Charlotte Allen

The Republican Party is in a state of Trump-fixated crisis right now, torn apart by its political and intellectual leaders’ detestation of the presidential candidate for whom the majority of their followers voted overwhelmingly a few months ago. The problem as they see it is a dangerous wave of “populism” — typically defined as the belief that ordinary people should have control of their government rather than the various elites of wealth, political expertise, and advanced levels of education who are usually in charge.

Donald Trump’s Oct. 22 speech at the Gettysburg battlefield, quoting Abraham Lincoln’s “of the people, by the people, for the people,” was a pure — and if you loathe Trump, outrageously demagogic — appeal to the resentments that have fueled surges of populism in America since the country’s founding. Writers for such liberal outlets as Salon and The Atlantic hastened to link Trump’s populist appeal to fascism, misogyny, and incitement to violence — even though, as the Project Veritas videos have shown, it’s been the Democratic Party operatives backing Hillary Clinton who have tried to stir up violence at Trump rallies.

But so did the anti-Trump Republicans. Matthew Continetti, editor of the conservative Washington Free Beacon, wrote a lengthy essay accusing populists, starting with the New Right that swept Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980, of indulging in mindless “adversarianism” against the hated liberal elites while failing to develop positive “policies” that might counteract the social destruction wrought by the liberal welfare state. Continetti urged his fellow conservative intellectuals to sever their ties with populism for good.

All of this shows a misunderstanding of what populism really is. Both the establishment left and the establishment right have been unduly influenced by the theories of the late Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, whose widely read books and essays of the 1950s and 1960s connected populism to what he called a “paranoid style” in American politics: a chronic, usually delusional, and deeply anti-intellectual suspiciousness that saw conspiracies of the rich and powerful under every bed and succumbed easily to the lures of far-right ideologies.

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In fact, populism is never amorphously “adversarian” and lacking in specific policies for change. Enforcing America’s immigration laws — a key plank in the Trump platform — is a policy. So is revamping our trade pacts so as not to keep moving masses of jobs out of America as we have done for the past 25 years. Furthermore, populism is never ideological. There have been as many populist movements on the left as on the right. Franklin D. Roosevelt won four consecutive presidential terms by adroitly positioning himself as the champion of the “common man” who blamed banks, Wall Street, and corporations for the miseries of the Great Depression. Populism arises whenever ordinary people — the middle and working classes — get fed up with whatever policies detrimental to their interests they perceive the political, economic, and cultural elites have shoved down their throats to further their own interests. Right now that means virtual open borders, declining employment prospects, pointless wars in which they or their offspring are expected to be targets, and forcing their schools to let biological males use the girls’ bathroom.

What the Republican leadership doesn’t realize is that it needs populism. During the last 50 years the only two Republicans to win the presidency — Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan — were Establishment outsiders who rode in on waves of populist antagonism to the social disorder of the 1960s and the stagflation and American global weakness of the 1970s. (The Bushes don’t count: George H.W. Bush was a single-term Reagan coattail-rider, and George W. Bush had the Supreme Court to thank for squeaking into office.) Republicans need populism because they need voters. The Democrats, with their ideology of grievance-mongering and ever-expanding government benefits, have built-in constituencies: ethnic minorities, LGBTs, unions, and single women. The Republicans have trouble inspiring people to get to the polls.

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Trump is the best thing that has happened to the Republican Party in nearly four decades. The level of rank-and-file GOP enthusiasm he has inspired is astounding. I just returned from a trip to the supposedly “blue” Pacific Northwest, where outside the major cities there was a Trump/Pence sign on nearly every lawn — most of them the well-tended lawns of the middle class. Trump handily won the nomination over 16 other candidates, several of whom were showered with money and blessings from a Republican establishment that continues to decry him as loudly as do the Democrats. He is detested as “vulgar” — as if we didn’t live in an age of unparalleled vulgarity. More to the point, the GOP elites seem to be invested ideologically in the very stances that actual GOP voters vehemently oppose: expanded immigration, aggressive foreign intervention, job-killing free-trade boosterism.

The Republicans may not survive this election, and if they don’t, their leadership will brand Trump’s a spoilsport and pen more denunciations of populism. I hope they eventually get it through their heads that populism means people, and a political party needs people — because in a democracy it’s the people, not the leadership, whose votes and views count.

Charlotte Allen is a writer in Washington, D.C. Follow her on Twitter @MeanCharlotte.

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