An
intellectual history of Trumpism
Trump’s
ideology has deep roots in US history. But this is the first time
it’s made it to the White House.
By DAVID
GREENBERG 12/12/16, 8:51 AM CET Updated 12/12/16, 8:55 AM CET
For most of the last
18 months, Donald Trump has been portrayed as a clown, a showman, an
opportunist, a faux conservative, a political naïf, and an egomaniac
bent on nothing but power and glory—but rarely as a man with an
intelligible ideology. Yet if Trump’s ideas can’t quite be said
to cohere into a unified worldview, and if his legion flip-flops deny
him any claim to philosophical consistency, many of his signature
promises and policies do add up to a set of ideas—populist,
nationalist, authoritarian—with deep roots in American history.
After a year and a half of dwelling on Trump the personality, it may
be time to turn our attention to Trumpism.
To the extent that
analysts have discerned any new philosophy behind Trump’s rise,
they have focused on the vicious, bigoted internet stylings of the
so-called alt-right. But the unabashed white nationalism,
anti-Semitism and misogyny of that hitherto underground movement
constitute only one strain of Trumpism. The larger ideology that the
president-elect represents is a post-Iraq War, post-crash,
post-Barack Obama update of what used to be called paleoconservatism:
On race and immigration, where the alt-right affinities are most
pronounced, its populist ideas are carrying an already right-wing
party even further right. On a few economic issues, such as
infrastructure and entitlement spending, they could direct the party
toward the political center. On trade and foreign policy, they
threaten to demolish the internationalism that has governed the GOP
since Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency. In each of these ways,
Trumpism represents a significant break with the conservatism that
has dominated the Republican Party for decades.
Where did these
currents come from? Today’s populist right has its clearest origins
in an early 20th-century backlash against a society that was becoming
centralized, urban, cosmopolitan and interconnected with the world at
large—tendencies that are still upsetting white rural America
today. Just as Trump was boosted over the wall of 270 electoral votes
by white Midwesterners, some of whom had previously voted Democratic,
so it was formerly progressive elements from the country’s
midsection that fueled the rise of a right-wing populism after World
War I. That movement was never strong enough to win the White House,
and it was largely discredited and marginalized by World War II. But
in today’s post-Great Recession globalized world many of its ideas
are suddenly reemerging with a vengeance. And now, for the first time
in history we have a president, commanding all the powers of the
Executive Branch, who espouses its ideas. That could mean a rollback
of the core tenets of post-New Deal, post-World War II America,
including the commitment to civil rights, civil liberties, and
pluralism at home and to liberal internationalism abroad.
* * *
The conservative
populism from which Trumpism derives began as a mutation of the
progressivism of the early 20th century. Progressivism is the name we
give to the bipartisan reform movement in the century’s first
decades that called for an activist president and a strong federal
government to address urgent new social and economic problems brought
on by the industrial revolution. Led first by Republican Theodore
Roosevelt and then by Democrat Woodrow Wilson, progressivism sought
to tame corporate power, protect workers, assimilate immigrants,
provide new social services, expand democracy and, on the global
stage, bring order to a fractious world. Both the idea of a strong
federal government and the specific goals that progressives cherished
would also undergird Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and, in time,
postwar liberalism more generally.
But as the nation
journeyed from progressivism to New Deal liberalism, not everyone
came along for the ride. After World War I, many Midwestern and
western progressives of a populist bent swung hard to the right,
retaining in some cases their economic egalitarianism but also taking
up reactionary stands on cultural and foreign-policy issues.
“Somewhere along the way,” as Richard Hofstadter wrote in his
classic work The Age of Reform, “a large part of the
Progressive-Populist tradition has turned sour, become illiberal and
ill-tempered.”
The reasons for this
swing are complicated, but they can be summarized as a form of
backlash. The 1920s, though remembered as a raucous time of cultural
innovation and modernization, also witnesses profound social change.
Fueled by decades of immigration, America’s urban population
finally overtook its rural population in size. “The New Woman”
and the “New Negro” demanded equality in gender and race. But
conservative forces, especially in the rural Heartland, regarded the
changing complexion of America with suspicion and considered the
looser morality of the cosmopolitanism cities a threat to their
old-fashioned Protestantism. Reactionary movements arose. The Ku Klux
Klan went mainstream and marched through Washington D.C.
Fundamentalist Christians banned the teaching of Darwin. Prohibition
became the law of the land. Midwestern and western progressives,
previously allied with liberal goals, could now often be found
fighting the liberal tides—championing, for example, the 1924
Immigration Act that all but sealed America’s borders. Economic
conservatives who favored the Republican Party’s pro-business
policies joined with these cultural conservatives to make the GOP the
dominant party of the 1920s, through the elections of Warren Harding,
Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover.
In foreign policy,
too, nationalistic populism gripped many onetime progressives, both
Democratic and Republican. After World War I, Western and Midwestern
progressive senators such as William Borah, Hiram Johnson, George
Norris and Robert La Follette, who were less attuned than Eastern
progressives to the importance of remaining involved in Europe’s
affairs, had killed Wilson’s plan for the United States to lead a
League of Nations, rooting their opposition in the fear of a loss of
American sovereignty. Some progressive intellectuals, such as the
historian Charles Beard and the sociologist Harry Elmer Barnes,
promoted conspiracy theories blaming America’s involvement in the
war on bankers or the arms industry. (Barnes eventually became one of
the earliest and most influential Holocaust deniers.) In 1934 Senator
Gerald Nye chaired a committee that, by investigating these dubious
claims, fanned popular fears.
Former progressives
also fought against easing the neutrality laws that kept Franklin
Roosevelt from doing more to fight fascism. Historians today tend to
avoid the word isolationist, because, as its critics note, many of
those who opposed the liberal internationalism of Wilson and FDR
didn’t want to extract the U.S. altogether from global affairs.
Still, in the absence of a pithy alternative phrase, popular habit
still relies on this useful shorthand term—and there were, after
all, antiwar leaders who believed America could and should steer
clear of Europe’s strife, and some of them either supported Hitler
or espoused anti-Semitism. (Since the original Populists of the late
19th century, those movements have been suspicious of banks,
internationalism, and concentrated power and have frequently
scapegoated Jews as well. Donald Trump’s anti-Semitic campaign ad
featuring George Soros and Janet Yellen has roots in 19th century
populist iconography.)
This populist right
was a powerful force in the 1920s and 1930s. But the success of the
New Deal and the Allied victory in World War II together dealt the
movement a near-death blow. The open anti-Semitism that had
flourished in the Depression, stoked by demagogues like the radio
priest Charles Coughlin (an exemplar of this philosophy), was
thoroughly discredited, giving way to a common view of the United
States as home to “Protestant, Catholic, Jew.” Civil rights for
black Americans moved to the center of the liberal agenda. The
election in 1952 of America’s first Republican president in a
quarter-century, Dwight Eisenhower, confirmed the rout of the
populist right, as Ike vowed to beat back isolationism in his own
party and espoused a “modern Republicanism” that acquiesced in
the permanence of the New Deal order, including liberal welfare-state
programs like Social Security.
* * *
Amid this new
liberal order, activists and intellectuals on the right reconstituted
themselves to try to reclaim the GOP from moderates like Eisenhower.
William F. Buckley’s National Review emerged in the 1950s as the
intellectual organ for what would soon be called the New Right. (The
older populist-nationalist conservatism now came to be called the Old
Right, or, later, “paleoconservatism.”) The New Right restored
the 1920s alliance between religious traditionalists, who bemoaned
the erosion of old values by the acids of modernity, and
free-marketeers, who attacked high taxes, government spending and
regulation as the weapons of a bureaucratic leviathan. Conveniently
cementing the alliance now, too, was a militant Cold War
anti-Communism—Communism was, after all, was both anti-market and
anti-God. (Buckley himself, in the words of George Nash, the foremost
intellectual historian of postwar conservatism, “was at once a
traditional Christian, a defender of free-market economics, and a
fervent anti-Communist.”) Anti-Communism also won over some old
isolationists, who deemed the Soviet Union a grave enough threat to
suspend their qualms about getting involved in foreign conflicts or
agreements.
Within the new
conservative coalition, paleoconservative voices remained. But
Buckley and other political and opinion leaders policed the
boundaries of their budding movement. While we think of National
Review as a staunchly right-wing magazine because it assailed
Eisenhower and the era’s moderate Republican leadership, it also
pointedly contrasted itself with far-right rival publications such as
The American Mercury and The Freeman. Buckley famously excommunicated
extremists like the leaders of the John Birch Society, a radical
populist-national group of the late 1950s and early ’60s that
imagined Communist conspiracies everywhere (they thought Eisenhower
was one) and warned against world government. He and other
conservative intellectuals also warred with libertarians like Ayn
Rand, whose atheistic “objectivism” had no place in his campaign
against “secular humanism.” After the civil rights revolution,
finally, conservatives began to reject explicit racism, too,
continuing to oppose most civil-rights legislation yet accepting (or
paying lip service to) the underlying liberal premise of civil rights
for all.
The new conservative
coalition came to power with Richard Nixon’s election to the White
House in 1968. Though true-blue conservatives always eyed the
opportunistic Nixon warily, his divisive cultural populism was clear
a far cry from Ike’s modern Republicanism. On drugs, crime,
religion, abortion, sex, child-rearing, gay rights, patriotism and
dozens of other cultural issues, Nixon and the GOP politicians who
followed his lead assailed the liberal “cultural elite”—Hollywood,
academia, the media, the courts—for corroding traditional American
values. With Ronald Reagan in 1980, they found a populist key for
expressing their anti-government ideology, arguing that Washington
was incapable of responsibly spending taxpayers’ money.
But if conservative
populism thrived in the late-20th century debates over social and
cultural issues, in other realms it was a dead letter. On foreign
policy, Republicans might quarrel over how to deal with the Soviet
Union (Nixon’s pursuit of détente vs. Reagan’s renewed
militarism), but few prominent leaders or intellectuals counseled
neo-isolationism. Meanwhile, the conservative movement’s
free-market philosophy consigned protectionist views to the sidelines
in debates about trade and rendered criticisms of finance and
business almost unheard of within their ranks.
Still,
paleoconservative voices occasionally arose. Pat Buchanan—the most
prominent apostle of Old Right ideas in the 1980s and 1990s—held
influential positions in the Nixon and Reagan administrations,
bestrode the TV gab shows as a ubiquitous pundit, and ran for
president in 1992 on an “America First” slogan that echoed the
1940s isolationists (and previewed Trump). Phyllis Schlafly, best
known for her role in defeating the Equal Rights Amendment in the
1970s, also opposed the Vietnam War, Bill Clinton’s humanitarian
intervention in Bosnia, and most international agreements since.
Other fringier paleocon writers such as Joseph Sobran, a Holocaust
denier, and Taki Theodoracopulos, whose anti-Semitic and racist views
were presented under the thinnest of veneers, were largely ignored by
policymakers and by the mainstream media but commanded significant
followings on the hard right.
In retrospect, the
first stirrings of a paleoconservatism comeback can be seen in the
1990s. With the fall of the Soviet Union after 1989, anti-Communism
receded as a unifying principle, and paleoconservatives revived the
case for isolationism. When Democrats held the White House, they
rallied Republicans in Congress to oppose interventions in Bosnia,
Kosovo and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the exploding number of undocumented
immigrants made border control a leading paleoconservative cause, as
it had been in the 1920s, and the international trade pacts backed by
both parties fueled the a new zeal for protectionism.
But
paleoconservatism struggled to gain adherents, owing to the
prosperity of the 1990s and the nation’s growing toleration on
social issues; paleoconservatism had always been associated with the
neo-Confederate, white supremacist and ideologically anti-Semitic
causes that respectable conservative leaders took pains to shun. In
the 1990s and 2000s, the appearance of this sort of rank bigotry
provoked controversy when it surfaced in magazines like National
Review, and Buckley and his successors felt compelled to banish the
worst offenders. (The more moderate Weekly Standard—which surpassed
National Review, at least for a while, as the preeminent conservative
magazine—had never attracted many paleocons to its pages.) In 1993,
Buckley fired Joseph Sobran for anti-Semitic writings. In 2001, the
magazine’s young new editor, Rich Lowry, fired Ann Coulter, for
writing, after 9/11, “We should invade their countries, kill their
leaders and convert them to Christianity.” In 2012, Lowry fired
another paleocon, John Derbyshire, for racist writings that appeared
in Theodoracopulos’s webzine, Taki’s Magazine—which, not
coincidentally, is now one of the favorite outlets of the alt-right.
Even Pat Buchanan, for decades one of the most popular conservative
pundits on TV and in print, fell into disrepute after publishing a
book in 2008 arguing that going to war against Hitler was a mistake.
* * *
Just when the Old
Right seemed on the verge of extinction, the world changed. First,
George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq undermined
conservative support for the hawkish foreign policy that had been
Republican orthodoxy since Reagan. Second, the 2008 crash and the
sluggish recovery that followed undercut the enthusiasm—among
voters, if not elected officials—for the free trade pacts that
market conservatives promoted. (The refusal of the increasingly
paleocon House Republican caucus to pass Bush’s Troubled Asset
Relief Program in late 2008 was, in retrospect, a harbinger of the
fissures that erupted in 2016.) Third, the prospect that whites would
soon constitute a minority in an increasingly multiracial, polyglot
society inspired a new racial consciousness among whites—as did the
election of America’s first black president, who was swiftly
branded as un-American by the populist right.
For much of the
Republican base these multiple shocks discredited the conservative
political and intellectual leadership that had failed to deliver on
promises to contain immigration, produce prosperity and make America
safer. Increasingly unwelcome even in a thoroughly right-wing
magazine like National Review (which devoted a whole issue during the
primaries to denouncing Trump as a sham conservative), paleocons
found new vehicles for their nationalist-populist ideas in The
American Conservative, founded by Buchanan and Theodoracopulos in
2002, Breitbart, which evolved from a right-wing curation site into
an ideological organ, and VADRE, a webzine founded by the
anti-immigration advocate (and immigrant) Peter Brimelow. The
resulting cluster of voices, which includes but isn’t limited to
the “Alt-Right,” represented a new generation of paleocon thought
that stressed its differences with the establishment right on trade,
foreign policy, immigration and race.
Until Donald Trump’s
presidential campaign, these profound divisions on the right drew
little analysis. Even in the last year’s coverage, Trump’s
insurgency was mostly portrayed as the challenge of an outsider to
the establishment—an accurate but incomplete picture. The hidden
history of Trumpism suggests that the president-elect may be not
simply an opportunistic showman but the leader of an at least
semi-coherent ideology—a new iteration of the populist and
nationalist paleoconservatism that has long lurked in the shadows of
American politics. Now, for the first time since the isolationist
1930s, this ideology commands real influence, and for the first time
in our history, it will enjoy favor from a sitting president. The
prospects could not be more ominous.
David Greenberg, a
professor of history and media studies at Rutgers, is a contributing
editor at Politico Magazine. His most recent book is Republic of
Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency.
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