Kevin McCloud: The best net-zero carbon place on the planet

Kevin McCloud (Grand Designs UK) invites us to visit somewhere that has already achieved net-zero carbon and has a 100 per cent recycling record.

 

Forests are an exemplar of circular economy. Image: Jocelyne Yvonne

It’s getting to the point where anything we do to try and mitigate carbon emissions is pointless. We are almost at the tipping point of no return, as Jonathon Porritt explains in his book Hope in Hell. Wholesale runaway planetary warming is inevitable and it is going to become uncomfortable quite a while before 2050, as we see more devastating events such as Australia’s wildfires of 2019 and more and more species wiped out – including, perhaps, our own.

That is a deliberately negative, but quite possible, scenario. I happen to be a cautious optimist and therefore in the Bill Gates camp of those who believe technology and collective action will get us out of this mess, but who cites two important numbers: 50 and 0:50, as in

50 billion tonnes of carbon emissions that our species spews out every year and zero carbon emissions, our 2050 target.

 

All carbon emissions are systematically captured and stored. Image: Lukasz Szmigiel

Net zero carbon city

So my heart skipped a beat when I recently read of an exemplar city that has already achieved net-zero carbon and has a 100 per cent recycling record; a place with a circular economy and a super-sustainable history that my friend Paul King recently visited. Paul is MD of sustainability at Lendlease (lendlease.com), a development company that has set its own ambitious net-zero carbon targets, so I expect him to seek out urban paradigms of eco-goodness and tell us all about them.

You have to guess which country this city is in, so I’ll allow you to read the full citation as written by Paul: this is a big, thriving place composed of high-rise towers, single-storey dwellings and everything in between. It is a home and workplace to millions, and yet it has been independently verified as net-zero carbon, water and waste through rigorous lifecycle assessment. All carbon emissions are systematically captured and stored, to be used for local fuel production and the manufacture of new building materials. Water use is carefully managed, but not at the expense of extensive green space at all levels.

And this place also has a strictly enforced 100 per cent recycling policy, so absolutely nothing goes to waste. Everything gets reprocessed and reused in the best example yet of a truly circular economy. Clever aesthetic design is one of the keys to success. For example, more than 50 per cent of this city’s sophisticated infrastructure is housed and managed in plant spaces underground – and a jaw-dropping maze of pipes, wires and waste distribution ducts is kept completely out of sight.

 

50 per cent of this city’s infrastructure is housed and managed in spaces underground. Image: Irina Iriser

No poverty, homelessness or despair

Above ground it is visually stunning, juxtaposing some of the oldest with the newest architecture creates a consistently stimulating environment that surprises at every turn.

So, this place is not just an environmental exemplar, it is a social and economic one too. The housing complexes cater for all, in tenure-blind, dense and beautifully designed places and open spaces that encourage interaction and connection. And clever design guides demand that even as the local population grows and traffic increases – albeit powered by 100 per cent renewable energy – the place manages to feel both bustling and peaceful at the same time.

Food is also grown, produced and distributed locally. It is accessible to all and affordable too. And there is no sign of poverty, homelessness or despair.

I had difficulty figuring out where on the planet this city is. Until I began to realise that it is not in one country – nor is it even a hybrid place made up out of the best bits of Vancouver, Singapore, Bristol and Freiburg. Nope, it is a place which, remarkably, exists in nearly every country on the globe.

 

There is no sign of poverty, homelessness or despair. Image: Steven Kamenar

The forest ecosystem

It is a forest. Forests are not just woodland, places to grow timber, but giant ecosystems of interdependent plants, trees, insects and fungi that show us how to produce, manage, recycle and cherish resources.

If you’ve read another great book of 2020, The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, you will know that the forest is not red in tooth and claw, but a respectful and balanced system. You will know that trees are sentient, can smell and feel when they are being harmed, that they carefully rear their young, will continue to feed the root systems of decaying pensioner tree stumps around them, and will act collectively to sacrifice foodstuffs and channel them to an outlier relative sitting on stony ground at the edge of the forest. They are philanthropic – I mean philodendric. They love other trees. Who knew? Only Mr Wohlleben apparently.

A model for the future

If you read Jonathon Porritt’s magnificent and at times terrifying book, then read Peter Wohlleben’s too, as an antidote. And go to a forest to take the pulse of an oak and benefit from a dose of phytoncides, the calming chemicals produced by trees. As Paul writes, ‘You can experience for yourself the best net-zero places on the planet, and ask yourself if only we could achieve a fraction of these things in the places we design, build and inhabit, we might yet stand a chance of leaving our grandchildren the future homes, cities and forests they deserve.’

With thanks to Paul King

 

 U.K. Far Right, Lifted by Trump, Now Turns to Russia

The anti-Islam agitator Tommy Robinson struck gold in America. Keeping it might require help from Moscow, where other British far-right activists are also finding friends. 

By Jane Bradley and Michael Schwirtz NY TIMES

LONDON — Two days after supporters of former President Donald J. Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol, but failed to reverse his election defeat, a defiant shout sounded from across the ocean. Tommy Robinson, Britain’s loudest amplifier of anti-Islam, far-right anger, insisted the fight was not over.

“You need to pick yourselves back up,” Mr. Robinson said in an online video viewed tens of thousands of times. “As Donald Trump says, it’s only just beginning.”

A former soccer hooligan and founder of the English Defence League, one of Britain’s most notorious nationalist groups, Mr. Robinson has largely been a pariah in his home country but Trump loyalists embraced him much the way they embraced many of the American extremist groups whose members would join the Capitol riot, including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

Mr. Robinson appeared on Fox News and Infowars. A right-wing U.S. research institute even bankrolled a 2018 rally in London that foreshadowed the violence at the Capitol: Mr. Robinson’s supporters attacked police officers in a street fight near Parliament. A month later, Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, flew to London to speak at a second rally for Mr. Robinson.

His message? Keep fighting.

The Capitol riot on Jan. 6 has brought new scrutiny to the ties that bind the far right, not only within the United States but abroad. Few fringe figures have enjoyed more cross-national appeal than Tommy Robinson. Anti-Islam groups in Germany and Denmark have given him awards. Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader, called him an inspiration. At one point, the White House took up Mr. Robinson’s cause directly, and the president’s son tweeted his support.

Mr. Robinson’s American connection was deeper than previously known. Interviews and internal documents newly released in court show how the U.S. research institute, the Middle East Forum, provided him with financial backing for three years, using cash from an American tech billionaire and Trump donor, while its president helped shape his message.

Now that Mr. Trump is out of office and the American money is apparently drying up, Mr. Robinson and some other far-right figures are turning to Moscow. Mr. Robinson, who is fighting a potentially costly libel case in London this week, did a media tour of Russia last year but three associates told The New York Times that part of his agenda was kept secret — to seek accounts with Russian banks.

“Why else would you visit Russia?” said Andrew Edge, a former senior figure in the English Defence League and another far-right group, Britain First, who said that he discussed moving money to Russian banks with Mr. Robinson and Britain First’s leader, Paul Golding.

In many ways, Mr. Robinson is now useful to the Kremlin — which has often encouraged fringe political figures who might destabilize Western democracies — for the same reasons he was welcome in Mr. Trump’s Washington.

He preached an angry narrative of Western civilization in decline, of a society ruled by shadowy elites and of the persistent threat of Muslims to the Western world — never mind that he was an agent of chaos in Britain, a key American ally.

Not long after the November election, Mr. Robinson spoke with Mr. Tarrio and urged the Proud Boys to try to keep Mr. Trump in office. Weeks later, rioters stormed the Capitol.

“I’ve always said that America needs a Tommy Robinson,” Mr. Tarrio said.

Mr. Robinson has done four stints in prison and is banished from Twitter and Facebook. His criminal convictions bar him from the United States, and one of his jail terms was for illegally entering the country on another man’s passport. Yet after one of Mr. Robinson’s many arrests, the White House intervened, raising the issue of Mr. Robinson’s arrest with Britain’s ambassador in Washington.

For the Middle East Forum, a small Philadelphia-based research institute bankrolled by wealthy right-wing donors — including Nina Rosenwald, an heir to the Sears fortune; and the Gatestone Institute, which has financial ties to the prominent Trump backers Rebekah and Robert Mercer — Mr. Robinson became an anti-Islam cause célèbre.

In internal memos included in filings of an ongoing court case in Pennsylvania, Lisa Barbounis, a former deputy at the Middle East Forum, described how Mr. Robinson had sharply increased traffic to the group’s social media accounts and website. Her boss, Daniel Pipes, the group’s president, was sometimes frustrated with Mr. Robinson’s excesses, such as when a video leaked in February 2019 that showed him bragging about scoring drugs in different countries.

But two months after that video appeared, the Middle East Forum donated to Mr. Robinson’s legal defense fund.

“Money follows Robinson,” said Jim Dowson, a far-right activist who previously ran fund-raising for several British groups. “The Americans love him.”

In an interview, Mr. Robinson denied all allegations and said they were based on “has-been rejects of the patriot force” who were working with “far-left” organizations and had been blackmailed by security services into supplying negative information about him.

David Gauke, a former Conservative lawmaker who served in the cabinet of then Prime Minister Theresa May, said Mr. Robinson was a marginalized figure, and that the Trump administration’s support of him had been perplexing.

“It was just embarrassing and irritating that our most important security partner and leadership figures in the U.S. were in any way endorsing him,” Mr. Gauke said. “It was a political and diplomatic headache.”

‘Do Not Stop Fighting’

In 2018, Tommy Robinson was sent to prison for contempt of court. Arguably, it was the best thing to ever happen to him.

Mr. Robinson, 38, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was a street brawler from a working-class enclave north of London who attracted a fringe following by trafficking in anti-Islam, anti-immigrant hatred. Yet he was transformed in May 2018 when he set himself up outside a courthouse in Leeds.

Inside, a group of men mostly of Pakistani heritage were on trial, accused of running a gang that sexually exploited girls. Mr. Robinson livestreamed himself haranguing the defendants. He was arrested and later convicted under an English law designed to ensure a fair trial.

It was a public relations coup: His backers portrayed him as a fighter against injustice, working to expose rapists. In reality, the men were already on trial, facing stiff sentences, and Mr. Robinson’s actions threatened to tank the case.

In the United States, the Middle East Forum was already posting articles that portrayed him as a martyr for free speech. Right-wing media outlets joined in, including Fox News’s top prime-time host Tucker Carlson — who declared that freedom of speech was “dying” in Britain. In response to a tweet about Mr. Robinson’s arrest, Donald Trump Jr. replied: “Don’t let America follow in their footsteps.”

In London on June 9, 2018, thousands of Mr. Robinson’s supporters with British flags and “Free Tommy” T-shirts gathered along Whitehall, a grand avenue lined with government offices, to demand his release. A few people waved Trump banners or wore MAGA hats. The far-right politician Anne Marie Waters railed against the “Islamic tyranny and supremacy that plagues our great country.”

Then a group of Mr. Robinson’s supporters charged at the police, swinging flag poles and other makeshift weapons as they chased officers down a side street. A group of protesters commandeered a double-decker sightseeing bus. Five police officers were injured. 

To British authorities, it was an alarming spasm of violence a short walk from Parliament. To the Middle East Forum, the rally was an unabashed success. The organization later proudly declared that it had sponsored the event in Mr. Robinson’s “moment of danger.” Mr. Pipes, the organization’s president, said his group was “vindicated.”

In an interview, Mr. Pipes acknowledged that Mr. Shillman was a Middle East Forum donor, but declined to disclose who paid for the rally. But a person involved in organizing it, and who spoke on condition of anonymity, identified Robert Shillman, the billionaire Trump supporter and chief executive of the technology company Cognex Corp., as a major funder of the rally. Middle East Forum internal communications also describe Mr. Shillman’s involvement in funding for Mr. Robinson.

Mr. Shillman, who has previously been publicly identified as funding another project with Mr. Robinson, did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Robinson said he had never spoken to Mr. Shillman but wished he had been able to thank him for “all his shekels,” a reference to the Israeli currency that is also a turn of phrase sometimes favored by anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.

Internal communications and interviews reveal that the forum began supporting Mr. Robinson in 2017, and later helped to shape his message, seeking to steer him away from Brexit. The organization also tried unsuccessfully to enlist the help of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Sebastian Gorka, a former White House adviser, to get a U.S. visa for a Robinson speaking tour.

The forum financed a second London rally in July, coinciding with a visit by Mr. Trump. Stephen Bannon, the president’s former adviser, was also in London after touring Europe on a self-proclaimed mission to build a far-right political network. In a radio interview, Mr. Bannon called for Mr. Robinson’s release and told British listeners that they were “going to have to fight to take your country back.”

For the second rally, the forum flew in Mr. Gosar, the Trump loyalist from Arizona, who railed against immigrants and the political establishment.

Mr. Gosar also gave protesters a message that Mr. Trump would echo two years later in his speech before the Capitol riot: “Do not stop fighting.”

Money Rolls In

Before 2018, Mr. Robinson had mostly relied on small donations from his working-class supporters in Britain, but the sudden attention from the United States opened floodgates for new money.

An analysis by The Times of Mr. Robinson’s financial records, as well as publicly available information, suggests that he has brought in at least $2 million since 2018. He raised some money himself — including by selling his gated home north of London for $1.1 million (810,000 pounds) — but other funding came from generous international supporters. Between March and May of that year, Mr. Robinson received nearly £435,000 from supporters, many in the United States and Canada, according to Caolan Robertson, a former associate of Mr. Robinson who provided a screenshot showing the account balance from this period.

He said that Mr. Shillman paid roughly $7,000 a month, for a year, through a right-wing Canadian media outlet called Rebel Media, and that Alex Jones, the host of Infowars, “transferred $20,000 to us every now and then to buy cameras and kit and grow our content.”

Bitcoin analysis also shows that Robinson received more than $60,000 in small donations between 2018 and 2020, according to John Bambenek, a computer security researcher.

Mr. Dowson, the far-right activist and fund-raiser, said Mr. Robinson once told him that he could introduce him to people in the United States “who would give us £300,000 to provoke and stir up hate against Muslims.” Mr. Robinson denied saying this.

Recently, questions have been raised about what Mr. Robinson has done with his money. None of the 10 companies linked to him in Britain have ever filed financial statements, despite legal requirements. Only two remain active and Mr. Robinson used his wife’s name, or aliases, to run many of them.

In 2014, Mr. Robinson was jailed for 18 months for mortgage fraud and more recently, in March, he was accused by his former associate Mr. Robertson in a report from the news outlet The Independent of using donations to pay for prostitutes and cocaine, which he denied.

By his own admission, Mr. Robinson appreciates luxury. He once arrived in prison with Gucci flip flops.

“I always knew the value of a pound and I always wanted nice things,” he wrote in his 2015 autobiography.

Mr. Robinson’s lifestyle could now be at risk, as the libel trial against him opened this week in London, centered on his response to a video posted online in November 2018.

The video showed a white teenager pushing a teenage Syrian refugee, Jamal Hijazi, to the ground and pouring water over his face, and it stirred near universal condemnation, including from Mrs. May, the prime minister. But Mr. Robinson quickly posted his own video accusing Jamal, without direct evidence, of violently attacking “young English girls.” The boy’s family sued, saying Mr. Robinson had spread falsehoods that forced them to abandon their home in the face of threats.

Mr. Robinson’s former associates say a loss could leave him penniless — an impression he is cultivating. He recently filed for bankruptcy and officials are hunting for assets he may hold. Mr. Robinson said he had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on legal costs.

In a recent podcast, Mr. Robinson said his wife had divorced him and that he was renting a room alongside four other divorced men.

“Five losers living in a house together,” he said.

Secret Russian Accounts?

By 2019, Mr. Robinson’s American allies were growing impatient. By that spring, the Middle East Forum had paid $50,000 for legal fees and protests, and if Mr. Pipes liked the interest Mr. Robinson attracted, his antics and association with extremist groups like the Proud Boys were becoming embarrassing.

“Could you gently caution him that our continued support requires him to stay away from the nasties?” Mr. Pipes wrote at one point in a message to his colleague, Ms. Barbounis.

Mr. Robinson had already been banned from many social media platforms when, in February 2020, he posted a new video on YouTube. Dressed in a gray three-piece suit, Mr. Robinson is seen strolling through Moscow.

“Red Square’s beautiful,” he said. “I was surprised just how nice it is.”

“I might move to Russia,” he added.

Mr. Robinson’s week in Russia was a full-throttle media tour, including a 30-minute interview with RT, the Kremlin’s English-language propaganda channel, as well as an appearance at a packed auditorium in St. Petersburg, where he gave a lecture titled “The Rape of Britain.”

In one interview, with a libertarian activist and Kremlin critic, Mikhail Svetov, Mr. Robinson explained that he had flown to Russia because he felt “silenced in the U.K.”

“I’ve come to seek a platform,” he said.

By rushing to Moscow, Mr. Robinson was perpetuating a myth on the Western far right that portrays Russia as a defender of white conservative Christian values and its president, Vladimir V. Putin, as a paragon of valor. Russia also gives a platform to Western extremists blocked from social media.

“By using Tommy Robinson, the Kremlin is obviously sowing chaos,” Mr. Svetov said in an interview. “But it’s only happening because Tommy is cornered.”

Yet associates of Mr. Robinson said he wanted more than media exposure. Andrew Edge, once a top official in Britain First and the English Defence League, said Mr. Robinson had called him soon after he left prison in September 2019 to ask about bank accounts in Russia. Mr. Robinson was already facing the libel suit and wanted to hide his money, Mr. Edge said.

Before Mr. Robinson went to Moscow, Mr. Edge said he met with him and Paul Golding, the Britain First leader, for a dinner in which they discussed how to move money to Russia. Mr. Edge said Mr. Golding had already opened accounts there linked to his far-right group. Mr. Robinson also paid £300 to a local accountant in Dartford, near London, who advised him on how to move assets offshore, Mr. Edge said.

“Paul then advised him to go speak to the Russians and talked about how they were helpful with bank accounts,” said Mr. Edge, who provided a photograph of the three men at the restaurant. “He’s really worried about the Syrian boy getting his money.”

Mr. Edge said that Mr. Robinson later told him he had opened an account during his Russian tour. Edvard Chesnokov, who said he had chaperoned Mr. Robinson during the visit, confirmed that Mr. Robinson had discussed the possibility of opening bank accounts. But he said that as far as he knew Mr. Robinson did not actually do it. 

 “We could just evaluate, discuss theoretically that there were Russian banks,” Mr. Chesnokov, the deputy foreign editor of Komsomolskaya Pravda, Russia’s largest tabloid, said in an interview. “If your assets are being frozen you need some reserve, don’t you? All that remained theoretical discussions.”

Mr. Golding said that he had spoken “extensively” with Mr. Robinson about his traveling to Moscow, which his group has visited several times, but there was “no mention” of bank accounts. He added that Britain First was planning greater collaboration with Russia after being “deplatformed,” including financially, in its home country, though he did not respond to questions about any banking arrangements involved.

In a phone interview that he filmed, Mr. Robinson joked that he had gone to Moscow to find a Russian wife, but denied opening or discussing opening any bank accounts in Russia, or holding assets outside Britain.

He said he had simply accepted an invitation to speak in a country that welcomed him more warmly than his own.

“I wanted to go and see what Russia was like and try to understand the freedom aspect because our politicians and journalists go on about how Russians have no free speech, how Russians have no freedom,” he said.

“But I wanted just to let them know that we don’t over here, we have a façade.”

It is a message that the Kremlin’s propaganda networks dutifully conveyed.

Tommy Robinson and the Far Right

 

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Jane Bradley is the U.K. Investigative Correspondent for The New York Times. She is based in London, where she focuses on uncovering abuses of power, financial crime and corruption, and social injustices. @jane__bradley

Michael Schwirtz is an investigative reporter based at the United Nations. Previously he covered the countries of the former Soviet Union from the Moscow bureau and reported for the Metro Desk on policing and brutality and corruption in the prison system.

 

Why Trump Is Still Their Guy

 Why Trump Is Still Their Guy

You don’t hear his name as much. But as far as the G.O.P. is concerned, the former president rules.

 

By Thomas B. Edsall NY Times

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

His exile in Mar-a-Lago notwithstanding, Donald Trump’s authority over the Republican Party remains vast. You can see it in Republican reluctance to back a bipartisan inquiry into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, in the widespread denunciation of party members who refused to overturn election results and who voted for Trump’s second impeachment, and in poll data showing continuing repudiation among loyal Republicans of the 2020 election results.

Trump’s centrality guarantees that large numbers of resentful, truth-denying, conspiracy-minded, anti-democratic, overwhelmingly white voters will continue to find aid and comfort in the Republican Party.

Ed Rogers, a top political aide in the Reagan White House who describes himself as “a committed Republican,” responded by email to my query about the degree of Trump’s command: “Trump is the most powerful person in the Republican Party — his endorsement can make the difference in a lot of primaries and sometimes in a general election.”

Trump, Rogers continued, “would win the Republican nomination for president if the race were today. He looks unstoppable in the G.O.P. I don’t know who could challenge him.” Anyone opposing Trump for the nomination “would be mocked, mimicked and generally harassed for months. Who needs that?”

Rogers captured his party’s current predicament: “For the G.O.P., Trump is like a fire, too close and you get burned, too far away and you are out in the cold.”

Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and Trump appointee as ambassador to the United Nations, recently proved Rogers’s point.

After the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, Haley was sharply critical of Trump, telling Tim Alberta of Politico:

We need to acknowledge he let us down. He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.

Haley went on:

Never did I think he would spiral out like this. … I don’t feel like I know who he is anymore. … The person that I worked with is not the person that I have watched since the election.

But Haley, ambitious herself to be president, quickly backtracked. And just last week, at a news conference on April 12 in Orangeburg, S.C., she was asked if she would support Trump if he ran in 2024. “Yes,” she said, before pointedly adding, “I would not run if President Trump ran.”

A key pillar of Trump’s strength is his success in turning the Republican Party into the explicit defender of white hegemony.

As my news side colleague Peter Baker wrote in September 2020:

After a summer when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets protesting racial injustice against Black Americans, President Trump has made it clear over the last few days that, in his view, the country’s real race problem is bias against white Americans.

Not in generations, Baker continued, “has a sitting president so overtly declared himself the candidate of white America.”

 

The result, as William Saletan of Slate wrote earlier in April this year, is that “three months after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the Republican Party still won’t fully renounce it.”

In recent weeks, Saletan continued:

Republican lawmakers have belittled the attack, defended the mob that precipitated it (Sen. Ron Johnson called them “people that love this country”), voted against a resolution condemning it, or accused liberals of overreacting to it. In February, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, speakers blamed a “rigged election” for provoking the rioters. But the sickness goes deeper. The Republican base is thoroughly infected with sympathies for the insurrection.

The depth of party loyalty to Trump and to the men and women who have his back has even found expression in the flow of campaign contributions.

As Luke Broadwater, Catie Edmondson and Rachel Shorey of The Times reported on April 17:

Republicans who were the most vocal in urging their followers to come to Washington on Jan. 6 to try to reverse President Donald J. Trump’s loss, pushing to overturn the election and stoking the grievances that prompted the deadly Capitol riot, have profited handsomely in its aftermath.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the first-term Georgia representative, perhaps the most extreme of Trump’s allies, has raised $3.2 million, they wrote, “more than the individual campaign of Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, and nearly every other member of House leadership.”

What are the sources of Trump’s continued ability to not only maintain the loyalty of millions of voters, but to keep them persuaded of the conspiratorial notion that the 2020 presidential election was rigged?

There is an ongoing debate among scholars and political analysts regarding the bond between Trump and his loyalists, his preternatural ability to mobilize white resentment into grievance-based social-movement action. Where does it come from?

Before we delve into competing interpretations, Johanna Ray Vollhardt, a professor of psychology at Clark University, makes a crucial point:

The psychology of collective victimhood among groups that were objectively targeted and harmed by collective violence and historical oppression is quite different from the psychology of grievance or imagined victimhood among dominant group members, who are driven by a sense of status loss and entitlement as well as resentment of minority groups that are viewed as a threat.

Because of this difference, Vollhardt wrote by email, she would not use the word “victims” to describe Trump supporters: “I would perhaps simply say ‘grievances’ or ‘imagined victimhood’ to refer to the kinds of ideas that have fueled Trump’s and other right-wing White Americans’ rhetoric and appeals.”

This distinction is explicit in “Resentment and Redemption: On the Mobilization of Dominant Group Victimhood,” by Stephen Reicher and Yasemin Ulusahin, both at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, in a chapter of “The Social Psychology of Collective Victimhood.”

Reicher and Ulusahin contend that “dominant group victimhood” emerges when groups experience a feeling

of actual or potential loss of dominance, a sense of resentment at this loss which is bound up with issues of entitlement — the undeserving are taking what we deserve — and hence provides a moral dimension to restitutive actions, and finally the prospect of redemption — of restoring the rightful order of things — through action.

These feelings of “undeserved” displacement, the authors write, “are not unmediated perceptions of reality. Rather, they are narratives offered by leaders with the aim of mobilizing people around the leader as representative and savior of the group.”

To conclude, the two authors write,

Our argument is not simply about victimhood as it applies to “objectively” privileged groups. It is ultimately about the toxicity of a particular construction of victimhood: One which transforms eliminationist violence into the restitution of a rightful moral order. For it is when we believe ourselves to be acting for the moral good that the most appalling acts can be committed.

Other scholars point to the political manipulation of the emotions of shame and humiliation.

In their March 2021 article “Populism and the Affective Politics of Humiliation Narratives,” Alexandra Homolar and Georg Löfflmann, members of the politics and international studies department at the University of Warwick in Britain, make the case that Trump is a master of “populist humiliation discourse.”

In this political and rhetorical strategy,

The country of the present is described as a fundamentally weakened nation, systematically disadvantaged through “bad deals” negotiated by the establishment and exploited by allies and enemies alike. Treasured pasts of national greatness are represented through romanticized images that reduce the present to a demeaning experience.

Members of the target audience, Homolar and Löfflmann continue, “are constructed as an idealized community of shared origin and destiny, the ‘pure people,’ who have been betrayed and humiliated because what is represented as their way of life and righteous place in the world has been lost.”

In September 2016, Hillary Clinton’s infamous characterization of Trump voters was an open invitation to Trump’s counterattack:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.

In a Sept. 12, 2016 speech in Baltimore, Trump shot back:

Hillary Clinton made these comments at one of her high-dollar fund-raisers in Wall Street. She and her wealthy donors all had a good laugh. They were laughing at the very people who pave the roads she drives on, paint the buildings she speaks in, and keep the lights on in her auditorium.

In a direct play on the humiliation theme, Trump declared:

She spoke with contempt for the people who thanklessly follow the rules, pay their taxes, and scratch out a living for their families. She revealed herself to be a person who looks down on the proud citizens of our country as subjects for her to rule over.

In a separate article, “The power of Trump-speak: populist crisis narratives and ontological security,” Homolar and Ronny Scholz, a project manager at the University of Warwick’s center for applied linguistics, argued that Trump’s “leadership legitimation claims rest significantly upon ‘crisis talk’ that puts his audience in a loss frame with nothing to lose.” These stories serve a twofold purpose, instilling “insecurity among the American public” while simultaneously transforming “their anxiety into confidence that the narrator’s policy agendas are the route back to ‘normality.’”

The authors studied Trump’s 2016 campaign speeches to identify the words he used most often, and then grouped them “together with the words with which they predominantly co-occur.” They demonstrate that the word clusters Trump habitually deployed “surrounding ‘American’ and ‘country’ centrally featured the interrelated themes of crime and violence, killing jobs, and poverty, as well as illegal immigration and drugs, Islamic terrorism, trade and infrastructure.”

At the heart of what the authors call “Trump-speak” is a

politics of reassurance, which relies upon a threefold rhetorical strategy: it tells audiences what is wrong with the current state of affairs; it identifies the political agents that are responsible for putting individuals and the country in a state of loss and crisis; and it offers an abstract pathway through which people can restore past greatness by opting for a high-risk outsider candidate.

Once an audience is under Trump’s spell, Homolar and Scholz write:

Rational arguments or detailed policy proposals pale in comparison with the emotive pull and self-affirmation of an us-versus-them crisis narrative, which creates a cognitive feedback loop between individuals’ ontological insecurity, their preferences for restorative policy, and strongmen candidate options. In short, “Trumpspeak” relies on creating the very ontological insecurity that it promises to eradicate for political gain.

The authors describe “ontological security” as “having a sense of presence in the world, describing such a person as a ‘real, alive, whole, and, in a temporal sense, a continuous person,’” citing R.D. Laing, the author of “The Divided Self.” Being ontologically secure, they continue, “allows us to ‘encounter all the hazards of life, social, ethical, spiritual, biological’ with a firm sense of both our own and others’ reality and identity. However, ontological security only prevails in the absence of anxiety and danger.”

Miles T. Armaly and Adam M. Enders, political scientists at the University of Mississippi and the University of Louisville, argue that Trump appeals to voters experiencing what they call “egocentric victimhood” as opposed to those who see themselves as “systemic” victims.

In their January 2021 paper, “‘Why Me?’ The Role of Perceived Victimhood in American Politics,” Armaly and Enders argue that:

A systemic victim looks externally to understand her individual victimhood. Egocentric victimhood, on the other hand, is less outwardly focused. Egocentric victims feel that they never get what they deserve in life, never get an extra break, and are always settling for less. Neither the ‘oppressor,’ nor the attribution of blame, are very specific. Both expressions of victimhood require some level of entitlement, but egocentric victims feel particularly strongly that they, personally, have a harder go at life than others.

There were substantial differences between the way these two groups voted, according to Armaly and Enders:

Those exhibiting higher levels of egocentric victimhood are more likely to have voted for, and continue to support, Donald Trump. However, those who exhibit systemic victimhood are less supportive and were less likely to vote for Trump.

The same pattern emerged in the case of racial resentment and support for or opposition to government aid to African-Americans, for building a wall on the Mexican border and for political correctness: egocentric victims, the authors report, tilted strongly in a conservative direction, systemic victims in a liberal direction.

In an effort to better understand how competing left and right strategies differ, I asked Kevin Arceneaux, a political scientist at Temple, a series of questions. The first was:

How would you describe the differences between the mobilizing strategies of the civil rights movement and Trump’s appeals to discontented whites? Arceneaux’s answer:

The civil rights movement was about mobilizing an oppressed minority to fight for their rights, against the likelihood of state-sanctioned violence, while Trump’s appeals are about harnessing the power of the state to maintain white dominance. Trump’s appeals to discontented whites are reactionary in nature. They promise to go back to a time when whites were unquestionably at the top of the social hierarchy. These appeals are about keying into anger and fear, as opposed to hope, and they are about moving backward and not forward.

What role has the sense of victimhood played in the delusional character of so many Trump supporters who continue to believe the election was stolen? Arceneaux again:

Their sense of victimhood motivates the very idea that some evil force could be so powerful that it can successfully collude to steal an election. It fits the narrative that everyone is out to get them.

Looking toward the elections of 2022 and 2024, Trump not only remains at the heart of the Republican Party but also embodies the party’s predicament: Candidates running for the House and Senate need him to turn out the party’s populist base, but his presence at the top of the ticket could put Congress and the White House out of reach.

Still, Arceneaux argues that without Trump, “I do believe that the Republicans will struggle to turn out non-college-educated whites at the same rate.”

Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster, observes that turning out working-class voters in 2024 will most likely not be enough for Trump to win: “There are a large number of Republican voters (around 40 percent), who were either reluctant Trump voters or non-supportive voters, who make a Trump win in the general election look very undoable.”

Ed Rogers, the Republican lobbyist I mentioned at the beginning of this column, argues that if Trump runs in 2024 — despite the clout he wields today — he is liable to take the party down in defeat:

I don’t think Trump can win a two-person race in a general election. He can’t get a majority. He pulled a rabbit out of the hat in 2016 and he got beat bad by an uninspiring candidate in 2020. 2024 is a long way away but I don’t know what might happen to make Trump have broader appeal or more advantages than he did in 2020.

Stuart Stevens, a Republican media consultant who is a harsh critic of Trump, emailed me to say that “Trump is the Republican Party” and as a result:

We are in uncharted waters. For the first time since 1860, a major American political party doesn’t believe America is a democracy. No Republican will win a contested primary in 2022 or 2024 who will assert that Biden is a legal president. The effect of this is profound and difficult to predict. But millions of Americans believe the American experiment is ending.

What is driving the Republican Party? Stevens’s answer is that it is the threat of a nonwhite majority:

The coordinated effort to reduce voter access for those who are nonwhite is because Republicans know they are racing the demographic clock. The degree to which they are successful will determine if a Republican has a shot to win. It’s all about white grievance.

Paul Begala, a Democratic consultant, described what may be Trump’s most lasting imprint on his party: He said many prospective presidential candidates, including Josh Hawley, Kristi Noem, Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis, “seem to me to be embracing the growing nativist, anti-immigrant, anti-diversity fire Trump lit.”

In the 28 years since the 1992 election, Begala continued by email, there has been “more diminution in white voting power than in the previous 208 years” dating back to the nation’s first presidential election.

For the Republican Party, Begala wrote, “as white power diminishes, white supremacy intensifies.”

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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011.