Trumpism, Conservatism, and the Republican Party

In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, Yuval Levin (he of National Affairs) spoke about the modern Republican coalition, and where conservatism fits within it. The whole interview is interesting, but the part I want to highlight comes from the interview's opening exchange:

Ezra Klein: So I want to start with an odd question: What is the Republican Party?

Yuval Levin: It’s an odd question that has to be asked now, of course. Any political party is an institution that exists to advance some vision of good and that exists to allow a coalition to cohere. A party is always both of those things. 

I think the Republican Party has thought of itself more in recent decades as the first, as a vehicle for a vision of the world, a vehicle for conservatism. In reality, of course, it’s been at least as much of the latter. I think some of the problems it’s had is that its own leaders have not seen that as clearly as they might and have assumed that the Republican electorate is more of a conservative electorate than it’s been .

EK: What do you think happened inside the party this year? It feels like the institution has changed, but how do you locate where that change happened? 

YL: For a long time now, the political class of the Republican Party has had a view of its own voters that has been an error. It's looked at the base as a conservative voting base. That view of the electorate has meant that a lot of Republican politicians think they can approach the Republican Party as an essentially conservative institution. The conservative movement, which is different from the Republican Party, has thought this way too, and has had a possessive approach rather than a persuasive approach to Republican voters.

Levin came to this realization before I did, and I believe he is spot-on. It speaks to the success of the conservative movement that for nearly four decades, conservatism and the Republican party have been largely indistinct. It's only in hindsight that I can see that this impression is mistaken, and that the Republican party is--as Levin points out, and just as the Democratic party is--a coalition of disparate interests. In fact, as the Trump movement lays bare, if there is a motivating ideology among the Republican party, it is not conservatism but rather white ethno-nationalism. You can see that in action in this video posted by the New York Times (warning: the video contains some pretty nasty racial epithets and the like). The video is not an aberration; a reporter documented similar happenings at a Trump rally in Greensboro back in June. Of course the national media focuses on Trumps various outrages (some of which--like his slurs against the Khan family--truly are horrific), but I think the happenings at his rallies that go largely unreported are both more telling and more troubling.

In a sense it's amazing that it took so many of us so long to connect the dots. Of course many of us realized that white racial resentment was a crucial part of Republican electoral strategy; Nixon's 1968 election was fueled in no small part by backlash to the Civil Rights reforms of the '60s and subsequent civil unrest in the summer of '68; Lee Atwater famously laid this bare in a 1981 interview. See also Ronald Reagan, particularly his emphasis on "welfare queens," and of course his speech on states' rights at the Neshoba County Fair in 1980 (in which county three civil rights activists were murdered sixteen years earlier). But somehow we still persisted with the belief that the Republican part was a conservative party: dedicated to principles of small government (or--more cynically--minimizing the tax burden of the wealthy). And from a policy and rhetorical standpoint it was, at least at the national level. But this ideological commitment to minimizing the tax burden of the wealthy existed in tension with an electorate that was mostly interested in white ethnic nationalism. In appealing directly to the latter, Trump has brought the interests of the Republican electoral base (as opposed to its donor and intellectual base) to the forefront of the party's political discussion. In essence, "low taxes on the wealthy" has been replaced as the face of the party by by angry white ethno-nationalism.

What's interesting--and I'll expand on this in a later post--is the degree to which we bought into that small-government face, even though the conception of conservatism as Grover-Norquist style drownable-in-a-bathtub government is a very modern phenomenon, whereas the Trumpist style is a constaint thread throughout American politics.