Think Trump is a one-off? The truth about the rise of US populism is terrifying
After former US vicepresident Joe Biden convincingly won the South Carolina primary on Saturday, today is what’s called Super Tuesday, when 14 states go to the polls to select their choice for Democratic presidential nominee. Only 246 days to election day!
Every week in American politics is busy and politically scarier than the week before. It is hard to believe that America has just been unlucky and suffered “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” that resulted in Donald Trump as president. Seems implausible. But it still begs the question – is he a one-off, oneterm president, the populist that the Founding Fathers feared? History suggests something different.
At least for now, Trump appears to be the frontman in a bigger political production, the groundwork having been laid by the others in the broader conservative movement, taking advantage of weaknesses in the US constitution and creating the conditions in which the Republican party could anoint a populist demagogue like Trump to become an insurgent, establishing a regime, not a government. The Congressional Republicans are playing a leading role.
In a 2017 article headlined The Populist Ploy, Win Mccormack, editor of the New Republic, pointed to a “prescient summation of Trumpism” in a book published around 20 years before.
Academic Shadia Drury, in Leo Strauss and the American Right, described an emerging strategy focused on “the political importance of religion, the necessity of nationalism, the language of nihilism, the sense of crisis, the friend/ foe mentality, the hostility toward women, the rejection of modernity, the nostalgia of the past and the abhorrence of liberalism”.
She added: “And having established itself as the dominant ideology of the Republican party, it threatens to remake America in its own image.” A spine-chilling reminder of Trump’s approach.
Predating these comments, the Wall Street Journal in 1985 published an article by Irving Kristol, a well-known intellectual and founder of the neo-conservative movement in the US. Mccormack wrote that Kristol “foresaw the possibility that a conservative, posing as a populist, could one day lead a successful democratic uprising against the nation’s liberal elites.
“What’s more, Kristol argued, such an uprising was an absolute necessity to salvage America from what he had come to see as the pernicious effects of the Enlightenment principles on which it had been founded.”
Kristol’s view of populism had been influenced by Strauss, a political thinker and Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, who was influenced by the ideas of Carl Schmitt, a German philosopher associated with the Nazi regime. Walking down this path towards Trump, it is worth noting that the president has adopted a fierce and uncompromising friend/ foe mentality, identifying political enemies and then attempting to bring about their political destruction.
Key congressional Republicans have, long before Trump arrived in the White House, been associated with foreign nationalists, autocrats and dictators across the world. Trump has declared himself a nationalist and has embraced brutal dictators as allies to be courted and celebrated.
Trump’s attitudes towards North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, Brazilian president Jair Bolsanaro, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte and President Vladimir Putin of Russia contrast sharply with his contempt for longestablished allies in Europe, such as France and Germany.
But Republican – or the Grand Old Party (GOP) – lawmakers on Capitol Hill may have indicated to Trump the company he should keep. Farright Dutch politician Geert Wilders was a guest of the GOP in 2016 and members of the far-right Freedom Party attended a gathering in Trump Tower in 2017.
While plotting his return to power in Hungary, Viktor Orban had close ties with GOP strategists on Capitol Hill and Marion Marechai-le Pen was a guest of the GOP at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) event in Washington in February 2018. The president hosted the Hungarian leader in the White House in 2019 and said it was “a great honour” to host Orban and that, “he (Orban) was highly respected all over Europe, especially for his anti-immigration policies”. The GOP leans much further to the right than most traditional conservative parties in Western Europe and even some far-right parties.
This could explain the behaviour of the GOP senators who have been conspicuous by their absence in times of Trump’s recent destructive rampages. Many critics assumed that the Republican Congressmen were in fear of their seats and afraid of his bullying. But it might be more appropriate to draw another conclusion – that many of them are politically supportive of Trump’s behaviour and actions, in line with their own thinking and their party’s.
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon was also influential in coaching Trump in the early months of his presidency. Bannon once told the Hollywood Reporter: “Darkness is good... Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power.” Bannon’s signature themes are capitalism, nationalism and “Judeo-christian values”.
In a speech to CPAC in 2017, which one commentator described as “terrifying”, he set out the ideas that have shaped Trump’s early years in office – economic nationalism; US sovereignty and the idea that the world’s natural state is of clashing civilisations; attacking the corporatist and elitist global media; immigration and open borders threatening US identity, culture and its reason for being; and the deconstruction of the administrative state. This is the Trump manual.
CPAC though must have a sense of humour as, Nigel Farage, one of their heroes, was introduced this year as “the Godfather of Brexit”.
The spiritual and ideological drivers of neo-conservatism in America are firmly in control. Donald Trump has surpassed their wildest dreams. With no moral compass, so consumed by his own importance, lacking any basic knowledge of the world outside Manhattan, ruthless and revengeful, lacking any human emotions, and speaking like someone from an alien planet, he has rapidly advanced their agenda. Not being a politician or a Republican has helped.
Trump’s greatest gift to those who conspire to create a ‘right-wing revolution’ in America is to have captured 63 million people in an election and to retain them as his solid base through good times and bad – and to have enlisted 120 million Twitter followers to a daily outpouring of rants, lies and disinformation: the means by which he could win a second term.