Doug Saunders on Trumpism and its variants:

In a big survey conducted this month by the think tank PRRI, one thing stands out, and it isn’t economic. When given the statement “It bothers me when I come in contact with immigrants who speak little or no English,” a whopping 64 per cent of Trump supporters agreed. Among backers of other candidates, fewer than half agreed.

As surveys by San Francisco political scientist Jason McDaniel have shown, expressions of “racial resentment” among voters increase with their level of support for Mr. Trump – something that doesn’t happen with other candidates.

This is explained well in the study White Backlash: Immigration, Race and American Politics, by political scientists Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan Hajnal. Their surveys show that racial resentment has displaced class, income inequality, education, income, gender and age as identifying factors among a large part (but not majority) of white Republican voters. The group who came to support Mr. Trump are clearly defined by anger and resentment at having a black president, and a sense that their racial identity is their country’s, and is therefore threatened.

But, as the authors note, this is not an inevitable turn in Republican politics. “The United States faces two radically different futures,” they conclude. “In one scenario, the Republican Party

alters its stance on immigration, it garners more votes from the nation’s expanding racial and ethnic minority population, the worrisome racial divide … shrinks, and wide-ranging racial conflict is averted. In a more ominous scenario, though, the Republican Party continues to fuel a white backlash against immigrants and minorities … the racial divide in U.S. party politics expands to a racial chasm, and the prospects for racial conflict swell.”

The fact that the first scenario offers a clearer path to victory – as conservatives in Canada, Britain and Germany have found – suggests that this last big idea will not become a map of the future.