REPUBLICAN ARMAGEDDON
The Meaning of Trump’s Meltdown
BY GARY ZABEL @AUTONOMIA75
The implosion of the Republican Party under the pressures of the Trump presidential campaign has occurred more rapidly and with greater intensity than anyone could have anticipated. It has consumed, not only Trump himself (at least for the time being), but such erstwhile luminaries as John McCain, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, Rudolph Giuliani, Chris Christie, Mike Pence, and many more. It has discredited the leaders of the “pro-family” Christian Right who continue to throw their support behind the foul-mouthed, vagina-grabbing, value-vacuous womanizer who once gave Howard Stern permission to call the candidate’s own teenage daughter, Ivanka, a “piece of ass.” It has likely poisoned the Republican “brand,” supposing it survives, for at least a generation among constituencies necessary to win the presidency and maintain majorities in Congress, including Hispanics, millennials, and women. It is poised to lose at least two Supreme Court appointments to the dreaded pro-gay marriage, pro-choice, anti-gun multiculturalists, and the presidency to the least popular, most compromised Democratic Party candidate in many a moon. Most important of all, it will leave the national Republican Party looking like a conclave of opportunists and cowards (which is, of course, what they are) and ridden by factions that hate one another more than they hate the Democrats. A major party has not been in so much trouble since the Whigs disintegrated on the eve of the Civil War, making way for the original, and now unrecognizable, Party of Lincoln.
The day of reckoning has been a long time coming. It can be traced back as far as Nixon’s Southern Strategy, which attracted white racists to the Republicans, and Reagan’s deficit-busting military Keynesianism as well as his failure to win anything meaningful for the Religious Right. However, the crisis that has now reached critical mass with the Trump campaign has a more recent history.
It has been clear for at least six years that the national Republican Party is no longer viable. The crisis began with the election of a good number of insurgent Tea Party candidates in the midterm Congressional races of 2010. For a while it looked as though the Republican Party establishment would be able to co-opt the Tea Party rebellion by bankrolling it while incorporating it into the party machinery. But the formation of the Tea Party-allied Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives, its successful revolt against Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner in 2015, and the rise of the Birther movement put an end to the illusion of cooptation. The willful paralysis of Congress by Senators and Representatives associated with the Tea Party in Obama’s second term is irrefutable evidence that the Republicans no longer function as a mainstream party. The government shutdowns, torpedoed budgets, and refusals to reform immigration laws or vote on a Supreme Court nominee show that Republicans have ceased to operate within the normal constraints of the US political system. For a party that preaches “constitutionalism,” the current incarnation of the Republican Party has torn the Constitution to shreds.
Tea Partiers are overwhelmingly white and middle-class. According to a CBS-New York Times poll (https://goo.gl/Ir7gB0 and https://goo.gl/nmCgTS; retrieved 10/16/2016) taken in 2012 of 1,580 adults, 881 of whom were Tea Party supporters, 89 percent of the Tea Party people were white, while only 1 percent was Black. Thirty-seven percent of the Tea Party supporters had college degrees, compared with 25 percent of the entire sample. Fifty-six percent had household incomes above $50,000 per year, slightly above the national average, while 20 percent had incomes exceeding $100,000 per year. The income figures, however, understate the class position of the Tea Party supporters, because 36 percent of those sampled in the poll lived in the South, where average household incomes and the cost of living are considerably lower than the national average. Twenty-five percent lived in the West, 22 percent in the Midwest, and only 18 percent in the Northeast. The core beliefs of Tea Party supporters involve an embrace of the “free market,” low taxes, and limited government, the converse of which is resistance to the supposed “socialism” of the Obama administration. Ninety-two percent of those in the poll said that Obama’s policies are “moving the country toward socialism,” and fifty-six percent described themselves as “angry” about the direction of government under Obama. Finally the Tea Party supporters tended to be older than the national average: 75 percent were 45 years old and older, while 29 percent were 65 and over.
The rise of the Tea Party was a direct response to the financial meltdown of 2008, with Tea Party activists cutting their teeth on opposition to the federal bailout of the financial sector and Obama’s rather modest plans for mortgage debt relief. The movement reached lift-off, however, when the new militants dramatically confronted Democratic Party congresspersons over the Affordable Care Act in a series of town hall-style meetings during the Congressional recess of 2009. Images of Obama’s face superimposed on the hammer-and-sickle as well as ludicrous claims that the US under Obama is a “people’s republic” became ubiquitous on the Tea Party Right. Opposition to even the most anemic forms of welfare state spending (with the exception of the Social Security and Medicare programs from which Tea Partiers personally benefit) in the name of individual liberty (i.e., small-to-medium private property rights) is the lynchpin of Tea Party ideology. But the ideology is linked to a political strategy, framed by a section of the white middle class, in the wake of the financial collapse of 2008, to shift resources from the poor to itself by cutting social spending and reducing the tax burden.
Although the Tea Party rebellion happened to coincide with a last-ditch attempt by the Religious Right to reverse its defeat in the “culture wars” (culminating in the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage), the two are independent developments, with revanchist Christian conservatism the decidedly weaker force, as Ted Cruz’s defeat in the Republican primaries demonstrates. On the other hand, there is a closer connection between the Tea Party and the Birther movement which began around the same time in 2008. “Movement,” however, may be the wrong to use of the Birthers, who are racist conspiracy theorists based in right-wing websites and conservative print media, including the Drudge Report, Breitbart.com, and, at one point, the National Review. The connection between the Tea Party and the Birthers, of course, is that the “socialist,” Barack Obama happens to be the first Black president of the United States. The Birther denial that he was born in the US, and the claim that he is, therefore, not a citizen was an explicit attempt to delegitimize Obama’s presidency. In spite of Obama’s economic neoliberalism, there is no denying that his election to two presidential terms is a momentous development in the history of the white settler state. With the emergence of the Birthers in tandem with the Tea Party rebellion, the anxiety over downward mobility of a stratum of the white middle class (for their children and grandchildren if not for themselves) combined with white anxiety over the election of the first Black president and the demographic shift to an increasingly nonwhite America. Thirty percent of the Tea Party supporters in the CBS-New York Times poll said they believed that Obama was born in another country, while 29 percent said that they did not know. Fifty-two percent said that too much had been made of the problems of Black people, while 82 percent regarded illegal immigration (i.e., the growing Latino population) as a serious problem.
Enter Donald Trump. Besides his reality TV star status and supposed wealth, Trump’s credential for joining the Republican presidential primary contest was the leading role he played in the Birther movement. In spite of a history of supporting Democratic Party candidates, and his (ephemeral) expression of sympathy for people without health coverage, Trump as presidential candidate has been able to focus and intensify the two streams of energy, represented by the Tea Party and Birther movements respectively, through the lens of his larger-than-life business and media persona: the resentment of small and medium property holders against politicians, corporate “cronies,” and the poor, and white anxiety over the Obama presidency and demographic racial decline. In addition, Trump’s long history of misogynistic behavior and comments appealed to more than a few men who saw in the Clinton campaign the threat of a final nail in the coffin of male privilege, while at the same time appealing to Christian conservatives who regarded Clinton’s quest for the presidency as an attempt to invert the divinely ordained hierarchy of the sexes.
These factors alone would have made Trump a formidable candidate, but he has managed to combine them with another ingredient that has caused a great deal of confusion among commentators. He initiated a crusade against neoliberal trade deals, from NAFTA to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that placed him in opposition to corporate Republicans and neoliberal economic policy. He also integrated this opposition into a generalized nationalism and anti-globalism that fit well with his racist and nativist diatribes against Mexican and Muslim immigrants. His intention was to a win a base among white blue-collar workers, a goal most media commentators believe he has achieved. But the truth is more complicated.
There is no denying that Trump has supporters in white blue-collar communities, especially in rural areas and Rust Belt cities devastated by the flight of industry that NAFTA and other “free trade” deals (many negotiated under Democratic presidents) facilitated. But according to a recent Gallop study (Explaining nationalist political views: The case of Donald Trump; (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2822059; retrieved 10/15/2016), most of his supporters are middle-class white people with above average incomes and levels of education, who tend to skew older than the national average. In other words, they share the Tea Party profile drawn by the CBS-Times poll four years ago. Unlike the Tea Party supporters, however, Trump’s followers do include a good number of blue-collar workers. But, when we look at the composition of this group, it turns out to be heavily weighted toward those with middle-class incomes. The workers hit hardest by the fight of industry tend either to support Clinton (although many voted for Sanders in the Democratic Party primaries) or to say that they will not vote at all in the November election. On the other hand, most of Trump’s blue-collar supporters have relatively secure jobs and household incomes above the national average, although they are also likely to experience fairly high levels of mortgage debt. Many are self-employed. This suggests that, owning their own homes, tools, and trucks, for example, they share the anxieties of the middle-class small property-holding whites who are the core of Trump’s support, as they are of the Tea Party Movement. Moreover, while many have stable jobs and income, or fairly comfortable retirements, most of Trump’s blue-collar supporters live in small towns or Rust Belt cities hard hit by industrial flight. In spite of the fact that they tend to suffer poor health, they appear to be more worried about their children’s or grandchildren’s futures than they are about their own, like the middle class Tea Party supporters of the 2012 study.
Trump’s mobilization of this blue-collar stratum bordering on the middle class seems to assume a level of political acumen that many liberal and even conservative commentators are unwilling to grant him. Their slighting opinion appears confirmed by the candidate’s meltdown after his first debate with Clinton (the flurry of 3 A.M. tweets pillorying a Latina former Miss Universe) and the apparently self-destructive scorched-earth strategy he has pursued following the release of the notorious Access Hollywood video tape. In addition, the candidate has refused to express remorse for his delight in sexual predation. Instead he has “doubled down,” as journalists say, intensifying the misogyny and pathological narcissism that made the tape possible in the first place. In addition, he has maintained his defiance in the face of the former beauty queens, female business associates, and fellow airline travelers who have now come forward to attest that his claims on the tape are not locker-room talk, as he insists, but straightforward accounts of real behavior.
The doubling down, however, is doing more than fuel Trump’s impending Election Day debacle. He is managing to use it to solidify his future role in US politics. Trump shares with a famous German pathological narcissist the ability to harness his pathology to the darkest but also the most utopian forces in the collective psyche of a beleaguered white middle-class. This along with his real-estate-speculator/reality-TV-star talent for sensing just where and how the suckers flock results in something akin to political intelligence. For confirmation, watch coverage of the interaction between Trump and his audience at the most recent rallies. The crowd sees their own resentment — their sense of being victimized by powerful, corrupt, and nefarious forces — magnified in their leader now cast as a victim. But it also identifies with Trump’s jihad against the political and media establishment, made possible by his money, celebrity, and power. In this way, the crowd’s self-esteem in an America that values money, celebrity, and power above all else is vicariously bolstered, while its members are able to indulge in the dream of a world where they share a place on top of the heap along with their leader. Of course, as far as that elevated position is concerned, Blacks, Latinos, and Muslims need not apply.
The new scorched earth strategy that redefines the Clintons, not just as a sexual predator husband and a wife who defends his predation, but as the center of a globalist conspiracy that includes international banks and corporations, the US government, the Republican Party, and the mainstream media is not going to win Trump the presidency. Leadership of the campaign has clearly shifted over the last week from the semi-respectable Kellyanne Conway to the Alt Right barbarian, Steve Bannon. But the raw meat Trump is now serving to his “basketful of deplorables” may well position him to play an important or even dominant role in the post-election struggle to control the Republican Party by inciting and consolidating his activist base. It also gives him the perfect alibi for the impending debacle at the polls by attributing it to a Dolchstoss (stab in the back) from his enemies in the party, in collusion with the globalist conspiracy.
The idea of a globalist conspiracy to undo white America in the interests of politicians, international corporations, and banks is straight out of Bannon’s Breitbart internet cesspool, and serves to link Trump even more closely with the borderline fascist Alt Right. Add to it the idea of Muslim immigrants as “the biggest Trojan Horse in history,” Trump’s continuing war against Mexican-Americans, his depiction of Black inner cities as war zones needing military-style pacification, the cult of the leader that identifies him as the only one who can save the nation, and the undercurrent of violence at his mass rallies, now directed at the press as well as racial and political enemies. Taken together, they are evidence of an incipient fascist movement, not very different in broad outline from those in interwar Central Europe. The main difference between Trump’s movement and Central European fascism is that the former has not (yet?) organized paramilitary forces to fight its enemies in the streets, or explicitly rejected representative democracy. But who knows where his current campaign to discredit the presidential election might lead?
Trump is likely to continue his movement of “deplorables,” perhaps through a rumored new media project involving the likes of Breitbart’s Bannon, Fox News’ disgraced former CEO, Roger Ailes, and its sycophantic news host, Sean Hannity, especially since the candidate’s reality TV career is over. Even his real estate empire is suffering reduced foot traffic, especially from women, while business partners have been backing out of deals they have come to regard as toxic and brand-destroying. The only chamber now available to echo Trump’s elephantine ego is the movement, and especially the mass rallies, that his presidential campaign has launched. And, of course, there is still the presidential race of 2020.
But what will keep the Trump rebellion alive is neither his ego, nor the policies of the new Clinton administration. That role is reserved for the continuing crisis of the global economy. The Great Recession that followed the financial collapse of 2008 is the economic springboard for both the Tea Party and Trump’s presidential campaign. It was the Great Recession and the anemic recovery that followed that jacked up the middle-class fear of falling to circus high-wire levels. The continuing instability of global markets (including Brexit and the general Euro-crisis as well as the slowing of China’s economy) along with limited consumer purchasing power in the wage-stagnant US — still the motor of international economic development — and long-term overcapacity in global manufacturing threaten a return to recession during Clinton’s first term. Fear of the economic future by a substantial segment of the white middle class will continue to intensify, increasing the chances that a Yankee Doodle fascist or quasi-fascist movement will emerge.
Hillary Clinton, who remains a died-in-the-wool neoliberal, militarist, and enthusiastic fan of Wall Street will have zero ability to counter this development. But there are four forces that may yet exercise the collective power that the Clinton “centrists” lack, while shifting American politics to the socialist left instead of the fascist right: Sanders activists and supporters within and outside the Democratic Party; the Black Lives Matter movement; rejuvenated Latino immigration activists; and, rather improbably at the moment, a labor movement that rises from the grave on a fundamentally new foundation. I will explore the possibility of a socialist answer to Trump (and Clinton) in another article.
Gary Zabel is a senior lecturer in philosophy at UMass Boston, and longtime labor activist.
