The Donald Trump Phenomenon: An Accumulation of 50 Years Worth of Republican Party Cynicism
Like just about everybody else who follows politics, I would not have anticipated three months ago that Donald Trump would come to dominate the political discussion for the summer, surge way ahead in the polls amongst a very crowded field, and suck all the oxygen out of the room for most other candidates. But that was primarily because I didn't know what kind of campaign he was gonna run. Had I known three months ago what I know now, it wouldn't have been nearly as surprising. Here we have one of the 100 richest men in America running a full-throated populist campaign railing against everything from illegal immigration to the Chinese eating our lunch in the global economy to America's political leaders being bought and paid for by, well, by guys like him. And the fact that he talks about these issues with the trademark Trump swagger and brash self-confidence only makes him more appealing to the demographic he's going for....a demographic that the Republican Party co-opted more than two generations ago that has now come to represent a majority in their party while the establishment was napping.
Minnesota's Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty coined a term in 2005 that seemed on-point then and has only gotten more fitting in the decade since.....that Republicans are no longer "the party of the country club but are the party of Sam's Club". In the 1950s, predicting voting patterns in America was pretty easy. If you were a low-income worker in Texas or a poor farmer living in a shack with a dirt floor in Alabama, you were a Democrat. And if you were a young professional on Long Island or a business manager in southern California, you were a Republican. To a much greater degree than today, people voted their pocketbooks. But then came the civil rights battle and other culture wars of the 1960s that dragged on into the 1970s and flipped America's voting coalitions on their head. Richard Nixon and the Republican Party, with Reagan after him, successfully employed a "Southern strategy" that co-opted culturally conservative southern Democrats into the GOP tent. By 1980, the new recruits along with the old-school money interests of the Republican Party combined to form a majority and conservatism was ascendant.
The quarter century that followed saw a shakeup amongst the "country club" crowd, however, as large chunks of their ranks drifted to the left on the same cultural issues that the GOP won over the "Sam's Cub" crowd with. It would have been unthinkable in the 1970s that 30 years later, the steel mill towns of southwest Pennsylvania would be Republican while the upscale suburban donut encircling Philadelphia would be Democrat, but that's exactly what has happened in that very local example and across the country. Cycle after cycle, the blue-collar whites that Republicans spent the 60s, 70s, and 80s co-opting into the Republican Party orbit based on a growing litany of cultural resentments became a larger and larger share of the party's base. In 2012, every fourth-rate contender in the weakest Republican Presidential field in decades was given a serious hearing by the party's primary electorate--halfwits like Herman Cain and Rick Santorum and nutjobs like Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich all had their time in the sun--before primary voters finally realized they were unelectable and then held their nose and voted for establishment choice Mitt Romney only after all other options were exhausted. That cycle foreshadowed the Trump surge we're seeing four years later, only Trump has far more media savvy and staying power than those clowns ever had, which is why he is dominating the field to the degree that he has.
It would seem as though 2016 is the year that the inmates have officially taken over the asylum in the Republican Party. It seems hard for me to believe that a businessman like Trump agrees with his own overheated rhetoric on immigration and sticking it to China in the global economy, but he recognizes that that's where the center of gravity is now in the Republican Party. For decades, the party has relied upon the foot soldiers in trailer parks and small impoverished towns throughout the South and the heartland for enough votes to win on election day, at which point the party graybeards would proceed with their real agenda of transferring wealth from that same peasantry to the top of the income pyramid, only stirring the pot of the culture war again before elections to make sure their soldiers will deliver for them yet again. But with the combination of changing demographics in the country and the moneyed class discovering they can get the same special protections with Democrats without the cultural intolerance, the Republicans are finding that all they have left are angry white guys in the South and the heartland whose Republican identity is entirely defined by their cultural resentments. And on the issues that matter most to establishment types like Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, these voters really don't have a vested interest.
Enter Donald Trump, who is taking positions on bread and butter issues that likely have Ronald Reagan spinning in his grave, including a higher minimum wage, protectionist tariffs, high taxes on the rich, and single-payer health care. To your average Republican base voter earning $25,000 a year in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Cape Girardeau, Missouri, who favors Republicans based on issues like guns, abortion, immigration, and sticking it to "welfare cheats", none of Trump's left-populist economic posturing is particularly troubling. After all, most of these guys are from families a generation or two removed from being New Deal and JFK Democrats based on the same left-populist economic posturing coming out of Trump. They're just not "conservatives" in the Reagan tradition no matter how much historical rewriting has been done to lionize Reagan and his policy positions. Mike Huckabee had success in 2008 running on a softer version of this platform as did Rick Santorum in 2012, but these guys never had the salesmanship or media platform that Trump now has to consolidate this white working class base.
Like everybody else, I figured early on that Trump would fade rather quickly, but that certainly hasn't happened. I'm about 50-50 on whether it will at this point. I think even among the flag-waving populist crowd, they may take a step back as the primary vote approaches and ask themselves if they really believe this guy is capable of winning a general election. And chances are, his shtick will be wearing thin by then. Some believe Trump's not even really running and is merely on a high-stakes ego trip, and will pull out of the race before the voting starts assuring everybody he "could have and would have won". All those scenarios are plausible, and collectively perhaps more plausible than him winning the nomination. In a way, Trump's rise has been a very useful reminder to those in elite circles in both parties and the media of the magnitude of the cultural tribal lines that already exist in this country that are poised to get much worse as the population continues to diversify. The idea of him getting anywhere near the White House is terrifying at any number of levels, but if Trump's candidacy is nothing more than an "art project" exposing the fault lines in American political and cultural life today while simultaneously getting a well-deserved jab in at the perils of our corrupt campaign finance system, then Donald Trump will go down as the best thing that happened to American politics in 2015.
Minnesota's Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty coined a term in 2005 that seemed on-point then and has only gotten more fitting in the decade since.....that Republicans are no longer "the party of the country club but are the party of Sam's Club". In the 1950s, predicting voting patterns in America was pretty easy. If you were a low-income worker in Texas or a poor farmer living in a shack with a dirt floor in Alabama, you were a Democrat. And if you were a young professional on Long Island or a business manager in southern California, you were a Republican. To a much greater degree than today, people voted their pocketbooks. But then came the civil rights battle and other culture wars of the 1960s that dragged on into the 1970s and flipped America's voting coalitions on their head. Richard Nixon and the Republican Party, with Reagan after him, successfully employed a "Southern strategy" that co-opted culturally conservative southern Democrats into the GOP tent. By 1980, the new recruits along with the old-school money interests of the Republican Party combined to form a majority and conservatism was ascendant.
The quarter century that followed saw a shakeup amongst the "country club" crowd, however, as large chunks of their ranks drifted to the left on the same cultural issues that the GOP won over the "Sam's Cub" crowd with. It would have been unthinkable in the 1970s that 30 years later, the steel mill towns of southwest Pennsylvania would be Republican while the upscale suburban donut encircling Philadelphia would be Democrat, but that's exactly what has happened in that very local example and across the country. Cycle after cycle, the blue-collar whites that Republicans spent the 60s, 70s, and 80s co-opting into the Republican Party orbit based on a growing litany of cultural resentments became a larger and larger share of the party's base. In 2012, every fourth-rate contender in the weakest Republican Presidential field in decades was given a serious hearing by the party's primary electorate--halfwits like Herman Cain and Rick Santorum and nutjobs like Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich all had their time in the sun--before primary voters finally realized they were unelectable and then held their nose and voted for establishment choice Mitt Romney only after all other options were exhausted. That cycle foreshadowed the Trump surge we're seeing four years later, only Trump has far more media savvy and staying power than those clowns ever had, which is why he is dominating the field to the degree that he has.
It would seem as though 2016 is the year that the inmates have officially taken over the asylum in the Republican Party. It seems hard for me to believe that a businessman like Trump agrees with his own overheated rhetoric on immigration and sticking it to China in the global economy, but he recognizes that that's where the center of gravity is now in the Republican Party. For decades, the party has relied upon the foot soldiers in trailer parks and small impoverished towns throughout the South and the heartland for enough votes to win on election day, at which point the party graybeards would proceed with their real agenda of transferring wealth from that same peasantry to the top of the income pyramid, only stirring the pot of the culture war again before elections to make sure their soldiers will deliver for them yet again. But with the combination of changing demographics in the country and the moneyed class discovering they can get the same special protections with Democrats without the cultural intolerance, the Republicans are finding that all they have left are angry white guys in the South and the heartland whose Republican identity is entirely defined by their cultural resentments. And on the issues that matter most to establishment types like Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, these voters really don't have a vested interest.
Enter Donald Trump, who is taking positions on bread and butter issues that likely have Ronald Reagan spinning in his grave, including a higher minimum wage, protectionist tariffs, high taxes on the rich, and single-payer health care. To your average Republican base voter earning $25,000 a year in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Cape Girardeau, Missouri, who favors Republicans based on issues like guns, abortion, immigration, and sticking it to "welfare cheats", none of Trump's left-populist economic posturing is particularly troubling. After all, most of these guys are from families a generation or two removed from being New Deal and JFK Democrats based on the same left-populist economic posturing coming out of Trump. They're just not "conservatives" in the Reagan tradition no matter how much historical rewriting has been done to lionize Reagan and his policy positions. Mike Huckabee had success in 2008 running on a softer version of this platform as did Rick Santorum in 2012, but these guys never had the salesmanship or media platform that Trump now has to consolidate this white working class base.
Like everybody else, I figured early on that Trump would fade rather quickly, but that certainly hasn't happened. I'm about 50-50 on whether it will at this point. I think even among the flag-waving populist crowd, they may take a step back as the primary vote approaches and ask themselves if they really believe this guy is capable of winning a general election. And chances are, his shtick will be wearing thin by then. Some believe Trump's not even really running and is merely on a high-stakes ego trip, and will pull out of the race before the voting starts assuring everybody he "could have and would have won". All those scenarios are plausible, and collectively perhaps more plausible than him winning the nomination. In a way, Trump's rise has been a very useful reminder to those in elite circles in both parties and the media of the magnitude of the cultural tribal lines that already exist in this country that are poised to get much worse as the population continues to diversify. The idea of him getting anywhere near the White House is terrifying at any number of levels, but if Trump's candidacy is nothing more than an "art project" exposing the fault lines in American political and cultural life today while simultaneously getting a well-deserved jab in at the perils of our corrupt campaign finance system, then Donald Trump will go down as the best thing that happened to American politics in 2015.
posted by Mark at 7:40 PM
2 Comments:
Great post! In general I'm a big supporter of third party candidates taking on the two party machine, but unfortunately I find Trump so objectionable as a person that it's hard for me to glean too many positives from his continued involvement. Your analysis of the Republican party demographics over time is really interesting and seems right on. I think of it as a coalition of the rich, the religious, and the uneducated -- and as you pointed out, the uneducated lower class doesn't know or doesn't care that the people they vote for actually represent much wealthier interests that make their lives worse.
On the Democratic side, I hear that Biden is thinking of running again. I like Biden, but at some point you have to consider old age as a detriment to electability: Bush 41, Dole, McCain all struggled against a younger, more vibrant candidate. I wish the Dems would nominate someone with more youthful, Obama-esque energy.
I'm not really a supporter of third-party candidates because more often than not they come from the center-left or far-left and allow Republicans to skate to victory. Growing up in Minnesota, the gadfly Independence Party has spent the last two decades allowing Republican after Republican to sneak into office with far less than 50% of the vote by poaching votes away from Democrats. That's how Tim Pawlenty got two terms in a state that would otherwise not be amenable to his policies. In Trump's case, the consensus opinion is that he'd only pick up votes from "the most conservative Republicans", but I suspect there are a lot of older, disaffected, conservative Democrats who would buy what Trump is peddling. It'd still probably be 2-1 in terms of Trump poaching GOP votes compared to Democratic votes but it wouldn't be unanimous. Ultimately, it seems incredibly unlikely that Trump will run third-party and self-finance a billion-dollar campaign.
I like Biden as well but he has some of the same self-discipline issues that Trump has and would be a ticking time bomb as a nominee. Obama's campaign trail discipline was one of his best assets as he wasn't prone to the sorts of gaffes that are so easily fatal. And as you say, Biden will be 75 by the time of inauguration, and that's too old for a job as demanding as the presidency. The Democrats' problem is that their coalition refuses to vote in midterm elections, meaning all the young talent in battleground state Governor and Senate races gets wiped out every four years, leaving nobody high profile enough to be a realistic Presidential candidate. Until the Democrats get their midterm problem fixed, they'll be seeing a lot of cycles where the only people running are over 75.
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