Trump is dangerous. He has some similarities with Hitler. He told people what they liked to hear. However, he also was not a typical politician. He channeled the frustration of Germans against Jews (Trump against immigrants). He promised to make Germany great again. He was unpredictable. He was strange and funny; there were many jokes about Hitler, and people laughed at him. We should not repeat the mistake of the Germans.

For quite a while now (pre-dating Obama, but more frequently since he was elected), I’ve been reading about the Democrats’ troubles with “the white working class”. In some ways, this is unsurprising. In every country with which I’m familiar, a substantial proportion of the working class votes for the more conservative/rightwing party. And, even compared to the most wishy-washy of social democratic and labor parties elsewhere, the Dems aren’t exactly fervent champions of the worker. Still, the Repubs are even worse, so it seemed surprising to read that they regard the white working class as their base. Other things I read (sorry can’t find links now) made things even more puzzling. On the one hand, in the US as elsewhere, higher incomes are correlated with voting for the conservative/rightwing party, which seems to cut against the thesis. On the other hand, I’ve read that the average income of the US working class is the same as that of the population as a whole, which goes against the whole idea of “working class” as I understand it.

All became clear (or, at least, clearer) when I discovered that US political discussion uses two very different (though correlated) concepts of “working class”. The first is the more or less standard one – people who depend on wage labor (normally in manual or low-status service occupations) for their income. The second, specific to the US, and standard in most political polling, is “people without a 4-year college degree”, a class which includes such horny-handed sons and daughters of toil as Bill Gates and Paris Hilton. More prosaically, it includes lots of small business owners, and (since college graduation rates were rising until relative recently), over-represents the old.

Data on US voting patterns is surprisingly scarce, but Andrew Gelman has a big data set confirming the point that Republican voting rises with income. Andrew kindly sent me the data, which classifies voters by education (5 levels), income (5 categories) and race/ethnicity(4), for a total of 100 categories, and gives, for each group the proportion voting Republican. I’ve used this to look at an income-based definition of working class, encompassing everyone with an income less than $40 000. I’m not sure of the exact definition of this variable, but it seems pretty clear that people with income at this level are unlikely to be living on income from capital or a high-status job. To focus on the claim about the white working class, I’ve divided the 100 categories into four roughly equal-sized groups: working class whites (income less than 40K), middle/high income whites with and without college degrees, and all non-whites. Then I’ve looked at how many votes the Republicans got from each group in 2008.

As the pie chart below illustrates, the biggest group in the Republican voting base, and the group with which they do best is that of middle/high income whites without college degrees (the percentage after the group name gives the Republican share of the vote for that group). There’s nothing surprising in this, since all three variables are correlated with Republican voting. It’s the practice of calling this group “working class” that causes the confusion.

Disaggregating, the extreme case is that of high-school educated whites with incomes over $150K, 81.7 per cent of whom supported the Republicans in 2008. They’re a small group of course, but not negligible at about 1 per cent of the sample (155 out of 19170).

To defend the “white working class problem” thesis, you might argue that the Dems, as the less rightwing party, ought to do better than a 50-50 split among this group if they were voting in line with their own economic interests, and obviously the politics of race and culture are playing a significant role here. But that would require a much more explicitly redistributionist position than the Dems have taken for a long time.

Bush hasn't always been the cheery moderate that he's presented as today. In fact, during his first campaign for governor of Florida in 1994, he was quite conservative.

In order to win the Republican nomination in that race, Bush ran as a hard-liner, staking out positions to the right of his GOP primary opponents on issues such as education, taxes, welfare and criminal justice. He eventually prevailed over the five other Republicans in the primary, though he lost the general election.

"A lot of Bush's ideas during his first run for governor in 1994 were really cutting-edge for the GOP," said Dr. David Colburn, director of the Askew Institute on Politics and Society at the University of Florida. "Bush was the fellow who was out in front and leading the charge with radical reforms."

The cornerstone of Bush's campaign was a sweeping set of conservative proposals that, if enacted, would have made Florida a virtual laboratory for far-right policy.

"I would abolish the Department of Education as it now exists, reducing the 2,000 person bureaucracy to about 50 to administer federal education funding and maintain minimum academic standards in Florida's schools," Bush told the Orlando Sentinel in a November 1994 interview.

Bush also laid out a plan to require that any proposed new taxes be approved directly by Florida voters, a strategy that would have made it nearly impossible to pass them. What state revenue there was, Bush said, should be used whenever possible to hire private corporations to replace state employees.

"We must push privatization [of government] in every area where privatization is possible," Bush told the Sentinel.

Jeb Bush has a reputation as one of the most moderate GOP presidential candidates. But while governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007, he actually racked up an extremely conservative record.

This disparity between his language and his policies isn't an accident. While he's long held strongly conservative views, Bush concluded two decades ago that the best way for a Republican to get elected is to use very compassionate and appealing rhetoric — and he's used that strategy ever since.

This approach was inspired by failure. During Bush's first campaign for governor of Florida, he called himself a "head-banging conservative," talked about "blowing up" state agencies, and said he wanted to "club this government into submission." He didn't carefully watch his words, and ended up causing controversy when, asked what his administration would do for the African-American community, he responded, "Probably nothing." (He intended to make a point about not governing based on race.)

Despite a nationwide landslide for Republicans that year, Bush lost. The lesson he took, as he told the Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson this year, was that "the thing I didn't do was show my heart." He thought he turned off voters by hard-line rhetoric and failed to show he cared about them.

So over the ensuing four years, Bush gave himself a political makeover. He embraced education reform as a major issue where he could combine conservative principles with a positive message, he launched high-profile efforts at outreach to the African-American community, and he focused his message on opportunity and compassion. But, Bush told Ferguson, "The ideology that I believe, the belief in limited government — that didn't change."

And once Bush won the 1998 election and took office, he proved that, pushing through a variety of very conservative measures in what had been one of the most progressive states in the South.

As governor he slashed taxes, rolled back regulations, vetoed $2 billion in legislative spending requests, and privatized a wide variety of government functions. He overhauled the state's public school system, trying to apply market forces like choice and accountability to it. He lifted restrictions on guns (including passing the nation's first Stand Your Ground law), passed pro-life bills, and fought to prevent Terri Schiavo's husband from having her feeding tube removed.

What is interesting about all this caterwauling from the right about Jeb Bush is that on most issues, he is as conservative as it gets. "He was really reactionary on education, criminal justice, taxes, and privatization, but he is regarded as a moderate because he speaks Spanish and has a Mexican wife, and supports more effective immigration laws," Susan Greenbaum, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, University of South Florida and the author of the forthcoming book Blaming the Poor: The Long Shadow of the Moynihan Report on Cruel Images about Poverty, told me in an email exchange. In reality, says Greenbaum, "he is clearly no moderate."

Situationally, conservatism is defined as the ideology arising out of a distinct but recurring type of historical situation in which a fundamental challenge is directed at established institutions and in which the supporters of those institutions employ the conservative ideology in their defense.

Thus, conservatism is that system of ideas employed to justify any established social order, no matter where or when it exists, against any fundamental challenge to its nature or being, no matter from what quarter. Conservatism in this sense is possible in the United States today only if there is a basic challenge to existing American institutions which impels their defenders to articulate conservative values.

The Civil Rights movement was a direct challenge to the existing institutions of the time, and conservatism as an ideology is thus a reaction to a system under challenge, a defense of the status – quo in a period of intense ideological and social conflict. The very notion of a race of people that was; at our beginnings as a country, only considered to be 3/ 5’ s of a human being, now having equal footing with those that actually believed in this idea, is a direct challenge to a long held social concept . It denied the idea of white supremacy as legitimate. It’s surprising how many people still cling to this idea, and will go to extreme lengths to perpetuate it. The idea that a person that could have been your slave at one time, could today be your boss, or even President of the United States, is more than some people can deal with on an emotional level. White supremacy as an institution is renounced, discredited, and dismantled, and that is a major blow to an existing order, and conservatism is always a reaction to a challenge to an existing order. These are people that desperately need somebody to look down to in order to validate their own self-worth. “Sure, life is tough. But at least I’m White.” They can no longer rely on a policy that used to be institutionally enforceable. When that is removed by law, hostility is the result; hostility for those that have been emancipated by law and elevated to equal status, and hostility for the law itself including those that proposed it and passed it.

Thus hatred for African-Americans and for the Liberal’s and liberal policies that endorse their equal status is fully embraced by the conservative. Letting go of the past is difficult to do. An entire race of people becomes an easy scapegoat for one’s own failures. Hate is passed on from one generation to the next. Parents teach their children to hate. The cure for hate is education, so every attempt to keep schools segregated was an important factor. Every attempt to desegregate schools was blocked.

The Conservatives entire set of values is wrapped in a theory of rationality that was handed to him by somebody else with a nice big bow. His way of life is now threatened by a truth that contradicts his beliefs. To admit that it was flawed and without any basis, is to admit that, foundationally, everything he believed in is flawed and that means that he could be wrong about something. And that also means that there is no justification for the pain and suffering that his ideology has inflicted on others. An entire war was fought and over 600,000 lives were lost in order to continue a way of life that was baseless. Rather than admit that his beliefs were in error, he clings to the ideology of hate and directs that hate toward the object that is the very cause of the hate: The Black Man. The Black Man is a constant reminder that his ideology is flawed, a reminder that his hatred is baseless. Holding on to an ideology with no basis is irrational. Rather than dump this irrational way of thinking, he embraces irrationality as a way of life. He becomes a justificationist, and looks for anything that will justify his flawed ideology. He looks for passages in the Bible as a justification for slavery and therefore a justification for his beliefs. He finds a refuge in the Bible and religion, (conservatives a very religious bunch) and this becomes the foundation that he “feels” he can stand on. But he fails to recognize that the Bible cannot be its own basis. That’s circular reasoning. A Criteria cannot be its own criteria. If we claim a basis gives us truth, we then are making the implicit claim that truth requires bases. But then it is plainly obvious our own basis lacks a basis, as it cannot be its own basis. The Bible might justify slavery, but what justifies the Bible? Well… it’s the inspired word of God. According to whom? According to the Bible. That’s circular reasoning. That’s a logical fallacy.

According to Smith; “The South is and always has been the most conservative part of America, conservative in an almost militant promotion of Lockean principles and institutions, and the only part of the country that claimed some kind of Burkean aristocratic conservatism. The South has also always been the most racist part of the country. This is probably the most direct connection between racism and conservatism in America; despite all the denials of southern intellectuals and politicians, past and present, the South’s militant conservatism was rooted fundamentally in its hyper-racism”.“ The schizophrenia that is part of “southern thought”, is that while it embraced John Locke for whites, it denied Locke to blacks. But at the same time, many of the South’s leading thinkers rejected Locke because slavery could not be squared with his idea of inalienable natural rights. It was one thing to deny Africans civil rights as northern whites did, but to deny them liberty and their property in their labor was more difficult, leading to a full-bore embrace of a bastardized Burkean Aristocracy”. “Southern conservatism is an integral part of American conservatism. And if one looks at it, you’ll find racism at its core. Its militant laissez-faire capitalism, it’s emphasis on the soil, limited government, states’ rights, concurrent majorities, tradition, and all the rest are little more than reactions to modernity and to anti-racist movements.”