INTRODUCTION

THIS IS NOT A BOOK ABOUT DONALD TRUMP.

Instead, it is about an immense shift that preceded Trump’s rise, has profoundly shaped his political party and its priorities, and poses a threat to our democracy that is certain to outlast his presidency.

That shift is the rise of plutocracy—government of, by, and for the rich. Runaway inequality has remade American politics, reorienting power and policy toward corporations and the superrich (particularly the most conservative among them). In the process, it has also remade the Republican Party, transforming a mainstream conservative party into one that is increasingly divisive, distant from the center, and disdainful of democracy. From the White House on down, Republicans now make extreme appeals once associated only with fringe right-wing parties in other rich nations, stoking the fires of white identity and working-class outrage. Yet their rhetorical alliance with “the people” belies their governing alliance with the plutocrats. Indeed, the rhetorical alliance stems from the governing alliance. To advance an unpopular plutocratic agenda, Republicans have escalated white backlash—and, increasingly, undermined democracy. In the United States, then, plutocracy and right-wing populism have not been opposing forces. Instead, they have been locked in a doom loop of escalating extremism that must be disrupted.

The rise of plutocracy is the story of post-1980 American politics. Over the last forty years, the wealthiest Americans and the biggest financial and corporate interests have amassed wealth on a scale unimaginable to prior generations and without parallel in other western democracies. The richest 0.1 percent of Americans now have roughly as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent combined. They have used that wealth—and the connections and influence that come with it—to construct a set of political organizations that are also distinctive in historical and cross-national perspective. What makes them distinctive is not just the scope of their influence, especially on the right and far right. It is also the degree to which the plutocrats, the biggest winners in our winner-take-all economy, pursue aims at odds with the broader interests of American society.¹

In all these ways, the rise of plutocracy is also an assault on our democracy. When wealth buys power, the responsiveness of government to ordinary citizens weakens, and the elected officials who are supposed to represent those citizens are pulled toward the positions of economic elites. American plutocracy has transformed both of America’s two great political parties. The most profound effects, however, have been on the Republican Party. As the power of the plutocrats has increased, America’s conservative party has shifted not just to the right of conservative parties in other nations, but to the right of many right-wing parties. And the greatest rightward movement has occurred precisely on those issues where the party’s plutocratic supporters have the most radical goals.²

On the plutocrats’ pet issues, the party has raced to the fringe. Republican leaders have become singularly focused on tax cuts for corporations and the superrich, whatever the effects on American inequality, or on the people who make up the Republican “base.” When those cuts have conflicted with their traditional emphasis on fiscal restraint, they have run up huge deficits to finance them, abandoning the principle of budget balance—except as a cudgel with which to attack popular social programs, such as Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. They have launched an intensifying assault on environmental, consumer, labor, and financial protections. They have attempted to strip health insurance from millions of Americans. They have appointed the most consistently pro-business, anti-labor, and anti-consumer judges in the modern history of the federal courts. And they have done all this despite the fact that every one of these aims has strikingly little public support, even among Republican voters.³

Which raises the obvious question: How? As political scientists, we have spent many years in dialogue with fellow scholars who see a basic harmony between what citizens want and what governments do. Government responsiveness to voters should be expected, these researchers insist, because electoral competition creates strong pressures for politicians to cater to popular majorities.

But we do not see this sort of harmony today. Rather, we see a political system in which elected representatives are caught in the gravitational pull of great wealth. We see a political system in which a once-moderate party now tightly orbits the most reactionary elements of America’s emergent plutocracy. And we see a political system in which, despite that party’s embrace of unpopular economic policies, tens of millions of Americans of modest means don’t just vote for that party but have become increasingly tribal in their loyalty to it.

As we write, the party advancing the priorities of the plutocrats holds the White House and the Senate, it has a dominant position on the federal courts (especially the Supreme Court), and it has entrenched a set of tax and regulatory policies that disadvantage ordinary workers, consumers, and citizens. More striking still, this party’s voting base consists increasingly of less affluent white voters living in regions of the country devastated by these very policies—voters who favor more infrastructure spending and promises to protect Medicaid rather than more corporate tax cuts and blueprints for privatizing Social Security.

We’ve been struggling with the “how?” question for nearly twenty years. Our interest in the evolution of the GOP started with an article on the 2001 Bush tax cuts, which gave roughly 40 percent of their benefits to the richest 1 percent. In that article, we argued that while the cuts received surface support in polls, the contents of the new law were sharply at odds with what the majority of voters thought the nation’s budget priorities should be. As the biggest policy shift of the last two decades, the tax cuts were strong evidence of declining responsiveness to voters.⁴

Some of our fellow political scientists thought that article was alarmist. If Republicans were really out of step with voters, they reasoned, the party would eventually pay the price. But they haven’t paid the price, and they keep moving further to the right. Again and again, what seemed like the peak of Republican radicalism proved to be just a base camp, as the party shifted its focus toward a narrower and narrower slice at the top. The tax cuts of 2017—passed after a presidential campaign in which the Republican standard-bearer suggested he would turn the GOP into a “workers’ party”—delivered more than 80 percent of their largesse to the top 1 percent. Looking back, we did make at least one error. We weren’t worried enough.⁵

This book is our answer to the “how” question. As the GOP embraced plutocratic priorities, it pioneered a set of electoral appeals that were increasingly strident, alarmist, and racially charged. Encouraging white backlash and anti-government extremism, the party outsourced voter mobilization to a set of aggressive and narrow groups: the National Rifle Association, the organized Christian right, the burgeoning industry of right-wing media. When and where that proved insufficient, it adopted a ruthless focus on altering electoral rules, maximizing the sway of its base and minimizing the influence of the rest of the electorate through a variety of anti-democratic tactics, from voter disenfranchisement to extreme partisan gerrymandering to laws and practices opening the floodgates to big money. And more and more, it coupled this vote rigging with even more extreme strategies to undermine the checks and balances in our system, weakening democratic accountability and strengthening the ability of powerful minorities to dictate policy. In short, Republicans used white identity to defend wealth inequality. They undermined democracy to uphold plutocracy.

The centrality of white backlash to Donald Trump’s rise has received plenty of attention. Among journalists and academics alike, the president is generally seen as an exemplar of what analysts call “right-wing populism,” a transnational wave of anti-elite and anti-immigrant sentiments that has roiled rich democracies in the wake of the global financial meltdown. But America’s version of right-wing populism began to surface well before Trump—in fact, well before the financial crisis. Trump turned the dial to eleven, but he did so on a machine that was already built.

Nor does America’s variant of right-wing populism mirror the variant found abroad. In other rich countries where right-wing populists are challenging for power, animus toward immigrants and minorities gets coupled with fervent defense of social benefits for white citizens. Republicans—and Trump especially—have the animus part down. The defense of social benefits, not so much. On the contrary: what they have done on economic matters has been consistently, breathtakingly plutocratic. Benefits for downscale Republicans have been on the chopping block. The benefits Republicans have defended—and, in fact, expanded—are those for corporations and the superrich.

So peculiar is America’s version of right-wing populism that it deserves a label of its own. In this book, we use the term “plutocratic populism” to describe the party’s bitter brew of reactionary economic priorities and right-wing cultural and racial appeals. This distinctive American hybrid emerged after 1980 as the Republican Party struggled to manage the tensions between its governing priorities and its electoral strategies, between its defense of plutocracy in the face of rising inequality and its reliance on less affluent white voters in the face of growing diversity. To deliver for the plutocrats yet still win elections, Republicans reached ever deeper into parts of the nation and segments of the electorate where conservative economic policies failed to stir voters’ passions but divisive appeals to identity did. The choices and alliances they made—and the opportunities to take a less destructive course they rejected—radicalized a party, divided a nation, and empowered a demagogue. They now imperil our democracy.⁶

AS THE TITLE OF THIS BOOK IMPLIES, the Republican Party has substituted division and distraction for a real response to the needs of ordinary Americans—and nothing better demonstrates this than Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. But it is not just voters who are distracted. Pundits and experts are, too. Almost everything we read today is about the president and his outrages. But focusing on Trump can obscure more than it reveals. We need to step back and understand the long road to plutocratic populism, and the degree to which Trump has reinforced, rather than challenged, the core elements of what his party had already become.

Two narratives, in particular, dominate commentary about our present crisis. Both contain crucial elements of truth, but both, in different ways, neglect the fundamental role of plutocracy.

The first and simplest account focuses on what’s often called the Republican “civil war.” In this analysis, Trump and his right-wing populist allies are an insurgent army that’s taken over the Republican Party, emphasizing “toughness” on immigration and trade while abandoning the party’s long-held (if not always upheld) commitments to limited government and fiscal responsibility. The enemy they’ve allegedly vanquished is the “establishment,” the politicians and groups aligned with the party’s national leadership and big-money lobbies. Among those supposedly toppled: Paul Ryan, the former Speaker of the House known for his hard-right budgets; the Tea Party and its grassroots warriors, who battled President Obama in the name of constitutional conservatism after 2009; and the libertarian Koch brothers and their network of conservative mega-donors. In this narrative, Trump demanded a party very different from what the Republican establishment represented, and the establishment lost.⁷

If the establishment lost, however, it’s hard to know what winning would have looked like. Now that Ryan has retired from Congress, he suggests his alliance with Trump was intended to “get [Trump’s] mind right.” But getting Trump’s mind right apparently meant ensuring his economic priorities were to the right. Under the leadership of Ryan and his Senate counterpart, Mitch McConnell, Republicans in Congress slashed taxes on corporations and the rich, stacked the federal courts with staunchly pro-business conservatives, and tried to repeal the most popular elements of the Affordable Care Act. Their refusal to devote resources to anything but tax cuts and the military turned “Infrastructure Week” from a popular Trump promise into a punchline. Another of Trump’s pledges—to not cut Medicaid—did not stop Ryan and McConnell from attempting to do just that. The point isn’t that they hoodwinked Trump. The supposed tribune of working-class Americans went along with all these moves, having outsourced his entire legislative strategy to economic hardliners in Congress and to a domestic policy team comprised mostly of economic hardliners who had recently been in Congress. The point is that Republicans tried to do with unified control of Washington mostly what they and their plutocratic allies had been trying to do for years—only in a more extreme form.

These policy developments are hard to square with the notion that Trump has trashed the ultra-conservative orthodoxies of the establishment. They make much more sense if we see Trump not as the victor in an intraparty civil conflict, but as both a consequence and recent enabler of the GOP’s long, steady march to the right. Some of the country’s most astute opinion writers have stressed this point, including Paul Krugman, Matthew Yglesias, and Jonathan Chait (and, beyond opinion writers, Jane Mayer, who has painstakingly investigated the party’s plutocratic ties). But their counterpoints are too often forgotten amid breathless chatter about Trump’s latest outrages. The same New York Times that publishes Krugman’s columns also publishes story after story explaining how Trump has rolled over the Tea Party, the Koch brothers, and America’s economic elite more broadly.⁸

Part of the confusion is that observers frequently assume that if some corporate leaders or billionaire donors are complaining, then Trump must be pursuing policies that plutocrats don’t like. And certainly, neither Trump’s tariffs nor his immigration policies are popular in moneyed circles. It is also true that precincts of the business community, such as Silicon Valley, find the president downright detestable, and that plenty of very wealthy people support the Democratic Party and style themselves progressives.

Still, most of the superrich are broadly aligned with the core Republican economic agenda. Few among the fabulously wealthy speak openly about these priorities, and many of the most public plutocrats are also the most progressive (think Tom Steyer and George Soros). But in those rare instances when political scientists successfully survey the views of the very wealthy, those views turn out to be much more conservative than commonly believed. For example, a 2011 poll of rich Americans—average wealth of respondents: $14 million—found that just 17 percent of these wealthy citizens said they’d support high taxes on the rich to reduce inequality, a position endorsed by over half of the general public.⁹

The most engaged and organized segments of the plutocracy are even further to the right. The typical plutocrat is a lot more conservative than the typical American: the poll just cited found twice as many Republicans as Democrats among the wealthy (among all voters, Democrats have the edge), and the self-identified Democrats in the survey were substantially more conservative on economic issues than the norm for nonaffluent voters in their party. But the typical rich American isn’t nearly as conservative as the most politically engaged plutocrats are. When you look at the ultra-wealthy activists who are spending fortunes to remake American politics—especially through their huge outlays of “dark money” encouraged by the ongoing decimation of campaign finance limits—you see a plutocracy that’s even more conservative. And when you look at the stances and investments of the political organizations that magnify the influence of corporations and the superrich, you see one that’s more conservative still. The most effective groups representing economic elites—the Koch Network, the US Chamber of Commerce, the American Legislative Exchange Council—range from the hard right to the even harder right.¹⁰

By no means are conservative plutocrats happy with everything Trump is doing to American public policy. Yet they are playing the long game—a game that has always required trade-offs. And far from losing that game, they are winning much more than they had once thought possible. Right-wing populism hasn’t derailed the extreme agenda of reactionary plutocrats. It has enabled it, accelerating the Republican Party’s decades-long transit toward their hard-right priorities.

To see just how stunning this transformation has been, it helps to throw off another assumption that leads observers astray: that the two parties are more or less mirror images of each other, moving away from the center at equal speeds. In truth, Republican politicians have moved much further right than Democratic politicians have moved left, a phenomenon we call “asymmetric polarization.” Republicans have also embraced rhetoric and tactics that are much more aggressive and anti-democratic, ranging from extreme obstruction—say, blocking a Democratic president’s Supreme Court nominee for a year—to all-out assaults on the right to vote. Neither the extreme groups that mobilize GOP voters nor the right-wing media outlets that shape those voters’ preferences and perceptions have real counterparts on the liberal side. Yes, important elements of the Democratic Party have moved leftward in recent years, but the Republican Party has moved rightward over decades. With increasing ruthlessness, Republican elites have embraced plutocratic priorities that lack appeal even among the party’s own voters—and that embrace has only grown tighter as the party’s public face has grown more “populist.”¹¹

THE SECOND DOMINANT ACCOUNT is more convincing, but still incomplete. This narrative, too, focuses on right-wing populism—but as a symptom of a deeper disease, rather than a manifestation of internal GOP conflicts. That deeper disease is racism.¹²

The racism-focused narrative takes various forms. Some emphasize contemporary forces: the incessant race-baiting of Donald Trump; white backlash against the nation’s first black president; the anxiety generated by the ongoing shift toward a “majority-minority nation.” Others emphasize the deeper historical roots of white identity. Yet all these accounts suggest that race is the cleavage that defines American politics. They all emphasize, too, that this cleavage reflects deep psychological attachments that are easily triggered and highly resistant to change. In this respect, they present a “bottom-up” perspective, emphasizing the underlying resistance of key parts of the white electorate to the shifts in status and power that demographic change entails.

This narrative rightly stresses the deeper forces at work in Trump’s rise, which is why it is more convincing than accounts focused on recent struggles within the GOP. America’s racial history is indeed unique, its legacies are often toxic, and those toxic legacies have been on vivid display in the response of many white Americans to the nation’s dramatic demographic changes. In 2016, Trump won in significant part because he exploited that response. We recognize now that our previous writings paid far too little attention to the role of racial divisions in the radicalization of the Republican Party, and we have tried to grapple with those divisions and their effects much more fully in this book.

To elevate the role of race, though, does not require denying the role of plutocracy. It requires seeing how (and how fundamentally) the two are intertwined. It also requires thinking about how the psychology of race is shaped and directed by elites with their own partisan and economic motives—to see how it works from the top down as well as from the bottom up. In multiracial democracies, what scholars call “ethnic outbidding”—when parties seek to mobilize voters on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, or citizenship—is always a temptation. Decades of research suggest that these spirals of extremism do not bubble up from below; they emerge when elites capitalize on preexisting prejudices in pursuit of political gain, forcing citizens and leaders to take sides in an intensifying battle of competing identity claims. In the absence of such elite outrage-stoking, citizens may well be receptive to more moderate party stances and strategies.¹³

As recently as 2004, for example, George W. Bush won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote on the way to reelection. Because of his ability to attract nonwhite voters without alienating white voters, he became the only Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote in more than three decades. Subsequent Republican leaders abandoned this multiracial strategy not merely because resentful GOP voters greeted it with suspicion, but also because attracting Hispanic voters proved difficult to reconcile with the GOP’s increasingly reactionary economic agenda and its growing reliance on extreme groups. The embrace of plutocratic priorities has been a powerful force pushing the Republican Party toward increasingly open and hostile racialized appeals. That choice, in turn, created powerful incentives for ethnic outbidding, as party leaders leaned more heavily on outrage-stoking organizations and ambitious Republican politicians intensified their appeals to resentful white voters.

Just as we should consider the role of top-down mobilization of racial resentments, we also should remember that Trump won over Republican voters in 2016 with a variety of appeals. He did unusually well among the most racially resentful voters. Yet he attracted these voters not only with divisive racial rhetoric, but also with liberal (for a Republican) economic pledges—pledges he mostly abandoned once in office. And Trump’s victory did not just rest on the support of working-class whites in the Midwest, as journalistic accounts often imply. He swept the party, pulling in white Republicans who expressed racially tolerant views as well as those who did not. In this respect, Trump benefited decisively from what political scientists call “affective” or “negative” polarization—that is, antipathy toward the other party and its supporters. Even Republicans who viewed him with dismay couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Prejudice has been an enormous contributor to affective polarization; the best available research suggests, for instance, that racial resentment was a bigger factor in the Tea Party movement than principled conservatism. But Republican elites have drawn on a range of themes, targets, and emotions to stoke the hostility of the Republican base to the “other side.” Demeaning minorities as predatory and dependent has gone hand in hand with demonizing government as corrupt and ineffective. Fears of status decline have gone hand in hand with fears of economic decline. Untangling racism, distrust of government, and economic insecurity is so hard because GOP efforts to tangle them together have been so successful.¹⁴

Racial divisions are, and always have been, central to the American story. What we want to emphasize is that the particular role they now play in our politics owes much to the massive shift of wealth and power toward the top. The United States is not, after all, the only rich nation struggling with racism or white backlash to demographic change. Yet it is the only one struggling with such extreme inequalities of wealth and power. Other western democracies have seen widening economic gaps; a handful (notably, the United Kingdom and Canada) have witnessed trends that bear surface similarity to the United States’. But none has seen anything like the intensifying concentration of economic and political resources that characterizes the American political economy of the past generation. That distinctiveness, in turn, explains a good deal of what’s so unusual (and dangerous) about America’s peculiar version of right-wing populism.¹⁵

Plutocratic populism brings together two forces that share little in common except their distrust of democracy and their investment in the GOP. Plutocrats fear democracy because they see it as imperiling their economic standing and narrowly defined priorities. Right-wing populists fear democracy because they see it as imperiling their electoral standing and their narrowly defined community. These fears would be less consequential if they were not packaged together within one of the nation’s two major parties. Plutocratic populism is a force multiplier, fusing hard-right economic policies that would have little future if relied on to mobilize voters with right-wing populist strategies that would have little future if they truly endangered, rather than reinforced, elite power. Yet plutocratic populism is also a threat multiplier, because neither side of the relationship feels secure despite this combined power. The result is an especially volatile and dangerous mix—a party coalition that is capable of changing policies and institutions, but fearful it will not long control them; a party coalition that is able to achieve its priorities, but only by disregarding majorities, dividing and lying to citizens, and distorting democracy.

Many have pointed to the risk of creeping authoritarianism under Trump, and we share these fears. Yet the Republican Party’s marriage of plutocracy and populism also points to another risk—not rule by a single powerful man, but rule by a set of powerful minorities. This threat, which might be called “creeping counter-majoritarianism,” predates Trump’s election. For years, Republicans have exploited America’s aging political institutions to cement their power in Congress, the federal courts, and rural and right-leaning states—even when they cannot win the majority of the nation’s votes, and even when they do not hold the country’s one nationally elected office. Our distinctive constitutional system was designed to make it hard for majorities to rule, forcing compromise and broad consensus. It was not supposed to make it possible for minorities to control governance in the face of majority resistance. Yet in an age of polarization, key features of that system—from the tilt of the Senate and Electoral College toward rural states, to the growing role of the Senate filibuster, to the vulnerability of state-administered elections to partisan rigging, to the conservative capture of the courts—allow a more and more determined minority to not just resist the will of a majority but increasingly to rule over it. In our vigilance against authoritarianism, we risk neglecting the less perceptible but no less pressing threat of permanent minority rule.

AFTER AN ELECTION, journalists rush to pivotal parts of the nation to interview voters. Social scientists dig into surveys to construct a more systematic picture of what those voters thought. These stories and statistics are revealing. Yet we often invest in them more importance than they deserve. Too frequently these bottom-up investigations treat voters as unmoved movers. But they are not unmoved; they are mobilized, messaged, and sometimes manipulated. Especially because of the tilt of our democracy toward the superrich, we cannot ignore how the attitudes of citizens are refracted by the interests, investments, and actions of those with outsized power.

A top-down perspective focuses our attention on elites, and particularly on the elites so often out of view. The spectacle of right-wing populism gets all the press. But it was reactionary plutocrats who first radicalized our politics. As their interests narrowed and their power expanded, democratic politics posed a growing threat to their privileges. But to protect and augment those privileges, they had to work through democratic politics—and, in particular, through the political party most closely allied with economic elites, the Republican Party. The result was a dilemma for Republican leaders: How to side with the elites who were winning big, yet attract the support of voters losing out? The answer was plutocratic populism.

Our argument is not that the plutocrats who have allied with the Republican Party are directly engineering all the developments we will describe. The plutocrats are not Bond villains in a hidden lair inside a volcano. There is no dominant figure—intellectual or economic—who set in motion the policies and strategies that have come to define plutocratic populism. A handful of conservative plutocrats have aggressively pushed the Republican Party to link its reactionary economic agenda to racialized appeals—for example, the financier Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, who bankrolled Trump’s white-backlash whisperer Steve Bannon and the right-wing news source Breitbart—but they are the exceptions.

What the plutocrats have done is use their formidable resources to shift the American political terrain in their favor, encouraging politicians and leaders to adopt certain stances and pursue certain strategies. Their influence has been so consequential precisely because it was not directed by one or a few powerful players, much less by some sort of coordinated conspiracy. Embedded in institutions and organized action, their efforts tend to endure over time and across successive political leaders, raising the stakes—and the hurdles—for those who seek to challenge it. Understanding this not only helps us see where Trump’s presidency came from. It also allows us to comprehend how and for whom that presidency has worked. And it shows us just how much must be done to repair our polity even if he governs for only a single term.

All along, of course, powerful people have made choices—choices that not only deserve analysis but demand accountability. Conservative plutocrats have usually remained a step removed from the divisive and anti-democratic tactics they have generated, but they have tolerated and sometimes encouraged those tactics. Nor does responsibility end with plutocrats on the conservative side of the spectrum. Even the most progressive plutocrats are much less so when wealth-defending policies are on the table. Many of the same tech executives who regularly criticize Republicans for their conservative stances on immigration and LGBTQ rights supported the 2017 tax cuts, allowing their companies to provide billions in stock buybacks to their shareholders. Conservative plutocrats may deserve the greatest share of blame, but all parts of the plutocracy are implicated in the shift of government toward business and the superrich—and the destructive politics that shift has unleashed.¹⁶

This shift sets our nation starkly apart from other rich democracies. Yet it does have parallels—in democracy’s troubled past. Roughly a century ago, conservative parties struggled to adapt to a world with large numbers of newly enfranchised voters, a world in which their long-standing alliance with the rich and powerful was suddenly a liability. They had two basic choices. They could make concessions and craft new appeals without demonizing vulnerable groups or destroying democratic norms. Or they could take a much darker path, one that involved partnering with groups capable of riling up voters, resorting to ever more incendiary rhetoric, and rigging elections. The British Tories mostly took the first path; German conservatives, alas, the second.¹⁷

Conservative parties of the early twentieth century were torn between the rich and the rest because the rest were gaining the right to vote. The Republican Party has been torn in a similar way because the rest are falling behind the rich so quickly. Adding to the dilemma, the party’s white voting base is becoming a smaller and smaller share of the electorate. To stay in power, Republicans have had to rally support in places and among parts of the electorate where the rise of plutocracy has brought more misery than opportunity. Meanwhile, their plutocratic allies have become richer and more powerful, their demands more at odds with those of ordinary voters, and their commitment to democracy weaker. As these trends have collided—rising inequality, growing demographic diversity, deepening ties between conservative plutocrats and Republican politicians—they have generated the same stark choices confronted by previous conservative parties. On one side are the priorities of the plutocrats. On the other, the demands of the broader electorate. In between is the Republican Party, whose response may decide our democracy’s fate.