Of the conventional wisdom, this much is true: When Donald Trump took over the Republican Party in 2016, it was the most momentous political revolution in at least a generation.
What’s not true is that Trump completely transformed the party or reversed its direction. He was not the first to try melding populism with conservatism within the GOP.
Tension was building for decades between the working class and the Democratic Party . Potential energy also steadily increased across the aisle as the Republican leadership tried desperately to resist the Right’s natural drift toward populism.
Then Trump arrived and broke the dam. After him came the deluge.
Prophets of populism
Trump is unparalleled and unmatched in many ways, but he was far from the first populist of the post-Cold War Republicans. Many moments in the preceding 25 years prefigured his takeover.
Pat Buchanan was the most forceful and eloquent, if controversial and ultimately unsuccessful, prophet of GOP populism. The two legs of his populism were nationalism and social conservatism.
The elites of both parties have long been internationalists, pushing interventionist foreign policy , liberal immigration laws, and free trade. This was at odds with the bases of both parties.
The average voter rejects the idea of America as global policeman and questions the wisdom of nation-building. On immigration , the center of American politics is certainly more restrictionist than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And while Americans are generally favorable toward international trade, the average Joe is certainly less absolutist than the average economist.
Buchanan combined noninterventionism, immigration restriction, and trade protectionism with a socially conservative message and became a political sensation. He garnered 37% in New Hampshire, and nearly 30% of all votes on or prior to Super Tuesday . Buchanan 1992 is the most successful primary challenge to a sitting president in the last 40 years.
Then, in 1996, Buchanan won four states, including New Hampshire , and was the clear runner-up to establishment pick Bob Dole in the GOP primary.
Buchanan’s showing in the 1990s hinted toward a quiet but significant populist minority within the party.
During President Barack Obama ’s first term, there were clues, too — even if much of the commentariat missed them.
Mike Huckabee , the former Arkansas governor, upset Mitt Romney in the Iowa caucuses and then persisted as the last challenger standing against establishment favorite John McCain. Commentators typically described Huckabee’s constituency as the evangelical vote, but Huckabee also drew in a significant slice of a less religious working-class vote — the populist vote.
That fall, the Wall Street bailouts supercharged conservative populism. The Tea Party was sparked by the bailouts, and its biggest primary wins involved upstart conservatives blasting establishment Republicans for their ties to Wall Street and K Street.
Rick Santorum in his 2012 challenge to establishment favorite Romney again was considered the candidate of the religious Right, but he very clearly was also the populist candidate. For instance, in Ohio, where Romney eked out a Super Tuesday victory, Santorum won the noncollege vote by 5 points and the sub-$100,000 vote by 7 points.
Then during the 2012 general election, Romney seemed explicitly to reject the working-class vote. He famously said his base was the richest 47% of the country and wrote off the lower-earning 47%, the “people who pay no income tax,” as incurable Democrats who could never be convinced that “they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
Democrats exploited this and successfully cast Romney as the candidate of the country club who didn’t care for the working man.
Romney’s political analysis was poor but self-fulfilling. After he lost to Obama, losing the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan, political analyst Sean Trende offered the most compelling explanation of Romney’s underperformance: the missing white voter.
“The most salient demographic change from 2008 to 2012 was the drop in white voters,” Trende found . The decline was concentrated in Appalachia, along the Ohio River, and in the Rust Belt.
“These voters were largely downscale, northern, rural whites.”
The working class wanted to be Republicans, but the Republicans kept pushing them away.
Santorum, after the 2012 election, wrote a book titled Blue Collar Conservatives making the case for a conservative and populist Republican Party.
Blue-collar conservatism
Democrats long enjoyed the reputation as the party of the little guy, and Republicans were understood as the party of the country club.
This wasn’t totally false. For starters, leading Republicans such as Romney also believed this and thus declared the working class unfit. Also, it was generally true that as income rose, propensity to vote Republican rose. Republicans have always advanced tax cuts, while Democrats have always fought to expand the welfare state.
But throughout the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, the image of Democrats as the party of the little guy, and Republicans as the sole home for the wealthy, increasingly clashed with reality.
In 2004, the top four political donors, led by George Soros, all supported John Kerry over George W. Bush. In 2002, the top nine donors all favored Democrats. In 2000, the top five donors all supported Democrats exclusively. The wealthiest counties in America favored Democrats in the Bush era.
Obama, speaking to donors in 2008, blasted the white working class as clinging bitterly to guns and Bibles. Democrats’ gun control battle often took on an elitist class warfare tone.
Obama won over Hollywood and media elites even more than the average Democrat. He teamed up with big business to pass his signature accomplishments, the stimulus bill and Obamacare.
In general, Democrats’ support for big government, while framed as broadsides against big business, tended to aid the biggest and most entrenched businesses at the expense of the small-business owner, the consumer, and the taxpayer. Obama, for instance, championed the 2008 Wall Street bailout and the Export-Import Bank, which subsidizes Boeing and big banks.
In the culture wars, the Democrats’ priorities have long been at odds with the interests of the working class.
For one, the gun control cause always reeked of elitism. A Washington Post columnist called the Second Amendment “the refuge of bumpkins and yeehaws who like to think they are protecting their homes against imagined swarthy marauders desperate to steal their flea-bitten sofas from their rotting front porches.”
The sexual revolution, denigrating marriage and family, in particular, had a grossly destabilizing effect on the working class and the poor.
Democrats’ broader efforts to concentrate power in Washington, disempowering smaller towns and states, also favored elites over ordinary people.
Even Democrats’ alliances with labor unions were partnerships with powerful political players at the expense of the less powerful. Labor laws and minimum wage hikes often serve as barriers to competition. And teachers unions famously fight to wrest power away from parents.
For all these reasons, the American Right was ready for a populist revolution by the end of the Obama era.
The Fifth Avenue populist
Trump in 2016, like Buchanan in the 1990s, placed immigration central, rejected the Republican consensus on free trade, and lambasted the Iraq War .
He promised to “drain the swamp,” pointing out how professional politicians and lobbyists all enriched one another at the expense of the ordinary guy.
Trump lavished praise on veterans, police, and factory workers in his 2016 campaign, declaring, “I love the poorly educated.”
Trump also sounded a more negative tone about the state of the United States, declaring, “The American dream is dead.” In the Republican primaries, Trump focused his campaign visits on struggling formerly industrial towns. “Every single place I go is a disaster,” he said.
In the Republican primaries, Trump’s early base was working-class, rural, white voters. Often, these were independents or even Democrats who didn’t broadly buy into the GOP policy agenda. Often, they were lukewarm on social conservatism. But there were, to the surprise of many lifelong Republicans and conservatives, enough latent Republicans in the working class to carry Trump to victory.
Hillary Clinton gave Trump an assist in the general election with her comments about the 25% of the country she considered “deplorables,” echoing Obama’s “bitter clingers.”
Trump explicitly framed his campaign as the working class versus the elites. “Today the American working class is going to strike back, finally,” Trump said on election night in 2016 from Michigan.
Sure enough, Trump dominated among working-class white voters, trouncing Clinton 68% to 24% among white voters with no college degree. He outpolled his Republican predecessors among veterans and union households.
This was enough to place Ohio, which Obama had carried in 2012, out of reach for Democrats and to carry Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
As Trende wrote, “There’s little doubt that a strong showing with these rural whites, who are disconnected from the global economy that increasingly defines urban and suburban environs, played a major role in his win.”
The result wasn’t merely a Trump presidency but the GOP finally accepting its place as a party of the working man.
Politics in the populist era
Republican leaders spent decades resisting their party’s blue-collar destiny, and thus probably undermined their party. Why did they resist?
Some of it was just the social preferences of GOP leaders: Businessmen and country-club types wanted to be the party of businessmen and country-club types.
Some of it, though, was political calculation. As the Trump years have shown, courting the working class involves sacrificing some of the suburban upper-middle-class vote, on which the GOP had heavily relied.
It’s a complex trade-off. Even if the numbers were even, one factory worker gained for one suburban attorney lost, the situation would hardly be symmetrical. In 2016, for instance, the working-class converts to the GOP lived disproportionately in the swing states.
On the flip side, working-class voters are less reliable at showing up to vote compared to college-educated suburban voters. Giving up a white-bread vote for a blue-collar vote worked fine in 2016, but in midterm and special elections, it’s a disadvantageous trade.
It was almost an iron law of politics for decades that Republicans do better in low-turnout elections. That law was premised on Republicans having the high-propensity voters and Democrats having the low-propensity voters. That dynamic has flipped with the Trump realignment.
Also, giving up wealthy donors for downscale voters means losing donors. This is probably why Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has so aggressively pursued the very realignment Trump brought about. Schumer, always close with industry, always thinking about fundraising, has courted K Street, Wall Street, and the upper-middle class.
In recent election cycles, Schumer made the Democrats’ central issue expanding the State and Local Tax deduction — a change that would only affect higher earners with expensive homes.
Many Northeast Democrats happily embraced their role as the party of the rich, focusing their messages on how Republicans have lower incomes and, thus, Red States are “moocher states” whose residents receive more in federal benefits than they pay in federal taxes.
When politics, partisans, and donor bases realign, so too do policy priorities.
Policy in the populist era
Trump is hardly dogmatic or inflexible when it comes to policy. His populism, in fact, can be amorphous.
At times, Trump’s populist economic policy has meant opposing corporate welfare. At other times, it has meant pushing industrial policy in the name of saving American jobs.
Given a party leader who is not attuned to policy details, plenty of activists, wonks, and lawmakers have tried to craft a Trumpian policy agenda: a populist conservatism.
Whether from brand-new groups such as American Compass or old hands such as the Heritage Foundation, there have been many efforts to make a coherent Trumpian, populist, conservative agenda.
Some of these efforts have explicitly embraced an activist government role: industrial policy consisting of tariffs and subsidies to prop up U.S. manufacturing, for instance, or family policy that heavily incentivizes marriage and children.
But here it is crucial to remember that the Republican Party, while preaching limited government, was attracting interest from blue-collar voters long before Trump came on the scene. Buchanan’s 1992 primary campaign focused on George H.W. Bush’s tax hike.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
When the government has more power, that gives the advantage to whoever has the best connections to government — and that’s never mom and pop. For this reason, ordinary working people with no ideological attachment to Milton Friedman perceived that the Democrats, with their open embrace of large, activist government, served the well connected.
All it took to turn millions of working-class people into Republicans was a presidential nominee who said he wanted them.
Timothy P. Carney is senior political columnist for the Washington Examiner.
Most Popular
Comments / 0