Populism

What’s left of the Bush-Cheney wing of the Republican Party doesn’t like Ron DeSantis. But it’s eager to see him run for president anyway. For if DeSantis challenges Trump for the 2024 GOP nomination, the old establishment stands to gain no matter who ultimately gets the nod. The Florida governor certainly seems to be ideologically closer to Trump-style populism than to the neoconservatism that prevailed among elite Republicans from the end of the Reagan era to the defeat of Mitt Romney in 2012. Why, then, would those who pine for the likes of Bush and Romney want to see a choice between Trump and DeSantis, both right-wing populists, two years from now?

With the collapse of Liz Cheney's political career in Wyoming, Donald Trump's supporters are fully ensconced in the vast majority of critical candidacies headed into November. He and his supporters have remade the GOP, at least for the moment, into a party devoted to the Trumpian America First agenda and running on that set of priorities — at least when it comes to the lip service they give to border concerns, trade, anti-globalism and culture war issues. But will this be a Republican Party that actually delivers on these priorities should they receive voters' endorsement in November? That’s a more questionable proposition. The core problem that many traditional GOP forces have with a Trumpian agenda is one of prioritization, not of positioning.

Two men stare down as they prepare to brawl in a made-for-TV spectacle. The cameras spotlight their faceoff as the referee restrains them from coming to blows prematurely. No, this wasn’t a promotional for the UFC heavyweight world championship live on HBO at the MGM Las Vegas. This was the GOP Ohio Senate Forum hosted by FreedomWorks. The Buckeye State has produced some of America’s greatest statesmen. It’s given us eight presidents and giants of the Senate from Robert A. Taft to the retiring Rob Portman. Now it's given us a car full of clowns. A few months ago, I wrote about how the Republican primary contest for Ohio's Senate seat was descending into madness. It’s now entered the realm of complete absurdity.

Laramie, Wyoming William Kristol, a Grand Poobah of neoconservatism, is leaving the Republican party to join the donkeys of the Democratic one. As Dorothy Parker remarked on being told that Calvin Coolidge had died, ‘How could they tell?’ Mr Kristol, of course, was never a Republican to begin with, only a conservative Democrat. Still, it is true that with Donald Trump’s election and ascendance to the Oval Office, the Republican party has changed considerably, at least for now. So has American conservatism. Whether or not the GOP remains the party of Trump after he steps down from the White House or is dragged out of it by his gilded forelock, conservatism in this country will continue to be Trumpist, and probably for a very long time.

The Republican National Convention kicks off Monday in the hope of offering voters an alternative to the unfocused, self-serving Democratic counterpart that took place last week. President Trump's best chance of accomplishing this lies in following the blueprint of a speech he gave in Pennsylvania this past Thursday. The Democratic party's convention attempted to appeal to everyone and thus appealed to no one, stacking excessively woke and anti-American screeds in the daytime with establishment figures giving vapid, hyperbolic anti-Trump speeches during the primetime national broadcast. Missing was an expression of a cohesive policy platform, which would seem key in a year where a division between the moderates and progressive left defined the primary.

‘The Trump presidency is over’, said Peter Wehner, in the Atlantic. The great wizards of liberal punditry stroked their beards and agreed. These are suddenly serious times and the president is a joke. He cannot survive, surely.‘The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point,' wrote Wehner, 'when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation.’Run that paragraph back through the journalistic ego-filter and it translates as: ‘I told you so! Why didn’t everyone listen to me?’The trouble is, Peter, the public still won’t listen.

Ross Perot, who has just died at age 89, is wrongly remembered as the man who cost George H.W. Bush his re-election in 1992. He should be remembered as the man who cost his own populist ideas their chance to remake American politics 20 years before the election of Donald Trump. Perot showed the promise of populism — then betrayed it, bottling it up for the next two decades. As far as Perot was concerned, if populism could win without him, it shouldn’t win at all. And so he made it as difficult as possible for anyone else — Jesse Ventura, Pat Buchanan, and yes, even Donald Trump — to build on what Perot achieved in 1992. And maybe Perot did cost Bush I his re-election, just not in the way most people think.

America is unraveling into an unhappy confederation of hostile tribes. Extremists on the right are murdering Jews in synagogues and African Americans in churches. The woke left is bullying us into a neo-segregation in which we’re judged by the color of our skin. We’re too obsessed with economic growth to recognize that the rising tide has swallowed entire regions. We’re too proud of our tradition of immigration to admit the failures of assimilation.At a time of such angry division, what can bind up our wounds and bring us together as a nation?A renewed patriotism would be a step in the right direction, but it’s not enough. Patriotism asks us to love our country. But what we need now is more than love of country. We must love our fellow citizens.

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Donald J. Trump ran his insurgency presidential campaign against the coordinated opposition of every single powerful institution in the Western world. The single decisive factor working in Trump’s favor was his ability to appeal to the millions of ‘forgotten’ Americans who felt particularly ill-served by these institutions. Trump’s shock victory was therefore simultaneously a stinging indictment of America’s elite institutions and a surprising vindication of the functional legitimacy of our democracy. After all, if a candidate is able to win in spite of near-unanimous opposition of a country’s elite institutions, this says something reassuring about the workings of democracy per se.

There have been many efforts to explain the rise of global populism, most of which posit it as a blowback against globalisation and the unequal economic effects that it has had on developed-country populations. The liberal international order has exacerbated income inequality, with middle classes rising in places like China and India at the expense of working classes in North America and Western Europe. But there has been a competing explanation for the shift that is rooted in cultural identity rather than economics. Or rather, identity becomes the way that voters interpret economic decline.