Populists vs. elites — America’s other favorite pastime
A Trump supporter at a campaign rally in Plattsburgh, N.Y., in April. (Photo: Elise Amendola/AP)
In recent days, Donald Trump and Paul Manafort, his new convention manager, have charged that Ted Cruz’s campaign is seeking to steal the election right out from under Trump. “Gestapo tactics,” moaned Manafort, casting aspersions on Cruz’s recent victory over Trump at Colorado’s Republican convention, as if Cruz had somehow rigged it in his favor.
Trump may yet win through the primary process the 1,237 delegates he must secure in order to capture the nomination in Cleveland outright. Yet it is now at least reasonably possible that he won’t cross that threshold, that Ted Cruz will finish a relatively close second, and that at least some Republican leaders will land in Cleveland fantasizing about Paul Ryan — despite his Shermanesque vow not to be drafted as their nominee — or another as-yet-unnamed savior who in the late July heat can save their party from moral ruin and political annihilation. A contested convention in Cleveland would be dramatic and fascinating to behold, of course. Since 1952, the United States has not experienced a convention battle that has gone beyond the first ballot.
Nonetheless, what makes the upcoming fight in Cleveland even more fraught — and more important to the character of American democracy — is that we will be witnessing a debate between populists and elites that has been raging, off and on, since the early days of the republic. Millions of Americans have long felt disenfranchised by what they see as out-of-touch plutocrats who feather their own nests at the expense of the common citizen. Elite efforts to check outbreaks of popular dissatisfaction, in turn, have long preoccupied political leaders. The Founding Fathers had a well-known fear of uneducated masses electing demagogues to high office, a fear that is once again ascendant among some of Trump’s fiercest critics. The GOP today is roiled by a fundamental conflict between the Trumpian masses claiming popular grassroots support for their man (raising the specter of an undemocratic coup) and Republican officials who see the Trump movement as democracy run amok (a vitriolic minority hijacking true Republican virtues).
The language of Trump and his supporters is consonant with the mass suspicion of distant elites who control economic and political systems to the detriment of white working men and women — with deep roots in the culture. “It’s a rigged, disgusting, dirty system,” Trump told New Yorkers last week, referring to the complex, arcane delegate selection process. One of his rallygoers told CNN.com, “Here is the Republican Party, instead of listening to its constituents, who are saying this is what we want, they’re not backing him up. Instead they’re rallying against him … they’re rallying against us.”
Trump’s supporters will also come to the convention armed with a shared sense of cultural grievance. In their telling, the economic and political systems have harmed them while favoring corporate titans, illegal immigrants and Muslims — all of whom, in the Trumpian worldview, are making America not great but actually unrecognizable. The Trump phenomenon is thus rooted in the combustible intersection of race, immigration and economic nationalism that has at times helped fuel populist uprisings of decades past.
The original populists — agrarian Western and Southern farmers of the late 19th century — decried Eastern bankers who were said to be choking off the money supply, making it hard for them to get credit and pay off their debts, and urban industrialists who were destroying the agrarian character of a Jeffersonian America. Decades later, during the Great Depression, followers of Louisiana’s “Kingfish” Huey Long rallied to his redistributionist “Share Our Wealth” battle cry, while the radio priest Father Coughlin’s supporters were likewise drawn to his everyman calls for economic equity. Both figures ultimately sought to return a measure of autonomy and control back to individuals and communities feeling disempowered by an ever larger modern industrial state.
As the historian Alan Brinkley has written, mass politics has represented to some observers “the victory of the dark forces that have in the [20th] century produced fascism, Stalinism, and other terrors,” while other critics have portrayed it as “the rational and entirely justified responses to oppression and injustice.” The debate about the nature of Trump’s movement — fueled by legitimate grievances or subterranean forces — has been framed in similar terms.
Trump and his millions of passionate voters distrust conservative pundits, elected and unelected officials, and the wealthy Republican donors who are sinking millions into anti-Trump super-PACs. Republican elites distrust Trump’s followers as ignorant, racist and vengeful. From Bill Kristol to Mitt Romney, countless Republicans have endorsed a Never Trump movement, with its own hashtag, which is grounded in the conviction that Trump’s demagoguery, racism and anti-market stances on issues like trade not only affront the tenets of conservatism but also coarsen and endanger tolerance, freedom and American life.
A dialogue — online and in the mainstream and conservative press alike — has raised questions about Trump voters’ intelligence, values and ethics. “Tell those people [voting for Trump] the truth” about Trump’s fraudulence, urged columnist David Brooks last month, aiming his message at Republican officials. “Trump’s Supporters Aren’t Stupid,” read a headline in Medium, the online forum, raising the prospect that some are, indeed, stupid. “Are Donald Trump’s Supporters Racist?” asked a headline in the Atlantic. Trump’s voters, Vox.com reported, “have a history of voting for segregationists and a tendency to support those with authoritarian philosophies.” His supporters, critics charge, are thuggish, conspiratorial and susceptible to Trump’s lies, which they are said to take at face value. By blocking Trump from the nomination, even if they lose the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton, the Never Trump forces can claim that they saved the Republican Party from Trump’s mass politics, and America from the kind of demagogues fueled by unruly mass support that the founders warned about.
The battle in Cleveland will be more than a fight for a majority of delegates — more, even, than a struggle to determine the future of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Cleveland will be the site of a clash of sharply contrasting worldviews, in which Trumpian populists who see mass politics as virtuous will be pitted against conservative writers, politicians, activists and strategists who regard mass politics of the Trumpian variety as inimical to democracy itself. Each side scorns the other; each side believes the other side represents a threat to the American way.
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Matthew Dallek, an assistant professor at George Washington’s Graduate School of Political Management, is co-author of Inside Campaigns: Elections Through the Eyes of Political Professionals and author of the forthcoming Defenseless Under the Night: The Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security (Oxford University Press, June).
