It may seem I’m getting a bit ahead of things by asking this question. This post is more a stab at thinking the question through than a definitive argument. But let’s ask the question: If Trump goes down to defeat in November, is that the end of Trumpism? As I’ve thought more about this question over recent days, I think the answer is clearly ‘no’.
As I wrote months ago, Trump’s transgressive nature, his instinct for provocation, isn’t incidental to his appeal or the power he’s gained through his campaign. It’s at the heart of it. And yet, one can certainly imagine messengers for Trumpism who have more emotional balance, self-awareness and impulse control. As I wrote a few days ago, there are smart terrible people and stupid terrible people. Trump’s the latter. One can imagine a Trumpite politician with more self-mastery and self-possession, assuming Trump himself leaves the political stage if he’s defeated in November.
But here’s how I’d frame the question. With everything that’s happened this year, with the emergence of a white nationalist incarnation of the GOP, with everything that comes with that, do we think those folks, the big chunk of GOP voters who are hardcore Trump supporters, will come back in 2020 and say, “Okay, that didn’t work out. Let’s go for Marco Rubio.”
That does not strike me as at all plausible.
Of course, if Trump suffers a devastating defeat, as now seems at least plausible, maybe hardcore supporters will simply see the Trumpite cause is hopeless? This does appear to be fairly widespread conventional wisdom. Trump goes down to an epic defeat. Establishment Republicans haul out a big bucket of ‘I told you so’ and retake the reins. Does that sound right? It doesn’t to me.
We’ve now had a version of the GOP that is strongly anti-immigrant, white nationalist in character, hostile to foreign trade as much as its hostile to foreign countries and the people who come from those countries. We’ve seen that a big chunk of the Republican party is hugely supportive of that program. The excitement, the galvanization of a large part of he electorate – I think that’s all too transformative to be dropped in favor of the pre-2016 GOP.
Of course much of the question turns on your theory of Trumpism. Is it just a fluke or ingenious media skills, Twitter and bad hair? I think not. As I’ve argued in various posts over the last year, our general politics and particularly the rise of Trumpism is being driven by an increasingly vocal and aggrieved minority (overwhelmingly, but by no means exclusively, made up of conservative white men, disproportionately without college degrees) who believe their country is being taken away from them. It is important to recognize that this perception and grievance is rooted in something real, which is by no means the extinction but the erosion of white racial supremacy, or white privilege, if you will. In simple numerical terms whites won’t much longer have the numbers to call the shots on their own in the country. And if you politically identify with your whiteness and what has historically come with it, that’s terrifying. The fact that Donald Trump would be the catalyst for ‘Trumpism’ is something that I never would have predicted. But that ‘Trumpism’ was the logical end result of the direction of conservative politics in the last decade was utterly predictable.
Now that it’s found a voice, now that it has broken through the bubble of establishment Republicanism I do not think it will go away quietly.
