Roots of Trumpism: New Book Sheds Light on the Savage Transformation of the GOP in the 1990s into a Party that Wanted To Tear US Society Apart
Trump Stole his "Politics of Resentment " Playbook from the Charlatans who Wanted a New Enemy to Fight after Collapse of the Berlin Wall
When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Francis Fukuyama wasn't the only one to signal that the world had changed. One quote that Fukuyama probably regrets more than most captures the spirit of giddy optimism we all felt when the Soviet Union passed into history:
"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
How spectacularly wrong that turned out to be. While some in the American elite cautioned against gloating, the more important emotion was a sense that we had suddenly become a country unmoored, without a map to guide us into the future. The Cold War had been a keystone brick in the bridge that held together American post-war politics. There was a threat that communism would take over, that socialism would conquer the future, and the US needed to keep feeding the Pentagon billions of dollars for ever more sophisticated weapons of destruction. Children practiced sheltering under desks, and we raced to the moon to show the world that capitalism, rather than communism, was the true way forward. John Ganz's illuminating book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, expertly retells how various charlatans attempted to fill the political vacuum after the disappearance of America's arch enemy.
Ganz identifies the early 1990s as a moment when "prevailing political myths ceased to make sense or have purchase, and nothing sufficiently capacious or legible emerged to replace them, leaving only a dank, foggy climate of conspiracy, bellicosity, and despair." The book recounts how certain now-forgotten figures anticipated our present moment. One individual in particular was Murray Rothbard, a new right "boy genius" whose comments seem unbelievably prescient of what was to come. Rothbard saw the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a moment to tear apart liberal society. This man, who died in 1995, was an unusually angry young person who was tired of hearing that you "could not turn back the clock" on the inevitability that the Soviet Union was going to win the Cold War. The USSR's death, rather than causing him to pause and reflect on the work it took to make that reality possible, inspired him to go for more. But what did "more" consist of? It turned out he wanted—with a passion that's hard to distinguish from insanity—to destroy the very society that had caused the Soviet Union's defeat.
"With the inspiration of the death of the Soviet Union before us, we know it can be done. With Pat Buchanan as our leader, we shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal...We shall repeal the twentieth century."
Rothbard's fiery tone represents the new right's energy, fueling the anger of outsider figures like Pat Buchanan, who shaped his America First campaign into a platform to attract the right-wing fringe parties that were starting to fall for David Duke's brand of thinly disguised KKK-style racism. Others, including Newt Gingrich and later the Tea Party, were doing their best to bring the whole thing down by calling every vaguely left institution "corrupt" and any feminist or civil rights organization "extreme." Their entire perspective was to do as much as they could to inflame emotions and, even though they would deny it, fan the flames of violence.
An alternative outsider was Ross Perot, who bid to become a third independent party candidate and commanded the airwaves with his quick wit and view that a bloated, inefficient government was the obstacle to peace and prosperity. Trump was too interested in exploiting a volatile economic climate to bother with politics, but he probably couldn't help watching from the sidelines and realizing that something quite remarkable was happening in US politics—outsiders were breaking up a once-stable GOP that had long prided itself on insulating itself from anti-establishment figures like himself.
The Democratic Party, by contrast, was slow to get off the mark. They believed that the collapse of the Soviet Union wasn't as big a deal as the Republicans seemed to think and certainly not an excuse to smash any kind of clock. Clinton and his VP running mate Al Gore preferred to see this epochal event as enabling the US to focus on reducing its defense budget and jumpstarting the tech revolution that the invention of the Internet was about to usher in, while expanding more open global trade, most notably through NAFTA. They wanted more technocracy, more neoliberalism, and a more activist government, but they found explaining all that became increasingly difficult during a time when crime was rising and ethnic tensions were exploding inside major cities. The impact of their trade policies was effectively to siphon off jobs from the key battleground states of Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—to the Democratic Party's long-term detriment.
Thus some of the seeds of Trump's rise might be found in the way that Clinton's embrace of globalism failed to deliver and in its wake hollowed out much of the Midwest. Trump was able to mix up a more toxic formula by taking slices from Buchanan's America First campaign and Perot's relentless criticism of an overpriced federal government that was incapable of solving any important problems. But Trumpism required one more ingredient—the discrediting of the GOP establishment. Father and son Bush were able to execute on that plan quite well by giving us two failed wars, with the son presiding over a near-disastrous economic collapse. Since Trump doesn't read, we can safely conclude that it wasn't Rothbard per se who paved the way for Trump's right-wing populism and his desire to smash the "unholy alliance of corporate liberal Big Business and liberal elites, who through big government have privileged and caused to rise a parasitic underclass, who among all are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working class in America...the proper strategy...is right-wing populism, that is to expose and denounce this unholy alliance."
The legislative agenda that Rothbard and his fellow right-wing insurgents hit upon was all about "cutting taxes, gutting the welfare state, attacking affirmative action, and the civil rights structure." Unprepared for several decades for this kind of frontal unified attack, the Democrats gave up control of all three branches of government by failing to understand an electorate that was fed up with stagnating wages even at a time of record profits, and a Democratic Party so distant from working-class concerns that the Harris campaign couldn't register the fact that for most working-class families, inflation—not abortion, DEI, or gender issues—was at the forefront of their concerns.
Trumpism can go many different ways. To keep inventing new enemies to replace the Soviet Union seems most likely, as it continues to undermine the welfare state, destroy media elites, and undermine universities and research, while giving out tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans (and of course their donors). That, and slashing programs directed toward the poorest Americans—the remnants of the New Deal that the Republicans never forgave FDR for because it seemed to posit that society was constructed around higher principles than just allowing successful people to create enormous personal wealth. What Rothbard and many other right-wing social critics wanted was to continue a politics of resentment forever in the hopes that one day they would turn America into something resembling the society featured in The Hunger Games.
What do the Democrats have to do? They need to tell a compelling story connecting the dots about how and why the working and middle classes are getting the worst end of Trumpism, and that continued rage and resentment doesn't pay bills. We need to offer a better vision for society that can narrow inequality and raise living standards, not by dividing us but by bringing us together. Democrats cannot allow themselves to be distracted, and we must find new spokespeople for our cause. Right now AOC looks promising—young and fiercely independent—able to communicate to young people directly without a lot of artifice. Her message should be that while Trump wants to continue smashing things, we want to build a new and more equal society based on common-sense values. Trump will undoubtedly cause long-term, even permanent, damage, but we must also look again at his enablers, who worked for decades to create the "structure of feeling" (a term Ganz borrowed from Raymond Williams) that fueled the rage and negativity that Trump and his followers fed on.