A vicious culture war is all Trump has left
“Dear Michael,” wrote British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1957 to the head of his Conservative Party’s research department, “I am always hearing about the Middle Classes. What is it they really want? Can you put it down on a sheet of notepaper and I will see whether we can give it to them.”
Macmillan’s puckish letter to Michael Fraser, the party official, is cited in Alistair Horne’s fine biography of the moderate Tory leader who figured out an answer good enough to sweep to victory two years later. Macmillan, in any event, had something important going for him: In the Britain of the late 1950s, he could plausibly declare that “most of our people have never had it so good.”
That is not a claim President Trump can make in a summer of pandemic and widespread unemployment. And so Trump has decided that what he can give to white middle-class voters whose support he desperately needs to win back is — a culture war.
Trump’s vile speeches at Mount Rushmore on Friday and at the White House on the Fourth of July signal that he sees one and only one possible path to victory: He will tear an already riven nation to pieces.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-vicious-culture-war-is-all-trump-has-left/2020/07/05/4ca0986c-bca1-11ea-8cf5-9c1b8d7f84c6_story.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
