The Insider Election

A merican politics — indeed, the politics of the entire Western world — continues to be shaped by the dynamics of inside versus outside. Last week’s election results are the latest example.

A standard interpretation of the last decade is that Donald Trump and his supporters are a movement of outsiders, an invasive force pushing their way into the sanctum sanctorum of the American political establishment. To some extent that is true, and Trump himself has exploited his supposed “outsider” status. But there is another frame, arguably more relevant to the current moment. Most of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters do not think of themselves as revolutionaries. They do not see themselves as a break with the mainstream of the American political tradition; rather, they are the latest expression of it. They see themselves as dedicated to a uniquely American way of life, and they are instinctively hostile to those who wish to upset it. They favor the normal over the novel, the customary over the radical, and the familiar over the foreign. They see themselves as patriots, and they think the average American is a patriot, too. They are “inside,” as defenders of the castle are inside.

Inside and outside can mark positions relative to a range of concerns: national borders, economic interests, ideological movements. Just like in 2016, Donald Trump successfully framed the election as one of inside versus outside, confident that, following four years of political, economic, and ideological upheaval, more people today see themselves as insiders than as outsiders. Consider the following cases.

1. Immigration. Since he emerged on the political scene in 2015, Donald Trump’s cornerstone issue has been immigration. However inchoately, he reflexively understood that immigration asks the fundamental inside/outside question: To whom does American law give priority — to those on the inside (citizens and legal residents) or to those on the outside (foreign nationals, refugees, or, especially, illegal aliens)? Who does the system prefer? The inside/outside distinction of course took a literal form in Trump’s promised border wall. (One might add that our periodic fights over voter-identification laws are part of the same debate: To whom does the American social contract extend?)
2. Trade. Donald Trump’s economic reflexes are protectionist — a term that already indicates an inside/outside perspective. American workers, especially in manufacturing and other forms of blue-collar labor, are representatively inside, while white-collar workers and, especially, elite financial- or professional-services workers, who are more connected to global networks of capital, are representatively outside. For Donald Trump, the question of who is inside or outside economically overlaps with the question of who is inside or outside politically.
3. Foreign policy. Donald Trump’s foreign-policy tendencies, captured in the slogan “America first,” turn on the inside/outside distinction. Whose interests does American foreign policy serve — the interest of American citizens, or of other peoples or nations (especially nations that are perceived as hostile, e.g., Iran, or parasitical, e.g., “free-riding” European allies)?
4. Crime. The losses of San Francisco mayor London Breed and Los Angeles district attorney George Gascón place an exclamation point on the wave of anti-progressive electoral results that have drowned the post–George Floyd “Defund the police” movement. Crime and policing ask the inside/outside question in immediate, tangible fashion: Who do the city and its services exist to serve — law-abiding citizens (inside), or criminals (outside)?

Viewed in this way, inside and outside have been the central terms of our political struggles for nearly a decade, and perhaps much longer. It is a striking fact that American cultural life has become eccentric, dominated by its coastal peripheries (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., New York City), and that the peripheries have become associated with ideological priorities that are perceived as alien to and imposed upon the rest of the country. The inside sees itself as literally dominated by the outside.

Progressives often argue, not without justice in certain cases, that a political system ought to give priority to the outsider — the marginal person, the minority faction, the novel idea. And, indeed, every system must balance the interests of inside and outside in its own way. But no political order lasts long that ignores the insiders.

Last week’s election was a reminder of that fact.