Commentary: What happens to Trumpism after Trump?
Can Trumpism outlive Donald Trump?
Let's say that Trump loses in a blowout, a scenario that looks increasingly likely. A real landslide loss, the kind the GOP hasn't had since Barry Goldwater in 1964 (the last year, coincidentally, that Cleveland won an NBA title). He holds onto a few Deep South states but little else, and Republicans lose the Senate and maybe even the House. What does the GOP look like after that?
Does it revert to how it was before Trump, a party that mixes a neoconservative foreign policy with a libertarian economic agenda and an evangelical culture? Or has Trump already changed the DNA of the party? Does it embrace the populist-nationalist positions, the protectionist trade agenda and defense of the welfare state that helped Trump win?
It's worth wondering about, especially now that so many elite Republicans -- even the ones who eventually warmed to Trump -- now talk as if the GOP has essentially forfeited the presidential race.
The idea that Trump can suddenly become a more traditional candidate is laughable: he doesn't have the skill set, which may have been part of his appeal in the first place.
Or maybe Trump figures out how to run for president at some point this summer, but who knows what that would look like? Maybe a recession or some other cataclysm might save him. Maybe.
So Trump loses, and he loses big. A liberal majority appointed by Hillary Clinton dominates the Supreme Court for the next couple decades. After an embarrassment that big, that catastrophic, do Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and the Kochs get a better hold on their base? Can they survey the wreckage, look back at the voters who plopped Trump in the driver's seat, and tell them, convincingly, that this is why the GOP can't have nice things?
Maybe. But first, consider a few points. Bear in mind that the conservative wave Goldwater fronted in 1964 eventually did take control of the GOP. Conservatism had to moderate a little bit -- objections to the Civil Rights Act weren't going to fly anymore -- but by the mid-1980s it was clear that liberal Republicanism was a thing of the past.
A key difference between that conservatism and Trump's variety, however, is that Goldwater had a coherent political tendency behind him. He could run as a conservative of the William F. Buckley school, and depend on Buckley to skillfully purge the crazies. National Review was the movement bulletin, the place where arguments could be fleshed out and orthodoxy established. Trump has none of these things; to the extent that he has any real governing ideology, in fact, he seems to have just stumbled into it.
But Trumpism is still weirdly recognizable to conservative intellectuals because it resembles arguments that have existed on the right for a long time. The Week's Michael Brendan Dougherty has convincingly pointed to Pat Buchanan advisor-cum-white nationalist Sam Francis, who warned of the dangers of globalism to the working class, as an important antecedent to Trumpism. The anonymous writers behind the Journal of American Greatness, which tried to provide a coherent philosophical defense of Trumpism until they shut it down and scrubbed their website last week, also looked to Francis, among others, to explain and justify Trump's appeal.
This is the sort of conservatism Buckley never approved of -- too many racists and antisemites, for one thing -- but it's also one that focuses on the white working class, which is now the GOP's real base.
This is probably not the preferred base of someone like Ryan, a modernizer who wants free trade, open flows of labor from one country to the next, and a multiethnic Republican Party of happy capitalists. And the white working class sees itself as the grand loser in a party that aspires to this kind of world.
At the same time, there's probably no way the white working class can alone provide the support base for a winning presidential candidate, a reality that must be sinking in at Trump Tower. There are many reasons for this: it's a shrinking demo, in part because their life expectancy is dropping due to heart disease, alcoholism, drug abuse and suicide - reasons, that is, of despair and excess. And for another, they don't tend to vote in huge numbers, a factor Trump, with his near absence of a national organization, seems unlikely to turn around in any significant way.
So for Trumpism to survive, it seems, it needs to find a way to talk about a protectionist, pro-welfare state economic agenda that puts the working class first but drops the white identity politics that have helped undergird Trump's support. A kind of rainbow nationalism, one that puts all Americans first regardless of religion or color or any of the other ways we identify as smaller groups, and emphasizes the quality of life of people living here over any abstract or international concern. This is really an old mainstream liberal message, one that predates the hip intersectionalism of today, and one that's dependent on old leftist notions of competing class interests.
Trump, for obvious reasons, probably has too much racial baggage to effectively deliver such a message. In fact, there may be no one on the political horizon who can. But it would be a shame if, post-Trump, the only people talking seriously about the deleterious effects of globalism on the white working class are on the far-left, a group that frequently assails mainstream liberalism's apathy toward downwardly mobile whites. Meanwhile, a Republican agenda that continues to prize wealthier, better-educated voters at the expense of the folks who actually vote for GOP candidates is likely doomed to extinction in the near future, Trump or no Trump.
Maybe the better question is whether Trumpism can survive Trump, given that he has made this brand of populism so toxic with his habitual unforced errors. Or it may be that right-leaning populism is impossible to divorce from notions of white supremacy.
In any case, the Republican party needs to find a way to appeal to the voters who have and will continue to back Trump, and do it in such a way that brings in new voters from a more diverse America.
Whoever figures out how to do that is a lot smarter than I am. But it's hard to imagine a GOP after Trump that much resembles the party that came before him. Like it or not, the Republican Party is now different than it was just four years ago, and if it doesn't figure out some sort of middle path Trump and Ryan, it won't be around for much longer.