The ‘left-behind’ voters who make up his base reflect a global populist-nationalist trend, and they are not going away.
The ‘left-behind’ voters who make up his base reflect a global populist-nationalist trend, and they are not going away.
W ill Trumpism survive President Donald Trump? For many observers, the answer is obvious: no. Trumpism is about Donald Trump, and only Donald Trump, and it has no substance beyond that. It is a rhetoric and an affect, in service to him, and that’s on its best days. On most others, it is a gibbering cult and series of baroque conspiracy theories. Trumpism is just a giant sucking sound around the black hole of the man’s own vanity. It will eventually disappear, as he has, up his own backside.
This is, I think, incorrect. Trumpism is a populist-nationalist politics. It is populist because it preaches political doctrines largely rejected by the incumbent political class: an America-first foreign policy, revision of the aims of our trade policy, and a halt to mass migration. It is a nationalist project whose ultimate aim is to restore the democratic link between the citizenry and government — a link that has been threatened by a class of “experts” who govern a subordinate native class on behalf of oligarchic interests. Trumpism seeks a political mandate from the losers of post–Cold War globalization. It chafes at the restraints of a “world order” when it does not suit the national interest. It is the restorationist character of this nationalist project that makes it appealing to many conservatives and, ultimately, an ally of conservatism — even if an occasionally annoying or obstreperous one.
Five years ago, I predicted that Trump would probably damage — perhaps irretrievably — the populist and nationalist causes he championed in the GOP. And he has roughly followed the script I laid out. His inconstancy and self-interest have often led to him to betray or leave incomplete the populist and nationalist policies he championed. We haven’t moved to the skills-based immigration system he promised. We haven’t fully withdrawn from long wars where there is no reasonable hope of a satisfying conclusion or national objective to be achieved. Trump’s trade war with China concluded without any fundamental changes to the economic and political dynamics of the Sino-American relationship.
And in recent weeks, his behavior has brought further disrepute to these causes. He made his claims of material electoral fraud a dividing line for his party. This GOP then lost the votes of the Georgia Republicans who believed that the presidential election had been stolen and that the state party was ignoring their concerns — which led to the GOP’s losing control of the Senate. Feeding his hardest-core supporters with the conspiracy theory led some of them to storm the U.S. Capitol in riotous violence, leaving five dead. Those who opposed him chiefly to resist populist and nationalist accretions to conservative politics have been given the weapons to potentially exclude him from discussions about the future of the Republican Party. Trump’s failures as a president, and the political failures of the GOP under him, will be used against populist-nationalism, by its critics on the right and left. They will be used opportunistically, just as the failings of Bush have been used against neoconservatives who eventually embraced him.
And yet, it’s not over.
To understand whether Trumpism has a future in the Republican Party, it’s important to consider “Trumpism before Trump.” It has been tempting to view Trumpism as a minor and electorally inert heresy. It has never had any real champions in the Senate. The giant phalanx of conservative institutions — think tanks, party leaders, and media outlets — were against Trumpism. It is, the critics say, just Pat Buchananism and revived only because Donald Trump was a celebrity and an innovative campaigner.
This is not true. While Trump’s celebrity is an underrated factor in his success, looking backward from 2021, Trumpism seems inevitable and on the rise, with many antecedent figures across the party championing at least parts of it. Ronald Reagan used tariffs to defend American icon Harley-Davidson. Patrick Buchanan and his allied paleo-conservatives denounced the first Iraq War and attacked George H. W. Bush on the cultural issues, particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1991.
Before the ideological transformation in the wake of 9/11, George W. Bush ran in 2000 on a more constrained foreign policy. He preached “the modesty of true strength” and “the humility of real greatness.” And his national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, tilted against an American foreign policy that aimed at “second order” effects, such as the advancement of human rights. He also used tariffs in an attempt to hold Ohio and add Pennsylvania to the Republican coalition.
Arguably the last two contenders in the 2012 Republican primary were Trumpists of a sort. Rick Santorum was critical of free trade. Mitt Romney showed something of a Trumpist ability to get to Rick Perry’s right on immigration, while being more supportive of the welfare state. If Romney had been elected, we might now have a more Trumpist trade arrangement with China than even Trump has sought.
The political logic of Trumpism resided in ideological and electoral opportunities — namely, solidifying the GOP among its new more-Evangelical voters, and reaching out over and over again to the remnants of Reagan Democrats and other groups that have been globalization’s losers — voters who have been effectively abandoned by a Democratic Party dominated by college-educated lifestyle progressives.
In fact, one big clue that “Trumpism” won’t just go away with Trump is that the phenomenon is global. Many left-leaning parties across the world made their peace with global capitalism after 1989, abandoning their traditional workers in favor of culturally progressive, upwardly mobile, educated voters; they centered themselves instead on the new professionals in global cities. That shift has inevitably generated failures and resentments, left and right. On the left, it inspired Syriza in Greece and a short vogue for old-school nationally focused socialists like Bernie Sanders in the U.S., Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K., and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France. It also inspired a broader movement on the right. The rise of Trumpism in the U.S., Brexit in Britain including Johnson’s smash-through in Labour heartlands, and the advent of Lega under Matteo Salvini in Italy are all connected by dissatisfaction with a politics of the 1990s.
And there are reasons to believe that political conditions will continue to call for a Trumpist response for some time.
The most obvious reason for this is China. Free trade has often been accepted by conservatives as simply efficient. But in the case of China, it has been defended by citing larger theories about the world that have proven untrue — namely, that trade liberalization would lead to political liberalization in China and that any losses owing to America’s strategy of low-wage labor arbitrage would be diffuse and easily ameliorated through redistribution of the gains. None of this has proved true, and what is called “free trade” by Americans is clearly seen by the Chinese as mercantile and industrial policy for China’s geostrategic benefit.
In the way that America’s Silicon Valley behemoths tended to transmit American ideas of free speech worldwide (at least at first), Chinese commercial firms are now proving to be extensions of the Chinese Communist Party, dedicated to total political control. As China’s economy grows larger than America’s, the rate at which CCP values are transmitted across the world will increase. Inasmuch as “globalization” means Sinicization, Americans are likely to resist it.
While the great mass movements of migration from 2015 have slowed down, the truth is that technological advancements have dramatically lowered the financial and psychological price of emigration from the third world to the first. Borders are hardening all over the world in response to this reality, and they are likely to do so here as well.
Finally, the truth is that those “left-behind” voters of the old left-wing coalitions as well as many other voters have been deprived of institutions. They exist in smaller, more fragmented networks. They are less likely to be a part of labor unions or members of churches. They are therefore less likely to be the kind of traditional small-c conservatives who hope to preserve their little platoons and who are content and therefore fearful of change. Instead, they are more likely to be dissatisfied with many present arrangements, and they are open to the broad appeal of politics in a nationalist key, which promises solidarity based on shared membership in the nation, and which seeks to reorder the priorities of the governing class to bring them in line with their own aims and well-being. Working with these voters presents serious challenges and even dangers for traditional conservatives. We’ve seen many of those dangers these last five years. But there are many more opportunities as well.
Trump may be leaving the national stage, but the voters he brought into the coalition and the challenges he identified are not going anywhere.