Portside

• Who Are the Out-Of-Touch Americans in This Election? – Daniel W. Drezner (Washington Post)
• The Less Noticed Battles That May Decide the Presidential Election – Liz Olson  (Fortune)
• Radicals in the Democratic Party, from Upton Sinclair to Bernie Sanders – James N. Gregory (The Conversation)
• The Religious Right’s Dangerous Bet On Trump – McKay Coppins (Buzzfeed)
• When Cuteness Comes of Age – Neil Steinberg (Mosaic)

Who Are the Out-Of-Touch Americans in This Election?

By Daniel W. Drezner
August 1, 2016
Washington Post

This month everyone is falling all over themselves trying to explain the parts of America that find Donald Trump appealing.
There are two predominant themes in these narratives. The first is the degree to which the modern global economy has devastated these parts of the country, combined with the fact that less-wealthy whites feel these relative losses more keenly than minorities.
The second theme in this narrative is that because elites are mostly horrified by Trump, they will naturally look down on Trump’s supporters, rendering them incapable of understanding the political movement he is spearheading.

The Less Noticed Battles That May Decide the Presidential Election

By Liz Olson
July 29, 2016
Fortune

During this fall’s presidential election, 17 states will have new voting restrictions in place for the first time. Stricter rules, ostensibly to weed out fraudulent voting, requiring voters to show specific types of identification have proliferated. But many are being challenged in courts and, recently, such efforts to limit access to the ballot box in Texas and Wisconsin have run into setbacks.

Radicals in the Democratic Party, from Upton Sinclair to Bernie Sanders

By James N. Gregory
August 2, 2016
The Conversation

As we watch Bernie Sanders’ supporters struggling to come to terms with the nomination of Hillary Clinton, it makes sense to ask why leftists are involved in the Democratic Party in the first place.
It started in 1934 when Upton Sinclair, author of “The Jungle” and a socialist for most of his life, announced that he would run for governor of California as a Democrat. This began a unique relationship that has been important to American politics ever since.
For 30 years, the Socialist Party carried the electoral hopes of most radicals. Then, in 1932, Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas endured a crushingly defeat, receiving just 2.2 percent of the vote. Although finally defeated by red-baiting in the general election, Sinclair’s vote tally of 879,537 in California was close to what Norman Thomas had achieved nationwide.

The lesson was obvious. Radicals could do much better working inside the Democratic Party than trying to win elections on their own.
 

The Religious Right’s Dangerous Bet On Trump

By McKay Coppins
August 1, 2016
Buzzfeed

On July 17, 2015, Donald Trump received a caps lock–heavy campaign memo from one of his advisers containing instructions on how to communicate with a voter species that was especially exotic to the candidate at the time.

“The audience is CHRISTIAN SOCIAL CONSERVATIVES,” the Trump adviser wrote on the eve of the the 2015 Family Leadership Summit in Iowa. “They are open to your candidacy but NEED TO KNOW that their issues are IMPORTANT TO YOU.”

The document — along with several other internal Trump camp memos recently obtained by BuzzFeed News — illustrates just how tenuous the New York billionaire’s connection was to his party’s religious base at the outset of this election cycle. Throughout 2014 and 2015, Trump’s small political team coached him on how to make himself more palatable to conservative Christians.

When Cuteness Comes of Age

By Neil Steinberg
July 19, 2016
Mosaic

Kumamon is a yuru-kyara, or ‘loose character’, one of the cuddly creatures in Japan that represent everything from towns and cities to airports and prisons. The word is sometimes translated as ‘mascot’, but yuru-kyara are significantly different from mascots in the West.

Kumamon is kawaii – the word is translated as ‘cute’, but it has broad, multi-layered meanings, covering a range of sweetly alluring images and behaviours. Not only does kawaii encompass the army of Japanese mascots, but a world of fashion that has adult women dressing as schoolgirls and schoolgirls dressing as goth heroines or Lolita seductresses, giving rise to ero-kawaii, or erotickawaii, a mash-up of cute and sexy.