Will Trump voting bloc hold?
GOP populists may find nationalists’ racism toxic
‘You will not replace us,” the white nationalists chanted carrying their Ku Klux Klan-inspired torches, marching through the August night on the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville.
The chant goes to the central grievance of the white nationalist worldview. White identity is the heart of their politics and their fundamental conviction is that contemporary America is being taken over by nonwhites. “You will not replace us” is at once a cry of defiance to the multicultural trends of American society and an angry promise to restore the white nationalists’ gauzy-eyed image of an earlier age of white domination, when people in this country knew their proper places.
Neo-Nazis and KKK types have persisted in corners of the United States since their last years of prominence in American politics, the 1920s and ’30s. With the Internet, they began to network as never before, overcoming their isolation.
But what seriously mobilized white nationalism in America, and restored it as a potent force in national electoral politics, was Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Suddenly, at the level of presidential politics, someone was talking the white nationalists’ language.
Trump’s famous words from his first day’s announcement of his candidacy condemned Mexican immigrants without the slightest bow to the “political correctness” of either the Democratic or Republican establishments: “They are bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” When Trump doubled down by promising to end Muslim immigration, he was speaking directly to white nationalists’ view of how to “Make America Great Again.”
David Duke, the most wellknown KKK figure in the United States, confirmed Trump’s role in bringing about the events of Charlottesville. “(Charlottesville) represents a turning point for the people of this country,” he said. “We are determined to take our country back, we’re going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump, and … that’s why we voted for Donald Trump.”
The white nationalists were joined in their support for Trump’s campaign by the populist base of the Republican Party. These are the people who flocked to the Tea Party in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown and the election of Barack Obama. They are the ones who furiously marched against Obamacare, who moved the Republican Party to extremes by voting out less radical Republicans in primaries for the House and Senate, and who, polls consistently told us, harbored the stubborn beliefs that Obama was either a secret Muslim or that he was born outside the United States.
Trump had softened up this populist base prior to his presidential run when he emerged as the country’s strongest voice of “birtherism” — the delusion that Obama was born abroad and that his presidency was therefore illegitimate. The motor of Trump’s electoral success in the primaries and then in the general election was the migration of the Republican Party’s populist base from the Tea Party to Trump’s America-first, anti-immigrant politics. Today, the populists are the backbone of the persistent 35 percent of Americans who avidly continue to support his presidency.
Much of this populist base is made up of sons of industrial workers in small cities and rural workers in the exurbs and the countryside. More than any other sector of the American population, these are the people who have suffered from the transition of the American economy from labor-intensive manufacturing toward information technology and the service and financial sectors. They are those who suffer most from the epidemic of opioid addiction and from declining lifespans. Their bleak employment outlook is tied to marginal positions like security guards or Walmart clerks.
The central question for the future of American politics is whether the populists remain in the Trump, America-first-voting bloc with the white nationalists. Steve Bannon’s political bet is that they will, and he is aiming to be the leader of the successor movement to the Tea Party. Bannon tries to play down the white racist appeal of what he calls his “killing machine,” the political operation he runs with Breitbart News at its center. But even a casual look at the stories on Breitbart, its readers’ commentaries and the continued support of the neo-Nazi and KKK right reveals the duplicity of Bannon’s claims that his “economic populism” is not rooted in white nationalism.
The very migration of the right populists to Trump/Bannonism in 2016 illustrates that this is a voting bloc whose attachment to doctrine is only skin-deep — hardly the dedicated ideological warriors Bannon is imagining for his movement. Can they really come to an enduring standpoint where racist scapegoats “explain” the ills they suffer in their economic lives or in their sense of dignity? Is this, finally, a direction in which a stable and decisive national electoral bloc wants its country to go?
What will happen to populist support for Trump when the jobs he promised don’t come back, when health insurance becomes increasingly unaffordable and when it becomes plain to the populists that policies like the tax law that passed Congress last week make mainstream Democratic and Republican corruption look dainty by comparison to Trump’s Washington swamp?
Will the old standby of war or other foreign adventures lead the populists to stick with Trump, the leader? Will the populists defy their tendency to stray ideologically and stick with the racism of the white nationalists? Or can the Democratic Party, perhaps its Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren wing, offer a vision that can cut through the populists’ resentment toward liberals, bring some back to the party their working-class fathers used to support and return the white nationalists to the fringe of American politics?