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Tag Archives: immigration policy

The alt-right defined

11 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by essaybee2012 in alt-right, American renaissance, Andrew Breitbart, anti-Europeanism, cathedrals, college-educated men, culture, dead white males, Donald Trump, intellectual awakening, intellectuals, Jonathan Haidt, language police, middle-American radicals, moral relativism, morality, natural conservatives, new conservative ideology, non-European ethnocentrism, non-violence, Old Masters, regressive Left, scrubbing of western history, symphonies, The Righteous Mind, tribal preservation, western political discourse, white working-class

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#NRx, /pol/, 1488ers, 1960s, 4chan, 8chan, 9/11, @PizzaPartyBen, academic writing, academics, African-Americans, Al Sharpton, Allum Bokhari, alt-right, AlternativeRight.com, American renaissance, Andrew Auernheimer (weev), Andrew Breitbart, anime, Anita Sarkeesian, anti-Europeanism, anti-Semites, anti-war left, antiracism, atheism, authoritarian instincts, Baby Boomers, basilicas, beltway conservatives, Betsy Woodruff, big business, bigotry, Black Lives Matter, bloggers, border walls, Bosnian genocide, Breitbart News, BuzzFeed News, caricatures, cathedrals, Cecil Rhodes, censorship, change, cheap foreign workers, Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, cognitive science, college-educated men, Commentary, communities, conservative instinct, conservative press, constituent peoples, contemporary journalism, creativity, cuckservatives, cultural appropriation, cultural consensus, cultural libertarian movement, cultural vandalism, curiosity, Curtis Yarvin, dead dogmas, dead white males, death metal, debate, democracy, Democratic establishment, Democrats, demographic displacement, demographics, Deray McKesson, dissent, distinctiveness, diverse societies, diversity, Donald Trump, doomsday rhetoric, drugs, dynamists, economic man, economic sense, egalitarianism, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Enlightenment, entertainment industry, equality, establishment conservatives, ethnic group, ethnic pride, ethnically distinct, evolutionary safeguards, ex-cons, extremist minority, fact, Father Christmas, fourth-wave feminism, free expression, free love, free market, free trade, French New Right, gamers, gay Jew, gay masculinists, GDP, gender, globalized, globalized societies, God Emperor, GOP establishment, grandparents, grassroots, H.L. 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Breitbart News

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/

An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right

by Allum Bokhari & Milo Yiannopoulos  29 Mar 2016

A specter is haunting the dinner parties, fundraisers and think-tanks of the Establishment:  the specter of the “alternative right.”  Young, creative and eager to commit secular heresies, they have become public enemy number one to beltway conservatives — more hated, even, than Democrats or loopy progressives.

The alternative right, more commonly known as the alt-right, is an amorphous movement.  Some — mostly Establishment types — insist it’s little more than a vehicle for the worst dregs of human society:  anti-Semites, white supremacists, and other members of the Stormfront set.  They’re wrong.

Previously an obscure subculture, the alt-right burst onto the national political scene in 2015.  Although initially small in number, the alt-right has a youthful energy and jarring, taboo-defying rhetoric that have boosted its membership and made it impossible to ignore.

It has already triggered a string of fearful op-eds and hit pieces from both Left and Right:  Lefties dismiss it as racist, while the conservative press, always desperate to avoid charges of bigotry from the Left, has thrown these young readers and voters to the wolves as well.

National Review attacked them as bitter members of the white working-class who worship “father-Führer” Donald Trump.  Betsy Woodruff of The Daily Beast attacked Rush Limbaugh for sympathising with the “white supremacist alt-right.”  BuzzFeed begrudgingly acknowledged that the movement has a “great feel for how the internet works,” while simultaneously accusing them of targeting “blacks, Jews, women, Latinos and Muslims.”

The amount of column inches generated by the alt-right is a testament to their cultural punch.  But so far, no one has really been able to explain the movement’s appeal and reach without desperate caveats and virtue-signalling to readers.

Part of this is down to the alt-right’s addiction to provocation.  The alt-right is a movement born out of the youthful, subversive, underground edges of the internet.  4chan and 8chan are hubs of alt-right activity.  For years, members of these forums – political and non-political – have delighted in attention-grabbing, juvenile pranks.  Long before the alt-right, 4channers turned trolling the national media into an in-house sport.

Having once defended gamers, another group accused of harbouring the worst dregs of human society, we feel compelled to take a closer look at the force that’s alarming so many.  Are they really just the second coming of 1980s skinheads, or something more subtle?

We’ve spent the past month tracking down the elusive, often anonymous members of the alt-right, and working out exactly what they stand for.

THE INTELLECTUALS

There are many things that separate the alternative right from old-school racist skinheads (to whom they are often idiotically compared), but one thing stands out above all else:  intelligence.  Skinheads, by and large, are low-information, low-IQ thugs driven by the thrill of violence and tribal hatred.  The alternative right are a much smarter group of people — which perhaps suggests why the Left hates them so much.  They’re dangerously bright.

The origins of the alternative right can be found in thinkers as diverse as Oswald Spengler, H.L Mencken, Julius Evola, Sam Francis, and the paleoconservative movement that rallied around the presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan.  The French New Right also serve as a source of inspiration for many leaders of the alt-right.

The media empire of the modern-day alternative right coalesced around Richard Spencer during his editorship of Taki’s Magazine.  In 2010, Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com, which would become a center of alt-right thought.

Alongside other nodes like Steve Sailer’s blog, VDARE and American Renaissance, AlternativeRight.com became a gathering point for an eclectic mix of renegades who objected to the established political consensus in some form or another.  All of these websites have been accused of racism.

Razib Khan, who lost an opportunity at the New York Times over his views on human biodiversity, now writes for the alt-right Unz Review.

R

The so-called online “manosphere,” the nemeses of left-wing feminism, quickly became one of the alt-right’s most distinctive constituencies.  Gay masculinist author Jack Donovan, who edited AlternativeRight’s gender articles, was an early advocate for incorporating masculinist principles in the alt-right.  His book, The Way Of Men, contains many a wistful quote about the loss of manliness that accompanies modern, globalized societies.

It’s tragic to think that heroic man’s great destiny is to become economic man, that men will be reduced to craven creatures who crawl across the globe competing for money, who spend their nights dreaming up new ways to swindle each other.  That’s the path we’re on now.

Steve Sailer, meanwhile, helped spark the “human biodiversity” movement, a group of bloggers and researchers who strode eagerly into the minefield of scientific race differences — in a much less measured tone than former New York Times science editor Nicholas Wade.

Isolationists, pro-Russians and ex-Ron Paul supporters frustrated with continued neoconservative domination of the Republican party were also drawn to the alt-right, who are almost as likely as the anti-war left to object to overseas entanglements.

Elsewhere on the internet, another fearsomely intelligent group of thinkers prepared to assault the secular religions of the establishment:  the neoreactionaries, also known as #NRx.

Neoreactionaries appeared quite by accident, growing from debates on LessWrong.com, a community blog set up by Silicon Valley machine intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky.  The purpose of the blog was to explore ways to apply the latest research on cognitive science to overcome human bias, including bias in political thought and philosophy.

LessWrong urged its community members to think like machines rather than humans.  Contributors were encouraged to strip away self-censorship, concern for one’s social standing, concern for other people’s feelings, and any other inhibitors to rational thought.  It’s not hard to see how a group of heretical, piety-destroying thinkers emerged from this environment — nor how their rational approach might clash with the feelings-first mentality of much contemporary journalism and even academic writing.

Led by philosopher Nick Land and computer scientist Curtis Yarvin, this group began a gleeful demolition of the age-old biases of western political discourse.  Liberalism, democracy and egalitarianism were all put under the microscope of the neoreactionaries, who found them wanting.

Liberal democracy, they argued, had no better a historical track record than monarchy, while egalitarianism flew in the face of every piece of research on hereditary intelligence.  Asking people to see each other as human beings rather than members of a demographic in-group, meanwhile, ignored every piece of research on tribal psychology.

While they can certainly be accused of being overly-eager to bridge the gap between fact and value (the truth of tribal psychology doesn’t necessarily mean we should embrace or encourage it), these were the first shoots of a new conservative ideology — one that many were waiting for.

NATURAL CONSERVATIVES

Natural conservatives can broadly be described as the group that the intellectuals above were writing for.  They are mostly white, mostly male middle-American radicals, who are unapologetically embracing a new identity politics that prioritises the interests of their own demographic.

In their politics, these new conservatives are only following their natural instincts  — the same instincts that motivate conservatives across the globe.  These motivations have been painstakingly researched by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, and an instinct keenly felt by a huge swathe of the political population: the conservative instinct.

Acclaimed social psychologist Jonathan Haidt described the conservative instinct in his 2012 book The Righteous Mind.

An establishment Republican, with their overriding belief in the glory of the free market, might be moved to tear down a cathedral and replace it with a strip mall if it made economic sense.  Such an act would horrify a natural conservative.  Immigration policy follows a similar pattern:  by the numbers, cheap foreign workers on H1B visas make perfect economic sense.  But natural conservatives have other concerns:  chiefly, the preservation of their own tribe and its culture.

For natural conservatives, culture, not economic efficiency, is the paramount value.  More specifically, they value the greatest cultural expressions of their tribe.  Their perfect society does not necessarily produce a soaring GDP, but it does produce symphonies, basilicas and Old Masters.  The natural conservative tendency within the alt-right points to these apotheoses of western European culture and declares them valuable and worth preserving and protecting.

Needless to say, natural conservatives’ concern with the flourishing of their own culture comes up against an intractable nemesis in the regressive left, which is currently intent on tearing down statues of Cecil Rhodes and Queen Victoria in the UK, and erasing the name of Woodrow Wilson from Princeton in the U.S.  These attempts to scrub western history of its great figures are particularly galling to the alt-right, who in addition to the preservation of western culture, care deeply about heroes and heroic virtues.

This follows decades in which left-wingers on campus sought to remove the study of “dead white males” from the focus of western history and literature curricula.  An establishment conservative might be mildly irked by such behaviour as they switch between the State of the Union and the business channels, but to a natural conservative, such cultural vandalism may just be their highest priority.

In fairness, many establishment conservatives aren’t keen on this stuff either — but the alt-right would argue that they’re too afraid of being called “racist” to seriously fight against it.  Which is why they haven’t.  Certainly, the rise of Donald Trump, perhaps the first truly cultural candidate for President since Buchanan, suggests grassroots appetite for more robust protection of the western European and American way of life.

Alt-righters describe establishment conservatives who care more about the free market than preserving western culture, and who are happy to endanger the latter with mass immigration where it serves the purposes of big business, as “cuckservatives.”

Halting, or drastically slowing, immigration is a major priority for the alt-right.  While eschewing bigotry on a personal level, the movement is frightened by the prospect of demographic displacement represented by immigration.

The alt-right do not hold a utopian view of the human condition:  just as they are inclined to prioritise the interests of their tribe, they recognise that other groups – Mexicans, African-Americans or Muslims – are likely to do the same.  As communities become comprised of different peoples, the culture and politics of those communities become an expression of their constituent peoples.

You’ll often encounter doomsday rhetoric in alt-right online communities:  that’s because many of them instinctively feel that once large enough and ethnically distinct enough groups are brought together, they will inevitably come to blows.  In short, they doubt that full “integration” is ever possible.  If it is, it won’t be successful in the “kumbaya” sense.  Border walls are a much safer option.

The alt-right’s intellectuals would also argue that culture is inseparable from race.  The alt-right believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved.  A Mosque next to an English street full of houses bearing the flag of St. George, according to alt-righters, is neither an English street nor a Muslim street — separation is necessary for distinctiveness.

Some alt-righters make a more subtle argument.  They say that when different groups are brought together, the common culture starts to appeal to the lowest common denominator.  Instead of mosques or English houses, you get atheism and stucco.

Ironically, it’s a position that has much in common with leftist opposition to so-called “cultural appropriation,” a similarity openly acknowledged by the alt-right.

It’s arguable that natural conservatives haven’t had real political representation for decades.  Since the 1980s, establishment Republicans have obsessed over economics and foreign policy, fiercely defending the Reagan-Thatcher economic consensus at home and neoconservative interventionism abroad.  In matters of culture and morality, the issues that natural conservatives really care about, all territory has been ceded to the Left, which now controls the academy, the entertainment industry and the press.

For those who believe in the late Andrew Breitbart’s dictum that politics is downstream from culture, the number of writers, political candidates and media personalities who actually believe that culture is the most important battleground can be dispiriting. (Though Milo is trying his best.)

Natural liberals, who instinctively enjoy diversity and are happy with radical social change – so long as it’s in an egalitarian direction – are now represented by both sides of the political establishment.  Natural conservatives, meanwhile, have been slowly abandoned by Republicans — and other conservative parties in other countries.  Having lost faith in their former representatives, they now turn to new ones — Donald Trump and the alternative right.

There are principled objections to the tribal concerns of the alt-right, but Establishment conservatives have tended not to express them, instead turning nasty in the course of their panicked backlash.  National Review writer Kevin Williamson, in a recent article attacking the sort of voters who back Trump, said that white working-class communities “deserve to die.”

Although the alt-right consists mostly of college-educated men, it sympathises with the white working classes and, based on our interviews, feels a sense of noblesse oblige.  National Review has been just as directly unpleasant about the alt-right as it has, on occasion, been about white Americans in general.

In response to concerns from white voters that they’re going to go extinct, the response of the Establishment — the conservative Establishment — has been to openly welcome that extinction.  It’s true that Donald Trump would not be possible without the oppressive hectoring of the progressive Left, but the entire media is to blame for the environment in which this new movement has emerged.

For decades, the concerns of those who cherish western culture have been openly ridiculed and dismissed as racist.  The alt-right is the inevitable result.  No matter how silly, irrational, tribal or even hateful the Establishment may think the alt-right’s concerns are, they can’t be ignored, because they aren’t going anywhere.  As Haidt reminds us, their politics is a reflection of their natural inclinations.

In other words, the Left can’t language-police and name-call them away, which have for the last twenty years been the only progressive responses to dissent, and the Right can’t snobbishly dissociate itself from them and hope they go away either.

THE MEME TEAM

Earlier, we mentioned the pressure to self-censor.  But whenever such pressure arises in a society, there will always be a young, rebellious contingent who feel a mischievous urge to blaspheme, break all the rules, and say the unsayable.  Why?  Because it’s funny!

As Curtis Yarvin explains via email:  “If you spend 75 years building a pseudo-religion around anything – an ethnic group, a plaster saint, sexual chastity or the Flying Spaghetti Monster – don’t be surprised when clever 19-year-olds discover that insulting it is now the funniest f*****g thing in the world.  Because it is.”

These young rebels, a subset of the alt-right, aren’t drawn to it because of an intellectual awakening, or because they’re instinctively conservative.  Ironically, they’re drawn to the alt-right for the same reason that young Baby Boomers were drawn to the New Left in the 1960s:  because it promises fun, transgression, and a challenge to social norms they just don’t understand.

Just as the kids of the 60s shocked their parents with promiscuity, long hair and rock’n’roll, so too do the alt-right’s young meme brigades shock older generations with outrageous caricatures, from the Jewish “Shlomo Shekelburg” to “Remove Kebab,” an internet in-joke about the Bosnian genocide.  These caricatures are often spliced together with Millennial pop culture references, from old 4chan memes like pepe the frog, to anime and My Little Pony references.

Are they actually bigots? No more than death metal devotees in the 80s were actually Satanists. For them, it’s simply a means to fluster their grandparents. Currently, the Grandfather-in-Chief is Republican consultant Rick Wilson, who attracted the attention of this group on Twitter after attacking them as “childless single men who jerk off to anime.”

Responding in kind, they proceeded to unleash all the weapons of mass trolling that anonymous subcultures are notorious for — and brilliant at.  From digging up the most embarrassing parts of his family’s internet history to ordering unwanted pizzas to his house and bombarding his feed with anime and Nazi propaganda, the alt-right’s meme team, in typically juvenile but undeniably hysterical fashion, revealed their true motivations:  not racism, the restoration of monarchy or traditional gender roles, but lulz. 

It’s hard to know for certain, but we suspect that unlike the core of the alt-right, these young renegades aren’t necessarily instinctive conservatives.  Indeed, their irreverence, lack of respect of social norms, and willingness to stomp on other people’s feelings suggest they may actually be instinctive libertarians.

Certainly that’s the case for a joyful contingent of Trump supporters who spend hours creating memes celebrating the “God Emperor” and tormenting his adversaries, such as Yiannopoulos ally @PizzaPartyBen, who has amassed 40,000 followers on Twitter with his raucous antics.

Were this the 1960s, the meme team would probably be the most hellraising members of the New Left:  swearing on TV, mocking Christianity, and preaching the virtues of drugs and free love.  It’s hard to imagine them reading Evola, musing at St. Peter’s Basilica or settling down in a traditional family unit.  They may be be inclined to sympathise to those causes, but mainly because it annoys the right people.

Young people perhaps aren’t primarily attracted to the alt-right because they’re instinctively drawn to its ideology:  they’re drawn to it because it seems fresh, daring and funny, while the doctrines of their parents and grandparents seem unexciting, overly-controlling and overly-serious.  Of course, there is plenty of overlap.  Some true believers like to meme too.

If you’re a Buzzfeed writer or a Commentary editor reading this and thinking… how childish, well.  You only have yourself to blame for pompously stomping on free expression and giving in to the worst and most authoritarian instincts of the progressive left.  This new outburst of creativity and taboo-shattering is the result.

Of course, just as was the case in history, the parents and grandparents just won’t understand, man.  That’s down to the age difference.  Millennials aren’t old enough to remember the Second World War or the horrors of the Holocaust.  They are barely old enough to remember Rwanda or 9/11.  Racism, for them, is a monster under the bed, a story told by their parents to frighten them into being good little children.

As with Father Christmas, Millennials have trouble believing it’s actually real.  They’ve never actually seen it for themselves — and they don’t believe that the memes they post on /pol/ are actually racist.  In fact, they know they’re not — they do it because it gets a reaction.  Barely a month passes without a long feature in a new media outlet about the rampant sexism, racism or homophobia of online image boards.  For regular posters at these boards, that’s mission accomplished.

Another, more palatable, interpretation of these memes is that they are clearly racist, but that there is very little sincerity behind them.

The funny thing is, being Millennials, they’re often quite diverse.  Just visit a /pol/ thread, where posters’ nationalities are identified with small flags next to their posting IDs.  You’ll see flags from the west, the Balkans, Turkey, the Middle East, South America, and even, sometimes, Africa.  Everyone on the anonymous board hurls the most vicious slurs and stereotypes each other, but like jocks busting each other’s balls at the college bar, it’s obvious that there’s little real hatred present.

That is, until the 1488ers show up.

THE ‘1488rs’

Anything associated as closely with racism and bigotry as the alternative right will inevitably attract real racists and bigots.  Calmer members of the alternative right refer darkly to these people as the “1488ers,” and for all their talk of there being “no enemies to the right,” it’s clear from the many conversations we’ve had with alt-righters that many would rather the 1488ers didn’t exist.

These are the people that the alt-right’s opponents wish constituted the entire movement.  They’re less concerned with the welfare of their own tribe than their fantasies of destroying others.  1488ers would likely denounce this article as the product of a degenerate homosexual and an ethnic mongrel.

Why “1488”?  It’s a reference to two well-known Neo Nazi slogans, the first being the so-called 14 Words:  “We Must Secure The Existence Of Our People And A Future For White Children.”  The second part of the number, 88, is a reference to the 8th letter of the alphabet – H.  Thus, “88” becomes “HH” which becomes “Heil Hitler.”

Not very edifying stuff.  But if you want to use the 1488ers to tarnish the entire alt-right, you need to do the same with Islamist killers and Islam and third-wave feminist wackos with the entire history and purpose of feminism. Which you might well be fine with — but let’s be consistent.

Alt-right vlogger Paul “RamZPaul” Ramsey describes them as “LARPers” or Live-Action Role Players:  a disparaging comparison to nerdy nostalgists who dress up as medieval warriors.  Paul even goes as far as to suggest some in this “toxic mix of kooks and ex-cons” may be there solely to discredit the more reasonable white identitarians.

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Allan Lichtman of American University abhors Trump yet predicts Trump victory

24 Saturday Sep 2016

Posted by essaybee2012 in 13 Keys to the White House, Allan Lichtman, Donald Trump, Predictiong The Next President: The Keys To The White House 2016, presidential election

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13 Keys to the White House, Affordable Care Act, Alan Lichtman, American University, approval polls, Barack Obama, birther movement, Democrats, Donald Trump, establishment Republicans, Franklin Roosevelt, Gary Johnson, Hillary Clinton, horse-race polls, immigration policy, Persian Gulf, Peter W Stevenson, Predicting The Next President: The Keys To The White House 2016, presidential election, Republicans, Trump Institute, Trump University, Vladimir Putin, Washington Post

WashingtonPost.com

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/23/trump-is-headed-for-a-win-says-professor-whos-predicted-30-years-of-presidential-outcomes-correctly/?tid=sm_tw

The Fix

Trump is headed for a win, says professor who has predicted 30 years of presidential outcomes correctly

By Peter W. Stevenson September 23 at 8:00 AM

Who will win the 2016 presidential election? This professor has predicted correctly for 32 years

Allan Lichtman, a distinguished professor of history at American University, created his “13 Keys to the White House” more than 30 years ago—and he’s ready to predict who will win in 2016. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

[For video, see:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/23/trump-is-headed-for-a-win-says-professor-whos-predicted-30-years-of-presidential-outcomes-correctly/?tid=sm_tw%5D

Nobody knows for certain who will win on Nov. 8 — but one man is pretty sure: Professor Allan Lichtman, who has correctly predicted every presidential election since 1984.

When we sat down in May, he explained how he comes to a decision. Lichtman’s prediction isn’t based on horse-race polls, shifting demographics or his own political opinions. Rather, he uses a system of true/false statements he calls the “Keys to the White House” to determine his predicted winner.

And this year, he says, Donald Trump is the favorite to win.

The keys, which are explained in depth in Lichtman’s book “Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House 2016” are:

  1. Party Mandate:  After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections.
  2. Contest:  There is no serious contest for the incumbent party   nomination.
  3. Incumbency:  The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president.
  4. Third party:  There is no significant third party or independent campaign.
  5. Short-term economy:  The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.
  6. Long-term economy:  Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.
  7. Policy change:  The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.
  8. Social unrest:  There is no sustained social unrest during the term.
  9. Scandal:  The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.
  10. Foreign/military failure:  The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.
  11. Foreign/military success:  The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.
  12. Incumbent charisma: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.
  13. Challenger charisma:  The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.

Lichtman, a distinguished professor of history at American University, sat down with The Fix this week to reveal who he thinks will win in November and why 2016 was the most difficult election to predict yet.  Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

THE FIX:  Can you tell me about the keys, and how you use them to evaluate the election from the point where — I assume it’s very murky a year or two out, and they start to crystallize over the course of the election.

LICHTMAN:  “The Keys to the White House” is a historically based prediction system.  I derived the system by looking at every American presidential election from 1860 to 1980, and have since used the system to correctly predict the outcomes of all eight American presidential elections from 1984 to 2012.

The keys are 13 true/false questions, where an answer of “true” always favors the reelection of the party holding the White House, in this case the Democrats.  And the keys are phrased to reflect the basic theory that elections are primarily judgments on the performance of the party holding the White House.  And if six or more of the 13 keys are false — that is, they go against the party in power — they lose.  If fewer than six are false, the party in power gets four more years.

So people who hear just the surface-level argument there might say, well, President Obama has a 58 percent approval rating, doesn’t that mean the Democrats are a shoo-in?  Why is that wrong?

It absolutely does not mean the Democrats are a shoo-in.  First of all, one of my keys is whether or not the sitting president is running for reelection, and right away, they are down that key.  Another one of my keys is whether or not the candidate of the White House party is, like Obama was in 2008, charismatic.  Hillary Clinton doesn’t fit the bill.

The keys have nothing to do with presidential approval polls or horse-race polls, with one exception, and that is to assess the possibility of a significant third-party campaign.

What about Donald Trump on the other side?  He’s not affiliated with the sitting party, but has his campaign been an enigma in terms of your ability to assess this election?

Donald Trump has made this the most difficult election to assess since 1984.  We have never before seen a candidate like Donald Trump, and Donald Trump may well break patterns of history that have held since 1860.

We’ve never before seen a candidate who’s spent his life enriching himself at the expense of others.  He’s the first candidate in our history to be a serial fabricator, making up things as he goes along.  Even when he tells the truth, such as, “Barack Obama really was born in the U.S.,” he adds two lines, that Hillary Clinton started the birther movement, and that he finished it, even though when Barack Obama put out his birth certificate, he didn’t believe it.  We’ve never had a candidate before who not just once, but twice in a thinly disguised way, has incited violence against an opponent.  We’ve never had a candidate before who’s invited a hostile foreign power to meddle in American elections.  We’ve never had a candidate before who’s threatened to start a war by blowing ships out of the water in the Persian Gulf if they come too close to us.  We’ve never had a candidate before who has embraced as a role model a murderous, hostile foreign dictator.  Given all of these exceptions that Donald Trump represents, he may well shatter patterns of history that have held for more than 150 years, lose this election even if the historical circumstances favor it.

We’re a little bit less than seven weeks out from the election today.  Who do you predict will win in November?

Based on the 13 keys, it would predict a Donald Trump victory.  Remember, six keys and you’re out, and right now the Democrats are out — for sure — five keys.

Key 1 is the party mandate — how well they did in the midterms.  They got crushed.

Key number 3 is, the sitting president is not running.

Key number 7, no major policy change in Obama’s second term like the Affordable Care Act.

Key number 11, no major smashing foreign policy success.

And Key number 12, Hillary Clinton is not a Franklin Roosevelt.

One more key and the Democrats are down, and we have the Gary Johnson Key.  One of my keys would be that the party in power gets a “false” if a third-party candidate is anticipated to get 5 percent of the vote or more.  In his highest polling, Gary Johnson is at about 12 to 14 percent.  My rule is that you cut it in half.  That would mean that he gets six to seven, and that would be the sixth and final key against the Democrats.

So very, very narrowly, the keys point to a Trump victory.  But I would say, more to the point, they point to a generic Republican victory, because I believe that given the unprecedented nature of the Trump candidacy and Trump himself, he could defy all odds and lose even though the verdict of history is in his favor.  So this would also suggest, you know, the possibility this election could go either way.  Nobody should be complacent, no matter who you’re for, you gotta get out and vote.

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Do you think the fact that Trump is not a traditional Republican — certainly not an establishment Republican, from a rhetorical or policy perspective — contributes to that uncertainty over where he fits in with the standard methodology for evaluating the Keys?

I think the fact that he’s a bit of a maverick, and nobody knows where he stands on policy, because he’s constantly shifting.  I defy anyone to say what his immigration policy is, what his policy is on banning Muslims, or whoever, from entering the United States, that’s certainly a factor.  But it’s more his history in Trump University, the Trump Institute, his bankruptcies, the charitable foundation, of enriching himself at the expense of others, and all of the lies and dangerous things he’s said in this campaign, that could make him a precedent-shattering candidate.

It’s interesting, I don’t use the polls, as I’ve just explained, but the polls have very recently tightened.  Clinton is less ahead than she was before, but it’s not because Trump is rising, it’s because Clinton is falling.  He’s still around 39 percent in the polls.  You can’t win if you can’t crack 40 percent.

As people realize the choice is not Gary Johnson, the only choice is between Trump and Clinton, those Gary Johnson supporters may move away from Johnson and toward Clinton, particularly those millennials.  And, you know, I’ve seen this movie before.  My first vote was in 1968, when I was the equivalent of a millennial, and lots of my friends, very liberal, wouldn’t vote for Hubert Humphrey because he was part of the Democratic establishment, and guess what?  They elected Richard Nixon.

And, of course, as I have said for over 30 years, predictions are not endorsements.  My prediction is based off a scientific system.  It does not necessarily represent, in any way, shape or form, an Allan Lichtman or American University endorsement of any candidate.  And of course, as a successful forecaster, I’ve predicted in almost equal measure both Republican and Democratic victories.

What Donald Trump is doing on the campaign trail

The GOP presidential nominee is out on the trail ahead of the general election in November.
 ~
[For additional photos, see:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/23/trump-is-headed-for-a-win-says-professor-whos-predicted-30-years-of-presidential-outcomes-correctly/?tid=sm_tw%5D

 

Peter Stevenson is the video editor for The Fix, where he covers national politics.

Follow @PeterWStevenson

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