This essay suggests that the contemporary moment sees a crisis in the experience of temporality and sequentiality, that can be felt across the anglophone world. There are a set of emerging political and ecological conditions, that offer a serious challenge to the way that we have conceived of the passage of historical time.

It is difficult as a result, the essay argues, to generate clear pictures of the future, either of Europe, or of our wider planetary environment. The essay addresses this crisis, by examining the forms in which some contemporary British authors give poetic expression to the claims that the past has on our experience of time, and by suggesting how such pictures of the past yield new ways of imagining a European future.

The biggest change in the party coalitions since the 1980s has been the movement of high-education whites into the Democratic Party and the defection of low-education whites to the GOP. Drawing on evidence from opinion surveys, election returns, and demographic data, Chapter 3 documents the parties’ changing voters and geographic constituencies. These trends continued in the 2020 election despite Democratic efforts to reverse the party’s declining popularity among noncollege whites, with some signs educational divides will spread to other racial and ethnic groups. Candidates, activists, political appointees and staffers, judges, party leaders, and campaign workers all demonstrate the same increasing divisions as rank-and-file voters. Democrats may suffer electorally because the Electoral College and apportionment of the Senate grants noncollege whites disproportionate voting power, but college-educated citizens punch above their weight in other forms of influence: as thought leaders, interest group activists, educators, media figures, scientific experts, candidates, political professionals, lawyers, and financial donors.

This chapter applies the total error framework presented in Chapter 5 to a case example of preelection polling during the 2016 US presidential election. Here, the focus is on problems with a single poll.

This chapter reviews the central arguments and empirics, maps out areas for future research, and discusses the policy implications of the book’s findings. It also discusses the relevance of the theory in accounting for the events of January 6, 2021 in the United States.

Scheuerman engages with the right-wing mobilization of “Weimar lessons” in the context of the contemporary US political landscape. The chapter focuses specifically on how the political thought of German Jewish émigré political philosopher Leo Strauss was used by supporters of the Trump Administration in academic circles, based primarily at the Claremont Institute. The Weimar analogy has often been mobilized to highlight the dangers of antidemocratic political forces. The chapter, however, serves as a reminder that the redeployment of Weimar and stories about its legacy can be instrumentalized to serve authoritarian as well as anti-authoritarian purposes.

Donald J. Trump’s election portended fundamental changes in America’s relations with its major trading partners and allies. However, Japan’s prime minister, Abe Shinzō, in developing a relationship with Trump as well as an understanding of how to deal with him, positioned Japan as a reliable partner of the US in its assertive stance against China and North Korea. Abe also understood the importance to Trump of image and perception and used this to Japan’s advantage throughout Trump’s term, particularly in his careful use of flattery and in Japan’s agreement to accept largely symbolic trade concessions. The Trump administration’s “America First” approach and its consequent abandonment of America’s leadership role in the region left a vacuum that Japan filled, notably in the resurrection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Japan’s concept of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” found support in Washington. However, Tokyo’s calibrated approach to China, which blended competition and cooperation, was not adopted by the US, which prioritized competition.

When compared to previous administrations, did South Korean public opinion of the US change during the Donald Trump presidency? During an unusual and sometimes tumultuous four years, President Trump questioned the value of America’s alliance system, specifically the South Korea–US alliance, and agitated against the liberal international order and democratic rule itself. However, Trump also pursued summit diplomacy with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, enabling South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s pro-engagement policy with Pyongyang. It stands to reason that South Koreans took notice, but what did they think of these significant and sometimes contradictory moves? Using a longitudinal dataset constructed with data from the Pew Research Center Global Attitudes Surveys, this chapter assesses South Koreans’ opinions toward the United States and President Donald Trump within the context of the last two decades. Specific focus is given to changes in opinion during the Trump administration and attitudes toward Trump-specific policies, especially his North Korea policy. This analysis finds that South Koreans’ views of the US, which remained positive and significantly higher than those of most other regional actors, were held separate from views of Donald Trump, which were negative but not consistently so and especially not for some groups (such as conservatives).

Korea’s public diplomacy vis-à-vis the US is the centerpiece of the country’s overall public diplomacy policy, with an emphasis on influencing the policy elites in Washington, DC, primarily through think tank-centric activities. This chapter explores Korea’s public diplomacy strategy vis-à-vis the US with an emphasis on the “policy public diplomacy” that was introduced in 2016 – coinciding mostly with the presidencies of Moon Jae-in in Seoul and Donald Trump in Washington, DC. At the policy elite level, the main objective of Korean public diplomacy in the US has been to generate support for Korea’s foreign policies, including in inter-Korean relations; and at the grassroots level, creating more favorability among the general American public. The former is more based on agenda-setting and framing Korean Peninsula-related issues and Korea’s increasing role in global governance. The latter is more diffuse and attempts to increase the country’s visibility and improve its brand value. In this time period, Korean public diplomacy has become partisan for the first time due to dividing nature of emphasis on inter-Korean relations in policy public diplomacy in the US.

The last chapter recapitulates the arguments in a normative, rather than historical, mode, examining the underlying logic of orthodoxy implicit in each version of conservative Christianity’s pursuit of authentic, historic faith. The chapter argues that orthodoxy is an inherently ambiguous concept that requires an authoritarian leader to determine arbitrary boundaries by policing and punishing the heterodox. So long as orthodoxy remains the normative goal, the culture-war politics of the Christian Right will remain.

While the political aspect of the traditionalist quest for prescriptive Christianity has been central to the story from the start, this chapter examines, first, the complicated way that religious and political norms are intertwined in American history and dependent on whether the Christian community is in a position of power or not. Second, the chapter examines two aspects of Christian identity that are especially important in understanding contemporary American politics: (1) a global Christian identity that understands Christians as those persecuted by godless secular society, and (2) an antignostic identity that understands Christians as those who wage war against “gnosticism,” a term applicable to whatever conservative Christians are currently combatting in the political sphere.

The “crisis of evangelicalism” that arose in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump, who was supported by 80 percent of American evangelicals, provides a case study in the challenge of determining who counts as a “true evangelical” or a “true Christian.” The distinction between descriptive and prescriptive approaches to Christianity helps to clarify much of the controversy. The anxieties of modernity have forced all Christians, liberal and conservative, to explore new approaches to prescriptivism.

It has been widely assumed the Tea Party paved the way for Donald Trump’s electoral victory in 2016. Yet, little research has examined the transition from the Tea Party’s takeover of the Republican Party to Trump’s subsequent capture of the GOP. This chapter examines the Tea Party’s engagements with Donald Trump between 2009 and 2018. Tea Party activists initially admired Trump’s amplification of the birther conspiracy theory, which falsely claimed that Barack Obama was not a natural born citizen. However, activists dismissed or ridiculed Trump’s political ambitions. By 2013, activists had warmed to Trump’s positions on Islam and immigration, but still did not view him as a viable political candidate. After Trump won the 2016 election, there was a sea shift in tone, as the remaining Tea Party activists enthusiastically embraced his America First agenda. These observations are corroborated by an analysis of the impact that Tea Party activism had on the 2016 Republican primaries for president and the general election. Our analyses shows that Tea Party activism had little impact on helping Trump become President, consistent with the insurgency’s larger ambivalence about Trump’s candidacy.

The presidential elections of 2016 and 2020 were two of the most disconcerting in American history. In 2016, the winning candidate lost the popular vote by 3 million votes and never obtained the support of the public. In 2020, the incumbent president lost by 7 million votes. Instead of conceding defeat, he exploited the complex system of certifying the results to prolong the denouement of the election, attempting to subvert the U.S. democratic process. Both elections raise serious doubts about democracy in America. At the core of these misgivings is the electoral college.

The electoral college is an extraordinarily complex mechanism for selecting a president. State and national laws drawn to implement the electoral college system have only added to the complexity—and the risks of a malfunction. The allocation of electoral votes among the states may not accurately represent the citizens resident in those states. Electors are not wise elites, and they may make errors or violate their charges when casting their votes. The constitutional provisions and laws required to implement the electoral college are open to multiple interpretations and may well involve Congress and the courts in partisan wrangling over which candidate won a state and which electoral votes to count. Their decisions may misrepresent the public’s wishes. Donald Trump’s attempts both to create alternative slates of electors and to reject certified electors from states won by Joe Biden could only occur because there was an electoral college. The absence of a right to vote in presidential elections is certainly inconsistent with our notions of democracy. Similarly, the selection of the ultimate choosers of the president—electors—by party committees is contrary to our notions of transparency and popular participation. Allowing a state legislature to choose the winning slate of electors of a state makes a mockery of popular selection of the president.