, Republicans flipped the Senate, likely tightened their grip on the House of Representatives and .

The so-called rolled in two years later, and the MAGA movement is now the dominant force in American politics.

Trump has an unprecedented mandate to reshape American life and politics, and is the first Republican to win the since 2004. He intends to be an activist and transformative president. Now Americans and the rest of the world must brace for the global fallout in Ukraine, Russia, China, Israel and Iran.

According to the , more than 71 million of Trump’s followers stayed loyal to the MAGA movement despite , and .

Trump won the presidency with the help of blue-collar, middle-class voters in the vital centre of the political spectrum, and in open defiance of the political establishment and most political power brokers.

Weak centre

What does Trump’s comeback mean for his unique brand of nationalist authoritarianism?

Trump’s victory shows just how weak and lacklustre the centre has become in comparison to surging extremism. The silent majority that once rallied to support Ronald Reagan’s popular agenda, for example, is now a seemingly amoral majority indifferent to Trump’s felonies and his apocalyptic vision for the country.

It’s now clear that the is smaller than ever. Voters on the left were dismayed about Kamala Harris’s support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel. Some planned not to vote or candidates.

What’s more, Republicans have been courting working class and racialized voters for years, and their messaging is paying off. Chipping away small numbers of and voters is adding up to .

‘Make extremism great again’

The Republican machine has grasped an essential truth: parties must redefine their centre of gravity with the shifting of the of political acceptability, which holds that the centre is not fixed forever; it is simply a gauge of the new extremes.

After a decade of the upheaval Trump has fuelled, mainstreaming extremism has become a proven formula for winning elections. The most basic question emphasized by the Trump-Harris showdown was: Can defeat ?

In America in 2024, it could not.

After 1945, the centre referred to the vast number of voters who rejected while embracing the welfare state and full-employment capitalism.

This middle “” — sought by politicians from Tony Blair to Barack Obama — won repeated elections. But today, the centre has been eclipsed by loyalty to a charismatic leader.

When the extremes cease to be red lines, reasonable parties can only intermittently eke out a win. That means extremist movements grow ever stronger. What will happen in four years is anyone’s guess. But even after Trump is gone, he will live on atop the conservative pantheon, having risen to even greater esteem among his supporters than Reagan or , the Republican senator who became a conservative standard-bearer for a generation.

Negative voting

The American election turned on negative voting. The only real question was whose fear would carry the day?

Democrats feared the loss of for women. Republicans feared immigration conspiracy theories such as “” theory.

Republicans made border security a successful culture war issue, and it will unquestionably loom even larger in future elections. Gallup has shown that 55 per cent of Americans now want immigration levels , a significant rise from 41 per cent just last year.

The United States is not alone. What began as anger over Syrian refugees in Germany has metastasized into an enormous . Anti-immigration sentiment is on the rise .

The rise of anti-immigration sentiment

Future Republican contenders will almost certainly be avowed opponents of immigration given Trump’s stunning comeback. He leveraged the issue at a time when immigrants and border security have become powerful symbols of the enormous changes brought about by globalization.

Zygmunt Bauman, the late eminent Polish sociologist, has described the technological advancement that defines global capitalism as “.”

He argues that constant change . The blue-collar middle class is not worse off in absolute terms, but they’re as the billionaire class surges ahead and governments fail to protect the traditional institutions of the welfare state.

For Trump voters, the “” was the most potent narrative for the MAGA coalition. Xenophobia was on during the closing days of the campaign when a comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally referred to Puerto Rico as an “.”

The full force of liquid modernity continues to degrade the institutions of advanced societies and to reward rule-breakers. It’s not hyperbole to suggest this election could transform both America and the post-war .

A dark MAGA future

One primary takeaway from this election is that an even darker, more apocalyptic form of the MAGA movement has taken hold. At a recent rally, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, : “I’m not just MAGA, I’m dark MAGA.”

In Trump’s warped view, an electoral loss would have been proof of cheating, but a win is a triumph of the will. In America today, conspiracy theories seemingly attract votes.

It’s hard to underestimate the impact of Trump’s toxicity on American civic life. With his new mandate, Trump has a green light to implement most, if not all, of his most extreme policies, from tariffs to cementing an absolutist approach to presidential power.

Trump has already promised to prosecute “” his political enemies. He has threatened to use American troops to round up 15 million undocumented immigrants. It is his stated intent to exercise enormous presidential privilege by pardoning the “patriots” who stormed the capital in January 2021 “.”

It is far from certain that the American constitutional order will survive intact.

By 91��ɫ Professor Emeritus Daniel Drache, Department of Politics, and Professor of Political Science Marc D. Froese, founding director, International Studies Program, Burman University.

This article is republished from the Conversation Canada.

The post What does Donald Trump’s win mean for his brand of populist authoritarianism? appeared first on News@91��ɫ.

TORONTO, July 17, 2024 – Has the uproar around mail-in voting in the United States trumped how Canadians view the practice here? Researchers at 91��ɫ have found former U.S. president Donald Trump’s negative rhetoric around the practice of mail-in ballots as fraud prone and untrustworthy has had clear effect in this country.

“It is already a well-established fact that Trump has impacted voters’ view and behaviour in the U.S., but what was less known until now was whether that effect crossed the border into Canada,” says Associate Professor , lead author of the paper. “We wanted to know if holding populist, right-winged views helped determine the level of trust someone had in mail-in votes and what role political media exposure played.”

The study, , found that those holding populist views across Canada, especially right-wing in nature, were more likely to have been influenced by rhetoric south of the border and to now distrust voting by mail.

Wu, 91��ɫ Research Chair in Political Sociology of Health, along with Associate Professor Andrew Dawson, both with the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies at 91��ɫ, analyzed data from the 2021 Canadian Election Study. It showed that the “Trump effect” had infiltrated Canadian’s views of mail-in voting.

The researchers were curious about any potential impact given the last federal election this country in 2021 generated the highest number of mail-in votes of any other election since 1993, when mail-in voting by special ballot was expanded to every Canadian at home or abroad. In the U.S., the practice dates back to the Civil War, a time when soldiers were allowed to vote from the battlefield.

In 2019, Elections Canada received about 55,000 mail-in ballots, but that shot up by more than 10 times that amount in 2021, during the pandemic, to a recording setting around 700,000. In the U.S. during the 2020 presidential election, almost half of voters, some 43 per cent, mailed their ballots. That’s also the year, Trump and some other republicans began a campaign to discredit mail-in voting saying it could lead to fraud and a “rigged election”.

“Prior to that, mail-in voting wasn’t politicized,” says Wu. “Although none of the political parties tried to delegitimize voting by mail in Canada, Canadians likely follow U.S. news more closely than other countries and are more prone to being influenced.”

The study found a significant amplifying effect regardless of where Canadians got their news from, which affected their perceptions of the electoral system in this country and its legitimacy. The higher the level of news consumption, the more Canadians were divided in terms of how they see mail-in voting. Those who held right wing populist views and also followed news closely, show the least trust in voting by mail. The media amplification effect is less significant in French-speaking Quebec, indicating the impact of U.S. media outlets.

This despite the Canadian electoral system being less prone to partisan politics than in the U.S. as federal elections here are run by Elections Canada, a single, non-partisan electoral management body. Even so, suspicion south of the border can still create doubt around elections in this country.

“Even though there is almost no evidence to suggest mail-in ballots are fraudulent or lead to fraud, the mere suggestion is enough to shake people’s belief in the practice,” says Wu.

“It’s not surprising that it received a lot of media attention worldwide, including in Canada. We found strong evidence of a ‘Trump effect’ here with a clear negative association between Trump’s views and a lack of trust in mail-in ballot voting. Perceptions of electoral integrity matter. Sowing the seeds of electoral mistrust through false claims can have real effects.”

The researchers found a distrust in mail-in ballots was more apparent in Alberta than in the rest of Canada.

The research was published today in the peer-reviewed Oxford University Press journal Public Opinion Quarterly.

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