Donald Trump, Abortion, and the Collapse of the Conservative Coalition

At The New Yorker, Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes that Donald Trump is managing to appeal to conservative voters without taking an active part in the culture wars. Although Trump has stumbled on issues such as abortion, his failures have not seemed to affect his standing with the party’s right wing. “The fragmentation of the nation into opposed cultural camps—red states versus blue—seemed then a sturdy feature of politics, the way in which the tides of the cultural revolution and counter-revolutions had settled,” Wallace-Wells writes. “But that pattern now seems less than permanent. From the perspective of 2016, the neat map of red and blue states looks more, as Trump might put it, like a starting point for negotiation.”

Read at The New Yorker

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