Trumpism versus Republicanism
by Professor John Kane
The Republican Party has now officially endorsed Donald Trump as its standard-bearer in the 2016 presidential election, but the billionaire businessman remains an indigestible lump for party members to swallow. Given the outcome of the primaries, swallow it they must, but can the party survive the ingestion of a body seemingly so foreign to its temperament?
Trump carries the Republican brand as a matter of convenience rather than conviction, and indeed it’s hard to discern amid the flurry of his contradictory pronouncements what his real convictions are (aside from those of his own wonderfulness). Yet if Trump is not a ‘real’ Republican, he is nevertheless a candidate that modern Republicanism has both enabled and — I will argue — deserved.
To understand the nature of the challenge Trump represents for the GOP, we must understand how the party came to be what it now is and where it now is. Its current crisis, which relates directly to the crisis of American politics with its hyper-partisanship, congressional gridlock and apparent ungovernability, is in fact a terminus ad absurdum of the long post-World War II trajectory of Republican politics.
Looking back
Modern Republicanism has its foundations in, and is permanently enmired in long-term reaction to, the New Deal politics of Franklin Roosevelt’s Democrats in the 1930's. The Roosevelt administration’s vast expansion of federal governmental programs to tackle unemployment, regulate industry, provide farm relief and introduce social security marked a repudiation of the strict laissez-faire, small government policies central to traditional Americanism. The fact that Roosevelt meant to ‘save capitalism’ not destroy it made the New Deal, for many on the Left, insufficiently radical, but to conservative Americans aligned with corporate interests it was ‘crypto communist’.
But corporations and their Republican allies had lost status during the Great Depression, and were routinely portrayed as combining mean-spirited fundamentalism and crass commercialism. Their wish to ‘roll back’ the New Deal could make little headway in an era of Depression, anti-fascist war and, later, post-war reconstruction that made active government seem a force for progress and stability. Some leading Republicans, from Ike Eisenhower up to and including Richard Nixon, consequently accepted the New Deal settlement (though conservatives derided them as ‘me-too Republicans’). The dominance of these leaders’ underpinned the so-called liberal consensus that ruled at home and abroad till the end of the Vietnam War.
Reactionary conservatives, meanwhile, had to confront the fact that they were problematically divided into two broad groups with conflicting views: libertarians and moral-traditionalists. The former opposed any government regulation of business and economic redistribution, the latter wanted government to enforce narrow moral norms and maintain existing class, race and gender hierarchies while resisting the distribution of civil rights to subordinate groups. What overcame the contradictions and allowed the formation of a common cause was shared anti-communism. Individualistic libertarians naturally opposed any form of collectivism, while traditionalists instinctively opposed ‘godless’ communism.
This fusion between libertarians and traditionalists, actively pursued and accomplished, laid the essential foundation of the so-called New Right of the 1970s (with its accommodation of the nascent Christian evangelical Right ). It was notable that ideological divergences mirrored geographical and class differences, with libertarians tending to come from the educated East Coast establishment WASP elite, closely allied with corporate interests, while the social conservatives were concentrated in the grassroots of the industrial heartland and later in the congregationalist South with limited economic power.
The fusion of these very different elements inevitably gave a powerfully reactionary cast to American conservatism. Libertarians compromised, for example, their ideal of individual freedom by deferring to States’ rights when it came to the 1954 Supreme Court decision mandating the desegregation of public schools. In fact the alliance with anti-civil rights forces embedded a racist element in the heart of Republicanism that became central to Republican strategy. Senator Barry Goldwater, in his challenge to Lyndon Johnson for the White House in 1964, argued the ‘unconstitutionality’ of requiring states to desegregate.
Though he lost the election, Goldwater carried five Deep South states that had been Democratic since the Civil War, thus inaugurating the Republican ‘southern strategy’ that George Wallace’s powerful third-party challenge in 1968 would further encourage and Richard Nixon would successfully deploy in the early 1970s.
Resistance to civil rights provided the political opportunity, but anti-communism was the crucial cement binding ‘fusion conservatives’ together. The collapse of the old communist enemy in the late 1980s thus presented a problem.
How long could the party contain the ideological, class and geographical diversity it enfolded in the absence of the communist threat?
Divisions were somewhat masked after the 1990s by the triumphalism of a clamourous set of neo-conservatives, a combination of bellicose Republicans still unresigned to the humiliation of Vietnam and idealistic Leftists converted by Ronald Reagan’s use of ‘strength’ to bring down the Soviet Empire. Together these groups sought to capitalise on post-Cold War unipolarity to stamp American authority conclusively on the world. Formerly isolationist Republicans were in a weak position to resist this impulse because, ironically, their anti-communism had over time induced them to embrace the full use of America’s power abroad against the common foe. Pat Buchanan, one of the very few to resist the trend, attempted to revive isolationist nationalism in the 1990s but was heavily criticised by New Righters and neoconservatives committed to pursuing a heavily interventionist ‘new world order.’
But neoconservative crusading came to grief in Iraq under George W. Bush, whose end-of-tenure was also marked by the gravest economic crisis since the Depression.
Renewed disillusionment with foreign adventurism, persistent economic malaise and the election of America’s first black president presented the perfect combination of factors to test the real character and strength of modern Republicanism. Unfortunately it opened existing fissures so wide they could no longer be bridged and revealed a great deal of ugliness at the party’s core.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s strategy of ‘just say no to everything’ was a cynical if effective tactic to deny Barack Obama the opportunity to fulfill his pledge to reach out across the aisle and heal the rift in American politics, and hopefully to deny him a second term. But McConnell’s adamant opposition to the passage of ‘Obamacare’, and the hysterical rhetoric deployed in the process, ignited a grassroots conservative movement, the Tea Party, which proved ultimately fatal. The Tea Party was initially welcomed by Republicans because of its vitriolic and frankly racist (though this was often denied) rejection, not just of Obama’s policies but of his person. But the movement turned out to be a viper in the party’s bosom.
The Tea Party in fact signalled the breakdown of fusion conservatism. It was the heartland’s revenge for the contempt and neglect it had long suffered at the hands of an elite Republican ‘establishment’ that alternatively flattered and ignored it, taking its support for granted. Ironically, this core constituency, once it found an independent voice, held adamantly and literally to the famed ‘principles’ that established Republicans frequently mouthed — small government, low taxes, balanced budgets, strict constitutionalism, traditional marriage, pro-life policies etc — but when in office more often fudged or compromised. Moreover, the movement deployed them more effectively against incumbent Republicans than against Obama and the Democrats. Highly respected congressional members of long-standing were successfully challenged in primary contests and Tea Party supporters installed in their place.
The balance in Congress thus shifted from old established authorities to ‘new people’ who insisted on ideological purity, causing control of the legislature, particularly the House, to slip from elite hands. It was amusing, therefore, to watch Republican Paul Ryan, the new Speaker of the House, object to the candidature of Donald Trump on the grounds of Republican ‘principles’, for it was precisely Tea Party members’ insistence on these that had undermined his predecessor, John Boehner, and that challenged his own tenure.
The depth of the Trump challenge can be understood only against this long historical background. Trump’s principles, whatever precisely those may be, do not perfectly align with Republican ones, but his inflammatory espousal of them has exposed the pusillanimity and hypocrisy of routine purveyors of familiar doctrine, in particular his erstwhile challengers for the presidential nomination. His rhetoric ignited latent feelings of resentment at elite manipulation and frustration at the suppression of full-throated expression of ‘regressive’ sentiments. The traditional Republican ‘dog-whistle’ style of racist invocation has, under Trump’s influence, been overthrown in favour of frank prejudice. Serving the interests of rich rentiers under the guise of defence of right has been shown to have limited purchase among a class burdened by debt and with declining economic prospects. Trump has, in other words, called the bluff of ‘respectable’ Republicans and thereby thrown them into ideological disarray. They cannot in superficial conscience accept this maverick but neither can they, in deepest conscience, reject him.
And this is why Trump is the candidate that contemporary Republicanism least wants but most deserves. The party was in critical condition before his advent, but his incursion and campaigning success has thrown that condition into sharp relief. Mitt Romney may have been the last establishment Republican figure to have a shot at the White House, and even he was battling against the grain of contemporary politics. The abject failure of Jeb Bush to make a decent showing, despite establishment political and financial support, points the lesson.
Trump is not of a piece, ideologically — he combines Tea Party irrationalism with Bernie Sanders’-style outrage at economic injustice, while insisting that, whatever anyone believes, he can get things done that need to be done. That is his complex appeal to those that respond to him. But whatever the fate of his tilt at the presidency in November, he has shown that the old template of Republicanism can no longer be successfully applied to the American condition. (The same may be said in the Democratic case, but that is another story.) Whether and how the Republican Party may reconstitute itself as a viable force in American politics in the long-term thus becomes an interesting question.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROFESSOR JOHN KANE
John Kane attained his PhD at the London School of Economics and is now Professor in the School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University.
John teaches in political theory, political leadership and US foreign policy and is a researcher in Griffith’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy.
He has published widely, been awarded numerous research grants, and four times been Visiting Professor to Yale University. He is the author of The Politics of Moral Capital (Cambridge UP) and Between Virtue and Power: The Persistent Moral Dilemma of US Foreign Policy (Yale UP). He is also co-author (with H. Patapan) of The Democratic Leader: How Democracy Defines, Empowers and Limits its Leaders (Oxford UP).
