Trumpism, Conservatism, and the Republican Party (II)

In my last post, I talked about how Trumpism is best understood as a manifestation of white ethnic nationalism, and how this has replaced small-government conservatism as the motivating force in twenty-first century Republican politics. In my next posts I want to dive a bit deeper and examine in brief the history of these competing ideas, beginning here with small-government conservatism.

The US version of conservatism traces its intellectual roots back to two men: Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson. Burke was an Irishman who famously wrote about the French Revolution which it turns out he was no big fan of. And for good reasons; for all of the problems inherent under the French monarchy, the Revolution was often a grisly, brutal affair. And while Burke was sympathetic to the goals of the French revolutionaries, he was repulsed by the result.

Hence conservatism, which in its Burkean conception calls for change to happen slowly (when it happens at all) and emphasizes intellectual humility and the dangers of the unknown. In this sense there's a lot to like about conservatism. Of course there's also a more cynical take on conservatism, that it represents an intellectual justification and defense of the existing social order. The best description of this I've come across comes from Corey Robin, in a book he wrote several years ago: conservatism is "... a meditation on, and theoretical rendition of, the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back."

Regardless of your level of cynicism, twentieth-century conservatism bears little resemblance to the Burkean ideals of intellectual humility and slow, careful change. Rather, early conservative intellectuals like William F. Buckley viewed conservatism as being primarily about low taxes (especially on the wealthy) and minimal government interference in the economy. "Small government," was the main ideological guidepost and in this sense the twentieth century conservatism seems quite a bit closer to Corey Robin's interpretation.

With regards to Jefferson: of course he needs no introduction. First as Secretary of State and then as Vice President and then President he was an advocate of a small central government with limited powers, which advocacy makes him a popular figure among the right. This view of the role of the federal government was dominant through early US history and was embodied in the politics of the Democratic-Republican and then Democratic party. That said, despite Democratic dominance, the government did steadily increase its reach of the course of the antebellum period (for an excellent history of this time you could do a lot worse than Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought). The key thing I want to focus on here is that during the antebellum era, the Democratic party did not advocate for limited government out of some abstract principle. Rather, the pursuit of limited government power was in the interest of defending the existing social and economic order. To wit: plantation slavery.

The United States of the antebellum period was unique in that it really was two distinct nations stitched together. North of the Mason-Dixon line was a more-or-less modern industrializing state. Subsistence agriculture was being replaced by wage labor, especially in factories. There was a nascent financial system developing in New York City. The northeastern part of the US represented contemporaneous England far more than it did the South. And as for the South? The economy was based on plantation agriculture and the growth of cotton. In this it resembled contemporaneous Brazil far more than it did the north.

And of course the South bitterly opposed the extension of government power. It did so for rational reasons. Southern plantations were tremendously profitable at the time only due to the violent expropriation of the labor of millions of black persons. Southerners such as Jefferson viewed a strong central government as a threat to slavery. They also rightfully feared industrialization and wage labor. As Sven Beckert makes clear in Empire of Cotton, cotton planters were everywhere destined to be the lowest rung on the ladder in terms of the global cotton industry; squeezed by financiers, merchants, and (much later) retailers. The South's opposition to large government was not out of some abstract Burkean principle; it was out of simple survival instinct: across the world muscular governments were a force for industrialization and the commodification of labor.

The question of slavery was settled by 1865, and it's worth noting that by then the question of the scope of government was also settled, at least for a few generations. Through the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, the United States developed as a major industrial power; by World War I it was the equal of England. And as with England, this process of industrialization was accompanied by a dramatic expansion of the reach of government.

And so rather than being an extension of the Jeffersonian tradition (which was fundamentally a defense of plantation agriculture), twentieth-century small-government conservatism as practiced by the likes of Reagan is a relatively modern idea. As recently as the nineteen-fifties, Republicans did not oppose the existence of the welfare state erected in the wake of the Great Depression; they ran elections on being more competent stewards of that state. It wasn't until the Goldwater nomination of 1964 that small-government conservatism stepped onto the main stage of US politics, and of course in that initial outing it was soundly rejected. Richard Nixon was of course no conservative (he was largely uninterested in domestic politics; his passion was in the global chess match that was the Cold War). It wasn't until Ronald Reagan in 1980 that conservatism found its footing in US politics. And of course Reagan rose to power (as I will write about in my next post) by exploiting the politics of racial backlash.

My next post will examine in brief the history of white ethnic nationalism, which I view as a modern manifestation of the centuries-old idea of white supremacy. I will show that in contrast to the relatively new ideology of small-government conservatism, white supremacy has been a powerful and enduring current in American politics, and today it is expressed in the politics of Donald Trump and his supporters.

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.