The story is quite different in America, because the Republican Party hasn’t tried to freeze out the kind of people who vote National Front in France. Instead, it has tried to exploit them, mobilizing their resentment via dog whistles to win elections. This was the essence of Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” and explains why the G.O.P. gets the overwhelming majority of Southern white votes.
But there is a strong element of bait-and-switch to this strategy. Whatever dog whistles get sent during the campaign, once in power the G.O.P. has made serving the interests of a small, wealthy economic elite, especially through big tax cuts, its main priority — a priority that remains intact, as you can see if you look at the tax plans of the establishment presidential candidates this cycle.
Sooner or later the angry whites who make up a large fraction, maybe even a majority, of the G.O.P. base were bound to rebel — especially because these days much of the party’s leadership seems inbred and out of touch. They seem, for example, to imagine that the base supports cuts to Social Security and Medicare, an elite priority that has nothing to do with the reasons working-class whites vote Republican.
So along comes Donald Trump, saying bluntly the things establishment candidates try to convey in coded, deniable hints, and sounding as if he really means them. And he shoots to the top of the polls. Shocking, yes, but hardly surprising.
Ted Cruz Sees Boon to His Campaign in Donald Trump
Speaking to donors in New York City on Wednesday, Mr. Cruz suggested a more strategic reason to be grateful: Mr. Trump is bending the race in Mr. Cruz’s direction.
“He has framed the central narrative of this primary as, ‘Who will stand up to Washington?’” Mr. Cruz, of Texas, said at the private fund-raiser, echoing remarks he has made publicly. “Now if that’s the central narrative, the natural next question is, ‘O.K., who has stood up to Washington?’”
Mr. Trump, in this view, has taken a machete through the brush for Mr. Cruz, allowing him to rise quietly despite his own reputation for bombast, while Mr. Trump absorbs the scrutiny a front-runner attracts and eventually peters out, as Mr. Cruz has wagered.
What We Talk About When We Talk About ‘Demagogues’
In Greece, the demagogue was not just a leader of people, but a leader who led, specifically, by bullying/cajoling/converting charisma into influence. He was a populist who appealed, in particular, to the lower classes. As Aristotle wrote of Cleon, a tanner, “He was the first who shouted on the public platform, who used abusive language and who spoke with his cloak girt around him, while all the others used to speak in proper dress and manner.”
.. “Democracy—and any other system with an element of democracy—intrinsically creates an opening for a demagogue.”
.. one person’s threat to democracy is another person’s populist hero.
.. He is a human distillation of the maxim that democracy “is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.” In all that, he may well represent just what Aristotle feared: democracy, feeding on itself. And thereby destroying itself.
Ted Cruz (Privately) Questions Donald Trump’s ‘Judgment’ to Be President
In an appearance on Fox News on Wednesday, the same day as the fund-raising luncheon, Mr. Cruz said he liked and respected Mr. Trump and “I don’t anticipate that changing at all.”
“The reason why I won’t get engaged in personal insults and attacks, I don’t think the American people care about a bunch of politicians bickering like schoolchildren,” said Mr. Cruz, adding at another point, “I’m grateful Donald Trump is running.”
.. Mr. Cruz has been notable in a field that has grappled with how to handle Mr. Trump for his refusal to publicly criticize his opponent. Mr. Cruz and his team, who covet Mr. Trump’s supporters, are also keenly aware of the searing criticisms that Mr. Trump has lobbed at rivals who went after him. Those attacks have precipitated a decline in some of their standings in the polls.