Which Tribe Are You On?

Stokely Carmichael, Donald Trump's ideological father

Just as Bernie Sanders is not a socialist, Donald Trump is not a fascist, nor are his followers.  They resemble fascists – with their worship of the strong leader, their dreams of unmediated state power, their casual attitude toward violence, their embrace of barbarism, and their hostility toward minorities – but they also differ in very important ways.  They don’t wish to end democracy, for instance, or embark upon wars of conquest.   Indeed, Trump defends majority rule and denounces foreign interventionism (though inconsistently).

But Trump does share one notable thing with historical fascists: he has borrowed the tactics and style of his opponents on the left.  In fact, right-wing movements traditionally take on the stylistic attributes of their contemporaries on the left.  Hitler famously adopted the organizational and rhetorical style of the Communists of his day.  The Birchers of the 1950’s self-consciously organized themselves into cells modeled on those of the Communists.  The Goldwater-Reagan right of the 1960’s created and nurtured a slew of conservative media and think-tanks to counter the then-dominance of liberal institutions.  The Moral Majority of the 1970’s portrayed itself as a Christian version of the Civil Rights Movement, claiming to be victims of anti-religious prejudice.  In each case, the right-wing movement in question became the mirror of its left-wing counterpart – only with inegalitarian goals.  They were all wolves in left-wing clothing.

And as our present left consists of identity politics – promoting the interests of traditionally oppressed groups: blacks, Hispanics, women, gays, etc. – so the new right that Trump is crafting consists of white identity politics; in its distilled version: politics for straight, white, Christian men.  White identity politics has been the lurking in the shadows on the right for decades, and though we’ve occasionally glimpsed its sinister face, conservatism’s Reaganite masters have generally kept it hidden (while still happily profiting from its electoral support, of course).  But Trump has dragged it into the bright sunshine and made it the shining, shouting, strutting star.  Trump is not a present-day Hitler, he’s a white Al Sharpton.

Consider Trump’s attacks on Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge who has ruled unfavorably for Trump in the ongoing Trump University fraud case.  Trump complained that Curiel can’t be fair to him because he’s “Mexican” (on an earlier occasion he called him “Spanish”) and therefore, presumably, must be angry at Trump’s anti-Mexican, anti-immigrant positions.  Curiel was actually born in Indiana of Mexican immigrant parents, and Trump seemed to imply he’s not American because he’s not white, and that is inarguably racist.  But was it racist to question the judge’s objectivity?

Many seem to think so, even many conservatives.  Republican Speaker of the House and 2012 nominee for Vice President Paul Ryan explained:

Claiming a person can’t do their job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment.

But that’s not quite fair.  Trump wasn’t complaining that Curiel was incompetent because of his national descent; he wasn’t saying that his race made him an inherently inferior judge, as a classic racist might; he was complaining that he was irredeemably biased against Trump.  At best, Trump was saying that Curiel couldn’t possibly be objective in the face of Trump’s well known anti-Mexican animus.  That’s not necessarily racist, since anyone’s bias might affect his or her objectivity.  At worst, Trump was saying the judge couldn’t possibly be fair to a white man.  Even that isn’t necessarily racist, since racial animosity, regrettably, can be found everywhere.  Though it’s reasonable to wonder if he meant that all non-whites are irredeemably hostile to whites, since he based his conclusion on little more than Curiel’s ethnic background.  And that would definitely be racist.

But the point is not whether Trump was being racist, the point is he was being self-consciously white, he was engaging in white identity politics.  And he was doing it just like leftists do it.  That is, left-wing identity politics isn’t simply about advancing the interests of oppressed racial and sexual groups, goals that are themselves tremendously necessary and important; it’s also about group consciousness, group pride and, crucially, group loyalty.  One of its axioms is that only members of an oppressed group can really understanding that oppression, and only they can apply that understanding as needed.  So only blacks can really understand the black experience and only blacks can do it justice; only gays know what it means to be gay and only gays can represent that, and so on.  This is the reasoning that says, for instance, that minorities need to be well represented in the judiciary, because white judges can’t be counted on to treat minorities fairly.  This seems plausible, as far as it goes.  But some on the left drive it off the rails when they claim, for example, that only a black person can fairly judge another one.  Trump has merely turned that logic back on itself, saying that only whites can be fair to whites.

He seems to be adopting the entirety of identity thinking, with all of its concomitant dogmatism and intolerance.  We begin to see the squalid outlines of this newest right, and it’s not a new fascism, it’s White Lives Matter.  Its first premise is that whites are themselves victimized by other groups, notably immigrants and Muslims, also by liberals and blacks.  And, crucially, they are victims of political correctness.  That is, the commonly accepted rules of political discourse prevent whites from asserting their values and interests.  This is a direct borrowing of the post-modern belief common on the left that received notions of propriety, reason, and truth are merely tools the oppressors use to squash dissent.  Following the rules is for suckers.  So almost anything – name-calling, attacking motives, suppressing opposition, even violence – is justified in the interests of one’s tribe.  And this is the essence of the new white nationalism: Whites have interests as whites, interests that can only be properly addressed when informed by consciousness of that whiteness.  The least self-aware person in America is leading whites into a deeper self-consciousness of themselves as white!

But this is how Trump and his followers understand, if only viscerally, their current situation, and it explains why they love him so.  To them, politics is about who is screwing who, and they’re determined to be the ones doing the screwing.  In this telling, there are various innately antagonistic tribes in America, defined primarily by skin color, the non-white tribes have been ganging up on the whites, and the whites are finally fighting back.  Politicians and activists can argue about capital-gains tax rates and Obamacare subsidies and abortion, but those issues don’t really matter.  They’re only symbols for signaling where one’s loyalties lie, and that’s all that really matters: loyalty to one’s tribe.  There are white conservatives on one side and blacks, gays, Muslims, and all the other racially, religiously and sexually dubious tribes on the other, and all that matters is who wins.  And white liberals, obviously, are traitors to their own tribe, and are therefore worthy of the worst scorn.  Tribe is all.

Which America?  And great how?

And America belongs to the white tribe.  Or it once did.  There was a time, not so long ago, when being a true American meant being a white, straight, Christian; others were casually consigned to the periphery.  That’s why Trump thinks Curiel can’t really be American.  Some white nationalists wish to restore male whiteness to its proper place at the center of American identity and social deference.  Other Trumpians merely feel that working whites in particular have been unfairly denigrated as backward, ignorant, malicious.  But all Trumpians share the conviction that whites are being treated unfairly by society at large.  When they hear Trump say “Make America Great Again”, they know he means them, only them.

It is, of course, foolish to think that whites per se are an oppressed group.  They still hold the vast majority of the wealth and power in this country.  And there are still oceans of anti-black, anti-gay, anti-Hispanic, etc. feeling out there; Trump’s rise demonstrates that all too well (there is ample rigorous empirical evidence, as well).  And it’s reasonable to think, for example, that a white judge might be unfair to a Hispanic claimant in a way that a Hispanic judge would be less likely to.  Indeed, there’s every reason to believe that a thoroughly white judiciary would be significantly less sympathetic and fair to minorities.

But the reverse is true as well.  There are probably fewer racially hostile minority figures in authority – judges, politicians, policemen, lawyers, etc. – than racially hostile white ones, because white supremacy has been and still is such a potent and insidious force in our national life, even if it is now largely unconscious.  But it’s highly unlikely that there are no non-white authorities who would be tougher on a white person.  And there is truth to the charge that working-class whites have been systematically and unfairly disdained by political and cultural elites.   (And of course working whites are being genuinely exploited, not by blacks or Muslims or gays, but by investors and globalist politicians.  That is, they’re being oppressed not as whites but as workers.)  And consider that programs like affirmative action are explicitly designed to lessen the number of white men in certain occupations.  Whatever good such programs may do (and they don’t do much good, even for minorities) is done by artificially maintaining higher barriers for whites.  This is a minor injustice compared to the universe of injustice that America has dispensed to racial and sexual minorities, but it is nonetheless an actual injustice committed against the individual whites in question.

But need justice be a zero-sum affair?  Is it necessary to lower whites in order to raise others? Are the Trumpians right that America is only a cage match of hostile tribes?  Either the logic of identity applies to all the tribes or it applies to none.  As the Civil Rights Movement was winding down, white liberals and black activists decided that blacks would be better off claiming blackness as their primary identity and loyalty – but what good has that done them?  One increasingly obvious result is that it has provided white nationalists with the perfect rationale for fighting for the interests of whites as whites.  It’s true that it has helped bring a small number of minorities into the higher echelons of American power.  But how does that help minorities stuck in the ghetto?  In practice, left-wing identity politics has been an abject failure.  It’s only changed the color of the CEO’s.  If whites embrace it too, it will do as little for them.

Our real enemy is racial consciousness itself.  America wallowed in racial identity politics for hundreds of years before the Civil Rights Movement, but the answer to white consciousness is not black consciousness, nor the reverse.  Race is a fiction, a social construct that has no objective existence, though plenty of racists have believed otherwise.  The early Civil Rights Movement understood this and worked mightily to overcome race consciousness and replace it with color-blindness.  But that short period was the only time in our long history when fully color-blind assimilation was seen as the ideal, when the very idea of race was attacked as meaningless and destructive.  The full weight of our sordid history has made race a most powerful and implacable fiction, one powerful enough to destroy us yet.  If whites follow Trump – and their own worst instincts – they’ll make real that other unimaginably destructive fiction: that we are nothing more than that war of all tribes against all.  And that can only unleash mistrust and hatred so horrible that we can barely imagine it now.

There are social constructs that are objectively real, and unlike race, national culture is one of them.  We all speak the same vernacular; we all share the same folkways and traditions; we’re all products of the same history.  We’re all Americans.  When generations of white Americans thought minorities were not real Americans, they were wrong.  And when black nationalists and white leftists think they themselves are not real Americans, they’re wrong too.  Thomas Jefferson and Frederick Douglass and Robert E. Lee and Susan B. Anthony and Cesar Chavez and Malcolm X and Judith Butler and Donald Trump and Gonzalo Curiel are all irredeemably American, even if they may not all recognize each other – or even themselves! – as such.  But this is the consciousness that must be raised, that must be re-invigorated, that must be embraced if we are to avoid the hideous nightmare into which both Trump and his obliging leftist opponents are so eager to lead us.  Only if we resist those false identities and accept our common, actual identity can we have any hope of making life better for all of us.  Let’s make America conscious again.

The Third Party

These people are not conservatives

Conservatism is dead.  If you don’t believe me, listen to the man who killed it.  Here’s Donald Trump at a recent Republican event in California:

I’m a conservative, but at this point, who cares?

Let that sink in.  Since at least the time of Ronald Reagan the GOP has been the furiously self-proclaimed party of conservatism.  And in the last few years Tea Party grassroots conservatives have crusaded against their own Republican establishment for being insufficiently fanatical in ideology and tactics.  But now, when given the opportunity, those same grassroots true believers have chosen for their nominee a man who not only diverges markedly from conservative doctrine, but who explicitly dismisses conservatism as irrelevant!  What gives?

Trump’s triumph has rudely revealed that there are really two Republican Parties, both of whom think of themselves as the true conservatives and the other as traitors to the cause.  What we think of as traditional conservatism, the conservatism that has dominated the party for decades, the conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan, is a program of free markets and free trade, scaling back the welfare-regulatory state, and maintaining American supremacy in the world.  Think of Reagan crushing the air-traffic controllers union or George W. Bush attempting to privatize Social Security.  The conservatives have a libertarian view of the federal government and a Social Darwinist view of capitalist success and failure.  Their core constituency is the investor class, and for decades these Reaganite conservatives have run the Republican Party, and they’ve run it for the benefit of that class, with the casual assurance that what benefits investors will eventually benefit everyone else.

But it turns out that much – perhaps even a majority – of the Republican constituency means something very different when they call themselves conservative.  For them conservatism means the blind conviction that America is the best country on Earth.  They see everyday, straight, white, Christian, American men, with their simple moral toughness, as the backbone of society and the best people in the world.  Some of those men regret the demise of the traditional American social structure, in which racial, sexual and religious minorities deferred to them, while some simply worry – not entirely without reason – that they’re now disdained and despised by American elites; and in practice the two perceptions readily blur together.  But either way, for decades the basic premise of this conservatism is that the social status of those men is unfairly under assault, and they’ve looked to the Reagan conservatives to protect and assert it. 

These white working class conservatives weren’t really interested in lowering capital gains tax rates or cutting Obamacare subsidies, though they made a good show of caring about such things.  Indeed, these conservatives actively support the welfare state; they’re all too anxious to receive the Social Security and Medicare benefits their Reaganite masters yearn to curtail.  And they particularly object to the free trade and lax immigration policies of the Reaganites, policies that send good jobs overseas and drive down wages at home.  But, for decades the conservative intelligentsia, in the think tanks and the magazines, on talk radio and Fox News, underwritten by big money, has worked to indoctrinate the grassroots in the intricacies of conservative dogma, while enforcing ideological rigidity among conservative politicians.  The populists may have been dissatisfied, but they couldn’t very well vote for liberals.

But Reaganite conservatism hasn’t kept its promises. Trump hasn’t really killed it, it was killed by its own abysmal failures, particularly the War in Iraq and the Great Recession.  It couldn’t survive its comprehensive inability to protect the interests and values of white working people.  It’s actually been dead since 2008, but tricked out to appear healthy with hefty doses of donor money, media bombast, and undying populist aversion to cultural liberalism and its racially and sexually suspicious beneficiaries.  What Trump has done is kill the illusion of conservatism.  As a man ignorant enough to overlook ideological considerations, rich enough to be indifferent to movement money, and self-assured enough (to put it mildly!) to dismiss received notions of propriety, he was perfectly constituted to override the conservative establishment and express and exploit the blunt instincts of those unhappy white populists, instincts he precisely shares.

And now that he’s exploited those instincts all the way to the nomination, they constitute the new conservatism.  The old conservatism, however, came to own the party through a very different strategy.  The Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan conservatives had to fight for years against the moderate Eisenhower establishment Republicans who controlled the party in the post-war years, and who had made their peace with the New Deal and Cold War stalemate.  Convinced that both the welfare state and international communism could be aggressively rolled back, they worked the grassroots, the media, the think tanks, the elections, etc., as they slowly took over the party from the inside.  Their first big triumph was the nomination of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964.  In 1968, segregationist and Democratic Alabama Governor George Wallace pulled white southern conservative populists out of the New Deal coalition when he ran for president as an independent, and they never went back (not at the presidential level).  Richard Nixon – who brilliantly straddled

Governor Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door to 
prevent the enrollment of black students 
at the University of Alabama, 1963

the moderate vs. conservative divide – added them and their white northern collaborators to his own coalition four years later.  At the same time, northern moderate and liberal Republicans – i.e. Eisenhower, Rockefeller and Lindsay Republicans – left the GOP for the Democratic Party.  And though Goldwater badly lost his general election, Nixon’s and Reagan’s cynical and skillful campaigning brought the white populists securely into the conservative movement and the Republican Party, leaving the Reaganites in charge.

But conservatism has now split in two, or rather it has reverted to its two naturally antagonistic groupings, with each side considering itself the heirs of Reagan and seeing the other as the successors of the hated Eisenhower-ish moderate establishment.  Both groups are technically conservative, given their belief in innate natural hierarchy.  And that means that neither group is really libertarian, or classically liberal, though some conservatives perceive themselves to be; in practice they don’t defend individual freedom against social coercion.  And neither group is Burkean, or classically conservative in the aristocratic European sense, in that neither affirms pragmatism or conciliation; both groups are intensely idealistic, even utopian, consisting of righteous, low-church crusaders working to create the City of God on Earth.  And both groups hold to a Social Darwinism that sees society’s winners as virtuously deserving their winnings.  It’s just that Trumpians believe that the natural aristocracy consists of those aforementioned straight, white, Christian, American men, while the Reaganites believe it’s successful capitalists.  Trumpism is about identity, Reaganism is about money.  And the Trumpians are less principled, more expedient, more willing to play dirty to advance the interests of their tribe.  Such is the logic of tribalism.

We can agree – with Donald Trump! – to call the Reaganites the True Conservatives, since they’ve claimed the title for so long, and they probably are closer to the classically conservative Burkean ideal, with their worship of plutocrats as aristocrats born to rule at home and abroad.  A true Burkean would condemn Reaganite worship of free markets as destabilizing and intemperate.  But a true Burkean would even more forcefully reject Trumpian recklessness and thoughtlessness; as he would reject Trumpian majoritarianism, not because it fails to respect liberal individual rights, but because it fails to defer to its rightful aristocratic masters.  So even with their right-wing inegalitarianism, it’s fair to call the Trumpians Populists, since they share much substance with left-wing populists, in particular instinctual embrace of the popular and the everyday, and animosity toward the rich and powerful.

Given these ideological incompatibilities and conservatism’s abject policy failures, it was quite likely that something like Trumpism would come along and topple Reaganism from its precarious perch at the top of the GOP.  But the Trumpian revolt, unlike the Reaganite overthrow of the moderates, has occurred in one fell swoop.  That’s because they didn’t have to conquer someone else’s party; they didn’t have to convert anyone, or bring in like-minded outsiders, or drive out ideological opponents.  The party has been theirs for the asking all along.

Of course, the Reaganites fought against the Trumpian takeover tooth and nail, caucus vote by delegate count, negative ad by convention rule.  They’ve been on top so long, and they’ve spent so much time and energy convincing themselves they’re America’s ordained saviors, they can’t let go of the political party meant to be the instrument of that salvation.  And there are still Reaganites among the grassroots; that’s who voted for Ted Cruz.  Some have accepted their new subordinate status within the exotic new right-wing order and are supporting Trump as an evil lesser than Hillary.  But some diehards are promising to sit out the general election, some are working to deny Trump the presidency, some are considering a true conservative third-party campaign, and some are so unhappy with Trump they say they’ll even vote for Hillary!  Of course, much of the Reaganite opposition to Trump has less to do with the Trumpian program and more to do with the man himself, with his flagrant irresponsibility and doltish ignorance.  Though it’s hard not to wonder if some of those never-Trump folks would so adamantly oppose an irresponsible and doltish nominee who toed the Reaganite line.  After all, most of them defended Sarah Palin.

But Trumpism – with or without the man himself – is here to stay.  Reaganism is dead.  Because of its complex of think tanks and media outlets, the Reaganites will continue to make noise and influence the discourse for some time to come.  But for a long time to come, no GOP nominee will be openly advocate free trade or looser immigration policies.  And many supposedly conservative politicians and media personalities have already happily pledged support for Trump, demonstrating that they were really populists – or shameless opportunists – all along.  Even some of the right-wing media and think-tank crowd have turned out to be populists.  Some politicians, like Paul Ryan, are trying to finesse the differences.  Rush Limbaugh has shown himself just as brilliant at straddling the present-day Reaganite-Trumpian divide as Nixon was at straddling the Eisenhower-Reaganite divide of his day.  When there are full-fledged, self-consciously right-wing populist think tanks to confront the Reaganite ones, the dying roar of Reaganism will wind down to a whisper.

In the grand history of the United States, it may turn out that the ultimate role of modern conservatism will be to give birth to a powerful and resentful white populist nationalism.  Nixon and Reagan thought they had stolen Wallace’s power, but maybe all they really did was unleash it.  It’s likely that Trump is the Goldwater of right-wing populism, not it’s Reagan, and he’ll come in for a solid defeat in November.  But a smarter, shrewder, more presentable Trump is waiting in our future.  We may be saved from that coming populist Reagan by the continuing demographic shifts transforming our society, shifts that seem likely to make white nationalism an electoral dead end (at least at the presidential level).  But can anyone – other than demagogues, fanatics, and fools – desire greater racial polarization and animosity?  A popular white nationalist movement, even one with no chance of winning the presidency, can bring nothing but division and destruction and horror.  And, for the moment, it’s a white nationalist movement with a reckless sideshow clown as its leader. We stare, more starkly than we have in a long time, into the sinister side of our collective unconscious; we walk dangerously close to the edge of the deep, dark American abyss, with little more than Hillary and her bland, neo-liberal platitudes to keep us from falling directly in. 

The Prick

Donald Trump, in a recent Republican presidential debate, defended the size of his penis, which he felt had been unfairly maligned by a rival candidate.  How reassuring.  Everyone is familiar with the profusion of Trump’s offenses against civility, dignity, fairness, evidence, and reason – claiming that Mexico deliberately sends criminals and rapists across the border; bragging about his wealth; peddling debunked statistics about crime and race; promising to prevent Muslims from entering the country; blaming a female journalist’s criticism on menstruation; excusing and encouraging violence at his rallies; declining to disavow support from overt racists; urging official use of “torture”; recommending killing the families of terrorists – the list goes on and on.  The most distinguishing feature of Trump’s campaign is its utter lack of seriousness, its stubborn refusal to engage the process of choosing the President of the United States with the circumspection and respect it justly demands.  The country and the world are in a perilous state, and Trump responds with schoolyard bullying and locker room braggadocio.  But beneath all the adolescent bluster, the childish taunts, the petulance, the threats, the bombast, the ocean of boorishness so vast that it would shame a barroom bigmouth – beneath all that appalling unseriousness lies a very serious message: Working Americans – in particular white, Christian, working American men – have been pushed around for a long time and they finally have a champion who pushes back.  They’ve been persistently and systematically disrespected, and Trump’s mission is to make that disrespect a two-way street.

In other words, Trump’s dismissal of the norms of political engagement – even his dismissal of the norms of civilized conduct! – are central to his appeal.  They signal to his supporters that he won’t let elite disapproval undermine his fight for them.  But there’s a deeper and more important implication: the normal political rules are themselves illegitimate.  This is the prime doctrine of Trumpism: the game is rigged in favor of the powerful, the comfortable, the rich, the connected, and fighting those elites requires breaking their rules.  If America is to be made great again then the received rules of capitalism, trade, campaign finance, civility, and particularly the rules of political discourse, must be broken.  This is what his supporters mean when they say, “He tells it like it is.”  He ignores received notions of what’s politically correct, of what’s acceptable or reasonable, and boldly speaks for white working people against a system of lies deliberately designed to exploit them.

It’s true, of course, that for decades the economic interests of working whites (indeed, of all working people) have been sacrificed for those of the investor class, while their cultural sensibilities – traditional, patriotic, religious – have been disdained and denigrated by cosmopolitan cultural elites.  And the pathetically unimaginative slogan festival that passes for our current political discourse positively hinders addressing the serious issues we face.  On both sides, political rhetoric is crafted primarily to delegitimize the other side and squash dissent on one’s own.  For conservatives, Obamacare is “socialism”, Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme”, and invading a non-threatening country was part of the bizarrely named “War on Terror.”  For liberals, any resistance to immigration or affirmative action can only be motivated by the most malicious racism.  Why should white working people respect notions of propriety that are used to dismiss their interests?

But this semi-conscious critique of our dismal discourse goes one step further.  On the outer reaches of the Trumpian worldview not just elite rules of conduct are dismissed, but any thought of proper conduct entirely!  Here, the fear of being denied official recognition to fight for one’s interests slips over into discounting the need for that recognition, and finally into discounting all recognition; arguably justifiable reassertion takes a wrong turn into destructive and juvenile rebellion against all constraint.  It’s this attitude that opens the door into that Trumpian world where anything in the service of one’s interests is justified, even embraced.  Violence, torture, barbarism – these are just more tools for achieving one’s ends.  This is positively post-modern: politics is war by other means, and all that matters in war is winning.  Trump will do anything to win.

And he’ll win for America.  There are two things Trump steadfastly believes in: the essential goodness of the American common man and his own indomitable talents and instincts.  If his instincts tell him he can get Mexico to pay for that wall, then they will.  If he remembers seeing New Jersey Muslims cheering as the twin towers fell, then they did.  And if he wants to slug those irritating protestors, then it must be OK to do so.  And his flawless instincts license him to make up policy – or even facts! – on the fly.  Without knowing the slightest thing about such topics he can blather on about NATO, or nuclear policy, or climate change, or anything at all.  He can claim, on the basis of an online video that’s been proven to be a hoax, that a man who’d tried to attack him was connected to ISIS, insisting “All I know is what’s on the internet.”  Has there ever been a candidate whose communications have consisted entirely of talking out of his ass?  His supernaturally perfect instincts even permit him to contradict himself from one moment to the next, such as calling for criminally punishing women who have abortions one day and then walking it back the next, all while insisting his position hasn’t changed!  People who reason, and marshal facts and arguments can’t be trusted; they’re all on the side of the elites!  But if one’s heart is in the right place, if one’s faith in America remains pure then one’s instincts can always be trusted.  Any action taken in that moral purity and for that moral purity is axiomatically moral, too.  Right makes might.

Trump’s supporters love him because his instincts and theirs are identical, and he lacks the capacity for self-reflection or critical thought that might impede the bounteous flourishing of those instincts.  This is the one thing that Trump thoroughly understands, if only viscerally: White America is his tribe and he is their chieftain.  He stokes their fears, he humors their pieties, he mocks their natural inferiors, he dallies with their darkest prejudices.  In short, he reclaims for them their rightful place as the heroes of the American story, the best people in the world.  He will do anything for them, and they deserve no less.

Trumpism represents a colossal over-reaction by white, male, Christian America in the face of its economic and cultural decline.  The various components of that over-reaction – the rejection of civility, the embrace of barbarism, the glorification of impulse over circumspection – have been rampant on the right for years.  Now the right is using the political chaos of the last decade – the Iraqi debacle, the Great Recession, the Obamacare wars, white decline – as an excuse to indulge its worst inclinations.  And Donald Trump came along at just the right moment and pulled it all together into a semi-coherent whole, even if it’s a whole that almost entirely lacks intellectual substance.  But Trump’s utter obliviousness to actual political content – to what is still quaintly referred to in certain circles as reality – is crucial to his ongoing success, since it insures he’ll never stop fighting for his tribe.  It’s not just that’s he willing to be a shameless jerk to advance the interests of his people, it’s that he’s incapable of being anything other than a shameless jerk.  He’s a prick, but he’s their prick, and they’re convinced a prick is exactly what they need.

The Great Comeuppance

Poetic Justice with bad hair

The conservative shuffle over to populism has finally broken into a run.  Unending economic hardship and liberal cultural triumph have torn the white middle class away from their neglectful conservative masters.  While those affluent overlords were swooning over no-capital-gains-tax fantasies and drinking themselves deep of Social Darwinist ideological purity, their downscale cousins were weathering decades of lowered wages and lowered expectations.  The America those workers knew, that sustained them and valued them, has been dying, and they’ve become desperate for a solution.  Now a large section of the supposedly conservative base supports a candidate who has argued for raising taxes and lowering pay for the rich, who opposes free trade and cuts to social welfare programs, and who condemns the influence of money in politics.  Donald Trump is what happens when the interests and sensibilities of such a large constituency are consistently ignored, marginalized and disdained.   Trump is the blowback from conservative failure.

Conservatism has always had a troubled relationship with its own base.  Modern American conservatism began in the 1950’s as a small intellectual movement that coalesced around National Review magazine, which argued over such things as whether the great British conservative Edmund Burke supported tradition per se, or as a means to protect ordered liberty.  They wrote homages to the British ruling class and Generalissimo Franco’s enthusiastically Catholic fascism – hardly positions likely to garner widespread support in a country with such a small-d democratic political culture.  Their anti-welfare-state positions gave them ready-made supporters among the rich and the business community, but little more.

So they went shopping for a constituency.  Their first lucky break was McCarthyism.  The conservatives were staunch anti-communists (opposed to socialism in general and Stalinism in particular) and they were quite happy to support a demagogue who accused liberal Democrats of being Soviet spies.  But McCarthyism was about more than overblown fear of communist subversion, it was also a movement of small town working whites against supposedly unpatriotic Northeastern establishment technocrats.  It was the first stirring of right-wing populism since the decline of the Father Coughlin and the America First crowd in the early 40’s.  That is, it was a base of support conservatives could use to attack the New Deal.

But McCarthyism collapsed and the conservative movement had to keep shopping.  This time they found a more reliable constituency: segregationists.  Opponents of civil rights shared conservative hostility toward the liberal federal government, and conservative’s natural deference to traditional social hierarchy meant they had no compunction about throwing their intellectual heft behind an explicit defense of white supremacy.  In the internal Republican fights of early 1960’s they supported Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a thoroughgoing conservative who forged an alliance of business interests and segregationists by strongly denouncing both the New Deal and civil rights legislation.  By the time Goldwater had become the Republican nominee in 1964, the ideology of modern American conservatism had hardened into implacable resistance against the three main threats to traditional American order: international communism, the welfare state, and racial integration.  Conservatism was now an alliance of the capitalist class and white supremacists, held together by a program of resistance to the federal government.

As the 1960’s progressed and liberation movements sprung up for not just blacks, but for women, Latinos, gays, etc. conservative opposition to racial equity broadened into opposition to all egalitarian social movements.   Shrewd Republican politicians like Nixon and Reagan rode white middle class resentment of those movements all the way to the White House.  The segregationists became the Moral Majority, then the Conservative Coalition and, finally, the Tea Party; but they were always the same rightward-leaning portion of the white working and middle class base, afraid of social change and looking to conservative politicians to halt it.

To achieve political influence and power, conservatism turned itself from a genteel ruling class intelligentsia into a broad populist movement.  But it sold its soul to do so.  It chose expediency over intellectual integrity, and it consistently appealed to the darker impulses of its base.  As the situation called for it, it invoked the threat of Stalinist feds, shiftless Negroes, family-hating feminists, child-molesting gays, welfare bums, union thugs, etc.  It portrayed liberals as snooty, condescending, feminized aristocrats, sipping lattes, nibbling French cheese, disdaining working class values and wasting working class tax dollars on undeserving populations.  Conservatism excused, justified, and encouraged the worst American instincts, and thereby undermined its self-proclaimed project of moral renewal.  It became gutter populism.

Gutter populism in the service of cynical capitalism, that is. In policy, conservatives stuck to reducing the social safety net, de-regulating the market, and allowing the unobstructed flow of capital, goods, jobs and workers around the world.  The cliché has it that conservative politicians promised the base they would protect traditional family values while all they were really interested in was free-market economics.  That’s true of course.  Reagan made the decision early in his presidency to prioritize undoing the New Deal, not the Sexual Revolution.  But it’s not just that conservative office-holders fought half-heartedly against abortion while fighting like demons for upper-end tax cuts; it’s that they pursued economic policies – free trade, relaxed immigration, social insurance privatization, de-unionization – that working people generally oppose!  And working people haven’t been too crazy about the results of those policies: stagnating wages, the replacement of high-paying manufacturing jobs with low-paying service jobs, the immiseration of small-town and rural America.  At the end of the day, conservatives gave them nothing.

To keep working whites in their electoral coalition, conservatives had to do two contrary things: keep the populist fires of resentment and paranoia burning high, but keep them from spreading over into resentment of the rich.  They called a market-friendly healthcare plan socialism; they warned of death panels; they questioned the first black president’s religion and birthplace – all to frighten and anger the base.  They insisted the terrible liberal threat justified the most ruthless tactics – shutting down the government, undermining the government’s credit, stonewalling all compromise – and condemned as insufficiently conservative anyone who dissented.  And all the while they denounced resentment of the rich as envy, progressive taxes as class warfare, reliance on social insurance as irresponsibility, and the slightest trace of pragmatism or moderation as profoundly un-American.

Needless to say, it’s not easy to both intensify and contain populist passion.  Eventually, something had to give.  In theory, conservatives could have directed economic policy more toward middle class interests, as many reformicons have been urging.  But no, that would have undercut the central premise of American conservatism, that individual wealth results from the highest personal virtue.  And for a long time it seemed that thoroughgoing ideological conservatism was spreading and consolidating among the white middle class.  Tea Party activists sure made a good show of hating government programs.  But no, both the traditional populism of American whites and their own real and pressing material interests made genuine widespread conservatism improbable. We are led to the startling revelation that a great deal of the conservative base has never really been conservative.  In particular, they never accepted the notion that what is good for the rich is always good for the rest of us.  It turns out they hate Wall Street as much as they hate Washington and Harvard and Hollywood.  This has all been a terrible shock to the conservative chattering classes.  After spending decades indoctrinating the rubes, firing up their hatred of the liberal establishment and the cultural establishment and the Republican establishment, those rubes now direct that hatred, ironically enough, at their real enemies, those alleged conservative masters themselves!  Working whites have stopped pretending to be conservatives, they’ve stopped fooling both the conservative movement and themselves, and they’ve gone home.

To be precise, they’ve come to the realization that American elites don’t really give a damn about them.  Conservatives promised American unity, prosperity and peace, all while inviting jobs overseas, allowing banks to crash the economy, and invading a country that posed no threat to us.  They carelessly discarded American jobs, American prosperity, American lives, and – maybe worst of all – American promise.  The sold it all for a few extra points on the Dow.

But liberals haven’t done much better.  Conservatives may have had ulterior motives for accusing liberals of elitist condescension, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong.  Since the time of Jefferson and Jackson, American populism was generally a phenomenon of the left, i.e. regular people fighting against exploitation by a rich and powerful elite.  But American populism ruptured in the 60’s when the Civil Rights movement put liberals and working whites at odds.  This is the part of the story we didn’t mention above: conservatives were able to attract large number of whites in the 60’s and 70’s because liberals were so willing to let them go.  At first liberals had tried to turn economic populism for whites into economic populism for everyone.  But many whites resisted full racial equality and began voting for thoroughly conservative politicians who, as we noted, were quite happy to profit from white resentment.  Liberals abandoned the project of broadly shared prosperity and instead focused on cultural emancipation for everyone who wasn’t a straight, white male.  That emancipation was and is a tremendously worthwhile goal, but excesses in pursuit of that goal further alienated the white working class that until then had been the heart of the liberal base.  Liberals and whites walked away from each other, each convinced the other had shown itself to be unworthy of friendship.

We still live amongst the wreckage of that Great Rupture.  Race, as always in American life, has poisoned everything.  Post-60’s liberals, twisted round by white guilt, abandoned sober color-blind integration for the romance of black nationalism and multiculturalism.  They rejected the heroic and hard task of assimilating blacks into the American mainstream and settled instead for the cheap tokenism of affirmative action.  That is, they chose sanctimony over results.  And, crucially, they condemned all dissent as abject racism.  They so over-reacted to rampant racism, militarism, fundamentalism and patriarchy that they started to wonder if there was something dark lurking at the heart of American culture.  They became suspicious of patriotism and religion and the military per se, and even of the American people themselves.  They adopted a host of problematic cultural attitudes – post-patriotic, post-religious, post-color-blind, post-gender – that were unpalatable to middle America.  They still pushed for programs to help workers – universal healthcare, family leave – but they came to culturally mistrust the very people their economic policies were designed to help.  And after a while they even abandoned those policies.  Many became New Democrats like Bill Clinton, promoting privatization and free trade and curtailing government programs.  They rejected American culture from the left and pro-worker policies from the right.  They became caricature anti-populists.

All these concerns come together perfectly on immigration.  This is one issue on which conservative and liberal ideologues agree: the more immigration, the better.  Conservatives are happy to remove constraints on the labor market, and consequently drive down wages and benefits.  And their free-market dogmatism prevents them from seeing the economic injury caused by flooding the market with cheap labor.  To them, resistance to immigration can only be motivated by the lazy and irresponsible desire to avoid honest competition, and nothing matters more to a conservatives than allowing competition to prove one’s moral worth.  Meanwhile, liberals are eager to prove their humanitarian virtue by rejecting any American immigration policy that might particularly benefit Americans.  Their love for the foreign poor blinds them to the damage done to their own countrymen.  Indeed, their cosmopolitan detachment protects them from any pedestrian concerns about American workers or – grab the smelling salts! – American culture.  To them, resistance to immigration can only be motivated by racism, and nothing matters more to liberals than proving they’re not racist.  Conservatives have no consideration for American workers as workers, but liberals have no consideration for them as Americans. 

And working people of all races are starting to understand that the people running the country are not looking out for them.  Indeed, when you consider the takeover of American politics by rich donors, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that almost nothing constrains elites from pursuing policies that actively hurt working people.  And history and ideology have conspired to leave working people, and working whites particularly, with no responsible leadership.  Both conservatives and liberals pretend to be populists during election time, and liberals even make half-hearted attempts to help working people; but there is no political movement that fights for the interests of American workers as American workers.  Indeed, elites would condemn as vulgar and unrespectable any politics that was both patriotic and pro-worker.

This is where the white middle and working classes finds themselves.  Liberals have abandoned them to the gutter populism in which conservatives have so cynically invited them to indulge.  And behold the result: Donald Trump, the genuine gutter populist!  Decades of gutter populist propaganda, combined with genuine economic pain, and good old-fashioned Puritan paranoia have left working whites bitter, angry and desperate.  Many of them are still right-wing populists, fearing blacks and feminists and gays and Muslims.  That hasn’t changed just because they now perceive the damage that conservative policy has done them.  That’s why they should gravely worry us.  And following Trump won’t exactly improve that.

Looking for a real leader

But they love Donald Trump because he perfectly speaks to their fear and desperation.  He shares their deepest instincts: that it’s regular working Americans who make America prosper, that America is strong and good and our standing in the world should reflect that, that economic and political elites have been ignoring those first two points, and at their peril.  Unfortunately, he also shares their darker instincts: that America is morally superior to every other country, that regular Americans are the best people in the world, particularly straight, white, Christian, male breadwinners.  He’s been rightly called the American id, the strutting embodiment of all those impulses.  But part of the reason his shtick works so well is that he’s little more than id himself!  He lacks a coherent ideology or set of policies because all he has are those nationalist instincts and a gigantic, monumental, indestructible faith in both them and himself.  He’s not just looking out for working white people, in cultural sensibility he is them, but independent and strong enough to fight like hell.  He’s not just a genuine gutter populist, he’s a determined gutter populist.  They delight in his irrepressible contempt for decent propriety.  He’s the cocksure naughty boy, breaking all the rules, smirking as the children cheer, and sneering at the grownups who try to shame him.  He is the national will to tear everything down and dance on the rubble.

We may even see – God help us! – President Donald Trump if enough independents feel sufficiently marginalized and desperate.  But it need not have been this way.  It’s conceivable – isn’t it? – that  we could have had a constructive and enlightened populism, one that picked itself up out of the gutter and fought for the interests of all American working people.  Or does the damnable intransigence of racial hostility make that impossible?  Both conservatism and liberalism, in their current forms, have eagerly exploited and exacerbated that hostility.  Neither is capable of addressing the current crisis, which is at bottom a crisis of political imagination.  Both are too rigid, too wedded to blind and implausible ideologies, too comfortable in their institutional power, too removed from the realities of American life.  They fight their petty, scripted battles over the heights of American society, while the foundation rots beneath their feet.  They have become irrelevant.

It’s unclear where working whites will go now.  They broke with conservatism when they came to understand that the system cannot be indifferent; it can only work for them or against them.  That is, they now know – in their experience and in their bones – that their economic condition is a function of more than just their own actions.  When they make this simple fact an explicit doctrine and a rallying cry and an organizing principle then they will have become full populists.  What they will do with that populism, whether it will be a force for preserving and promoting the best of America, or whether it will degrade and destroy – we don’t know yet.  Only disaster can result if they allow leaders like Trump to drag them further into the gutter.  They have the potential to become a powerful force for unmediated white authoritarianism, and that’s an outcome too awful to contemplate.

If there is to be a constructive populist alternative, an inclusive, color-blind, mature populism, it can ultimately come only from a reconstructed liberalism.  Bernie Sanders has taken liberalism halfway there, with his stress on economic concerns over cultural ones, and his nascent and inchoate economic nationalism.  The rupture between liberalism and white working people must be reconciled, and that can only happen when liberals come to understand the centrality of our shared American identity.  And maybe a program of working class unity could reduce racial tension.  Maybe such a movement could address our actual problems and offer real solutions.  Maybe it could remind us all who we are to each other, what we owe each other, and what we can accomplish together.  Maybe it could elicit the better angels of our nature.  And maybe, finally, it could tell us how we can be healed.