When he descended the Trump Tower escalator on June 15 last year to announce his run for
the presidency, Donald Trump polled near the bottom of the Republican
field. An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll taken from June 14 to 18
reported Trump was the first choice of 1 percent of Republican voters,
behind Rick Perry, Carly Fiorina, and eight others. A RealClearPolitics
graphic tracking an average of several polls illustrates the stunning
speed of Trump’s rise. For most of June, Trump’s line slithered along
the bottom of the 17-person field, then headed by Jeb Bush. Two weeks
after his announcement, Trump stood at 6 percent. After that his support
line began to shoot up vertically, pulling even with Bush by mid-July.
Trump finished the month at 21 percent, comfortably ahead of Bush and
Scott Walker at 12 and 13 percent respectively, a lead he would never
relinquish.
His announcement was at first treated by
the press as something of a curiosity. Many focused on his assertions of
wealth. “I’m really rich,” he said at one point. Few focused initially
on the notorious remarks about Mexico—“When Mexico sends its people
they’re not sending their best … they’re sending people that have lots
of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us, they’re
bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I
assume, are good people.” While factual, if one conceded that Trump was
not speaking of all Mexican migrants, the words were clearly incendiary."...
[Commenter: "OMM 0910 says: June 27, 2016 at 6:53 am
[Commenter: "OMM 0910 says: June 27, 2016 at 6:53 am
But just as a political scandal is often
governed more by the cover-up than by the crime, more significant than
Trump’s words was the fact that he didn't apologize for them, which he
could easily have done. Instead, Trump held a large rally in Phoenix,
where he was introduced by Arizona’s tough-on-the-border sheriff, Joe
Arpaio, drawing a crowd far larger than any other candidate had
mustered. Shortly after, in Las Vegas, he brought on stage the father of
a young man who had been murdered by an illegal alien. He mocked NBC
for dropping him while standing by Brian Williams, who had been caught
lying on the air. This was the backdrop to Trump’s surge: a tough
immigration and border-control message reinforced by a refusal to bend
before what had become a massive barrage of liberal denunciation.
Within weeks, every prestige newspaper in America had published columns written by Republican neoconservative figures anathematizing Trump and warning that his success would “stain” the Republican Party. Republican voters, from that July through the following May, ignored them.
Within weeks, every prestige newspaper in America had published columns written by Republican neoconservative figures anathematizing Trump and warning that his success would “stain” the Republican Party. Republican voters, from that July through the following May, ignored them.
♦♦♦
Trump’s victory
in the primaries has elicited a great deal of establishment
hand-wringing and wondering what more could have been done to stop him.
Many blamed the press for giving Trump “free media”—which of course he benefited from only because he was unafraid of reporters, and viewers wanted to see and hear him. Some pointed to the unwieldy size of the
initial GOP field or the failure of well-funded establishment super PACs
to attack Trump early on. In fact, the GOP establishment campaign
against Trump was massive: the pages and websites of National Review, Commentary, The Weekly Standard, the New York Times, and the Washington Post
overflowed with anti-Trump polemics throughout the campaign season, and
Trump was eventually bombarded with more than $70 million of negative
TV advertising, three times more than he spent in his own campaign. Yet
it seemed to make little difference.
Trump clearly has some gifts as a
candidate—a good public performer, enormously energetic, courageous. His
business success allows him the much appreciated talking point that he
is independent of the D.C.-establishment lobbyists. But his weaknesses
are obvious as well—a shallow grasp of policy, a tendency frequently to
say things that are probably not true, an impulse to personalize
conflicts and create unnecessary antagonisms. Few would describe his
character as “presidential.”
Yet he managed to prevail—to mount the
most astonishingly successful insurgent campaign against a party
establishment in our lifetimes. For all of Trump’s talents, his victory
probably owed as much to underlying political currents as to his
brilliance as a leader and political tactician.
Donald Trump became the presumptive GOP
nominee because he won the GOP’s untapped residue of nationalist voters,
in a system where the elites of both parties are, as if by rote,
extreme globalists. He won the support of those who favored changing
trade and immigration policies, which, it is increasingly obvious, do
not favor the tangible interests of the average American. He won the
backing of those alarmed by a new surge of political correctness, an informal national speech code that seeks to render many legitimate political opinions unsayable. He won the support of white working-class
voters whose social and economic position had been declining for a
generation. He won many who consciously or unconsciously identified with
the pre-multicultural America that existed for most of the last
century. And he won with backing from the growing group of Republicans
who understand that the Iraq War was an unmitigated disaster.
When one examines Trump’s main opponents—
Bush and Rubio then, Hillary Clinton now—on the critical issues of
immigration (legal and illegal), trade, and Iraq and other military
interventions, one finds no substantial differences between them. In
foreign policy, the liberal interventionists who would staff a Hillary
administration line up seamlessly with neoconservatives in support of continued American "hegemony." A recently published Center for a New
American Security report, produced by charter members of both groups,
makes this unambiguously clear. With some tweaking on social issues and
the Second Amendment, Hillary Clinton could have run interchangeably
with Bush and Rubio in the Republican field, and vice versa.
Opposition to this establishment
consensus has been advancing, by fits and starts, and is now too large
to be ignored. Michael Lind of the New America Foundation argues that
the 2016 election ratifies a party realignment that began in 1968, when
white working-class voters started moving towards the GOP. The core of
Trump’s supporters are the political descendants of what had been the
backbone of the Democratic New Deal coalition: working-class whites,
politically strongest in the South and flyover states. On the triad of trade, immigration, and foreign policy, these voters are nationalist, not
globalist—they would limit America’s intervention in foreign conflicts
and subject the importation of products and people from the rest of the
world to a more rigorous is-it-good-for-us test. (And by “us” they mean
themselves, not the Fortune 500.) By nominating Trump, the Republican
Party has finally been forced to come to terms with these sentiments,
choosing a candidate who is largely disdainful of the globalist
consensus of GOP donors, pundits, and think-tank experts. For Trump and
his voters, the “Reaganite” basket of so-called “conservative”
issues—free trade, high immigration, tax cuts for those with high
incomes and entitlement cuts for the middle class—was irrelevant or
actually undesirable.
Meanwhile the Democrats under Hillary
Clinton have solidified their identity as a party of America’s top and
bottom, revolving around the dual axis of urban coastal elites who
benefit from their ties to a global economy and poorer ethnic
minorities. The Clinton wing of the Democrats defends the free trade
deals and has now joined much of the hard left in opposing meaningful
enforcement of America’s immigration laws. (Before his campaign started,
Bernie Sanders assailed open-borders advocacy as a right-wing “Koch
Brothers” argument, but the logic of his party’s politics drove him to
embrace amnesty and non-enforcement.) On the left, the argument that
national boundaries are themselves, like racism or sexism, an arbitrary
and unjust form of discrimination is made with growing frequency. During
their debates, both Clinton and Sanders expressed support for an
amnesty-based immigration reform and opposed the deportation of migrants
who had not committed crimes here.
While neither the Republicans nor the
Democrats have fully jelled as nationalist or globalist parties, that is
the clear direction of their evolution. Lind suggests that “border
wars” have replaced “culture wars” as the critical dividing line between
the parties. That the most violent of recent anti-Trump rallies have
featured Mexican flags would seem to confirm his analysis.
In one form or another, this
nationalist-versus-globalist division is being reproduced in almost
every country in the West facing the pressure of working-class decline
and mass immigration. Given the opportunity, most European voters have
consistently resisted ceding greater powers to the EU, but their votes
have had little impact. Marine Le Pen, the National Front leader who now
heads most French presidential polls, mocks France’s President Hollande
by referring to him as Angela Merkel’s vice chancellor, a functionary
permitted to administer “the province of France.” Throughout Europe,
right-wing nationalist parties are rising in the polls against
establishment coalitions unable to preserve either the economic gains
won by past generations or public safety in migrant-dominated urban
areas.
Trump is obviously part of this pan-Western nationalist/populist wave, and may be the first to break
through in a major Western country. But even if he loses, he will have
transformed the Republican Party. Because the Democratic coalition,
perhaps now best exemplified by the twin poles of Goldman Sachs and
Black Lives Matter, is inherently unstable, there is every likelihood
that a more conventional politician, making use of Trump’s basket of
issues, will again win the GOP nomination and eventually the presidency.
♦♦♦
Rereading the first two essays of Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites,
published just after his death 22 years ago, confirms that the issues
that have elevated Trump are not particularly new. Lasch described an
American establishment increasingly contemptuous of Middle America, a
“new aristocracy of brains [who] tend to congregate on the coast,
turning their back on the heartland and cultivating ties with the
international market in fast-moving money, glamour, fashion and popular
culture. It is a question whether they think of themselves as American
at all.” For Lasch, this “global bazaar” of multiculturalism, which
could be savored without meaningful social obligation or commitment,
suited the new elites to perfection.
Pat Buchanan’s two Republican campaigns
in the 1990s, as well as Ross Perot’s bids, emerged in reaction to this
globalist-oriented elite. But Buchanan, though far better versed on the
issues than Trump, did not ever come close to capturing the GOP
nomination, and some of the differences between the two are instructive.
Support for traditionalist views on abortion and gay rights were
critical to Buchanan’s efforts, which placed as much emphasis on the
“culture war” as the “border war.” But by the 1990s, the culture war may
have already have been lost to the right.
Trump, while embracing nationalist
positions on trade and immigration, has remained subdued on social
issues. During the campaign Ted Cruz hoped to take advantage of this,
assailing Trump for holding “New York values,” but failed to profit.
Trump succeeded in business as a minority WASP in the heavily Jewish
milieu of New York real estate, and his daughter Ivanka, his closest
advisor by most accounts, has married and converted into Orthodox
Judaism. This diffuse connection with “New York values”—attitudinal and
ethnic—may well have given Trump some inoculation against the kind of It Can’t Happen Here
abuse heaped upon Buchanan, and thus more political room to run as an
unapologetic America First nationalist than a conservative Catholic like
Buchanan could muster.
At every level of American life, the
elite versus Middle America split is more pronounced than in Lasch’s
time. The funneling of an ever greater share of national income to the
top 1 percent has gone beyond anything imagined in Revolt of the Elites.
Political correctness existed in the 1990s; speech codes were a
growing, if often mocked, phenomenon on campuses. But no one could have
anticipated its explosion in the last few years. The concept of “white
privilege”—whose emergence has taken the education world by storm—seeks
essentially to hold responsible all whites, whatever their own views or
personal conduct, for the legacy of racism. But of course this has
double-edged effects. Writing in The Federalist, David Marcus
goes so far as to claim that the growing use of anti-“white privilege”
pedagogical techniques—such as films, teaching exercises, mandatory
confession, and other measures—has had the unintended result of making
many white students, and their appalled parents, more conscious of
having an inescapable and defining white identity. Trump is probably
quite sincere in his assertion that he himself is “the least racist
person” in politics, but there is little doubt his campaign has
benefited from a white reaction to an emerging liberal cultural and
educational discourse that depicts whites, and especially white males,
as more dangerous and immoral than any other people.
In the 1990s, Americans had not yet
experienced the downside of having a foreign-policy elite that faced no
rival superpower. The first Gulf War was perceived as a glowing success,
the five-day victory with precision air strikes and few American
casualties heralding what neoconservatives rushed to herald as “the
unipolar moment,” or “benevolent global hegemony.” It was followed by a
relatively costless (to Americans) conflict with Serbia. For the past 15 years, however, the United States has engaged in seemingly permanent
and unwinnable wars—the ground troops supplied largely by the white
working class—in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
Trump’s sallies against the folly of
military intervention thus resonate far more than Buchanan’s ever could.
Trump’s foreign-policy assertions may have been all over the map, but
he is plainly less biased in favor of military intervention than Hillary
Clinton. Recent American policies—the overthrow of Libya’s Gaddafi, for
instance—reinforce another of Trump’s arguments: intervention unleashes
waves of non-Western refugees. As Trump advisor Stephen Miller put it,
“Hillary’s platform is, I want to start wars in the Middle East, and
then import all the refugees into the United States without knowing who
they are.” In the wake of the Paris terror attacks and the Cologne
sexual assaults, with the endless columns of refugees now trying to
enter Europe perhaps the most dramatic visual news story of the past
year, this is a powerful argument.
It
is unlikely that Donald Trump believes with certainty that negotiating
better trade deals, or slapping tariffs on Chinese goods, will be a
panacea for the American economy or that building a wall will ensure an
immigration policy that broadly benefits our citizens. But variants of
these two policies, protectionism and immigration restriction, have been
tried before and succeeded. America experienced its greatest era of
industrial growth behind protective tariffs; its extraordinary success
in assimilating a huge and diverse group of immigrants was accomplished
only after the restrictive legislation of the 1920s. It would be
peculiar indeed, after a generation of middle- and working-class income
stagnation and growing inequality, if such tried-and-true remedies could
not even be considered because a bipartisan establishment opposed them.
However surprising it might be that real-estate tycoon and promoter
Donald Trump was the man who figured this out and acted successfully
upon it, the truth remains that he did.
Everything that has happened in the past
20 years has widened the opportunity for the nationalist persuasion in
American politics. Pat Buchanan cracked open the door in the GOP; Perot
widened it further, as did, in idiosyncratic ways, Ron Paul. But Trump,
with a unique blend of showmanship, independent means, and sheer nerve,
has blown this door wide open. It remains open because globalist
policies have failed a growing number of Americans. Trump’s weaknesses
as a candidate, well known to everyone, may keep him from winning. But
his run will change the nature of the GOP, and it is very hard to see
how the old GOP elites and neoconservative establishment will put the
lid on the aspirations Trump has unleashed, in this election cycle or
those to come.
"Scott McConnell is a founding editor of The American Conservative."
Image above from The American Conservative
Image above from The American Conservative
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-trump-wins/
.......................
Among comments to article:
============
"OMM 0910 says:
Few focused initially on the notorious remarks about Mexico—“When Mexico sends its people they’re not sending their best … they’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us, they’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”What if Trump was saying “Their rapists” rather than “They’re rapists”? Then the whole notoriety is nothing more than a semantic misunderstanding."
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-trump-wins/
...................................
..................
(continuing): "Still, it took several days for outrage to build. The first major move came from the Spanish-language TV channel Univision, which 10 days later announced it would sever ties to the Trump-owned Miss Universe and Miss USA pageants. NBC followed suit, dropping The Apprentice, and then Macy’s, which dropped a line of Trump-brand accessories. Soon liberal organizations Change.org and MoveOn.org were gathering signatures in support of boycotting Trump’s business interests. The PGA was pressured to drop scheduled tournaments at Trump golf courses. Within two to three weeks, Trump’s “calling Mexicans rapists and murderers” had become part of the national conversation.