The Bernie Sanders show, which is filmed in the Democratic party’s DC-based studio, is atypical in ways beyond just presentation. Sanders has decided to bypass traditional media and broadcast exclusively on Facebook. And it is attracting – to borrow a Sandersism – a huge audience.
There seems to be a growing audience for poetry that speaks to the anxieties of our era. Traffic to the academy’s online poetry archive has surged in recent months. Maya Angelou’s poem, “Still I Rise,” has been viewed nearly 470,000 times since Nov. 8, compared to about 280,000 times in that period the previous year, while Langston Hughes’s poem, “Let America Be America Again,” has been viewed some 280,000 times, up from about 88,000 times.
The research of Duke political scientist Ashley Jardina shows that White identity more strongly affects opinions when whites perceive themselves as under threat.
Trump has empowered narratives that would otherwise have no place in electoral politics. Trump also forced America to see these threats in the light of day. That could be their undoing. Exposed, these guises of bigotry have been (or for progressives, must be) recognized, decoded and even classified – as the “alt-right” – by the press and public.
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