Defying the Odds

by James W. Ceaser

  Within his own party, Bush faced an unexpectedly strong primary challenge from columnist Pat Buchanan. After growing up in Washington, D.C., earning degrees at Georgetown and Columbia, working as a White House aide in two Republican administrations, and logging many hours on the television talk-show circuit, Buchanan was yet another insider who took up outsiderism. Specifically, he became a spokesperson for a faction of conservatism that disdained internationalism and free trade, and even flirted with Holocaust denial. Bush’s support for NAFTA and Israel outraged him. “He is yesterday and we are tomorrow,” Buchanan said in his announcement speech. “He is a globalist and we are nationalists. He believes in some Pax Universalis; we believe in the Old Republic. He would put Americans’ wealth and power at the service of some vague New World Order; we will put America first.”28 After the Los Angeles riots, he placed much of the blame for disorder on undocumented immigrants: “Foreigners are coming into this country illegally and helping to burn down one of the greatest cities in America.” His solution will sound familiar to those who saw the 2016 campaign: “If I were President, I would have the (Army) Corps of Engineers build a double-barrier fence that would keep out 95% of the illegal traffic. I think it can be done.”29

  Buchanan also saw the budding desperation of the white working class. In his 1992 convention address, he said:

  There were the workers at the James River Paper Mill, in the frozen North Country of New Hampshire—hard, tough men, one of whom was silent, until I shook his hand. Then he looked up in my eyes and said, “Save our jobs!” There was the legal secretary at the Manchester airport on Christmas Day who told me she was going to vote for me, then broke down crying, saying, “I’ve lost my job, I don’t have any money; they’re going to take away my daughter. What am I going to do?”30

  Similar concerns drove the candidacy of Ross Perot, who said that incompetence and corruption lay behind trade agreements that purportedly hurt U.S. interests. “[We] have made the strangest trade agreements in the world with our international competitors. They have picked our pockets. Why? They knew how to negotiate. The people we sent over didn’t. And the people we sent over to negotiate know that, if they keep their noses clean, that in a short period of time they can be hired for $30,000 a month as a Japanese lobbyist.”31

  Buchanan and Perot seemed on track to become central figures in American politics. It was not to be. Buchanan upset Bob Dole in the 1996 New Hampshire primary, but never posed a serious threat to his nomination, and failed to get a speaking role at the party convention. In fall of that year, Perot ran as the Reform Party candidate but his share of the popular vote was less than half of his 1992 level, and he quit politics. When Buchanan took up the Reform Party label in 2000, he got less than 1 percent of the popular vote, and his only major influence on the campaign was accidental: Democrats claimed that faulty ballot design caused hundreds of Gore supporters in Palm Beach County to vote for Buchanan by mistake, tipping Florida and the presidency to George W. Bush.

  Fast-forward to 2016. Like their predecessors in the world of outsiders, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump said American workers were suffering because of the perfidy of special interests and their enablers in the government. In particular, Trump was the culmination of more than two centuries of outsiderism: a silver-spoon populist (widely seen as a demagogue) who warned of rigged political processes, dangerous foreigners, slick lobbyists, greedy rich people, and snooty intellectual elites. He trafficked in insults and unfounded conspiracy theories, and some of his followers responded with a nasty zeal that crossed the line into bullying and violence.

  He also took his party in a different ideological direction.

  LEFT, RIGHT, AND THE GRID

  The inside-outside spectrum represents just one dimension of American politics. Another is the traditional dimension of party-and-issue-position, ranging from left to right. As the 1992 book explained, it is possible to put these axes together in a grid that locates major figures on the American political landscape. (See table 1.1.)

  As subsequent chapters will explain in much more detail, this grid helps us see the relationships of presidential candidates and congressional leaders. Sanders and Trump were both outsiders, but the former’s issue stands placed him well to the left. For a while early in the campaign, Cruz had a good relationship with fellow outsider Trump, but his own ideology was distinctly more conservative. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi held off on an endorsement until the end of the primary campaign, and the grid illustrates the cross-pressures that she faced. On the one hand, she and many of her backbenchers were sympathetic to Sanders’s issue positions, but, like Clinton, she was also a wealthy insider who had raised millions from business and financial interests. (Also like Clinton, she was a legacy insider: both her father and her brother had served as mayor of Baltimore.)

  Any discussion of the left-right dimension requires some context. As issues evolve, so does the ideological spectrum. From the mid-nineteenth century until the Second World War era, conservative Republicans believed in protectionism, while liberal Democrats championed free trade. By late twentieth century, they had switched sides. In his 1979 announcement of candidacy, Ronald Reagan proposed what eventually became the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In the 1990s, Bill Clinton solidified his standing as a moderate by endorsing NAFTA over the objections of most congressional Democrats. He secured its passage by building a coalition of the minority of Democrats who favored free trade, along with the overwhelming majority of Republicans. His partner in this effort was House minority whip Newt Gingrich. Twenty-four years later, the partisan and ideological lines seemed to be on the verge of another change, with Trump joining Sanders in criticizing NAFTA and opposing a Pacific trade agreement.

  Sometimes, the country settles certain issues, thereby moving the ideological goalposts. In the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, there was a great debate over basic civil rights laws. National Review opposed federal legislation in this field, and in 1957 ran an editorial “Why the South Must Prevail.”32 By 2016, conservatives were routinely quoting Martin Luther King, and they knew that questioning the 1964 Civil Rights Act was beyond the pale in national politics. (While preparing for his ill-fated 2016 presidential race, Senator Rand Paul awkwardly walked back his earlier comments on the law.33) Equally dramatic was the transformation of the politics of marriage. In 1992, Bill Clinton opposed legal recognition of same-sex marriage, and, in 1996, he reluctantly signed the Defense of Marriage Act. As late as 2004, conservative Republicans hoped to score gains on the marriage issue, and President Bush endorsed a constitutional amendment to define marriage exclusively as the union of a man and woman. By 2016, public opinion had undergone a radical transformation in favor of same-sex marriage and the Supreme Court had ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause guarantees the right to marry a member of the same sex.34 In the presidential campaign, Republican candidates seldom mentioned the issue.

  And then there was the dog that did not bark: affirmative action. In the 1990s it was still a live issue, and even in Democratic-trending California, voters passed a 1996 ballot measure banning racial preferences. In the following years, however, discussions of affirmative action nearly vanished from campaign rhetoric. In 2016, the Supreme Court voted 4–3 to approve the consideration of race in ensuring a diverse student body.35 The decision occurred in the middle of the presidential race, and it might have come out as a 4–4 tie if Justice Scalia had not recently died. In spite of these potentially electric circumstances, GOP candidates said little about it, and the issue did not even come up in debates.

  On a couple of occasions, reporters did ask Trump about affirmative action. His brief responses revealed something both about the extent to which the issue had gone to rest and about his approach to policy in general. Late in 2015, Scalia was still alive and he suggested in oral argument that affirmative action programs might place some African American students in overly demanding programs. “I don’t like what he said
,” Trump said when a reporter asked him about the comment. “No, I don’t like what he said. I heard him, I was like, ‘Let me read it again’ because I actually saw it in print, and I’m going—I read a lot of stuff—and I’m going, ‘Whoa!’ ”36 On Meet the Press, he said, “Well, you know, you have to also go free market. You have to go capability. You have to do a lot of things. But I’m fine with affirmative action. We’ve lived with it for a long time. And I lived with it for a long time. And I’ve had great relationships with lots of people. So I’m fine with it.”37

  Trump’s attitude on this issue, as on most others, was essentially pragmatic, which is why our grid does not place him on either the left or the right. Political commentators often use pragmatic interchangeably with words such as practical or prudent. It means something different. Pragmatism is a school of thought that shuns abstract theories and ultimate truths in favor of “what works.”38 Trump often made clear that he was a “what works” kind of guy, and if he had ever read William James, he would have smiled at the way he posed pragmatism’s usual question: “What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?” In the case of affirmative action, Trump’s position turned on convenience and familiarity rather than any deep thought about equal rights. He usually dismissed high ideals by reducing them to crude material terms. Consider, for instance, America’s foundational proposition that all men are created equal. “The world is not fair,” Trump said in a 2006 video. “You know they come with this statement ‘all men are created equal.’ Well, it sounds beautiful, and it was written by some very wonderful people and brilliant people, but it’s not true because all people and all men [laughter] aren’t created [equal] . . . you have to be born and blessed with something up here [pointing to his head]. On the assumption you are, you can become very rich.”39 Similarly, Trump did not think of “American exceptionalism” as a way of thinking about the nation’s role as a beacon for equality and liberty. As he said in 2015, it was all about the Benjamins.

  I want to take everything back from the world that we’ve given them. We’ve given them so much. On top of taking it back, I don’t want to say, “We’re exceptional, we’re more exceptional.” Because essentially we’re saying, “We’re more outstanding than you. By the way, you’ve been eating our lunch for the last 20 years, but we’re more exceptional than you.” I don’t like the term. I never liked it.40

  Trump’s disdain for these ideas put him at odds with a major strain of conservative thought that revered the Declaration.41 It surely set him apart from conservatives who loved to quote Reagan’s rhetoric of a “shining city on a hill” and who faulted President Obama for seeming to belittle American exceptionalism. Trump just did not care very much for conservative ideology. In May 2016, he said, “This is called the Republican Party. It’s not called the Conservative Party.”42 Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio told a post-election conference, “One of the problems is many people tried to look at the Donald Trump phenomenon through the ideological lenses which had defined previous Republican presidential nominating contests. Donald Trump is post ideological. His movement transcends ideology.”43

  His movement did appeal to “alt-right” activists who believed in an American nationalism rooted in “blood and soil.” Unlike Pat Buchanan, however, who had raised this theme in his 1992 campaign, Trump did not draw from any consistent philosophy. In 2012, he had taken a totally different tack when he criticized Mitt Romney on immigration: “He had a crazy policy of self-deportation which was maniacal. It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote. He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.” Trump said that the GOP needed a comprehensive policy “to take care of this incredible problem that we have with respect to immigration, with respect to people wanting to be wonderful productive citizens of this country.”44 A few years later, he could see that a hardline immigration policy would win him some support—so, in true pragmatic fashion, he reversed himself.

  Until 2016, politicians and journalists typically assumed that the GOP electorate cared mostly about the Reaganite agenda of limiting the power of the federal government. According to conservative writer Yuval Levin, Trump demonstrated to GOP politicians that “the people they claimed to represent were not quite who they imagined they were.” He elaborates: “Trump showed that much of the base of the party was driven far more by resentment of elitist arrogance, by a rejection of globalism, and by economic and cultural insecurity than by a commitment to conservative economic or political principles.”45 Buchanan had appealed to such sentiments, too, but why did they carry so much more force in 2016 than they had in 1992? The answer lies in some very large changes in American society.

  COMING APART

  In a prescient 1992 article, Nicholas Lemann noted that the Clintons were the first products of the meritocracy to reach the White House. FDR, JFK, and George H. W. Bush were all intelligent, but they entered the Ivy League when it still catered to rich students instead of smart ones. Truman did not go to college, and Johnson, Nixon and Reagan went to obscure local schools. Eisenhower and Carter got into military academies on merit, wrote Lemann, “but for them college was the doorway only into a narrow elite, the officer corps, not the common run of leadership positions.” He went on:

  Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton will be the first occupants of the White House who truly meet the big break test: the day that fat letter from an elite college (Georgetown and Wellesley, respectively) arrived in their middle class, middle-of-the-country mailboxes was the day the trajectory of their lives changed dramatically. The Clintons met and courted on the campus of the elite Yale Law School; as the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell has observed, for meritocrats the dean of admissions functions as a de facto marriage broker.46

  The trends that brought the Clintons together had been under way for some time. In 1947, the year that Hillary Clinton was born, only 5.4 percent of Americans over the age of twenty-five had four years of college or more.47 In 1970, the year of the Clintons’ storied first meeting at the Yale Law Library, that figure was up to 16.4 percent. The ranks of higher education had swollen because of the GI Bill of Rights, the growth of state university systems, and the expansion of financial aid. At the kind of high-ranking institutions that the Clintons had attended, standardized testing had helped create an efficient “sorting machine,” spotting smart youths and bringing them to campus.48 Higher education stayed busy during and after the Clinton administration. Between 1992 and 2015, the share of college-educated adults rose from 23.6 percent to 35.6 percent.

  It makes sense that a better-educated America would become a more prosperous America, and certain topline statistics seem to bear out this assumption. In the third quarter of 1992, real gross domestic product per capita (2009 dollars) was $36,184. In the third quarter of 2016, the figure stood at $51,473—up 42 percent.49 In October 1992, unemployment was 6.9 percent. Twenty-four years later, it was down to 4.7 percent.50 On Election Day 1992, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 3,252.48.51 On Election Day 2016, it finished at 18,332.74—a 464 percent increase. These improvements came about even with the tech-bubble recession of 2001, the Great Recession of 2007–2009, and the sluggish growth of the Obama years.

  Economic life did get a great deal better—for college graduates. For people whose schooling stopped short of a bachelor’s degree, the picture was darker. From 1990 to 2015, the top sector for employment growth was educational services (105 percent), while manufacturing employment fell by 30 percent.52 In the early 1990s, the median worker over age twenty-five with a bachelor’s degree (but no higher degree) made 40 percent more than a worker with just a high school diploma. By 2015, that difference was 70 percent.53 Moreover, people with college degrees were more likely to have jobs in the first place, gaining from both lower unemployment rates (2.6 versus 5.4 percent in 2015) and higher rates of labor force participation (74 versus 57 percent in 2015).54

  Families headed by college graduates had higher medi
an wealth in 2013 than in 1989, while families headed by those with less education saw no improvement.55 This gap stemmed from income trends, as well as the distribution of benefits from the soaring stock market. A 2013 Pew poll found that 77 percent of college graduates had money in stocks, either directly or through retirement plans. For those with some college but no degree, the figure was 45 percent. Among those with only a high school diploma or less, only 24 percent owned stock.56

  Notwithstanding anecdotes about cab-driving philosophy majors, Americans with degrees generally did so well because the economy placed increasing value on the kinds of skills that colleges teach. Technology was a key reason. The Internet had existed since 1969 but was still not in wide use as Clinton took office: in 1992, there was a grand total of ten websites.57 In the years to follow, the rapid growth of the Internet profoundly affected economics and society, creating entirely new job categories (e.g., webmaster) and providing great new opportunities for people whose jobs involved such activities as coding, writing, research, and graphic design. For those in blue-collar occupations, the change was not as positive.58 Driving a delivery truck was pretty much the same in 2016 as it was decades before, but now the drivers were accountable to black boxes that tracked their every move. (That is why the people in brown uniforms run so fast and look so tense.) Since automation had put some blue-collar workers out of a job completely, these drivers might have considered themselves lucky—except that self-driving trucks were looming as a near-term threat to their employment.59