We’ve Seen the Trump Phenomenon Before

Mr. Trump perhaps can be best understood as the face of a broader global dynamic: the resistance to policies that encourage global competition and open borders to people who have lived too long on the losing side.

.. Expanded trade and immigration put pressure on the jobs and wages of the working class, yet they also served to deliver enormous wealth and enhanced power into the hands of a tiny elite. In the absence of actions to mitigate the damage and more broadly share the bounty of globalization, it’s no surprise that righteous anger against the establishment has opened the door to unorthodox political entrepreneurs.

.. “The middle class allows for both democracy and stability,” he writes. Middle-class people “tend to eschew extremism of both the left and the right.” Workers who feel themselves losing their perch in the middle class may be the most vulnerable of all to a populist appeal.

.. Mr. Trump may seem unusual to Americans because the United States did not produce the kind of autocratic populist leaders Europe offered the 20th century, men who built power bases blaming others for their ills: immigrants, Jews, foreigners in general.

.. rising inequality in the United States led not to populism but to what he calls a “plutocratic” equilibrium, where elites purchase political power while the poor are systematically excluded and the working class is encouraged to support the status quo based on issues like gun control and gay marriage.

.. It’s possible the United States will soon by governed by a president who rode into office partly by appealing to popular resentment against China, a country where overt nationalism is a central plank of the government’s claim to authority. What would happen if an incident in the South China Sea ended with 200 dead American sailors?

Trump is as dangerous as Hillary

Yes, Hillary Clinton is an arrogant, boring, cynical, dishonest, entitled, favor-trading, greedy, hypocritical, inconsistent, joyless, Leftist, Machiavellian, nasty, overbearing, power-hungry, queen-like, ruthless, shameless, tired, untrustworthy, vain, Washington-insider embodiment of the status quo who doesn’t stand for anything that isn’t focus-group approved or that wouldn’t line her and her husband’s pockets. (I went in alphabetical order for simplicity.)

The problem is that an incoherent authoritarian populist demagogue, operating under the banner of the once-conservative party of smaller government is as dangerous as Hillary.

The Calculated Populism of Rob Ford

Perceptions of a new divide between haves and have-nots emerged, exemplified by an epidemic of traffic-snarling condo construction and a growing class of young, affluent creatives. To those who weren’t benefitting from the boom, or who simply preferred Toronto as it had been, the city’s council and left-leaning mayor seemed élitist and out of touch, content to levy taxes from their perch downtown.

.. Out of this alchemy of expansion and resentment came Ford, who died on Tuesday of pleomorphic liposarcoma, a rare form of cancer, at the age of forty-six. In 2013, his fame, long established in Canada, spread to the United States after Gawker, followed closely by the Toronto Star, reported the existence of a video depicting the mayor smoking crack. For six months, Ford denied the allegation, before finally admitting to using the drug “in one of my drunken stupors.”
.. Running for election in 2010, he had emerged as an improbable but genuine political phenomenon—one that in many ways anticipated a certain Republican politician with whom Americans have become intimately acquainted. Large, brash, and uncouth, Ford engaged in behavior and made utterances that would have sunk a traditional politician, but that appeared to enhance his standing with his core supporters, who called themselves Ford Nation.
.. That he won the election was no accident, however. Though he played the buffoon, especially in his later American media appearances, Ford was at the outset a calculating political operator, who fronted a mayoral campaign that a rival official told me was the most sophisticated he’d ever seen in Toronto. The operation that I witnessed combined deep political know-how—careful polling, sophisticated robocalls, dogged debate coaching—with the recognition that the last thing many Toronto voters wanted was an actual politician. Ford and his team relentlessly co-opted the critiques of his political rivals, and even his own gaffes, in order to advance a perception of Ford as an outsider, unafflicted by conventional insider politics.
.. When I asked one of Ford’s handlers, Nick Kouvalis, why he was content to have Ford chronicled as he ate, where another candidate might have found it unflattering, he gestured at the crowd. “Look at his supporters. They’re all overweight,” he said. This method of creating identification worked; as one voter told me, “When you insult him, you insult us.”
.. But when the crack-video allegation came to light, in 2013, even that seemed, in a way, to play to his narrative. Ford’s vices had put him in contact with some of Toronto’s outcasts and outlaws, and he’d indulged them in a part of the city where few politicians ever went. Infamously, he was photographed in a hoodie, arm in arm with three young men linked to the drug trade, including one who was shot and killed that same year. The men were standing outside the home where the smartphone footage of Ford smoking crack had purportedly been shot, in the city’s tough northwest, not far from some low-income housing complexes.
.. After Ford’s admission that he’d smoked crack, the council stripped him of most of his mayoral powers, but he never lost the support of his base.

A Walk in Rome in the Days of Trump

Two forces eerily contemporary have traditionally been thought to bring down ancient republics: the oligarch and the demagogue. What makes republics fragile are compacts of the very rich confiscating wealth in ways that makes injustice too palpable, and the demagogue who, usually rising as an opportunist among the oligarchs, can manipulate the incoherent discontent of the plebeians.

.. The fall of the Roman Republic, in any case, left a bad thousand-year savor, a certainty that democracy, even constrained republican democracy, was doomed by demagoguery. This was so much the standard view that when Shakespeare, never having known any democratic institutions at all—aside from a few local, limited Stratford ones—tried to imagine them in “Coriolanus” and his other Roman plays, he could only picture a setup that was divisive, factional, and pitifully easy to manipulate by a demagogue or two. The superiority of an authoritarian arrangement seemed, well, self-evident.

.. Today, though, we find ourselves in the midst of the ascent of a figure right out of Petronius: an orange-colored vulgarian of meretricious display, right down to the trophy wives from Far Elsewhere—with an ambition to dominate, a cunning out of proportion to his wisdom, a contempt for truth coupled with a readiness to manipulate, and a personal arrogance combined with, and indifferent to, a universal understanding that he is utterly unfit to govern.