traveling to meet Yeltsin in April, Clinton asked Dresner what he should say in Moscow to boost his buddy’s campaign.

It worked. In a stunning turnaround, Yeltsin—who had begun the campaign in last place—defeated his communist rival in the election’s final round by 13 percentage points. Talbott declaredthat “a number of international observers have judged this to be a free and fair election.” But Michael Meadowcroft, a Brit who led the election-observer team of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, later claimed there had been widespread voter fraud, which he had been pressured not to expose. In Chechnya, which international observers believe contained fewer than 500,000 adults, one million people voted, and Yeltsin—despite prosecuting a brutal war in the region—won exactly 70 percent. “They’d been bombed out of existence, and there they were all supposedly voting for Yeltsin,” exclaimed Meadowcroft. “It’s like what happens in Cameroon.” Thomas Graham, who served as the chief political analyst at the U.S. embassy in Moscow during the campaign, later conceded that Clinton officials knew the election wasn’t truly fair. “This was a classic case,” he admitted, “of the ends justifying the means.”

Link here.

Why Trump Is Getting Away With Foreign-Policy Insanity

"The main reason, I suspect, is that the elite foreign-policy establishment doesn’t have a lot of credibility anymore. After all, this bipartisan caste of national security managers are responsible for open-ended NATO expansion, which did not make Europe a reliable “zone of peace”; mishandled the Kosovo War; failed to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks; either conceived, supported, or went along with the invasion of Iraq; have continued to back the 17-years-and-counting-quagmire in Afghanistan; bungled assorted interventions in Libya, Yemen, and Syria; repeatedly mismanaged the Middle East peace process; and have presided over an ever-expanding and apparently endless “war on terror.” Some of these folks also approved the illegal surveillance of Americans, the torture and targeted killings of foreigners (some of them innocent civilians), and any number of other crimes or follies. The credibility of this elite was further tarnished by the 2008 financial crisis and their failure to recognize that globalization and rising inequality were leaving many people behind and were bound to provoke a powerful backlash.

To make matters worse, most members of this elite refused to hold themselves or their friends accountable for all of these failures. Instead, both Democratic liberal interventionists and Republican neoconservatives kept insisting that the United States had the right, the responsibility, and the wisdom to spread its values far and wide and that there was no alternative to their ambitious strategy of liberal hegemony. With a few notable exceptions, most of these folks have never acknowledged their past errors or shown that they’ve learned from their mistakes."

Link here.

These American scholars say the real threat to the U.S. is Russophobia

“I’ve seen these things from the inside. I've re-thought and re-thought how we got to the edge of war with Russia, where we haven't been since Cuba in 1962. And I have concluded, and I would be happy to debate my opponents… It is 95 percent our own doing,” Cohen said.

Amen.

Link here.

DC Elites Shocked at Trump Bromance with Putin but Give Israel’s Netanyahu a Pass

"In Washington, it is all right to slam Trump for treason (it isn’t really treason since the US isn’t at war with the Russian Federation) or for making nice with Putin despite the latter’s various misdeeds. But it is political death to criticize Netanyahu’s interference in American foreign policy or aggressive Israeli land theft or Israel setting the US up for conflict with Iran.

But there is no domestic Russia lobby, so it is all right to slam Putin.

Hypocrisy."

Link here.

Washington’s Dangerous Fixation on Iran

"Perhaps the most problematic aspect of how Iran’s specter haunts America is that it forecloses serious domestic introspection about Washington’s Middle Eastern policies. This is unfortunate because the U.S. bears much responsibility for what Iran and the surrounding region have become today- but America seems unlikely to recognize that anytime soon."

Link here.