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 (III)

This is the third post in which I seek to understand the modern Republican party of the United States in the context of Donald Trump's surprising candidacy. The thesis of this series of posts is that we should not have been surprised by his candidacy; Donald Trump's combination of ignorance and overt racial and cultural animus is a reflection of where the majority of the Republican Party finds itself in the twenty-first century. The first post--in which I identify Trumpism as a manifestation of white ethnic nationalism--can be found here. In my second post on the subject I discussed the modern conception of small-government conservatism, and show that it is a very recent phenomenon (n.b., I will have another post up in the coming days examining whether or not small government conservatism is a governing philosophy or just a load of nonsense used to justify tax cuts for the wealthy. Can you guess in advance what I think?) In this post I will seek to provide some historical context for this idea of white ethnic nationalism that--in contrast to small-government conservatism--so strongly animates the modern Republican party

In my second post on this subject (and indeed, on this incarnation of my blog) I spoke of how Thomas Jefferson and the antebellum Democratic party viewed a weak United States government as crucial to the maintenance and even extension of slavery. To understand the modern Republican party (and indeed, modern politics in this country) you must grapple with this country's ugly history with regards to race. That the Republican party of the twenty-first century consists overwhelmingly of white men is not a coincidence; the white ethnic nationalism motivating the Republican party is merely the latest manifestation of this country's ugly history of racism.

The topic of race relations in the United States is beyond the scope of a single blog post. Indeed, it's beyond the scope of a single book; entire academic careers could be built on the subject. I have previously mentioned Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom; this book is required reading for anyone who wants an understanding of U.S. history and U.S. politics. In that work, Morgan details the origins of the slave economy that came to dominate the southern half of the nation for two centuries, as well as the origins of American racism and bigotry toward blacks. Put simply: racism did not happen naturally or organically; ideas about the inferiority of blacks were created. They were created not just to justify the enslavement of those people and the plunder of their labor, but also to separate enslaved blacks from poor whites, whose living conditions were not all that much better than those of slaves. Socially, what the nascent aristocracy did was to create a class below that of the white underclass, and then used class- and race-based resentment to secure their own superior position in society. As bad as life was for a poor white person in the early days of those colonies, it could always be worse. You could be black.

Racism and the halo of associated social ills remained a enduring feature in American society through the mid nineteenth century. So powerful was slavery as an issue that the country fought the bloodiest war in its history over the subject. And while the Emancipation Proclamation and the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution settled the question of slavery, the racial animus developed over two centuries endured.

It's worth digressing here for a bit of basic sociology. Race is a social construct; racial differences were created by society. They were created to justify and perpetuate imbalances between different groups. In the case of black Americans, the purpose initially to separate the interests of poor whites and black slaves in order to protect the status of the planter aristocracy. Racism is a system, it exists within society and like many social systems it creates winners and losers. The winners from racism were almost always white people, the losers were black people. Racism is often (but not always) accompanied by bigotry, which is an emotion felt by and a set of beliefs held by individuals. It is possible to exist within a racist system and even perpetuate that system without being a bigot. Such is the insidious nature of racism.

Newly-freed black slaves enjoyed only a brief respite from the brutal control over their lives that was slavery. As the North lost interest in their fate, Reconstruction came to an end and Jim Crow laws were put into place. These laws kept black citizens in the south in a subservient social position, clearly below even the lowest-class white citizens. Of course the system did not last; cracks began appearing in the 1950s and by the mid 1960s Jim Crow was being rapidly relegated to the dustbin of history. But racism endured. In her masterful book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander documents how Jim Crow was replaced by a new system of social control over black Americans: mass incarceration.

Of course today that system is beginning to weaken. The Black Lives Matter movement has brought attention to the disparate impact of police violence against African American communities. Michelle Alexander's book along with the work of thousands of tireless activists has raised awareness of the problems inherent in our criminal justice system and how these problems disproportionately affect black people. And of course there is the demographic fact that America is changing. As of last year, the majority of babies born in the United States is not white. It is only a matter of time until whites lose their majority status; they will soon be just one minority amongst many. And some of them are really pissed off about that.

So what does this have to do with Republican politics? Racism is not just a powerful social force; it has been a powerful political force. In the wake of the Civil War, the parties became sorted geographically. The Party of Lincoln was toxic to the states of the Confederacy; whereas the Democratic party--widely associated amongst loyal Unionists with secession and the bloody war--was out of favor in the north. This geographical sorting of the parties might seem a strange thing to us; today our parties are sorted by ideology. But during the century or so from the end of Reconstruction through the 1960s there was quite a bit of ideological overlap between the parties. In my previous post I talked about small-government conservatism as an animating political philosophy of the modern Republican party; during the century from 1865 to 1965 support for this philosophy was at its nadir. Conflict between Democrats and Republicans was not an abstract conflict about the scope of the federal government and the reach of its policies; by and large it was a conflict over patronage. To wit: whichever party controlled Congress and especially the Presidency would be able to grant coveted government jobs to its supporters.

The geographical sorting of the parties meant that there were liberal and conservative Republicans, as well as liberal and conservative Democrats. Conservative Democrats were an especially important part of the equation; most of them hailed from the south and as such they had extremely regressive views on race. Indeed, questions of race and the continued ability to oppress black citizens were at the top of their list of priorities. During the New Deal, FDR was able to pass social security legislation with the support of these Democrats; as originally written Social Security was structured to avoid providing benefits to African Americans.

So why do I make the claim that the Republican party is now the standard bearer of this regressive racial legacy? United States politics underwent a realignment in the 1960's. As President Johnson passed Civil Rights legislation through Congress, he lost the support of the south. Many conservative southern Democrats defected to the Republican party. Others died off or retired, and were replaced by Republicans. This process took decades; it wasn't completed until the 1994 Gingrich Revolution swept the last of the southern Democrats out of Congress.

The Republican party deliberately cultivated bigoted voters. In my first post on this subject I mentioned Lee Atwater's famous interview on the subject. I also mentioned Ronald Reagan's calculated speech on states' rights (which in the south is code for the right to discriminate against black people). The Republican electoral playbook in the 1980s and 1990s was to exploit racial resentment in order to justify gutting the social safety net and lowering taxes. Welfare benefits had to be cut because welfare was going to those people, where those people were inevitably black. It worked.

Of course the Republican party no longer stands for overt racism, or at least it no longer claims to. This is belied by the fact that a host of its policies achieve overtly racist ends, from the gutting of the social safety net to its historical support for mass incarceration to the more modern phenomenon of voting restrictions which are usually targeted to reduce minority turnout (the recent example in North Carolina is particularly flagrant and repulsive). I believe it indisputable that the Republican party--like the rest of the country--has been slowly (if reluctantly) been moving in the right direction on questions of race and racism. Which is why I identify the Trump movement as one of white ethnic nationalism, not of white racism. As I mentioned previously, the racial hierarchy created back in the early decades of the Virginia colony created winners and losers; it created a system in which all whites--regardless of their place in society--enjoyed a privileged position relative to blacks. That system is steadily breaking down, which necessarily means a loss of privilege. Furthermore, as I again previously mentioned, whites will soon be a minority in this country. For the first time in nearly four hundred years, white people across the nation face the prospect of not occupying the dominant position in our society. This creates a perhaps understandable sense of unease, even resentment. And it is this sense of unease and resentment that I call white ethnic nationalism.

Let me be clear: I do not claim that a majority or even a significant minority of the Republican party are bigots. I claim only that a majority of the Republican party has benefited and continues to benefit from racism; because of the racialized structure of our society they occupy a superior position than they might otherwise. They probably do not see their superior position in society in these terms, which is an understandable defense mechanism. But that does not make it true. And these people are now facing the steady erosion of their superior position. This leads to the anxiety and animus that animates white ethnic nationalism.

In manipulating the politics of racial animus and then white ethnic nationalism for electoral gain, the Republican party gathered the forces that Donald Trump has unleashed. For nearly forty years they directed these forces towards conservative ends: dismantling the social safety net, and passing tax cuts for the wealthiest members of our society. Of course there is one more element of Trumpism I haven't yet mentioned: a sort of cultivated ignorance, a deliberate and even delighted-in know-nothingism that manifests in a rejection of all things considered to be "elite," whether it be scientists or political experts. In my next post on this subject I will describe how the cultivation of white ethnic nationalism combined with a decades-long diet of know-nothingism served up by the likes of Fox News lead inevitably to The Donald being the Republican nominee in 2016.

edit: I was just reminded of a fantastic book on the subject of how race and Republicans' tax-cutting fanaticism interacted: Thomas and Mary Edsall's Chain Reaction. It's a bit older, but still a fantastic read.

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.