Trump-Vance Is Making Something Very Clear About Trumpism

 

Opinion

Guest Essay

Trump-Vance Is Making Something Very Clear About Trumpism

Sept. 5, 2024

By Noah Millman

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/05/opinion/trump-vance-populism.html

 

Mr. Millman has written extensively about politics, policy and culture and is the author of the newsletter Gideon’s Substack.

 

Since his selection as Donald Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance has performed poorly on most metrics by which we judge vice-presidential nominees. He has never been noted for his charisma, and his attacks and insults have rendered him exceptionally unpopular.

 

But he was not picked for traditional political reasons, like electoral strength in a swing state or being the ambassador to a needed voting bloc. It may be hard to recall after weeks of talk about “cat ladies,” but Mr. Vance, as much as virtually anyone else in Mr. Trump’s orbit, has tried to put ideological and policy meat on the MAGA bones. Mr. Vance was positioned to be MAGA’s overseer of the so-called deep state, the one who would make sure that, this time around, things would really change. Whether or not he became Mr. Trump’s heir, he would make sure that there would be a Trumpism beyond Mr. Trump.

 

But can there be a Trumpism beyond Mr. Trump? The idea — which appeals to many on the right who agree with the Trumpist turn on immigration, trade and foreign policy but also see Mr. Trump’s unfitness for office — may be an impossible dream in principle and not only because of Mr. Trump’s practical inescapability.

 

Mr. Trump’s persona has been the essence of his appeal — his policies matter more for the way they create and sustain that persona than they do for their substantive impact. It is intimately bound up with his anti-institutional posturing, his claim to be the one man who can defeat the system. That is a very difficult thing to institutionalize or even to hand off to a successor.

 

Indeed, some of the most institutionally destabilizing aspects of populism — its resort to demagoguery, its threats to liberal norms and its association with corruption — may be inseparable from its core appeal.

 

Populism’s essential criticism is that the apparently neutral forms of liberal government have been hijacked by a class of self-serving elites that are alien to the people from whom, under our Constitution, the government derives its legitimate authority. Right-wing populists tend to emphasize the cultural alienation of that elite class, while left-wing populists highlight its plutocratic remove. But they have a common remedy: a champion who, in the name of the people, will drive those elites from their positions of power and influence and restore a government of the people, by the people and for the people. For that very reason, populist movements from Brazil and Mexico to France and Italy to Turkey and India have been led by charismatic leaders whose authority derives from them personally and not from institutions — because only such a leader can plausibly posture as such a champion.

 

In government, a populist leader must continue to operate on the basis of that personal authority. If elites have entrenched themselves in apparently neutral forms of government, then by definition, those structures will be in the populist’s cross hairs. Civil service protections and the procedural niceties of administrative law, for example, are ways that the corrupt system can frustrate the will of the people in favor of the permanent interests of the elites. It’s only logical, therefore, that Mr. Trump has long wanted to reclassify tens of thousands of government workers as Schedule F employees, who can be fired at will (he tried to implement this policy during his final months in office through an executive order), and that Mr. Vance has said Mr. Trump should defy the Supreme Court if it stands in the way of his policy goals.

 

Removing these guardrails on presidential will opens up obvious opportunities for cronyism and corruption; that’s why civil service protections and the procedures of administrative law were adopted in the first place, as good-government reforms. From a populist perspective, though, this may be a feature rather than a bug. Yet corruption is a useful lever for maintaining personal control over the operation of a sprawling bureaucracy, for example. That’s one reason that corruption is endemic in authoritarian regimes.

 

Mr. Trump’s enthusiasm for tariffs, which presidents have a great deal of latitude to both impose and issue waivers from, and for a more discretionary, personalized approach to antitrust have a similar populist rationale. And those are similarly destructive of any kind of neutral institutionalism. His proposals would give the executive branch a lot of power over the economic fates of specific businesses and sectors. That’s a recipe for personal corruption and for rampant economic distortion — but it’s also a means to enforce administration policy through the private sector without going through the grinding work of drafting and passing legislation.

 

Once those good-government guardrails are down, of course, the opposition will be equally empowered, should it win an election. This creates the condition for a permanent elevation of the electoral stakes. That, in turn, increases the incentive to corrupt the electoral process — as well as the need for a leader who is a successful demagogue capable of speaking as the voice of the people, whatever the electoral outcome.

 

All of this operates against the possibility of true institutionalization or even of succession.

 

This is not just a problem for right-wing versions of populism. In Mexico, the charismatic left-wing populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been succeeded by his more technocratic deputy, Claudia Sheinbaum. Without his personal authority, she will have a harder time performing the balancing act that he did of keeping elite interests at bay and satisfying them quietly behind the scenes. She will also have a harder time getting away with flouting liberal norms, as he did, or surviving their restoration. Nor can she forget that other successors of populist leaders — like Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, who succeeded Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — have been felled by corruption scandals that originated in their predecessors’ administrations.

 

Populism, ultimately, is not a politics capable of governing well or even one focused on trying. It not only is prone to demagoguery and corruption but also depends on them to operate. This is why, where populism has achieved a kind of institutionalization — for example, in Argentina under Juan Perón — the long-term results have proved disastrous.

 

Populism is better understood as a kind of immune reaction within a democracy, a warning to more institutionally oriented parties that they have lost an essential connection with their electorate — culturally, economically or both.

 

The way to institutionalize the populist criticism, then, is not to try to institutionalize populism as Mr. Vance seems to have been selected to do. Rather, the more institutional parties must co-opt populism’s most potent policy prescriptions and its most popular cultural positions in order to restore trust in the system itself and stand against the kind of routine elite self-dealing that populism feeds on.

 

To some degree, the Biden administration has done this on a variety of fronts. Mr. Trump relentlessly attacked free trade with China for hollowing out American industry, but through the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and other initiatives, President Biden has achieved far more in the way of industrial policy than his predecessor ever attempted. Mr. Biden also belatedly tackled the asylum crisis through tough executive orders and a bipartisan border bill that Mr. Trump opposed for political reasons.

 

These initiatives, though, have not yet won Mr. Biden — or Kamala Harris — that much credit because they are still seen by many as representatives of a system that has failed, a system that only populists can credibly promise to overthrow. Mr. Trump’s primary victory suggests that the same systemic distrust is driving Republicans. For either party to quell the populist fever, they need more than policy victories, and less than permanent revolution. They need to rebuild public trust that the system they represent can and will serve the people.

 

That’s easier said than done. But the alternative isn’t an institutionalized populist system of government. It’s a state of continual crisis and democratic decay, regardless of which party is in power.

 

Noah Millman (@BloggerGideon) writes the newsletter Gideon’s Substack and is the film and theater critic at Modern Age.