"Trumpism" Doesn’t Exist, and Why It’s So Terrifying (Part 4)
[THIS CONTENT WAS WRITTEN LONG BEFORE THE 2024 ELECTION, AND YET IT'S EVEN MORE RELEVANT TODAY THAN WHEN IT WAS WRITTEN.]
Narrative Mistake #4: America can avoid autocracy. We won’t.
The GOP has always been fond of the “Big Lie.”
The media fuss endlessly over the latest “Big Lie” about election theft in 2020, but as previously mentioned, Birtherism was a kind of “Big Lie,” as was the Swift Boat attack on John Kerry, as were the freak-outs over Sharia Law, CRT, and Obamacare’s Death Panels, as well as decades of “Big Lies” about a supposed Homosexual Agenda. Such “Big Lies” are the bread and butter of GOP politicking.
But for decades, the original BIG “Big Lie”—has been driving a stake further and further into the heart of American pluralism:
Un-American domestic enemies are everywhere and in control; they are destroying the real America; excluded, marginalized, heroic conservatives must destroy their Liberal tyranny to save and restore the nation. (And by the way, all “government” is “tyranny against individual liberty,” because Freedom.)
That BIG “Big Lie” was born in the post-New Deal era, refined and radicalized in the Goldwater era, institutionalized within the GOP during the Reagan era, and weaponized during the Gingrich era and beyond.
It now functions as a supercharged identity myth on the right. All the GOP’s other “Big Lies” are merely derivative lies, and they get traction with conservative voters precisely because they give shape and substance to the original BIG “Big Lie.”
It needs to be said here that conservative scholar Robert Kagan deserves deference when he argues that it would be “bad history” and a huge strategic mistake “to paint all GOP policies for the past 30 years as nothing more than precursors to Trumpism.”[1]
Understood, but his caution totally misses the point. The key issue here isn’t policy, it’s politicking.
The modern history of the GOP is a history piecemeal extremism. Regardless of any stated policy priorities (and sometimes in spite of those priorities), the Establishment wing of the GOP, which dominated the capital-P Party machinery for many decades, increasingly used hegemonic, anti-pluralist politicking to win elections.
The media activists of the 1940s and 1950s built a model for right-wing political activism, told in detail by Nicole Hemmer in her book Messengers of the Right. These activists became an insurgency that eventually overthrew the GOP Establishment: “Not only did they start an array of media enterprises, they built a movement… They coordinated rallies, founded organizations, ran political campaigns and mobilized voters.”
They set the stage for a shift toward extremist divisive narratives, which started around the mid-1960s, as the hard right began to exercise its electoral muscle. And while the Establishment decried the extremism of the movement’s loudest voices, it never hesitated to leverage the extreme right-wing’s ability to deliver both votes and money.
According to news coverage of the time, by 1977 the New Right had overwhelmed the Establishment “in legislative battles in Congress, in political fundraising, in mobilizing support for controversial issues throughout the country, in winning key off-year elections, and in sheer intellectual energy.”
And criticism of the right wing’s extremism did nothing to stop the rightward drift of the party. In 1977, GOP House Rep. John Anderson saw the purge coming and warned that the “extremist fringe” wanted to push moderates out of the GOP. And Democratic Sen. Thomas McIntyre saw the increasingly divisive nature of the Republican Party and warned of an “ominous change taking place in the very direction and character of American politics.”[2]
The piecemeal shift continued even as the right-wing itself was reshaped by its insurgent religious fringe. By 1980, after the religious right helped Reagan win the White House, he brought them into his administration, at the same time they were co-opting more and more of the Party machinery.[3]
Nicole Hemmer builds on her history of GOP extremism in her second book, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. By the early 1990s, the religious fringe of the GOP had built an enormous and highly efficient voter turnout machine, and had become gatekeepers to GOP voters. By 1995, they had elected enough of their own to become a thorn in the side of House Speaker Gingrich, who had “sold them out time and time again” on the social issues that meant the most to them.
Says Hemmer of the right’s political tactics, including the Clinton impeachment:
It was not that such tactics were new to Gingrich – he had been a fan of destructive tactics throughout his time in Congress – but that they metastasized under pressure from his right, shredding any instinct toward compromise…
That ethos led to a transformation within the party when the right was finally in the driver’s seat. And it marked the moment when moderates were no longer welcome.
It might take a few more years for the remaining moderates to retire, switch parties, lose elections, or adopt hard-line views, but under Gingrich, the party transformed from one that celebrated the broad tent ethos that welcomed Reagan Democrats to one that hunted heretics, dismissing anyone not on board with the right’s agenda as a RINO.[4]
Within the Party Establishment, the shift in politicking to threat-based, hate-filled narratives was driven by a congealing “self-trickery” among GOP operatives, to use a phrase of Tim Miller’s.
They needed a narrative that would work with right-wing voters. Miller, who worked for a range of GOP politicians in the 1990s and beyond, makes an honest confession about the work required, even of moderates:
“Our actions exacerbated the sense of alienation among many of ‘our’ voters. Rather than trying to address their underlying concerns or channel their anger for good, which frankly may or may not have been possible, we chose instead to try to manage a raging fire, redirecting their resentment toward cheap culture war calories.”
“Trumpism”? Hardly. Conservatives Have Been Building Their “Real-America” Narrative for 70 Years
Election cycle by election cycle—sometimes tacitly, but more often deliberately—supposedly “Big Tent” conservatives staked a proprietary claim to being the “real America,” while vilifying and delegitimizing their opponents as un-American domestic enemies. Thus, to riff on Kagan’s words, I believe it’s quite fair “to paint all GOP [politicking] for the past 30 years as nothing more than precursors to Trumpism.”
In the beginning, the BIG “Big Lie” may have started out as a narrative of political convenience, an embrace of grassroots grumblings and complaints that helped Republicans gain a tactical electoral advantage.
Since its birth in the 1950s, the BIG “Big Lie” has become an explicitly narrative project aiming to tear down and rebuild the world through the use of story, and over the decades, that’s exactly what it has done.
The most terrifying part about all this? Romantic identity myths require a positive ending that elevates the hero.
The battle must end in a complete rout. Reagan argued that conservatives must win or “all of humanity” would be lost.[5] Pat Buchanan advised Nixon: “It will be their kind of society or ours; we will prevail or they shall prevail.”[6] Proto-pugilist Newt Gingrich threatens: “Trump’s America and the post-American society that the anti-Trump coalition represents are incapable of coexisting. One will simply defeat the other. There is no room for compromise.”[7] Supreme Court Justice Alito said, “One side or the other is going to win… because there are differences on fundamental things that can’t be compromised.”[8]
All is lost if the hero doesn’t win, and so, the hero will win.
This is the last and most critical mistake that conventional wisdom makes about the MAGA phenomenon: believing that America can avoid a right-wing autocracy.
Here is the stone-cold, difficult truth: there’s no stopping autocracy’s overtaking of pluralistic democracy.
Given America’s penchant for wave elections, which happen every few election cycles, the GOP will soon win unified control of the federal government. And what is the likelihood that the born-again conservatives in control of the GOP will give up their revanchist hero mythology—with its hegemonic claims over all things “America”—before they sweep into power?
Zero.
Even if they don’t win the White House in 2024, sometime the in next decade or two, a born-again conservative GOP will roll into Washington DC atop a wave election that they will surely claim as a “mandate.”
At that point, the rest of us will get pulled along into a “real America” of their making, likely one modeled on 18th century America—i.e., the very kind of society today’s born-again conservatives see as a blueprint for the ages.[9]
That new America, like the original colonial version, most likely will be a pious, radically libertarian, deeply economically stratified, racialist, pamphleteering free-for-all. Following their originalist logic, America would become a kind of maximalist colonial-era world: the same mentality just with bigger churches, better guns, and cooler technology.
In the conservative narrative, that’s the originalist freeze-frame that the founders intended, and they insist that we all have to live in that zero-sum world with them. Any liberal win that modifies the freeze-frame comes at their expense.
In his book, Revenge of Power, former editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine, Moisés Naím, points out that today’s new breed of autocrats, in order to seize and hold power, “hypocritically mimic the forms of the liberal consensus, appearing to shore up its legitimacy while stealthily undermining the old order.”[10]
So, our revanchist, restored America won’t likely be a jackbooted, cartoonish version of an autocracy. Rather, it will be something that looks and feels “American” but different:
quasi-authoritarian
quasi-religious
construing freedom in a narrow, parochial way
a pseudo-democracy that ensures the legislative authority of born-again conservative interests
a country governed by a kind of pseudo-law that assures the legal authority of born-again conservative ideas, as we are seeing with a born-again conservative Supreme Court
in practice, it will find ever more inventive ways to restrict the social, legal, and political vehicles by which conservative primacy might be challenged
those of us in the pro-democracy, pro-pluralism contingent will find ourselves hemmed in and howling in protest, in a shrinking media bubble of our own.
We Need to Admit That the Cavalry Isn’t Coming.
The GOP’s Establishment old-guard has aged out and been chased out; the Party apparatus is now controlled by extremists, who will never yield to the spineless, traitorous RINOs they have already ousted. The religious right will continue their march to the center of conservative politics; as Katherine Stewart observes in The Power Worshippers, “Theirs is not a culture war, it is a political war over the future of democracy.”[11]
As we have seen with the slow return of billionaires to the Trump camp, and we have to admit the truth we all know from history: the moneyed elite will continue backing any candidate who backs their financial interests, no matter how hostile that candidate is to democracy.[12] Moreover, technology and media companies, which control more and more of the world’s information production and delivery, have shown little willingness to prioritize truth and democracy over the profits generated by information pollution and addiction.
The alt-right trolls are hard at work right now, at places like the Claremont Institute, building their own educational institutions, think tanks, media enterprises, social networks, youth outreach programs, and other infrastructure (within and outside the GOP); they’re doing it just the way original right-wing media activists did it in the 1950s.
Not to mention the world’s bad actors (e.g., China, Russia, Iran, North Korea) keep waging an asymmetrical information war against pluralistic democracy all over the world.
Moreover, under a cold-hearted analysis, the pro-pluralism electoral coalition reveals not just weak alliances, but the likelihood of sizeable defections around the center at some point very soon:
a return of White women to their home in the GOP, likely to happen once basic abortion protections have been restored;
religious and anti-communist Latinos leaving the Democratic Party because they believe the GOP’s “socialist liberal tyranny” attacks;
exasperated and fickle young people not showing up;
cynical centrists giving up on voting in a fit of antipolitics, or syphoning off votes to anti-Establishment candidates;
libertarians making any number of self-interested excuses as to why their lives would be better under an autocratic GOP compared to the sanctimonious Dems.
Trump got nearly 10 million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, and in the much-hailed Democratic victory in 2022 House elections, Republicans actually won the aggregate popular vote, garnering three million more votes than Democratic candidates.[13] The GOP only has to put up a candidate who appears just reasonable enough, who can swing a tiny realignment of the political “center” along a few of the fault lines listed above, across a few states—totaling about 60,000 votes—to sweep into power in a wave election.
Have no doubt; autocracy is coming.
What America’s pro-democracy, pro-pluralism coalition needs to do right now is admit how vulnerable their position is and start planning their way back – i.e., planning the same kind of multi-pronged, multi-decade, unrelenting ideological march that conservatives began in the 1950s that got them to where they are now.
It’s going to be a long and difficult slog to restore any kind of faith in America’s pluralist narratives—not to mention a pluralist American identity—but what other choice is there?
THE CONCLUSION IS PAINFUL, BUT GIVES A RAY OF HOPE…
“Trumpism” Doesn’t Exist (Conclusion): The Tide Will Break Eventually, Though It Will Take 80-ish Years
[1] Kagan, R. (2021, September 23) Our constitutional crisis is already here, The Washington Post(https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/23/robert-kagan-constitutional-crisis/)
[2] Corn, ibid, pp. 81, 90-91, 120-121, 127
[3] Corn, Ibid, pp. 122, 137-138, 147
[4] Nicole Hemmer, Partisans, The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s, (New York: Basic Books 2022) pp. 136-137
[5] Ronald Reagan, (1964, October 27) A Time for Choosing, Ronald Regan Presidential Library (https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/reagans/ronald-reagan/time-choosing-speech-october-27-1964)
[6] Corn, ibid, p.104
[7] Goldfarb, M. (2020, November 8) Trump was no accident. And the America that made him is still with us, The Guardian(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/08/trump-was-no-accident-the-america-that-made-him-is-still-with-us)
[8] Stuart, M. and Dickinson T. (2024, June 10) Justice Alito caught on tape discussing how battle for America “Can’t be compromised,” Rolling Stone (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/samuel-alito-supreme-court-justice-recording-tape-battle-1235036470/)
[9] This revivalist mentality can be seen in the views of many mid-century conservative “rebels,” one of whom was L. Brent Bozell Jr., a founding editor of the National Review, ghostwriter for Goldwater’s book Conscience of a Conservative, and a Congressional primary candidate in 1964; Geoffrey Kabaservice profiles him in a chapter titled “The Center Cannot Hold,” in which he explains, “Although little recognized at the time, this was one of the first elections pitting an ideological champion of the New Right against a moderate Republican.” Bozell idealized a pre-industrial way of living and believed in using the power of government to “inhibit citizens’ freedom and enforce their virtue,” arguing that the Founding Fathers wrote “not a word suggesting that freedom is the goal of the commonwealth.” While today’s conservatives might argue a different interpretation of the customs, mores, and intentions of America’s colonial era founders, they share with people like Bozell a reverence and loyalty to that era as a timeless model, even for modern times. Rule & Ruin. p.81-83
[10] Moise Naiim, The Revenge of Power: How autocrats are reinventing politics for the 21st century (New York: St. Martin’s Press 2022) p.XXii
[11] Stewart, ibid, p.3
[12] Dawsey, J.; Stein J.; Scherer, M.; Dwoskin, E. (2024 March 29) Many GOP billionaires balked at Jan. 6. They’re coming back to Trump, The Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/29/trump-billionaires-gop-donors/)
[13] Wolf, Z. (2022, December 17) Republicans won the popular vote, but they’re not used to this feeling, CNN.com