Trumpism, Conservatism, and the Republican Party (In Conclusion)

This series of posts ended up being quite a bit longer than I'd intended; when I made the original post a week ago I didn't think I'd be writing a lot more. But it turns out that the thesis of this series was worth exploring in some depth (or at least what passes for depth on a blog). For this post I'm going to eschew a summary (go read the other posts!) and instead just offer some parting thoughts.

The Democratic party and the nation as a whole is fortunate that the first candidate to speak directly to this sense of white ethnic anxiety is such a buffoon. Trump's combination of incompetence and ignorance almost certainly mean his candidacy is doomed; as of this writing Hillary Clinton's lead in the polls seems to be approaching double-digit margins. But we should not imagine that Trump's upcoming defeat means the defeat of Trumpism; I expect that the political movement he represents will endure. The Republican party is--like the Democratic party--a collection of factions and interest groups, but I expect that the Trumpist faction will remain the dominant faction in the coming years.

The coalition that propelled Donald Trump to victory in the Republican primaries and which provides the core of his diminishing support today will not go away. His base of white voters motivated by ethnic anxiety stemming from the changing face of the country is going nowhere. Furthermore, having now had a candidate that speaks openly to their concerns, these voters are not likely to be satisfied with a return to the dog-whistling that characterized previous Republican candidates' attempts to court them. They will almost certainly demand a candidate that will continue to address them openly, and in 2020 there will almost certainly be a Republican candidate who attempts to ride the Trumpist coalition to victory in the primaries. If I might butcher an old principle of economics: in politics, demand creates its own supply. And it's likely such a candidate--perhaps Ted Cruz (who I believe has not a single political principle beyond his own advancement)--will have a strong chance of being the party's nominee, by exploiting the politics of white anxiety and resentment while also managing to run a disciplined and even formidable campaign. This country is deeply divided; despite being manifestly incompetent and unsuited for the role of President, Donald Trump will almost certainly receive at least forty to forty-five percent of the popular vote.

The challenge we face as liberals is to grapple with this reality, and find a way to grapple with these voters. Some commenters (such as Chris Arnade, who is worth following) maintain that Trumpism is still best understood as having its origins in the economic conditions facing the middle class. And while it's possible that some of Trump's supporters are motivated by stagnating wages and an increasingly unstable economic position, they are generally not those for whom the economy truly has failed. Rather, Trump's voters seem to be white people who sit a few rungs up the economic ladder. And to judge them by their own words (instead of by inferences about their economic circumstances), these voters are primarily motivated by ethnic concerns: issues like immigration and political correctness. In my mind, these are not people who liberals can appeal to, not without abandoning the principles of inclusiveness and diversity that motivate the party.

It seems that I've been a bit of a trailblazer with these posts, several commentators have spent the past few days discussing the nature of Trump's support. Matt Yglesias makes the same point that I do. James Kwak thinks Yglesias is going too far, but I find his reasoning to be unpersuasive. On Twitter, Brian Beutler more or less agrees with Yglesias and I. And Kevin Drum has a typically level-headed take. While I'm sure the discussion will continue online, for the purposes of this blog I'm done and moving on to other areas i'm more interested in.

How the Long Con killed the Tea Party

I've linked to Rick Perlstein's fantastic article The Long Con in a previous post. Anyone who seeks to understand American politics and especially the conservative movement in the late twentieth / early twenty-first century ought to read it. The article describes how the conservative movement is deeply entwined with grifters: people who seek to exploit the ignorance and passion of the conservative base to make a buck.

I mention it because I want to highlight an article I came across today in Politico: How We Killed the Tea Party. The article is written by a lawyer who worked for a conservative political action committee, and he describes how these organizations bilked Tea Party voters out of millions of dollars. I don't have anything to add, I just thought that the article was interesting. It turns out the Long Con is alive and well!

Trumpism, Conservatism, and the Republican Party (V)

This is the second to last post I will make on the subject of Trumpism and what it means for the broader Republican party. My goal has been to contextualize Trumpism within the context of white ethnic nationalism. My thesis is that rather than being an insurgency, Trumpism represents the mainstream Republican electorate in the early twenty-first century.

Before I continue with this post, I wanted to flag a story in the Washington Post about a recent study that provides some support for my thesis that Trump voters are motivated more by ethnic rather than economic anxiety.

Previous posts in this series:

• The first, in which I introduce the concepts I'm discussing.
• In the second post I discuss small government conservatism and point out that rather than being a foundational ideology, it's a rather new concept.
• The third post deals with white ethnic nationalism and link it to our country's ugly history of racism and white supremacy. 
• The fourth post links white ethnic nationalism to small government conservatism to show how the former was exploited to pass tax cuts and deregulation in order to benefit the wealthy. 

This post is a bit of a diversion. In it I want to discuss the degree to which the Republican base is afflicted by a strain of know-nothingism. The term know-nothing refers to the American party, which was active nationally in the 1850s in the interregnum between the disintegration of the Whig party and the coalescence of the Republican coalition that propelled Lincoln to the presidency in 1865. The party was colloquially known as the Know-Nothing party; the party was a semi-secret organization and upon being asked about the party members were supposed to respond with the phrase "I know nothing." 

Of course there are similarities between the policy agenda of the two parties. The Know-Nothing party was aggressively anti-immigrant, a response to the immigration of a large number of German and Irish immigrants in the mid 19th century, while the modern Republican party has often been outright xenophobic in its opposition to Mexican immigrants. But perhaps a strong thread uniting the two parties is ignorance: in the case of the Know-Nothings it was professed ignorance about the party. In the case of the modern Republican party it's often outright ignorance about, well, everything.

This isn't a new phenomenon. For decades the right in the United States has cultivated an alternative media landscape dedicated to the care and feeding of the Republican base. The original bastion was of course conservative talk radio. Rush Limbaugh is of course the avatar of the right-wing talk radio host, offering his audience a steady diet of bile and fury about the latest liberal outrages. Talk radio was in no small part the fuel for the controversies of the Clinton presidency; the place where conspiracy theories about the Rose Law Firm and Vince Foster first took root. Limbaugh is the most notorious and successful of the bunch, but he's only the tip of the iceberg. There is a virtual army of right wing radio hosts, at least one per media market across the country. Incidentally: this is a good place to mention David Foster Wallace's classic article Host, which makes right-wing talk radio its subject. 

Right wing talk radio is of course a relative fringe. Far more well-known is Fox News, the primary source of news and commentary for the Republican base. Numerous polls show that Republicans engage in far more media monoculture than independents and Democrats, and the focus of that monoculture is Fox News. "Fair and balanced," tagline aside, it's also well established that Fox News presents a distinctly right-wing view of the world. This extends beyond its editorial content and into its news coverage, both in terms of the subjects it chooses to focus on (Benghazi, the IRS scandal, etc) and the tone of that coverage. Of course it's also well established that people who use Fox News as their primary source of news about the world are less well informed than those who prefer other sources. This is not a coincidence.

Online, sites ranging from the Drudge Report to Breitbart.com to others decidedly less savory perform the task of caring and feeding for the Republican base. These sites feel even less of a burden than Fox News in terms of acknowledging reality, often peddling outright falsehoods and deceptions (Breitbarts series of "sting" videos have been universally discovered to have been frauds; Breitbart is being sued by Planned Parenthood over one such series). Spend some time on these sites and you'll rapidly come to the impression that these people aren't just seeing the world from a different perspective; they are living in another world entirely.

This phenomenon is deliberate. The entire point of the conservative media complex is to create an alternative world in which Republican voters are constantly one election away from disaster. From having their guns taken, their jobs seized, their daughters married off to minorities. Conservative media exists to keep the base in in a state of perpetual panic, living in a world where only Republicans stand between the voter and the barbarian hordes. 

Let me make something clear: it's not that Republicans are dumb, though they often seem that way. It's that they are the victims of a decades-long effort to exploit their insecurities. The Republican party has performed this exploitation for electoral gains. And as Rick Perlstein documented in his fantastic article The Long Con, an array of hangers-on have exploited them for financial gain. Indeed, the entirety of Ben Carson's 2016 presidential campaign appears to have been a scam to enrich unscrupulous political consultants. Republicans have been convinced by their alternative media landscape that they are under siege. Furthermore, they have been convinced that they can trust no other sources of information: academics, experts, elites, and all other outside sources are necessarily afflicted with liberal bias and are not to be trusted. Julian Sanchez in 2010 coined a term for this: epistemic closure. 

And in 2016 this epistemic closure has bit the party on the ass. The Republican base has been kept in a state of frenzied panic for decades. And all that their leadership has delivered in that time has been a series of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. For all the sturm und drang over the threat Obamacare presented to the nation, the Republican Congress could not repeal it. For all the furor over Hillary Clinton's emails, the FBI refused to indict her. It's important to realize the depth of Republican delusion: Republicans were not simply rooting for an FBI indictment: they were certain of it. They were genuinely shocked when Director Comey declined to recommend an indictment. Because of course Hillary Clinton is a criminal. Rush says so. Breitbart says so. Hannity says so.

One important function of political parties and elites is to guide the nomination process. This was the subject of the 2008 book The Party Decides, which examines the modern presidential nomination system. The book describes the nomination process as a contest among elites, where elites signal their preferences via fundraising and endorsements. The nomination of Donald Trump presents a powerful counter-argument to the thesis of the book; he trailed badly in both fundraising and endorsements and yet throughout the primaries lead in polling as his more well-funded and endorsed opponents fell by the wayside. To anyone with a modicum of sense Trump was obviously a terrible choice for President. Forget that he's proven to be an awful candidate in the general election: the man is a buffoon. He's a dim-witted narcissist, a bully, as well as a bigot. He's been a disaster as a businessman (as anyone who grew up in the New York media market in the 80s and 90s knows). A character like Trump would never have had a chance in the Democratic primaries, regardless of what policies he offered. But Republican voters--who among all have a well-cultivated sense of ignorance and distrust of elites--chose Trump. They did this in no small part because Donald Trump appeals to their ethnic anxiety; the most common refrain from Trump supporters when they explain their support for him is "He says what he thinks." But they also did this because they were too ignorant to recognize what a disaster Trump would be, both as a candidate and as a president. And their distrust of elites meant that they could not be convinced otherwise. 

Trumpism, Conservatism, and the Republican Party (IV)

This series of posts has gone on longer than I'd anticipated. This is the fourth in the series. In the first, I laid out my general thesis: that Trumpism should not be viewed as having hijacked the Republican party, but rather should be understood as an expression of the Republican Party's motivating principle: white ethnic nationalism. In the second post I examined briefly the history of the Republican party's conservative principles, in order to show that the small-government conservatism espoused by Republican elites is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the third post, I examined how white ethnic nationalism is a modern expression of racial anxiety and animus. I anticipate making two more posts on this subject: today I will examine how small-government conservatism and white nationalism were brought together. In the fifth post on the subject I will detour on an important tangent: the embrace of know-nothingism by Republicans. And then in the final post I will tie these things together, bringing them back to my thesis.

I've often said to friends that I feel as if I'm living in a Thomas Pynchon novel. Donald Trump--a buffoonish figure whom I am more than familiar with due to having grown up in the New York City media market during the 1980's and 1990's when his buffoonery was on frequent display--is now the Republican candidate for president. It's impossible to understand how this state of affairs came to be without examining how the small-government conservative agenda was operationalized with the support of voters whose Republican votes were an expression of white ethnic nationalism.

Put simply: the Republican party has operationalized the ideology of small-government conservatism by attempting to minimize the taxes paid by the wealthy and by corporations, and the regulations applying to corporations. That's it. They have been largely unconcerned with abstract questions about the size of government, or with the national debt, or with any of the other things they often claim to care about. The case of Ronald Reagan is instructive: Reagan famously passed a series of tax cuts that brought top tax rates from 70% to 28%. He also raised payroll taxes (which are used to pay for social security and Medicare). But of course there is a payroll tax cap; income above a certain level is exempt from the payroll tax. The interaction of these changes to the tax code resulted in both an overall reduction in tax revenues, as well as a shift in the tax burden from the upper class (who saw their income tax rates slashed) to the middle and lower classes (who saw their payroll taxes hiked).

Exhibit two in this case: the Ryan budget. Much ink has been spilled on this subject by various analysis and I won't waste time by reproducing their analysis; you could do worse than starting off with Paul Krugman. I bring up the Ryan budget because he's lauded by conservative intellectuals as a serious person worth listening to, and because the budget itself is such nonsense. Naturally it includes huge tax cuts for the wealthy, and beyond that? It makes some drastic changes to social safety net programs (block granting Medicaid, switching Medicare to a voucher scheme). The Ryan budget achieves deficit reduction by the use of magic asterisks: it simply assumes that the numbers will add up in a favorable way. I mention the magic asterisks to demonstrate how totally unserious the Ryan plan is, and thus how totally unserious conservative intellectuals are. Furthermore, the Ryan budget is in no way a conservative document! It makes sweeping, drastic changes to programs that are at the core of our country's social safety net. Recall in my first post when I pointed out that conservatism involves a belief in small, incremental changes. The changes proposed by Ryan to Medicaid and Medicare are neither small nor incremental; they are sweeping and drastic.

To review: in operations, small government conservatism is neither philosophically conservative (in that it does not follow the principle of small, incremental changes) nor is it about small government. Rather, conservatism since the 1980s has been focused on passing tax cuts for wealthy Americans while rolling back (when possible) regulations that limit corporate bad behavior. So how the heck did Republicans get so many voters to vote for this for so long?

The answer, of course, is by exploiting the politics of racial backlash. Probably the best single source on how this came to be comes from the historian Rick Perlstein. In Before the Storm, he tells the story of Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, in which conservative insurgents were able to capture the Republican nomination and elevate Barry Goldwater as their candidate for president. Of course Goldwater lost in historic fashion; the country simply wasn't willing to buy his brand of conservatism. Perlstein's next book--Nixonland--details the ascendancy of Richard Nixon, who ably exploited white backlash to the Civil Rights movement to capture the presidency in 1968, and then win reelection with a historic margin in 1972. Nixon's 1968 victory was based off of the infamous Southern Strategy, architected by Harry Dent and then famously described by Lee Atwater in the interview I've mentioned now several times.

I recently listened to Ezra Klein's interview with Heather McGhee, where she very ably summarized the Republican two-step by which racial animus was exploited to roll back the welfare state and cut taxes for the wealthy. Two brief quotes are instructive: in describing how Republicans got white voters to vote for tax cuts for the wealthy while cutting benefits that accrue to the poor and middle class, McGhee says, "White voters became alienated from the idea of government and government benefits because they didn’t, in the conservative methodology, benefit them." She then later elaborates on this theme:

It’s not really clear why a base white conservative really wants a small government or spending cuts. Why am I driven to the polls to cut spending? It’s in large part, and lots of research shows this, that government spending has been racialized. …

By racializing government spending, Republicans were able to get the white middle class to support cuts to the social safety net, and the attendant tax cuts for the wealthy. They were able to do this because the Republican base has always been motivated in no small part by racial animus. Republicans have now spent nearly fifty years exploiting this animus: stoking racial fears and paranoia. Of course the targets of the fears have evolved: thirty six years ago it was "welfare queens," twenty years ago it was urban "super predators." Today it's Muslim immigrants and Mexicans. But the underlying tactic remains the same: stoke fear of others in order to motivate Republican voters. This fusion of white nationalism as a voting motivation in order to secure tax cuts for the wealthy has been wildly successful, but in Donald Trump the conservative movement seems to have lost control of the forces it has long been exploiting.

White nationalism hasn't been enough to enable Donald Trump. In the next post on this subject I will detail how Republican elites have spent twenty years cultivating a strain of know-nothingism among Republican voters; what Julian Sanchez called in 2010 "epistemic closure." The cultivated ignorance and distrust of elites created a base of voters that are by and large resistant to elite attempts to direct them, which has been crucial to the rise of Trump.