{"id":15588,"date":"2015-09-02T14:38:16","date_gmt":"2015-09-02T18:38:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15588"},"modified":"2016-11-22T13:33:50","modified_gmt":"2016-11-22T18:33:50","slug":"trump-equivalent-european-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15588","title":{"rendered":"is Trumpism akin to the European right?"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the whole, I’m inclined to think that Donald Trump’s large lead in the Republican race is a passing phenomenon, similar\u00a0to several candidates’ surges during 2011-12, and driven mostly by media attention and name-recognition at a time when\u00a0most people\u00a0are\u00a0not yet following the campaign closely. In Die Hard III<\/em>, which is 20 years old, Trump and Hillary Clinton are already two prominent references. The Donald\u00a0has a level of celebrity that may give him disproportionate\u00a0attention early in a multi-candidate campaign but that won’t win\u00a0him the nomination.<\/p>\n

However,\u00a0there is an interesting substantive discussion of his candidacy. It’s not about whether he will\u00a0win but rather whether he and his followers are\u00a0like the\u00a0right-wing parties in Europe. That constituency\u00a0might outlast his presidential run.<\/p>\n

Trump’s\u00a0positions are not consistent with American conservative\u00a0doctrine.\u00a0He\u00a0is fanatically anti-immigrant and lobs verbal grenades at\u00a0various countries every day, but he also says<\/a>, “I\u2019m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I\u2019m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid. … Every other Republican is going to cut, and even if they wouldn\u2019t, they don\u2019t know what to do because they don\u2019t know where the money is.” Apparently<\/a>, Trump would also\u00a0raise taxes on unearned income.<\/p>\n

The combination of grievances against foreign countries and immigrants plus enthusiasm for state intervention in the domestic economy is a position that tends to be called “populism” in Europe. I resist that terminology for the US<\/a> because we have a very worthy political tradition officially known as Populism (on which Laura Grattan<\/a>‘s forthcoming book is excellent). Another term could be “far-right.” As Mathew Yglesias writes<\/a>, “several of [the European parties] have institutional roots in old fascist political movements.” That would indeed make them far-right. But, as Yglesias adds, “their current ideological positioning is generally much more complicated than that, and some of them have no such institutional roots.” They typically combine extreme positions against\u00a0immigration with economic policies that would be left-of-center in the US. So perhaps the most accurate term is “economic nationalist.” It can then come in varieties that range from truly chauvinistic to plausibly mainstream.<\/p>\n

Similar views make a popular combination in the US as well. As Lee Drutman shows<\/a>, if you screen for people who favor expanding Social Security and decreasing immigration, you get 24% of the electorate. They may or may not be chauvinists, since their views on immigration could be moderate. But they are out of step with the Republican Party on Social Security and could accurately be called “economic nationalists.” Meanwhile, those who would expand Social Security and keep immigration at least at current levels constitute 26.5%. This\u00a0second group is\u00a0in sync with the Democratic Party’s leadership. The strong conservative position\u00a0(trim or privatize Social Security and restrict immigration) draws just 2.4% of voters, one tenth as many.<\/p>\n

Trump is aligned with the 24% who are economic nationalists.\u00a0If we use Social Security and immigration as the\u00a0two proxies for that view,\u00a0then\u00a0Trump’s constituency is\u00a0comparable in size to liberals and much larger than conservatives.\u00a0A third measure would be attitudes toward policing, on which Trump takes an aggressive position that may also be fairly popular (with similar people).<\/p>\n

It’s common for a combination of views not to be represented in a two-party system. Antiabortion progressives, for instance, have nowhere\u00a0to turn in presidential politics in the US. But economic nationalists represent a big enough bloc to\u00a0possibly\u00a0destabilize\u00a0the political system. Antiabortion progressives are typically Democrats who are badly outvoted within their own party on that issue. Economic nationalists, in contrast, seem to be Republicans who represent\u00a0a large force in their party but are at odds with its\u00a0elites.<\/p>\n

While Trump’s support (about 30% of Republican voters right now) may be boosted by his attention-grabbing style during the silly season of the campaign, it is conceivable that someone with similar views and a less rebarbative and risible style might actually perform\u00a0better in the long term. Republican elites disagree with half of economic nationalism and will have to figure out how to keep it at bay even after Donald Trump no longer threatens the nomination.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the whole, I’m inclined to think that Donald Trump’s large lead in the Republican race is a passing phenomenon, similar\u00a0to several candidates’ surges during 2011-12, and driven mostly by media attention and name-recognition at a time when\u00a0most people\u00a0are\u00a0not yet following the campaign closely. In Die Hard III, which is 20 years old, Trump and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,34,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-election","category-trump","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15588"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15636,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15588\/revisions\/15636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}