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.

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.