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MICHAEL CARLSON, The Times Literary Supplement
After sixteen months of campaigning, Donald Trump is suddenly being denounced by both political and media mainstreams as an aberration within America’s political process. This opinion was triggered largely by his refusal to promise, in the third debate against Hillary Clinton, to accept the upcoming election results. For Trump this was a last-ditch rallying cry to his hard core supporters, but it was also a godsend for the Republican Party, an excuse for “down-ballot” candidates to repudiate their support of someone likely to drag them down with him in November’s election. It also provided an escape-hatch that people could use to distance themselves from their previous support of Trump, by wrapping themselves in the “sanctity” of American democracy.
But positioning Trump as a political outlier ignores reality. His candidacy is crashing on a late questioning of his “character”, but character is a bullfighter’s cape, distracting attention from more systemic issues. Trump is far from being an exception, even if you believe exceptions that prove rules. Only eight years ago, for example, John McCain chose Sarah “Going Rogue” Palin as his choice to stand a heartbeat away from the Presidency. The roots of Trump’s success can be traced to America’s post-war transition from the grey flannel 1950s to the 60s.
Politically, Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of half a century’s decline in America’s relative balance. Yes, parts of Trump’s personal history and quirks of his performance are unusual for a candidate for the nation’s highest office. But his candidacy represents the ultimate convergence of two realignments in American politics which have taken fifty years to resolve. The Republican Party has been devolving, and the resolution of this process is Trump.
The internal conflict among Republicans lay between what the American writer Carl Oglesby described as the “Yankees” and the “Cowboys”. Yankees represented old Eastern aristocracy and money, the Wall Street lawyers and investment bankers. They founded the party before the Civil War, partly through a noblesse oblige desire to end slavery. Their ranks were joined by nineteenth-century robber barons who gained respectability through wealth and the adoption of that noblesse oblige. They tended to be internationalists. Cowboys represented new money: independent Texas oilmen, aerospace and defence contractors, gigantic retailers, the rising power of the Far West. They offered little noblesse and no oblige, and advocated American exceptionalism which bordered on isolationism, unless America’s dominant interest dictated otherwise. They included groups such as the John Birch Society, funded by the Coors brewing fortune – right-wingers who considered Dwight Eisenhower a communist.
In 1964, their standard-bearer, Barry Goldwater of Arizona (“extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice”) won the Republican presidential nomination. He was trounced in the election by Lyndon Johnson, and the Yankee-backed Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford regained power within the Party. But by 1980, the Cowboys found a more presentable spokesman. Former television host Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter by running against the Washington establishment, with George H. W. Bush, the son of a Yankee investment banker turned Texas oilman Cowboy, as his vice-president. Since then, opposition to “government” has become the Republicans’ default position. Career politicians run against “Washington insiders”, in pantomime rebellion against the very interests who bankroll them into office and whose needs they service.
It was also in 1964 that Johnson enacted the landmark Civil Rights Act. In 1965 he pushed the Voting Rights Act through Congress and as he signed that bill, he remarked presciently “there goes the South”. Four years later Richard Nixon introduced a “southern strategy” to the Republicans, and by 1980, when Reagan defeated Carter, the only southern state Carter captured was his own Georgia.
When the Right and Left were mixed between two parties, the art of compromise was the essence of politics. But now all the hard Right was in one party, and these radical, religious and overwhelmingly white Republicans shared a commitment to ideological purity, exerting extreme pressure on “moderates” to tack firmly to the right or face challenges, funded by unlimited money from backers like the Koch brothers, in the primaries. Co-operation with the Democratic Party became anathema.
Assuming a Trump loss, what happens next? To many commentators, Trump appears to be moving toward his own television news channel (a proposal he has denied), fuelled by his Manichaean view of “the establishment”. Roger Ailes, the former Republican kingmaker at Fox News, who resigned after Trump-like accusations of sexual harassment, could run it. Trump may be aiming at becoming an American Silvio Berlusconi, complete with bunga-bunga.
For a Republican Party facing another four years of fighting a rear-guard action in Washington, Trump TV’s appeal to their hardest core by questioning the very legitimacy of government could become a fatally divisive wedge. The Republican Party’s challenge lies in finding a leader who can hold that core together with its backers, while managing not to further alienate floating voters. That task might require another Ronald Reagan, and their only consolation is that Trump is nowhere near as skilled an actor as Reagan was.