Were Trump able to check his id and think beyond the horizon of his instincts in the moment, he would be a far more formidable demagogue. Fortunately, he cannot, and so the constitutional architecture of our government, combined with the patriotic commitments of most of the people who work for him, is more than adequate to constrain his will to power as president. Still, it is precisely these qualities in him that make him so fascinating. Beneath his suits and his abnormally long ties, he is a throwback, a kind of generic prototype of premodern man, obsessed with being the alpha of the group. Because he is bereft of any coherent ideology and largely immune to any of the norms of good character, Donald Trump is, in many respects, a perfect example of how capitalism, absent the extra-rational dogmas of morality, creates creatures of pure appetite, guided only by the most rudimentary software of human nature. He cares about sex and power, dominating others, and having his status affirmed. He puts family above all other considerations, but defines the family’s interests in terms of wealth and dynastic glory. He views others as instruments of his will whose value is measured in their loyalty to him, a loyalty that is rarely reciprocated. When asked what sacrifices he made comparable to those of parents who lost a child in war, he couldn’t even name any sacrifice at all.42 He is a knight, in the Nietzschean sense, and he makes his own morality.
Alas, rather than see these facts as flaws, many voters saw them as admirable features. Donald Trump’s improvisational, almost glandular style of politics, combined with his unapologetic ignorance of democratic norms and undiluted resentment toward elites, made him an ideal vessel for the frustrations and anger of not just the Republican base but millions of disaffected non-traditional and Obama voters who felt they had no voice in politics as usual. Indeed, doctrinaire conservatives were among the last to rally to Trump’s banner, a fact easily forgotten now that so many conservative ideologues and intellectuals have retrofitted their worldview to rationalize and accommodate Trumpism.
In short, Donald Trump is the most successful populist politician in American history, with the possible exception of President Andrew Jackson. Many conservative commentators have convinced themselves that Trump’s victory was the product of his own incredible political genius. There is scant evidence to support this claim. This is not necessarily a slight against Trump. Politics is about moments more than anything else. The right politician at the wrong time will almost always lose against the wrong politician at the right time. Trump flirted with running for president in 2000 on the Reform Party ticket and again in 2012. Both times he opted not to, at least in part because he had no chance of winning. The point is simply that Trump won the presidency because the time was ripe for him to do so, and even then he barely pulled it off.43
Just as it’s always advisable to be a well-stocked water seller during a drought, it’s good to be a populist at a moment of widespread thirst for populism. It’s worth remembering that there were two authentic populists in the 2016 presidential race, the other being Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. There is reason to believe that, if the Democratic establishment had not circled the wagons around Hillary Clinton, the quintessential technocratic progressive new-class candidate, Sanders could have won the Democratic primaries. Even if that were not the case, the fact remains that populism is high in the saddle on both the left and the right, here and abroad.
THE PERILS OF POPULISM
Populism, which essentially means nothing more than “peoplism,” is not a doctrine. It is an orientation and a passion. In theory and in its rhetoric, it elevates “the people,” but in reality it only speaks for a subset of them. It shares with nationalism a romantic glorification or sanctification of the group. Those in the group are part of the tribe, the cause, “the movement,” or any other abstraction that triggers “the coalition instinct” discussed earlier. They are us, we, the ones we have been waiting for. “The people” simultaneously claim to be victims and superior to the victimizers, with a more rightful claim on power. They may claim to be “the 99 percent”—they aren’t—but they mean that they are 100 percent of those who matter. “For populists,” writes Jan-Werner Müller, “this equation always works out: any remainder can be dismissed as immoral and not properly a part of the people at all. That’s another way of saying that populism is always a form of identity politics (though not all versions of identity politics are populist).”44
As an outspoken conservative critic of the president, I’ve been subjected to near-constant anger and scorn from Trump supporters, including many who were once admirers of mine. (Indeed, one of the most painful revelations of the last two years has been to discover so many people disappointed in me for not living down to their expectations.) I bring this up because it’s been fascinating to hear from so many Trump supporters who fly under the banner of “We the People.” It is a constant refrain. But it’s also untrue. The Trump supporters’ use of “We the People” is a perfect illustration of Müller’s point. Donald Trump lost the popular vote and, as of this writing, has approval ratings in the mid-30s. Donald Trump, by any objective metric, is not the paladin of “We the People.” He is the representative of the people his supporters believe to be the only people who matter.
Populism and nationalism often go together, but not all populist movements are nationalist, nor are all nationalist movements populist. Before he took his populism to the national stage, William Jennings Bryan was, properly speaking, a Nebraska-firster. Likewise, George Wallace was populist for “the people of Alabama,” by which he meant the white people of Alabama who supported Jim Crow. Al Sharpton rose to fame as a populist demagogue representing himself first and a subset of blacks in Harlem second. Donald Trump talks often about “the American people,” but his definition of who qualifies as the American people often begins and ends with those Americans who support Donald Trump. The “only important thing,” Trump announced at a rally in the spring of 2016, “is the unification of the people—because the other people don’t mean anything.”45
Populist movements in America have tended to be cast on the left side of the political spectrum—except when they’ve been avowedly racist or anti-Semitic, in which case liberal historians and political analysts go to great lengths to disassociate and exonerate progressivism from any such associations. In Europe, where the upper classes have replaced the old notions of inherited nobility and aristocracy with elite technocracy, populism tends to be associated with demagoguery, pandering, and backward thinking. The bankers and bureaucrats scoff at the little people who resist the tides of globalization as bitter losers.
And there’s some truth there. Populist movements do tend to be coalitions of losers. I do not mean that in a pejorative sense but in an analytical one. Populist movements almost by definition don’t spring up among people who think everything is going great and they’re getting a fair shake. Populism is fueled by resentment, the sense that the “real people” are being kept down or exploited by the elites or the establishment or, in the numerous extreme cases of populism, shadowy conspirators. “Conspiracy theories,” Müller writes, are “not a curious addition to populist rhetoric; they are rooted in and emerge from the very logic of populism itself.”46
FDR came up with the phrase “the Forgotten Man” not because he himself was much of a populist but because he needed to siphon off support from his many populist challengers. But the phrase was a brilliant encapsulation of the source of populist discontent. To be forgotten is to feel disrespected, left out, left behind. It breeds a soul-poisoning sense of ingratitude for the status quo and a burning sense that things were better in the past. It was this sentiment that the romantic nationalists of Europe tapped into. All of us are familiar with the way paranoia can fester when we have been excluded; we invent theories about how our enemies—or friends—are working against us.47 Populism often works under the same dynamic, but on a mass scale.
The first populist movements in the United States were mostly agrarian a
nd rural. Farmers, for obvious reasons, were not at the cutting edge of social change. The rapid industrialization and urbanization of American life understandably led rural communities to feel that their country was getting away from them. The tendency of young men to leave their communities in search of a new life in the big city aroused feelings of resentment among those who stayed behind (and amplified feelings of alienation and rootlessness among those who left). The ever-increasing sophistication of financial capitalism made many feel like tools or pawns of forces outside of their control.
This is one reason why populist movements, here and in Europe, are attracted to various forms of “producerism,” an economic doctrine that distinguishes between “good” economic activity—building with your hands, toiling in the soil, etc.—and the mere manipulation of capital. William Jennings Bryan distinguished between those who worked with their hands making things and “the idle holders of idle capital.”48 Producerism is often associated with “right-wing” populist movements, but one can see its relationship to Marxist notions of the labor theory of value and exploitative capital. When Benito Mussolini was transitioning from socialism to fascism, he stopped calling his newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia (The People of Italy), a “socialist daily,” in favor of a “producers’ daily.”49 To listen to Donald Trump, the only jobs that matter are manufacturing and construction. He talks about the trade deficit obsessively, never mentioning that America has a significant trade surplus in services or that trade deficits are the product of large foreign investment in America.
Historically, the demonization of “idle capital” provided a fertile medium for the oldest of conspiracy theories: anti-Semitism. Thomas E. Watson, a prominent Georgia populist, started out as a defender of poor blacks and whites alike, arguing that the poor needed to unite against the monied interests. But because populism has no limiting principle save the need to feed off and stoke resentment, he eventually embraced white supremacy, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Semitism. The 1892 Populist Party platform proclaimed, “A vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents, and it is rapidly taking possession of the world.”50
In Europe in the 1930s and in much of the Arab world today, the widespread belief that the Jews or Zionists are the author of every problem of the world has made anti-Semitism the easiest route to pander to the masses.
“Populists…look at the supposedly secret deals that run the world ‘behind the scenes,’ ” observed Christopher Hitchens, This is “child’s play,” he added. “Except that childishness is sinister in adults.”51 Hitchens was making a more profound point than he might have realized. The corruption of democracy comes from human nature, and children are always closer to our natural state than adults. Adults—hopefully—have been civilized. Children are born barbarians, and their instincts are the same in every era. Populism is a barbaric, childish yawp coming out of democratic man.52
Donald Trump’s constant insistence that “the system is rigged”—even as he runs the system—fits neatly into the mainstream of the populist tradition—as does most of the rhetoric from Bernie Sanders and, to a slightly lesser extent, Elizabeth Warren. At times, Trump’s persecution complex is quite amusing. His relentless tweets asking why the government hasn’t done this or that make it sound like he can’t actually ask his employees directly. But Trump’s indictment of the “globalist” conspiracy against “the people” has some more ominous echoes as well.
In the final weeks of the 2016 presidential race, Trump’s campaign went into overdrive. In an October 13 speech, he railed against “the global special interests” that “don’t have your good in mind.”53 In an ad touted as his “closing argument,” Donald Trump railed against a global “political establishment” that has vampirically “bled our country dry.” Over images of various supposedly villainous globalists—most of them Jewish—Trump inveighed against this sinister cabal. While the screen showed Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Trump declared, “It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”54 (The fact that large swaths of his administration are run by the Goldman Sachs/Wall Street/Davos crowd is a stirring tribute to his lack of ideological—or just plain logical—coherence.)
The ad invited vociferous charges of anti-Semitism, with some likening it to the nineteenth-century anti-Semitic conspiracy forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Such complaints might be heavy-handed, though it doesn’t seem inconceivable that Steve Bannon, Trump’s avowed nationalist campaign manager, was feeding the troll army of alt-right bigots he helped bring out of the floorboards. I don’t think Bannon or Trump are anti-Semites, but it’s much harder to defend them against the charge of gross cynicism in their willingness to play fast and loose with populist rhetoric and their willingness to feed an army of racist and anti-Semitic trolls.*2
But, again, the important point is not that people in Trump’s orbit—or their kindred spirits in Europe—traffic in populist and nativist appeals. It is that we have blundered into a time when such appeals work. There have always been populist opportunists in every country and in every age. But healthy societies with healthy institutions can usually fend them off like a weak virus. The rhetoric of the demagogues is drowned out by the much larger conversation. The dismaying thing about the moment we are in is that demagoguery on the left and the right is in such high demand.
Demagoguery—appealing to the gut instincts of the mob or the crowd—is an ancient form of rhetoric. The term comes from ancient Greeks who first defined a demagogue as a leader of the common people. Only later did it come to mean playing on the passions of the public to foment immediate and unthinking action or hatred toward the system. Demagoguery is quite obviously linked to romanticism, because both elevate the importance of emotion and feelings above reason and fact. But the practice of demagoguery is far more ancient, because it is grounded in human instinct. In primitive societies, where strangers are presumed to be enemies and where survival requires inflaming a zealous defensiveness of the group and demonizing hatred for the other, the ability to see the world in black-and-white is a competitive advantage. A talent for stirring up passion—and the ability to have one’s passion stirred up—is a source of strength. For unity is the fruit of passion. In other words, demagoguery is a natural human trait. Containing, channeling, and dispelling dangerous popular passions is what civilizations do. The Constitution does many things, but one of its chief functions is to blunt and divert the power of demagogues and the masses that listen to them. This was once understood and celebrated by conservatives. Not so much today.
Again, if Trump had been able to keep his instincts in check, he would have been a much more formidable president and a more effective demagogue. If he had a better read on the moment, he would have given a very different inaugural address, reaching out to Democrats for some massive share-the-wealth program of big-infrastructure spending and the like. He would have siphoned some of the populist passion that drove the Sanders campaign. Instead, as so many new presidents do, he misread the election results, antagonizing Democrats and appeasing his most zealous supporters. As a conservative and as an American, this makes me happy, at least in the short term, because by galvanizing opposition against him, he has unwittingly strengthened the system of checks and balances. But in the long term I worry more, because he has demonstrated that conservatism, at least as expressed by the Republican Party and its more loyally allied media outlets, is not immune to the tribal desire for strongmen.
Donald Trump did not cause this corruption on the right; he exploited it. And, having succeeded, he is accelerating it. If civilization is just a conversation, then Donald Trump is already a very consequential president, because he has profoundly changed the conversation of our democracy.
*1 “A big change i
n the common opinion about markets and innovation, I claim, caused the Industrial Revolution, and then the modern world. The change occurred during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in northwestern Europe. More or less suddenly the Dutch and British and then the Americans and the French began talking about the middle class, high or low—the ‘bourgeoisie’—as though it were dignified and free. The result was modern economic growth.
“That is, ideas, or ‘rhetoric,’ enriched us. The cause, in other words, was language, that most human of our accomplishments. The cause was not in the first instance an economic/material change—not the rise of this or that class, or the flourishing of this or that trade, or the exploitation of this or that group. To put the claim another way, our enrichment was not a matter of Prudence Only, which after all is a virtue possessed by rats and grass, too. A change in rhetoric about prudence, and about the other and peculiarly human virtues, exercised in a commercial society, started the material and spiritual progress. Since then the bourgeois rhetoric has been alleviating poverty worldwide, and enlarging the spiritual scope of human life….” Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), xi.
Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy Page 35