In a series of essays for conservative magazines like Chronicles, Francis hammered home three key insights.
The first was that globalization was screwing Middle America. The Cold War had just ended, capitalism seemed triumphant and the Clinton years seemed to be an era of broad prosperity. But Francis stressed that the service economy was ruining small farms and taking jobs from the working class.
- His second insight was that the Republican and conservative establishment did not understand what was happening. He railed against the pro-business “Economic Men” who thought G.D.P. growth could solve the nation’s problems, and the Washington Republicans, who he thought were infected with the values of the educated elites.
- Francis told Buchanan. “Go to New Hampshire and call yourself a patriot, a nationalist, an America Firster, but don’t even use the word ‘conservative.’ It doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
- .. His third insight was that politics was no longer about left versus right. Instead, a series of smaller conflicts — religious versus secular, nationalist versus globalist, white versus nonwhite — were all merging into a larger polarity, ruling class versus Middle America.
“Middle American groups are more and more coming to perceive their exploitation at the hands of the dominant elites. The exploitation works on several fronts —
- economically, by hypertaxation and the design of a globalized economy dependent on exports and services in place of manufacturing;
- culturally, by the managed destruction of Middle American norms and institutions; and
- politically, by the regimentation of Middle Americans under the federal leviathan.”
appalled by pro-corporate Republican economic policies on the one hand and liberal cultural radicalism on the other. They swung to whichever party seemed most likely to resist the ruling class, but neither party really provided a solution.
The Buchanan campaign was the first run at what we now know as Trumpian populism.
.. “The ‘culture war’ for Buchanan is not Republican swaggering about family values and dirty movies but a battle over whether the nation itself can continue to exist under the onslaught of the militant secularism, acquisitive egoism, economic and political globalism, demographic inundation, and unchecked state centralism supported by the ruling class.”
.. Francis was a racist. His friends and allies counseled him not to express his racist views openly
.. in 1994 Francis told a conference, “The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.”
.. When you look at today’s world through the prism of Francis’ work, a few things seem clear: Trump is not a one-time phenomenon; the populist tide has been rising for years. His base sticks with him through scandal because it’s not just about him; it’s a movement defined against the so-called ruling class.
.. Trump may not be the culmination, but merely a way station toward an even purer populism.
.. Trump is nominally pro-business. The next populism will probably take his ethnic nationalism and add an anti-corporate, anti-tech layer. Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple stand for everything Francis hated — economically, culturally, demographically and nationalistically.
.. As the tech behemoths intrude more deeply into daily life and our very minds, they will become a defining issue in American politics. It wouldn’t surprise me if a new demagogue emerged, one that is even more pure Francis.
The End of the Left and the Right as We Knew Them
Trump accelerated a realignment in the electorate around racism, across several different measures of racial animus — and that it helped him win. By contrast, we found little evidence to suggest individual economic distress benefited Trump. The American political system is sorting so that racial progressivism and economic progressivism are aligned in the Democratic Party and racial conservatism and economic conservatism are aligned in the Republican Party.
.. In the French parliamentary elections this month, the ruling Socialist Party saw its 280 seats dwindle to 29 out of 577. In the Netherlands, the number of seats held in parliament by the Dutch Labor Party fell from 38 to 9 after the March election.
.. The Financial Times has documented a steady decline in class-based voting in Britain. In 1987, the British middle class voted for the Conservative Party by 40 points more than the national average, while the working class voted for the Labor Party by 32 points more than the national average — a 72-point spread. By 2017, the spread had dropped to 15 points. Once a Tory stronghold, the British middle class now splits its vote evenly.
.. education emerged as the strongest predictor of votes for a right populist option, where the less educated chose it more often than those with degrees.
.. Austria to this list. The presidential election there in May of 2016 pitted Van der Bellen, the center-left candidate, against the hard-right populist Norbert Hofer. Polls showed that Van der Bellen won decisively among the well educated and the better paid, while Hofer won workers and the less well educated in a landslide. The election in the Netherlands was also emblematic
.. Macron’s genius has been to argue that he can thread the political needle, by embracing globalization and reinforcing social protections to compensate those exposed to its downside. In the process, he has obliterated traditional parties of the left and the right, while promising a synthesis tailor made for the twenty-first century. If he can bring it off, he will become a model for other leaders to follow — including in the United States.
.. among all voters, Clinton won 52-42 among the college-educated while Trump carried those without degrees 51-44.
.. A candidate making that appeal, however, and seeking to build a broad majority biracial coalition, must in fact have broad biracial appeal. As of now, Sanders is far from personifying broad majority biracial appeal. Worse, existing Democratic candidate recruitment and nomination processes have paid insufficient attention to the selection of candidates who are competent to build bridges across America’s immense cultural gaps.
.. there is a “growing tension” between the Democratic Party’s “ascendant militant wing and Democrats competing in conservative-leaning terrain.”
.. The “ascendant militant wing” — a colorful, if controversial, description of the Sanders-Warren wing of the party — has the moral high ground within Democratic ranks but the votes they want the party to seek are those of some of the least reachable constituencies — white men and women whose views on immigration, race and political correctness are in direct conflict with liberal idealism. It would be an extraordinary challenge to get these particular voters to join with minorities and progressive activists.
.. Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity.
In practical terms, Beinart writes, “it means celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.”
.. The hard part
is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.
.. Exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference — the hallmarks of liberal democracy — are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness.
.. Americans, Beinart contends,
know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact that he — a black man with a Muslim-sounding name — twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary Clinton.
What we are seeing now is the replacement of class-based politics, a trend apparent in the United States and Europe. This gives us a more racialized and xenophobic politics, on one hand, and a politics capitalizing on increasing levels of education and open-mindedness in the electorate on the other.
Trump’s base turns on him
Steve Bannon’s downgrade is just one of many complaints. ‘We expect him to keep his word, and right now he’s not keeping his word,’ says one campaign supporter.
.. Their complaints range from Trump’s embrace of an interventionist foreign policy to his less hawkish tone on China to, most recently, his marginalization of his nationalist chief strategist
.. a belief that Trump the candidate bears little resemblance to Trump the president.
He’s failing, in their view, to deliver on his promise of a transformative “America First” agenda driven by hard-edged populism.
.. Lee Stranahan, who, as a former writer at Breitbart News
.. “There was always the question of, ‘Did he really believe this stuff?’ Apparently, the answer is, ‘Not as much as you’d like.’”
As Bannon’s influence wanes, on the rise is a small group of Wall Street-connected advisers whose politically moderate and globalist views are anathema to the populist cause.
.. Trump voters “felt like they were voting for an anti-establishment candidate — and they’re terrified, they’re losing faith,
.. Michael Savage and Laura Ingraham, called last week’s bombing of Syria a betrayal
.. he backed away from his oft-repeated campaign line that NATO is “obsolete.”
.. Other Trump boosters worry that he’s ditching his economic agenda.
.. backed off his vow to label China a currency manipulator
.. reversal on his position to eliminate the Export-Import Bank.
.. Larry Kudlow .. expressed dismay that the president hadn’t yet released a tax plan.
.. has yet to follow through on his pledge to rescind protections for undocumented parents and children put in place under former President Barack Obama.
.. Immigration is “why we voted for Donald Trump
.. some of his loyalists are beginning to compare him to another Republican who lost the support of the party’s base: Arnold Schwarzenegger.
.. It’s like dating a girl whose father cheated on her mother. She’s always going to be suspicious,” he said. “He’s got to constantly provide wins because he’s got an emotionally damaged base that’s been abused.”
The President of Our Dreams
Had it been not for such a deep crisis in the American political system and its so dramatic polarization (which began during Bill Clinton’s presidency and kept increasing ever since), the U.S. policy and priorities could have been adjusted in a much calmer way and by not so extravagant a person.
.. Interestingly, political adventurism, which reached its peak during George W. Bush’s presidency, did not cause such a strong outburst of isolationist sentiments.
.. But the financial crisis of 2008 and its consequences noticeably radicalized the social and political atmosphere.
.. there came a man who talks not about leadership but greatness. Greatness, as he understands it, is the ability to become an example of success for everyone to follow (very much consonant with the Founding Fathers’ idea), without forcing anything upon anyone and putting on a show of force only when it is necessary for specific U.S. national interests.
.. total domination of the liberal-globalist approach was not a norm but an exception, a product of a unique situation that had accidentally developed after the end of the 20th century.
.. Trump is an American nationalist, inclined towards mercantilism in the economy and a strong-arm approach in politics. This is nothing new if one turns the page and admits the fact that the liberal era is over for the time being. Russia actually wanted to see such a president in the United States, not Trump personally but his type, understandable and not overly disposed towards political correctness. The dream has come true. We shall see how it will actually materialize.