by John Marini
Trump was not the first to argue against a narrative that was rooted in an abstract theoretical vision inspired by a future good. When Ludwig von Mises analyzed this phenomena in his book Bureaucracy, he attacked the various forms of Progressivism on the ground of their denigration of reason and common sense. He noted that “the champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty.… They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau, what an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight for! Against all this frenzy of agitation there is but one weapon available: reason. Just common sense is needed to prevent man from falling prey to illusory fantasies and empty catchwords.”1 Where would common sense come from?
Since the end of the Cold War, American leaders have understood their offices in terms of global and administrative rule, rather than political rule on behalf of the American people and the sovereignty of the American nation. Yet those offices were established on the foundation of the moral authority of the people and their Constitution. Once elected or appointed, politicians and bureaucrats have utilized their will, in both domestic and foreign policy, in an unrestrained manner on behalf of bureaucratic rule and organized-interest privilege. They govern on the implicit premise of elections as plebiscites, but it is no longer clear who confers the legitimacy of an electoral mandate. Bureaucratic rule has become so pervasive that it has undermined the ability of the people to establish their consent as the ground of legitimate government. Rather it is the will of the various national—and often international—social, economic, political, and cultural interest groups that determine the outcome of elections.
Trump established his candidacy on the basis of an implicit understanding that America was the midst of a crisis. Those who opposed him denied the seriousness of the crisis and saw Trump himself as the greatest danger. And here again, Trump’s success will likely be dependent upon his ability to articulate the ground of a common good that is still rooted in the past—a common good established by a government that protects the rights of its citizens in a constitutional manner and establishes limits on the authority of government by demanding that the rule of law replace that of political privilege and bureaucratic patronage.
Almost from the start, Donald Trump defined the political contours of the election. He did so by attempting to defy and delegitimize the Washington establishment and its moral defense of diversity and interest-group liberalism. In doing so, he challenged an orthodoxy that had been embraced by both political parties. That orthodoxy, defended as diversity, was made politically unassailable by imposing a monolithic political correctness as the only intellectual and moral standard of public discourse. And that moral and political standard was legitimized and reinforced by the authority of nearly all of the national political elites. It was made politically viable by dividing and appealing to the electorate as discrete groups understood in terms of economic and social interests. It was defined in terms of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and other measurable and controllable demographic categories. Diversity was to become the moral substitute for what had always established unity in any nation or polity: the necessity of pursuing a common good, or justice.
Trump attempted to sever the connection between the governing establishment and those electorally decisive minority groups. Those groups have consistently supported the Democratic Party. But they have served the interests of both parties within the Washington establishment for decades. They have provided both parties with reliable voters who have established the margins of victory in many of the most important states. Trump has insisted from the beginning that he wanted to unify America. Consequently, he made an appeal for the votes of the many minorities who had been long written off by the Republican Party. But he appealed to them as American citizens and offered to secure their rights as citizens, not as members of interest groups. Thus, he avoided, as much as possible, making his appeal to their political leaders and their organizations—those who claim to represent and attempt to speak for them but seem to benefit only themselves or their organized interests.
Of course, it is not easy to appeal to a common good when public discourse, and so much of the country, had come to be defined in terms of its diversity. When political identity is established on the ground of interests, whether economic, social, ethnic, gender, or religious group difference, it is nearly impossible to pursue a common good. Nor is it easy to distinguish residents and aliens, or citizens and noncitizens. In such a time, an appeal to American citizenship is itself almost a revolutionary act because it requires the ability to determine what is common among citizens, while at the same time making a distinction between citizens and all others.
In looking at the people as sovereign, and the country as requiring borders, he made the American nation and its people his primary concern. Along the same lines, Trump has appealed to the rule of law and has attacked bureaucratic rule as the rule of privilege and patronage on behalf of social, economic, foreign policy, and political interest groups. Nonetheless, this appeal on behalf of citizenship is made difficult by the fact that the administrative state has fragmented and isolated the people by undermining or destroying the institutions of civil society. Those institutions include the family, church, professional, and other private associations. In these terms, the success of Trump’s campaign will depend upon the American people’s ability to still recognize the existence of a common or public good.
The problem of revitalizing the political in an administrative state is extraordinarily difficult. At first glance, it would seem to be necessary to return to the political parties as the place to begin. But Trump appeared to have understood that the political parties no longer establish a meaningful link between the people and the government. Party patronage has been replaced by political and bureaucratic patronage, and a professional elite has established itself as the vital center between the people and the government. The authority of that elite cannot be understood simply in terms of social, economic, or even political power. What unites the vital center—what establishes their prominence and legitimizes their public authority—is knowledge. They understand the world through their attachment to their professions: academia, science, economics, business, media, entertainment, and even religion. They often lack political consciousness of themselves as a class. Many of them do not even think of themselves as political. Their interest and loyalty is to what they profess to study and what they think they know, and what establishes their intellectual and political authority is their production of what is seen as useful knowledge in the administrative state.
It is the technical requirements of the modern administrative state that have made it possible to politicize the elites in a manner that disguises their political role. When nearly every social, economic, scientific, religious, and political problem is decided in a bureaucratic or legal way—and always from a central authority; usually Washington, but sometimes New York or one or two other places—the professional elites are given a stake in the political and bureaucratic world. Trump has apparently refused to acknowledge the authority of this policymaking establishment and in doing so has perplexed nearly all of the public intellectuals, both liberal and conservative. In refusing to allow the established vital center to mediate the political debate, he has gone directly to the people. And so doing, he has made it nearly impossible for the vital center to condone or even attempt to understand, let alone praise, his candidacy.
It is not surprising that American elections have also been placed in the hands of the Washington professionals. Social scientists, media pundits, and policy professionals may tilt liberal or conservative and may differ in their party preferences, but they are united in their dependence upon intellectual authority, derived from empirical science and its met
hodology, in their understanding of politics and economics. Moreover, the latest progressive theories have established themselves as the closest thing to a public philosophy. And they are institutionalized, legitimized, and enforced by all of the powers of the bureaucratic state.
Progressive, or postmodern, critical theory had established personal autonomy and group diversity as central to what is now morally defensible in terms of public policy and private behavior. As a result, political partisanship and analysis has focused on race, class, gender, and other such demographics to provide the kind of information that has become central to the shaping and predicting of elections. Moreover, it has served to legitimize dividing the electorate into racial and demographic categories that have come to be understood in moral terms.
Consequently, political campaigns have made a science of dividing the electorate into groups and reassembling them as voting blocs committed to specific policies and issues denominated by the demographic categories themselves. This strategy requires the systematic mobilization of animosity to ensure participation by identifying and magnifying what it is that must be opposed. Appeals to the electorate are strategically controlled by the experts. The kinds of issues that are allowed to be raised are thought to be more important than the manner in which they are packaged and sold to the electorate. Understood in this way, what is central to politics and elections is the elevation of the status of personal and group identity to something approaching a new kind of civil religion.
Individual social behavior, once dependent on traditional morality and understood in terms of traditional virtues and vices, had become almost indefensible when judged in light of the authority established by social science and postmodernism. Public figures have come to be judged not as morally culpable individuals, but by the moral standing established by their political, or partisan, group identity. When coupled with the politicization of civil society and its institutions, the distinction between the public and the private, the personal and the political, has almost disappeared. The destruction of the moral authority of civil society institutions has marginalized the family and the church and has placed the public and private character of American culture in the hands of the intellectuals.
Many conservatives have rejected Trump on the ground that he is not a conservative. But what is conservatism? Is it merely a doctrine, or even a dogma, to be upheld intellectually, as the antidote to liberalism? Or is it the political defense of a certain way of life that derives much of its authority from the past? If conservatism means anything, it must require a defense of the good as established by a tradition that has preserved the best of the past. At its political peak, it came to be understood in terms of the traditional defense of civil and religious liberty. That is what the American Founders and Lincoln understood constitutionalism to be. Yet modern Progressivism is established upon a rejection of the good of the past. And it has established the intellectual and political ground of both liberalism and conservativism.
It is not surprising that many now wonder if they can conserve anything meaningful from the past, including constitutional government itself. They have experienced the wholesale destruction of the regime of civil and religious liberty; one that was built upon a moral tradition that was established in the course of a two-thousand-year-old civilization. It may still be possible to preserve a conservative doctrine, but it is not unreasonable to ask whether it is possible to live a traditional or conservative life. In reality, it is the traditional moral and political defense of civil and religious liberty that has been undermined by liberalism. American citizens, who want to live by the virtues established by that tradition, have no real public means of defending their way of life. The Washington elites have succeeded in transforming the moral foundations of contemporary political and social life behind the backs of the American people, and without their consent.
By mobilizing a constituency outside of and against the Washington establishment, Trump seized the opportunity to revitalize politics in a manner that may, at least potentially, make a revival of the political separation of powers possible. The administrative state had concentrated all economic, social, and political power in the central institutions of government. Trump sought to bypass the organized interests in order to make a direct political appeal to the electorate—one that would have been difficult for anyone from within the Washington policymaking establishment to make. Politicians have had to appeal indirectly to the organized interests, and to the centralized media, not to or on behalf of the political constituencies themselves. The representatives of organized and centralized interests, and the media, had become the mediators between government and the people—but the brusque Trump cut through that layer.
Because the political representatives have represented organized public and private interests en masse, it has been difficult to establish a governing coalition on behalf of a public interest. Modern professional elections have exacerbated the problem by dividing the electorate and appealing to discrete demographic groups. Nonetheless, the officeholders have alienated themselves from the political electorate. Under these circumstances, the Washington establishment itself became a political target. Only an outsider could have benefited from the hostility of the American electorate and their acute awareness that the federal government was no longer able to pursue, let alone establish, a political common good.
Trump was unable to unite his party after the nomination. And he was unable to do so after the election. Indeed, after nearly a year in office, his support within his own party remained lukewarm at best. That has made it difficult for Republican candidates to embrace Trump, thereby depriving them of the energy of potential Trump voters. And it has made it difficult to expand his own base. In addition, that lost year makes the midterm election more difficult than what is normally a difficult first appeal to the electorate after being elected. Will candidates embrace Trump? Will Trump campaign on behalf of those bold enough to support him? Must he recruit wholly new candidates in states that are sympathetic to Trump but have representatives who are not? Are there still forces in society and the electorate that remain hidden or unforeseen? If so, he has the opportunity to establish a new political landscape, one that is not yet recognizable. There is little question that the new partisanship he has brought to bear will be at odds with many of the organized interests in Washington. It goes without saying that those interests will defend themselves and their alliances with the old political elites, the organized interests, and the bureaucracy.
Nonetheless, Trump must establish a governing coalition, and this requires the cooperation of a legislature that has been the anchor of the administrative state. He does benefit from one major asset: the political electorate he has mobilized. He will likely enjoy greater flexibility in dealing with Congress if his policies begin to work and are recognized as beneficial. He cannot count on establishment generosity in terms of mobilizing public opinion on his behalf. That hostility will cease only if he succeeds politically. If that happens, he may well bargain with members of Congress in both parties, establishing a governing coalition on a new ground of partisanship not yet visible. The field is open for him to lay the groundwork for a political realignment, perhaps of a magnitude not seen since FDR. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that Donald Trump can or will prevail against the organized forces that inhabit the administrative state.
The great difficulty Trump faces is the lack of respectable intellectual defenders, those who help shape and inform public opinion. As a Republican, he could have expected support from leading conservative intellectuals. It has not been forthcoming. Before he was elected, many conservatives attacked Trump because he was not a conservative. Yet, after nearly a year in office, he seems to have done what conservatives have advocated for years. Despite this accomplishment, many conservative pundits have failed to acknowledge this success. It is as though the fake, unqualified Trump is still more real in the minds of those who oppose him than the real Trump and his actual accomplishments. If he i
s not judged by what he has done, it is almost impossible to assess factual reality as it relates to Trump. It is not surprising that those who see Trump in terms of his personality, rather than his politics, judge him personally and not politically. Even after a year in office, many of the opinion leaders, liberal and conservative, have denied the legitimacy of Trump’s election despite the judgment of the electorate. Although they have not sought to undermine the election by turning from ballots to bullets, they have substituted words, or volatile rhetoric, as a means to accomplish that task.
Trump may or may not succeed in transforming the landscape of American politics in a manner that makes it possible to reestablish political rule once again. All of those who have a stake in preserving Washington as it now exists are his enemies. The public that is drawn to him is almost wholly unorganized. The ability of the established order to manipulate and control public opinion rests on the authority and respectability of the social, economic, and political elites, nearly all of whom oppose Trump. Trump has built his constituency in opposition to those elites who have denied his legitimacy as president. He has denied that the press and media, which establishes the medium that links the government to its people, fairly and accurately portrays the reality of Washington to those outside of it. He is the first president to vigorously contest the motives and the objectivity of the press, even in terms of presenting simple factual information without bias. He decries fake news and creates his own method of communicating with his constituency.
His success thus far has revealed the need to restore the political rule of the people as a whole. To do so, American public opinion must be reflected in the creation and mobilization of national political majorities. Constitutional government is not possible in the absence of the mobilization of such majorities. They are indispensable for establishing the legitimacy of law in a manner compatible with the rule of law and the common good. That requires revitalizing the meaning of citizenship and reaffirming the sovereignty of the people and the nation. It also requires restoring the link between the people and the political branches of the government, so that both can become the defenders of the Constitution as well as the country that has made it essential to its political existence.