By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Monday, January 18, 2021
Will Trumpism survive President Donald Trump? For many
observers, the answer is obvious: no. Trumpism is about Donald Trump, and only
Donald Trump, and it has no substance beyond that. It is a rhetoric and an
affect, in service to him, and that’s on its best days. On most others, it is a
gibbering cult and series of baroque conspiracy theories. Trumpism is just is a
giant sucking sound around the black hole of the man’s own vanity. It will
eventually disappear, as he has, up his own backside.
This is, I think, incorrect. Trumpism is a populist-nationalist
politics. It is populist because it preaches political doctrines largely
rejected by the incumbent political class: an America-first foreign policy,
revision of the aims of our trade policy, and a halt to mass migration. It is a
nationalist project whose ultimate aim is to restore the democratic link
between the citizenry and government — a link that has been threatened by a
class of “experts” who govern a subordinate native class on behalf of
oligarchic interests. Trumpism seeks a political mandate from the losers of
post-Cold War globalization. It chafes at the restraints of a “world order”
when it does not suit the national interest. It is the restorationist character
of this nationalist project that makes it appealing to many conservatives and, ultimately,
an ally of conservatism — even if an occasionally annoying or obstreperous one.
Five years ago, I predicted that Trump would probably
damage — perhaps irretrievably — the populist and nationalist causes he
championed in the GOP. And he has roughly followed the script I laid out. His
inconstancy and self-interest have often led to him to betray or leave
incomplete the populist and nationalist policies he championed. We haven’t
moved to the skills-based immigration system he promised. We haven’t fully
withdrawn from long wars where there is no reasonable hope of a satisfying
conclusion or national objective to be achieved. Trump’s trade war with China
concluded without any fundamental changes to the economic and political
dynamics of the Sino-American relationship.
And in recent weeks, his behavior has brought further
disrepute to these causes. He made his claims of material electoral fraud a
dividing line for his party. This GOP then lost the votes of the Georgia
Republicans who believed that the presidential election had been stolen and
that the state party was ignoring their concerns — which led to the GOP’s
losing control of the Senate. Feeding his hardest-core supporters with the
conspiracy theory led some of them to storm the U.S. Capitol in riotous
violence, leaving five dead. Those who opposed him chiefly to resist populist
and nationalist accretions to conservative politics have been given the weapons
to potentially exclude him from discussions about the future of the Republican
Party. Trump’s failures as a president, and the political failures of the GOP
under him, will be used against populist-nationalism, by its critics on the
right and left. They will be used opportunistically, just as the failings of
Bush have been used against neoconservatives who eventually embraced him.
And yet, it’s not over.
To understand whether Trumpism has a future in the Republican
Party, it’s important to consider “Trumpism before Trump.” It has been tempting
to view Trumpism as a minor and electorally inert heresy. It has never had any
real champions in the Senate. The giant phalanx of conservative institutions —
think tanks, party leaders, and media outlets — were against Trumpism. It is,
the critics say, just Pat Buchananism and revived only because Donald Trump was
a celebrity and an innovative campaigner.
This is not true. While Trump’s celebrity is an
underrated factory in his success, looking backward from 2021, Trumpism seems
inevitable and on the rise, with many antecedent figures across the party
championing at least parts of it. Ronald Reagan used tariffs to defend American
icon Harley-Davidson. Patrick Buchanan and his allied paleo-conservatives
denounced the first Iraq War and attacked George H. W. Bush on the cultural
issues, particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1991.
Before the ideological transformation in the wake of
9/11, George W. Bush ran in 2000 on a more constrained foreign policy. He
preached “the modesty of true strength” and “the humility of real greatness.”
And his national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, tilted against an American
foreign policy that aimed at “second order” effects, such as the advancement of
human rights. He also used tariffs in an attempt to hold Ohio and add
Pennsylvania to the Republican coalition.
Arguably the last two contenders in the 2012 Republican
primary were Trumpists of a sort. Rick Santorum was critical of free trade.
Mitt Romney showed something of a Trumpist ability to get to Rick Perry’s right
on immigration, while being more supportive of the welfare state. If Romney had
been elected, we might now have a more Trumpist trade arrangement with China
than even Trump has sought.
The political logic of Trumpism resided in ideological
and electoral opportunities — namely, solidifying the GOP among its new more-Evangelical
voters, and reaching out over and over again to the remnants of Reagan
Democrats and other groups that have been globalization’s losers — voters who
have been effectively abandoned by a Democratic Party dominated by
college-educated lifestyle progressives.
In fact, one big clue that “Trumpism” won’t just go away
with Trump is that the phenomenon is global. Many left-leaning parties across
the world made their peace with global capitalism after 1989, abandoning their
traditional workers in favor of culturally progressive, upwardly mobile,
educated voters; they centered themselves instead on the new professionals in
global cities. That shift has inevitably generated failures and resentments,
left and right. On the left, it inspired Syriza in Greece and a short vogue for
old-school nationally focused socialists like Bernie Sanders in the U.S.;
Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K.; and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France. It also inspired a
broader movement on the right. The rise of Trumpism in the U.S., Brexit in Britain
including Johnson’s smash-through in Labour heartlands, and the advent of Lega
under Matteo Salvini in Italy are all connected by dissatisfaction with a
politics of the 1990s.
And there are reasons to believe that political
conditions will continue to call for a Trumpist response for some time.
The most obvious reason for this is China. Free trade has
often been accepted by conservatives as simply efficient. But in the case of
China, it has been defended by citing larger theories about the world that have
proven untrue — namely, that trade liberalization would lead to political
liberalization in China and that any losses owing to America’s strategy of
low-wage labor arbitrage would be diffuse and easily ameliorated through
redistribution of the gains. None of this has proved true, and what is called
“free trade” by Americans is clearly seen by the Chinese as mercantile and
industrial policy for China’s geostrategic benefit.
In the way that America’s Silicon Valley behemoths tended
to transmit American ideas of free speech worldwide (at least at first),
Chinese commercial firms are now proving to be extensions of the Chinese
Communist Party, dedicated to total political control. As China’s economy grows
larger than America’s, the rate at which CCP values are transmitted across the
world will increase. Inasmuch as “globalization” means Sinicization, Americans
are likely to resist it.
While the great mass movements of migration from 2015
have slowed down, the truth is that technological advancements have
dramatically lowered the financial and psychological price of emigration from
the third world to the first. Borders are hardening all over the world in
response to this reality, and they are likely to do so here as well.
Finally, the truth is that those “left behind” voters of
the old left-wing coalitions as well as many other voters have been deprived of
institutions. They exist in smaller, more fragmented networks. They are less
likely to be a part of labor unions or members of churches. They are therefore
less likely to be the kind of traditional small-c conservatives who hope to
preserve their little platoons and who are content and therefore fearful of
change. Instead, they are more likely to be dissatisfied with many present
arrangements, and they are open to the broad appeal of politics in a
nationalist key, which promises solidarity based on shared membership in the
nation, and which seeks to reorder the priorities of the governing class to
bring them in line with their own aims and well-being. Working with these
voters presents serious challenges and even dangers for traditional
conservatives. We’ve seen many of those dangers these last five years. But
there are many more opportunities as well.
Trump may be leaving the national stage, but the voters
he brought into the coalition and the challenges he identified are not going
anywhere.
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