The right lured off the cliff by populism
Donald Trump was elected to be the bull in the china shop. He was chosen to challenge the status quo, to stand up to outoftouch elites in Washington, D.C. For Americans who feel aggrieved by rapid changes to the American economy, culture and, at least for some, demographics, Donald Trump represented the last best chance to save the nation.
Four years later, after “owning the libs” so much, where do things stand?
Well, Donald Trump lost reelection. States, courts, and now Congress have all validated that.
Republicans lost two United States Senate seats in Georgia and by extension, control of the Senate. Republicans actually did impressively well in November, all things considered, but in the end, the Democratic Party is fully in control of two of the three branches of the federal government.
The president is also facing the real prospect of being impeached twice, which on its own terms is remarkable. And this time it’s because he riled up a group of his staunchest supporters, who truly do believe that the election was literally stolen from him, many of whom then participated in the storming of the Capitol, the beating of police officers, and a chaotic situation that left five people dead.
If this is what “winning” looks like, it appears the president and his supporters don’t just have alternative facts but alternative definitions of English words, too.
I don’t doubt the sincerity of many of the president’s staunchest supporters, who, in the face of all of the aforementioned realities, continue to believe whatever he says and continue to believe in him. But that the president has such robust support, to put it mildly, doesn’t give any credence to any particular belief of his supporters.
But the fierce loyalty to the president even after all that has happened is perfectly consistent with the president’s brand of populism.
Observed around the world, populism is an approach that fundamentally puts “the people” versus “the elite.” Nationalism is a cornerstone of populist movements; the president declared himself a nationalist in 2018 (“You know what I am? I’m a nationalist. OK? I’m a nationalist.”). Appeals to glorious pasts (“Make America Great Again”) that never entirely existed are common. And, populism includes a tendency for even the most successful figurehead of a populist movement to be in a state of perpetual victimhood (the two months since the election have been an unending string of this).
Populism occurs on the left (Hugo Chavez in Venezuela) and on the right (Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey). As with any political movement, populist leaders will often espouse ideas that are widely accepted and supported. But these ideas are routinely framed in populist terms: the people versus the elite, the nationalists versus the globalists.
Populism is not a wholly unsuccessful political force. Donald Trump didn’t become the president by accident. It was also strong enough to deter many, if not most, elected Republicans from rebuking him, even as he pursued policies directly contradictory to conservative, free-market and constitutional principles, and even as he dabbled in outright racist and xenophobic rhetoric.
But besides the reality that Trump’s populism has derailed the political success of the Republican Party, populism is a fundamentally toxic force.
“We need to be prepared to face populism, because in our days, we have seen how what we thought were the most solid societies for democracy, for freedom, can evolve suddenly, in such a way that populism suddenly replaces the real world with its fantasies, and starts to produce division and demagoguery instead of reason, and fictions instead of truth,” warned the great novelist and classical liberal Mario Vargas Llosa in 2018.
I don’t doubt the sincerity of many of those who still believe in Donald Trump. But the fictions, the lies, of the president have disconnected many from reality and untethered many from principle.
It’s one thing to be concerned about election integrity. It’s another to claim that fraud on the scale alleged by Trump definitely happened.
It’s one thing to not like that Joe Biden won. It’s another to believe that Venezuelan voting systems rigged the results and Georgia’s Republican governor and secretary of state, along with former Attorney General William Barr, were bought off by the deep state. Or whatever.
The American right as a whole must decide whether to commit itself to classical liberal principles, to reason, to the truth, or, whether it will continue to ride populism, deservedly, right off a cliff.