By Ross Douthat
Saturday, February 27, 2016
The spectacle of the Republican Party’s Trumpian meltdown
has inspired a mix of glee and fear among liberals — glee over their rivals’
self-immolation, and fear that what arises from the destruction will be worse.
What it hasn’t inspired is much in the way of
self-examination, or a recognition of the way that Obama-era trends in liberal politics have helped feed the
Trump phenomenon.
Such a recognition wouldn’t require letting the
Republican Party off the hook. The Trump uprising is first and foremost a
Republican and conservative problem: There would be no Trumpism if George W.
Bush’s presidency hadn’t cratered, no Trumpism if the party hadn’t alternated
between stoking and ignoring working-class grievances, no Trump as front-runner
if the party leadership and his rivals had committed fully to stopping him
before now.
But Trumpism is also a creature of the late Obama era,
irrupting after eight years when a charismatic liberal president has dominated
the cultural landscape and set the agenda for national debates. President Obama
didn’t give us Trump in any kind of Machiavellian or deliberate fashion. But it
isn’t an accident that this is the way the Obama era ends — with a reality TV
demagogue leading a populist, nationalist revolt.
First, the reality TV element in Trump’s campaign is a
kind of fun-house-mirror version of the celebrity-saturated Obama effort in
2008. Presidential politics has long had an escalating celebrity component, a
cultish side that’s grown ever-more-conspicuous with time. But the first Obama
campaign raised the bar. The quasi-religious imagery and rhetoric, the Great
Man iconography and pillared sets, the Oprah endorsement and Will.i.am music
video and the Hollywood stars pledging allegiance — it was presidential
politics as one part Aaron Sorkin-scripted liturgy, one part prestige movie’s
Oscar campaign.
And it worked. But because it worked, now we have the
nearly-inevitable next step: presidential politics as a season of “Survivor”
or, well, “The Apprentice,” with the same celebrity factor as Obama’s ’08 run,
but with his campaign’s high-middlebrow pretensions stripped away. If Obama
proved that you can run a presidential campaign as an aspirational cult of
personality, in which a Sarah Silverman endorsement counts for as much as a
governor or congressman’s support, Trump is proving that you don’t need
Silverman to shout “the Aristocrats!” and have people eat it up.
He’s also proving, in his bullying, overpromising style,
that voters are increasingly habituated to the idea of an ever more imperial
presidency — which is also a trend that Obama’s choices have accelerated.
Having once campaigned against his predecessor’s power grabs, the current
president has expanded executive authority along almost every dimension:
launching wars without congressional approval, claiming the power to
assassinate American citizens, and using every available end-around to make
domestic policy without any support from Congress.
In the process, he’s cut the legs from under principled
liberal critiques of executive power, and weakened the American left’s role as
a bulwark against Caesarism. Which makes it altogether fitting — if deeply
unfortunate — that his reward is the rise of a right-wing Caesarist whose
authoritarian style and outrageous promises makes George W. Bush look like Cato
the Younger.
And that Caesarist, crucially, is rallying a constituency
that once swung between the parties, but that the Obama White House has spent
the last eight years slowly writing off. Trump’s strongest supporters aren’t
archconservatives; they’re white working-class voters, especially in the Rust
Belt and coal country, who traditionally leaned
Democratic and still favor a strong welfare state.
These voters had been drifting away from the Democratic
Party since the 1970s, but Obama has made moves that effectively slam the door
on them: His energy policies, his immigration gambits, his gun control push,
his shift to offense on same-sex marriage and abortion. It was possible to be a
culturally conservative skeptic of mass immigration in the Democratic Party of
Bill Clinton. Not so anymore.
Continue reading the main story
Of course this process has been a two-way street, as bigotry
inclined some of these voters against Obama from the start, or encouraged them
to think the worst of him eventually. And political coalitions shift all the
time: There’s nothing inherently wrong with the Obama White House’s decision
that a more ethnically diverse and thoroughgoingly liberal coalition held more
promise than continued efforts to keep Reagan Democrats in the fold. (Though
Democrats in Congress and statehouses might be forgiven for doubting the
decision.)
But liberalism still needs to reckon with the
consequences. As in Europe, when the left gives up on nationalism and lets part
of its old working class base float away, the result is a hard-pressed
constituency unmoored from either party, and nursing well-grounded feelings of
betrayal.
Hence Marine Le Pen and the nationalist parties of
Europe. And hence, now, Donald Trump.
He is the Republican Party’s monster, yes. But what he
represents is also part of the Obama legacy — a nemesis for liberal follies as
well as conservative corruptions, and a threat to both traditions for many
years to come.
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