A Cure for Trumpism

The case for a conservative politics that stresses the national interest abroad and national solidarity at home.

.. We didn’t see Trump’s apotheosis coming. But in our 2008 book, “Grand New Party,” we pointed out that despite its “party of the rich” reputation, the Republican Party increasingly depended on mostly white working-class support, even as its policy agenda was increasingly unresponsive to working-class voters’ problems and concerns.

 .. America’s wars are disproportionately fought by volunteers from downscale Red America
.. So what should the Republican Party offer them instead? The best answer is a conservative politics that stresses the national interest abroad and national solidarity at home.
.. With the exception of Rand Paul and the partial exception of Ted Cruz, the consensus critique of President Obama from not-Trump Republicans often seemed to be that he should have kept more troops in Iraq and kept more troops in Afghanistan and sent more troops to Libya and intervened in Syria andsent more arms to Ukraine and expanded NATO’s presence in the Baltics and been more willing to bomb Iran and …
.. And the ease with which Trump crushed Jeb Bush, in particular, suggests that it will continue to resonate until Republican leaders become more selective in their hawkishness, more comfortable with five simple words: Invading Iraq was a mistake.
.. But when you dig into survey data, immigration skepticism seems to be rooted as much in concerns about how quickly immigrants assimilate, whether they rely on welfare programs and whether they compete for American jobs as it is in racial or cultural anxiety.

.. should explicitly try to attract immigrants who will be in a strong position to provide for their families in a difficult economic environment. It should encourage a market in which employers have to compete more for less-skilled labor, to slow the alarming retreat from paying work among native-born working-class men.

.. Nothing unites elite conservatives more than their support for bringing entitlement spending under control. But by frequently insisting that he’d never cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, and basically endorsing universal health care, Trump has put himself on the side of millions of grass-roots Republicans.

.. The party will still back tax cuts for the middle class and revenue-neutral tax reforms. But there should be no new income tax cuts for households earning $250,000 or more.
.. A politics that stresses national solidarity isn’t just the best way to keep Trump voters from tearing down the party’s tent. It’s also the most plausible path up from white identity politics to a one-nation, pan-ethnic conservatism.
.. Some liberals believe that this kind of shift is basically impossible — that racism and right-wing politics are so deeply intertwined that any Republican populism will just end up defending welfare for white people, that any “immigration in the national interest” proposals will descend into “Mexican rapists” one-liners on the campaign trail.

 Sadly, Donald Trump has offered powerful evidence for the liberals’ perspective. But if the Republican Party hopes to recover from his destructive rise, it has no alternative except to try to prove them wrong.

The Evangelicals and the Great Trump Hope

The former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister whose daughter, Sarah, is a senior adviser to Mr. Trump, checked the “family values” box by testifying to Mr. Trump’s closeness to his adult children.

.. Mr. Jeffress bluntly said that in the face of perceived threats facing evangelicals, “I want the meanest, toughest, son-of-a-you-know-what I can find in that role, and I think that’s where many evangelicals are.”

.. But the anger, anxiety and insecurity many contemporary white evangelicals feel are better understood as a response to an internal identity crisis precipitated by the recent demise of “white Christian America,” the cultural and institutional world built primarily by white Protestants that dominated American culture until the last decade.

.. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, white Christians (Catholics and Protestants) constituted a majority (54 percent) of the country; today, that number has slipped to 45 percent.

.. More than two-thirds believe that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against other groups. For discrimination against Christians, that number is nearly eight in 10.

.. Mr. Cruz assured evangelicals that he’d secure them exemptions from the new realities, while Mr. Trump promised to reinstate their central place in the country. Mr. Cruz offered to negotiate a respectable retreat strategy, while Mr. Trump vowed to turn back the clock.

For white evangelical Protestants, Mr. Trump’s general vow to “make America great again” means something specific. Mr. Trump stepped into the spotlight just as the curtain was coming down on the era of white Protestant dominance.

Trump As Tribal Leader

The thing that frustrates me, though, is that so many of the anti-Trump people seem to think that Trump is some kind of aberration, that the system was more or less fine before he barreled in and started tearing it up. Not true. He was only able to accomplish this because the Republican Party, and indeed the entire edifice of our political system, has grown weak at its foundations.

.. it will never fail to astonish me, the degree to which the Left is blind to how its own principles and illiberalism strengthens Trump. We all see how Black Lives Matter and related leftist groups trample all over institutional authority in colleges with race-based special pleading, some of it flatly racist, and administrators yield.

.. Given that reality, how long did they think it was going to be before a white candidate emerged who would defend white tribal interests, and who didn’t care what any of them thought about him? If Trump is the champion of white identity politics — and he pretty much is — then the Democrats should think about how their practicing tribal identity politics has contributed to his rise on the Right. I’m not blaming Trump on the Democrats, but I am saying that their “diversity” rhetoric, and the way they have mobilized their own tribes, has helped to create the social and cultural conditions that brought us Trump.

.. “Total ostracism and shame.” If you lived and worked in a cultural environment in which you were at risk at every moment of saying the “wrong” thing, and being made to pay a severe price for it — even when you are merely stating a conventional conservative opinion — well, wouldn’t you be emotionally attracted to a man like Trump? Again, many liberals haven’t the slightest idea how their own behavior has fueled the rise of Trump.

.. If black lives matter (for example), then why don’t white lives matter? That sort of thing. For a very long time, much liberal rhetoric has been focused on left-wing identity politics, not appealing to what unifies us as Americans, but on our tribal divisions.

.. I expect Hillary Clinton to use a lot of unity rhetoric this fall. But here’s the thing: if she wins, I fully expect her to govern as someone who treats my own tribe — conservative Christians — as the enemy.

.. the nation is fractured and fracturing. Both political parties have benefited from the ideological divide they have created, and that historical circumstances have created. What’s new about Trump is that for the first time, many whites are seeing themselves the way Democrats and the liberal media have encouraged blacks, Hispanics, and gays to see themselves: as a tribe.

The Seven Broken Guardrails of Democracy

Here’s the part of the 2016 story that will be hardest to explain after it’s all over: Trump did not deceive anyone. Unlike, say, Sarah Palin in 2008, Trump appeared before the electorate in his own clothes, speaking his own words. When he issued a promise, he instantly contradicted it. If you chose to accept the promise anyway, you did so with abundant notice of its worthlessness. For all the times Trump said believe me and trust me in his salesman patter, he communicated constantly and in every medium that there was only thing you could believe and trust: If you voted for Donald Trump, you’d get Donald Trump, in all his Trumpery and Trumpiness.
 .. The television networks that promoted Trump; the primary voters who elevated him; the politicians who eventually surrendered to him; the intellectuals whoargued for him, and the donors who, however grudgingly, wrote checks to him—all of them knew, by the time they made their decisions, that Trump lied all the time, about everything. They knew that Trump was ignorant, and coarse, and boastful, and cruel. They knew he habitually sympathized with dictators and kleptocrats—and that his instinct when confronted with criticism of himself was to attack, vilify, and suppress. They knew his disrespect for women, the disabled, and ethnic and religious minorities. They knew that he wished to unravel NATO and other U.S.-led alliances, and that he speculated aloud about partial default on American financial obligations. None of that dissuaded or deterred them.
.. Polls in late May show 85 percent of Republicans now supporting Trump.
.. It’s often said that a good con is based upon the victim’s weaknesses. Why were conservatives and Republicans so vulnerable? Are these vulnerabilities not specific to one side of the political spectrum—are they more broadly present in American culture? Could it happen to liberals and Democrats next time? Where were the guardrails?
..  The first guardrail to go missing was the old set of expectations about how a candidate for president of the United States should speak and act.
.. Donald Trump, by contrast, former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney lamented, exemplifies what millions of parents would fear in their sons: “the bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics.”
.. The second broken guardrail is the expectation of some measure of trustworthiness in politicians.
.. Donald Trump’s dishonesty, however, is qualitatively different than anything before seen from a major-party nominee.
.. A third broken guardrail is the expectation that a potential president should possess deep—or at least adequate—knowledge of public affairs.
.. It’s a fair generalization that Republicans demand less policy expertise from their national leaders than Democrats have usually expected from theirs.
.. What’s different now is the massive Republican and conservative rejection of the idea that a candidate for president should know anything substantive about governing at all. As of November, 2015, 62 percent of Republicans insisted that “ordinary Americans” would do a better job solving the country’s problems than professional politicians.
.. Over the past three cycles, Republicans have elevated a succession of manifestly unqualified people to high places in their national politics. Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann shot to stardom in the Tea Party era. For a brief period in late 2015, Ben Carson led the Republican polls—Carson being the only candidate who made even Donald Trump look knowledgeable by comparison.
.. Although Republican voters in the aggregate are better informed than Democratic voters in the aggregate, their votes are guided by two more urgent and immediate feelings: bleak pessimism
.. Despairing yet obdurate, Republicans have come to value willpower over intellect, combativeness over expertise.
.. “A party whose leading factions often seemed incapable of budging from 1980s-era dogma suddenly caved completely to a candidate who regards much of the conservative vision with indifference bordering on contempt.”
.. Trump urged evangelical leaders to “trust him” on traditional marriage. Days later, he told a reporter that he’d “move forward” on gay rights. He then resolved the contradiction by refusing to answer more questions about the issue.
.. “We love him most for the enemies he made,”
.. Donald Trump would have been hemmed in a generation ago by a fifth guardrail: the primacy of national security concerns. Trump has no relevant experience, no military record, scant interest in the topic—and a long history of casual expressions of sympathy for authoritarian rulers. He famously explained that he gets his military advice from TV talk shows.
.. There’s something more going on here than an Iraq War hangover. Trump’s foreign policy is predicated upon an apocalyptic vision of the United States as a weak and fading country, no longer able to shoulder the costs and burdens of world leadership. That view aligns with the deeply pessimistic mood of today’s Republican voters. Sixty-six percent of them say that life has gotten worse for people like them as compared to 50 years ago.
.. Trump’s ramshackle statements do present a coherent point of view. His instinct is always to abandon friends and allies, to smash up alliances that have kept the peace, to leave the world to fend for itself against aggressors and predators.
.. Trump’s online presence is strongly reinforced by pro-Putin trolls and bots.
.. Republicans still care that their candidate be “strong.” They thrill to Trump’s rhetoric of massive violence against ISIS. What they seem no longer to care about is the larger architecture of security built since 1941 to keep America and its friends safe, prosperous, and free.
.. A deep belief in tolerance and non-discrimination for Americans of all faiths, creeds, and origins also once functioned as a guardrail against destructive politics.
.. n the words of the 1980 Republican platform: “The truths we hold and the values we share affirm that no individual should be victimized by unfair discrimination because of race, sex, advanced age, physical handicap, difference of national origin or religion, or economic circumstance.”
.. Trump has appealed to white identity more explicitly than any national political figure since George Wallace. But whereas Wallace was marginalized first within the Democratic Party, and then within national politics, Trump has increasingly been accommodated.
.. One-time Trump opponents like former Bush White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer now dismiss criticism of Trump’s slurs and insults as “a Northeastern look down your nose at other people who are different …. That [criticism] is disdain for the voters.”
.. That’s the summary of a set of experiments by psychologists at Northwestern University. Their work is supported by abundant evidence across the social sciences, including perhaps most famously a 2007 paper by Robert Putnam showing that increases in ethnic diversity lead to collapses in civic health. Trust among neighbors declines, as does voting, charitable giving, and volunteering.
.. Trump is running not to be president of all Americans, but to be the clan leader of white Americans. Those white Americans who respond to his message hear his abusive comments, not as evidence of his unfitness for office, but as proof of his commitment to their tribe.
.. Ticket splitting in 1984 was only a little less dramatic
.. Partisan identities have hardened since then.
.. Once you’ve convinced yourself that a president of the other party is the very worst possible thing that could befall America, then any nominee of your party—literally no matter who—becomes a lesser evil.
.. Policy, however, is not the first or second or third impetus of the Trump campaign. It’s driven by something else—and the source of that something is found inside the conservative and Republican world, not outside. The Trump phenomenon is the effect of many causes. Yet overhanging all the causes is the central question: Why did Republicans and conservatives react to those causes as they did? There were alternatives. Of all the alternatives for their post-Obama future, Republicans and conservatives selected the most self-destructive of the options before them. Why? What went wrong? That will be the excruciating mystery to ponder during the long and difficult work of reconstruction ahead.