The Great Populist Escape

How Donald Trump rode the coattails of a decaying conservative language and jailbroke the GOP

You ought to at least be honest with yourself about this.

The Republican party is in the midst of a divorce. Some have acknowledged the failed populist-conservative marriage and begun to push forward; others are somewhere between denial and anger on the grief spectrum. The natural instinct in any failed union is to find someone, anyone to blame for the schism.

You’re eager to slap together a clever tweet or pen a scathing missive attributing responsibility for the GOP divide. Success may have a thousand fathers, but the poor failure that was once a functional political party seems to have been some horrific test tube baby comprised of splicing DNA from Establishment this and Pennsyltucky dummies that and a heapful of radioE and a dash of Obummer and hey has anyone explored the Hitler angle yet?

If you read one more Theory of Trump thinkpiece you’re concerned you’ll puke. And you know what? None of them are wrong. You can make a case for any of the commonly argued causes, most convincingly, the media entertainment complex. But none of them are exactly right, either. Because they’re avoiding a key contributor: you and me.

The Art of the Deal

If you consider yourself to be of a principles-based political philosophy, your mind has already figured this out. Maybe it hasn’t assimilated it in a way that‘s readily described, but your subconscious knows. The arguments put forth to troubleshoot the Trump phenomenon don’t quite scratch the itch, no matter how many you consume or proffer yourself.

That itch is your brain’s way of reminding you of an uncomfortable but unavoidable fact: you made a bargain and signed away some of your principles in exchange for a coalition with enough mathematical clout at the national level to advance the principles you were able to keep.

You knew what you were getting. You knew there were some in the tent with you who didn’t mesh with your sense of right or wrong. You knew not everyone shared your exact set of principles. You knew there’d be days you’d just have to choke it down and let someone speak up for you who couldn’t have gotten it more backwards. You knew the cost of coalition governance was having to toss the occasional bone to this or that special interest group to hold it all together.

You knew all of this, but ultimately you knew that the choices laid before you were to tenuously cling to some semblance of governing power, or wander unarmed through the pitch black wilderness of political irrelevance. And you struck the bargain anyway, because the devil you knew was surely better than the devil you didn’t.

Cognitive Dissonance

You thought you made a solid deal, too — for a while, at least. There were good days, at times even months, and some nice successes that seemed to validate your decision. Maybe it wasn’t perfect, but you had seats at the table. This was going to work out alright, after all.

But then the successes became fewer. The bad days started to outnumber the good. You looked around at your coalition and noticed that a lot of your allies who you’d previously assumed shared your bedrock principles were spouting overly simplified sound bytes they’d heard on the radio. Left is bad. Right is good. Liberals were responsible for everything. (You kind of wanted to correct people that actually, classical liberals have a good deal in common with conservatives and should be our natural allies, and progressivism is a true problem, but you try to not be the actually guy.)

You started tuning out of Fox News because everything was viewpoint A or viewpoint B. No matter the issue, it was packaged into two simple debatable points. The person shouting was right and the person being shouted at was wrong, and then they’d switch roles. You noticed a lot of the websites you read followed a similar format — a story broke, the world was ending, the next day dawned, and the world never ended. The story was forgotten when a new story broke and the world was ending again.

A local at the bar spotted your Gadsden flag hat and asks if you heard about FEMA camps. Your buddy at work was still talking to you about safety seeds. The first ten comments on a dry article about Executive Power limits were an all-caps debate over whether someone was a Muslim. Your nice aunt kept forwarding you email memes about a plan to invade Texas masquerading as a military training exercise.

Your company laid people off and everyone blamed it on the Chinese. Illegal Mexicans were apparently raping people in the streets at an alarming rate, although most of your experiences with Mexicans were to note that they did a pretty nice job showing up on time and cutting the lawns in the adjoining office park, even on those days when it was 100 degrees outside. A black kid got shot in Florida by a guy playing cop, and everyone demanded you pick a side, right away, or you’d be a bad conservative. You couldn’t really find anybody who really wanted to take a minute and say hey no matter what this is sad. Then a cop shot a kid outside St. Louis, and everyone already knew what side they were on from the last time this happened, and what, don’t you support the cops?

The party management remained an unimaginably inept clown show, unable to out-scheme a zucchini, but they finally kicked John Boehner out, and replaced him with a guy you thought was pretty conservative, all things considered. But what seemed like half of your coalition now told you Paul Ryan may as well be a Democrat (you never could quite follow why) and worse, apparently had a secret Muslim beard. While you thought the beard thing was a joke, you were alarmed to see a whole lot of people didn’t.

Hey, We’re All On the Same Team Here

And the entire time, when the progressive media and the social justice lunatics went after your allies in the coalition, they called them racists, xenophobes, bigots, fascists, hicks, simpletons, low-information voters, Jesus freaks, hillbillies, dumbasses, gun-clingers, rednecks. And that bothered you, because you knew they were none of those things. They were decent people who didn’t have the time or burning interest in developing a deeper understanding of conservatism. You knew a lot of them were actually very intelligent, but just didn’t waste time applying intelligence to politics — and that almost made them seem smarter to you. You figured they worked long hours at tough jobs and paid their taxes and didn’t deserve the condescending labels just because they disagreed with the progressive viewpoint.

You defended them because they might be wrong on the little issues, but they were right on the big ones, and anything the progressives wanted to shove onto your allies, you knew would be shoved onto you, too.

You defended them because you actually kind of liked them. You defended them because the only difference between you and them was where you got your information. You defended them because you thought they just wanted to be left alone, and that’s ultimately all you ever really wanted out of your government.

Sure, the whole time you argued conservative principles — to people you thought would understand what you were getting at. Most of the time that meant you jumped on Twitter and argued principles with the same people who already agreed with you, anyway. You kept most of your contentious opinions to yourself lest you appear insufficiently Team Red.

You didn’t want to be a bad team player or worse yet, be a RINO. The next election cycle was for all the marbles and you needed that coalition to hold together. You didn’t see the point of agitating your allies — they were pretty jumpy and excitable and most of the arguments just seemed to end in smoldering bridges, anyway.

And then Donald Trump showed up, and a weird thing happened.

Communication Breakdown

Just about everyone in your coalition who’d spent the last few years boiling conservatism down to easy-to-swallow tropes and binary hostage scenarios and shouty artificial patriotism suddenly fell head-over-heels in love with Donald Trump.

It dawned on you that easy-to-swallow tropes and binary hostage scenarios and shouty, artificial patriotism were classic populist hallmarks. And while no one else could seem to understand why a bunch of Republicans could be lured by such an obvious Democrat in Donald Trump, you suspected it was because the Republicans really weren’t so Republican anymore.

You realized that cheap and watered down conservatism is largely indistinguishable from the Democrat platform. What you’d accepted as a flawed but vital part of your coalition had fermented into rank nationalism, open racism, outward disdain for intellectualism, and outright hostility for any coalition member who refused to incessantly peacock themselves as anything but RIGHT or LEFT.

If you dissent, you are LEFT. If you concur, you are RIGHT. And yell louder next time, so we know we can trust you.

Your coalition was rife with accidental populists.

The Second Law of Trumpodynamics

Donald Trump, though far removed from an intelligent or intellectual man, possesses animalistic market intuition in spades. It’s doubtful even Trump himself could tell you how he does what he does — his garbled and dissembling attempts to describe his own business ventures and “deals” certainly suggest as much. But give the man credit: he has a knack for instinctively identifying market voids and exploiting them at the right moment. He is a pure entropic force unthinkingly drawn to natural economic vacuums, much as warm air rushes out an open door on a cold day. Over three decades, Donald Trump’s only consistent behavior has been to swoop in and out of various market voids, cashing out before anyone could figure out what had just happened or who was stuck with the tab.

As Donald Trump peered into the political landscape, perhaps out of boredom or perhaps out of greed, he recognized something incredible: the GOP base and his own target consumer base now contained a remarkable degree of overlap. He identified what few others would have seen — a sizable bloc of ready-bake populists, ripe for the picking. At a national level. And no one was selling product to them. This was the mother lode of all market voids.

There were a few substantial obstacles in the way, namely that Donald Trump is actually a Democrat, and the votes he coveted were locked in by decades of labeling themselves Republicans. Worse still, they were the particular breed of Republican who noisily profess an unreasoning Capulet-Montague blood feud variety hatred towards Democrats. And then, even if he could somehow find a way to win their interest and spring them, the Republican party would surely try to win them back, so he’d need to craft a mechanism to not just win, but retain their support.

Ironically, Donald Trump’s one true talent just happens to be convincing people they can’t live without a product they once thought they hated. Trump likes to point to gaudy Manhattan skyscrapers and exotic Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous real estate as his calling card, but these are a veneer. His true businesses pitch ordinary, crummy product to ordinary, appetent people. His target demographic doesn’t have millions; just whatever modest savings they’ve been able to cobble together. They have an eager, almost desperate belief that a just-this-once item or event can dramatically improve their lives. They have an earnest willingness to hear that somebody else is getting over on them, not because somebody else is smarter, but because somebody else has embraced the secret that Trump is willing to reveal to them, and that somebody else is trying to keep it secret.

And through years of pitching just-this-once product, populism has become Donald Trump’s native language.

The rules are simple: speak in simple, easy to digest bromides. Completely disregard the topic at hand. Demonstrate an attention span shorter than the audience’s. Earn trust by embracing and mimicking the caricatured stereotypes the consumer bristles beneath. Demonstrate intentionally sneering disrespect for those factions of somebody else who sneeringly condescend to “us.” Dismiss unhelpful facts as concoctions of sinister conspiracies by somebody else. Turn every opponent’s parry into a reminder that somebody else does the same and, in fact, is far worse. Co-opt willing accomplices with megaphones to amplify your message, and villainize those who won’t be co-opted as somebody else who’s conning you. Affirm your audience’s deepest, darkest underlying suspicions about somebody else and make them feel intelligent for harboring those suspicions all along. Tell them somebody else just doesn’t want them to catch up and have a seat at the table.

Tell them somebody else was keeping them imprisoned for their own purposes. And tell them somebody else would never let them out; they’d have to escape. Tell them to follow to freedom.

Everyone is too smart to buy timeshares, diet pills, bad steaks, fake degrees, pulls on rigged slot machines, or the Democrat platform, until suddenly, they aren’t.

And so, using his own native language, and by selling them the very product they once thought they hated the most, Donald Trump quite neatly jailbroke the hidden populist faction trapped inside the GOP.

As you watched half of your former coalition members buy Trump’s product, you tried to talk sense into them. But you didn’t speak their new language, because it’s a language only con men are fluent in and only their marks understand. And the more you used your foreign language of facts and reason, the more they heard you’re the somebody else Donald Trump warned us about. You’re trying to put me back in your jail.

Thanks For the Memories

You sadly recognized that a core tenet of conservatism is responsibility for one’s own actions. Your coalition allies were capable of making their own choices, and were free to leave at any time. They were never in jail. This was their party, too, and the idea that political coalitions can be held together at gunpoint exists only as part of a sales pitch for the frothing populism we’ve descended into. If they find the ideologically incomprehensible platitudes Trump vomits at random to be more appealing than yours, they’re more than welcome to embrace them. Their choice to follow Trump into electoral calamity and exile is an allowable consequence on the free market of pure democracy. Perhaps it’s time to consider what you could’ve done differently to make that choice less desirable next time.

You realize you’re culpable of allowing the messaging of your principles to be outsourced to shallow and unintelligent ratings whores for so long — they undermined your professed best interests, diluted conservatism to CliffsNotes talking points, and served as useful tools to men bent on malice. You intend to ensure that the media entertainment complex that’s turned your philosophy into a craven back-alley shell game will be held publicly accountable and shunned. You regret the years not engaging the left in any actual debate and allowing stereotypes of the right as unthinking meme-bots to colonize. You most of all resent yourself for serving as cover for the small, but no longer insignificant, groups of bigots who were in fact lurking in the ranks. Their choices are theirs, but no one put a gun to your head and forced you to unflinchingly wave them off as nonexistent or misunderstood all those years.

But above all, you can’t help but feel the slightest bit responsible for the years you bit your tongue and said nothing while your former allies devolved into a sad and angry mob. You know it’s a collective action conundrum, but you were more aware than you’d like to admit that the language of conservatism was being hijacked and corrupted. You had opportunities to put some small extra effort into conversations with your former allies, back when you both spoke the same language. You’ll never get everyone to agree, but maybe you could’ve taught one or two people to debate productively with a few basic principles instead of memes labeled LEFT and RIGHT. Maybe you could’ve established a better understanding that disagreements are not prison walls.

You want to live up to the ideal that somebody else is not always to blame. You’ve got a piece of this, too, even if disproportionately small. You’re going to be starting over with a smaller group of people with like-minded philosophies, and it’s important to get it right from the outset. You vow to work harder to get your message through next time and to ensure your coalition consists of the willing — a political party shouldn’t feel like a jail.