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Sean Kelleher's avatar

I’ve noticed a lot of historical analysis when looking at Trump’s approval, and Dem’s chances for a revival. But, to me, this moment feels unique and unprecedented (I was born in the early 80s). Consequently, I keep thinking about a book I read in grad school called “Analogies at War,” which argued that leaders often draw the wrong lessons from past events. As a result, they frequently implement bad policies in the present, based, in part, on their faulty understanding of history.

Do you think there could be similar issues in public opinion analysis - where there’s a mismatch between present realities and past experience - or is there something about the field that makes it good at adjusting for political and cultural changes and staying current?

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Andy in TX's avatar

This was really good and just what I come here for! I recently read Dan Carter's super book, The Politics of Rage, about George Wallace. Wallace's populism is an interesting forerunner of Trump. although the book was written well before Trump appeared on the political scene, there are a lot of parallels (Wallace was a superb speaker, for example, able to read a crowd and get them worked up into a frenzy, his populism was a mishmash of ideas from different sources and not particularly ideologically coherent, he drew on white working class voters in a way similar to Trump, etc.) If we ever get a slow news week again (and those may be a long way off), I'd love to see you look at Wallace's support in 1968 as an independent candidate and in 1972 in the Democratic primaries and see if there's a connection to Trump's support. (I know that's a long temporal gap from 1972 and 1968 to 2016-2024, but some trends seem to be persistent.) In the meantime, I highly recommend Carter's book for anyone interested in the role populism has played long term in US politics and for its absolutely chilling description of racial issues in the 1950s and 1960s.

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