Spotlight Elections: The Meaning of Donald Trump - An American Conservative’s Perspective

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Spotlight Elections: The Meaning of Donald Trump - An American Conservative’s Perspective

10/04/2016 Spotlight News by Kurt Schlichter

 

The ‘FES Spotlight Elections’ is a series that presents short opinion pieces on social and economic policy topics that are playing a role in the debates and campaigns leading up to the U.S. Presidential elections of 2016. By presenting views from authors from the African American and Latino communities, from female authors, labor representatives and young people, as well as members of the LGBTQ community, from religious groups, and the working poor, the series aims to offer a voice to segments of the U.S. population and shed light on policy issues that do not get adequate coverage in the mainstream media.

 

Understanding the rise of Donald Trump requires an understanding of America’s unique political culture, a political culture that is very different from that of Europe in general and that of Germany in particular. It is easy to try to place the rise of Trump in unrelated contexts and to try to wedge it into paradigms that may make the observer more comfortable, but this provides little insight into the reality behind this important phenomenon.

 

The rise of Donald Trump is not a fascist phenomenon, nor is it conservative in the American sense. Rather Trump, along with the rise of defeated Democrat nominee and self-described Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders, represents a power shift among the coalitions making up the American political parties

 

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Spotlight Elections: Does Rural America Exist? You’d Hardly Know it From the US Presidential Campaign so Far

09/06/2016 Spotlight News by Anthony Flaccavento

It goes without saying that election campaigns in the United States are heavy on style and light on substance. What content candidates do offer is severely limited, in part by the sound byte preoccupations of our media, but equally by the staff who manage would-be office holders. I experienced this first-hand when I ran for Congress in 2012. My campaign manager regularly admonished me to “stay on message” and to keep that message simple. When potential voters asked me questions that were challenging or outside my talking points, I was advised to “pivot”, that is, to avoid the question and maneuver the conversation back to my core points. I wasn’t a very easy candidate to manage.

 

Presidential campaigns go on for much longer than your typical congressional run, with dramatically more media attention and many more opportunities to raise and debate the issues. Candidates visit nearly every state in the Union, including the Midwest, the Southeast and other heavily rural areas. There would certainly appear to be enough time in these extended campaigns to thoroughly cover a very wide range of issues, including the concerns of country folks. Is that happening in the 2016 election marathon, and if so, what are the candidates saying about Rural America?

http://www.fesdc.org/news-list/e/spotlight-elections-does-rural-america-exist-youd-hardly-know-it-from-the-us-presidential-campaign-so-far/