(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
This Election Pits the Guardians Against the Counterrevolutionaries - The New York Times [1]
['Ezra Klein']
Date: 2024-11-03
Imagine telling yourself, in 2012, that just three presidential elections into the future Barack Obama, Dick Cheney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Alberto Gonzales, Barbara Lee and Elizabeth Warren would be endorsing the same candidate. Such is the strange breadth of Kamala Harris’s coalition: a popular front united not by shared policy goals but by a shared defense of American institutions.
The breadth of Trump’s coalition is different: It stretches from anti-corporate naturalists like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who says Trump has promised him “control” of public health agencies — to post-liberal Catholics like JD Vance to crypto bros to Elon Musk. This, too, is a coalition with vast policy differences. They are united by a shared distrust in — and desire to take control of — American institutions.
We’re used to elections pitting Democrats against Republicans. This election pits Guardians against Counterrevolutionaries.
Steven Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, described it to me like this: We normally think of America as polarized across a left-right ideological divide. This was the axis of political polarization in 2012: The parties were divided on Obamacare and tax rates and austerity. Republicans said they represented America’s entrepreneurial makers against the Democratic coalition built around the indolent 47 percent who paid no income tax and lived off the government. Democrats painted Mitt Romney as a rapacious private equity firm that had taken temporary human form.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/03/opinion/trump-harris-election-day.html
Published and (C) by Common Dreams
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0..
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/
