13 THE TRUMPIAN ERA

The Perils of Populism

Let’s pick up where we left off in the last chapter.

Civilization is an ongoing conversation: Change the conversation, you change the world. If a baby born today is no different from a baby born 50,000 years ago, then the only thing keeping that baby from growing up into a barbarian is the conversation he or she is born into. This is the moral of everything we have discussed so far.

Deirdre McCloskey says that the Miracle happened because of words and talk. “The economy is nothing without the words supporting it,” she insists. “Capitalism, like democracy, is talk, talk, talk all the way down.”1 ^*1

This is true about more than just the economy. It is true about politics, family, religion, and every human endeavor. We are a cooperative species, and it was our ability to communicate concepts that sent us skyrocketing up the food chain.

One need not be too literal here. It’s not, strictly speaking, the words themselves but how we use them, the concepts they form and convey. But it is axiomatically true that what can be created by conversation can be destroyed by conversation. A holiday dinner can be a lovely affair or a dark and dismal disaster, all depending on the course of the conversation. So it is with our civilization. The Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution represented the ascendance of a new bourgeois worldview that elevated liberty, commerce, innovation, hard work, and the autonomy of family and individual alike. This worldview bubbled up from below far more than it trickled down from above. The bourgeoisie asserted their rights. And once they were won, those rights steadily became more and more universal because that was the only way the conversation could go. Once you say that all men are created equal and that we are endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it becomes ever more difficult to say, “Well, except for those people.” Once you insist that the only legitimate form of government is government by consent of the people, it’s very difficult to walk that back.

Indeed, until fairly recently, dictators and totalitarians had to claim the mantle of democracy, talking as if it were something even they had to believe in, if they wanted to be seen as legitimate rulers. The Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy—they all insisted that they spoke for the people’s will, even if they rejected the “mechanical” fictions of Western politics and held Potemkin elections. East Germany called itself the “German Democratic Republic.” North Korea still goes by the name “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and the mullahs in Iran feel the need to hold elections and referenda for the sake of appearances, just like Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, and Napoleon before them. Even the deceit of dictators was a tribute paid to democracy’s virtue.

In the West, the left and right argued about how and where to draw the line between social welfare and economic liberty, but the rest of the conversation usually boiled down to which party was more committed to democracy, free speech, and personal liberty. Progressives from FDR to Barack Obama believed that granting “economic rights” would liberate people. Recall that FDR proclaimed that “necessitous men are not free men.”2 Conservatives in the classical liberal tradition argued that this approach was a violation of liberalism properly understood and was destined to constrict freedom in the end. These disagreements were—and remain—intense, but if you took each side at its word, both believed they were on the side of liberty and each used rhetoric to that effect.

That started to change in the early part of the twenty-first century.

For the last two decades, the rhetoric of Western elites has grown increasingly hostile to democracy, free speech, and capitalism. One reason is the widespread belief that authoritarian societies develop faster and better than democratic and free-market ones. This is a very old notion that emerges in new wrappings every generation. Mussolini made the trains run on time. Lincoln Steffens returned from the Soviet Union to declare, “I have been over into the future, and it works.”3 They said it about Napoleon’s command economy and they probably said it about Hammurabi’s too. There’s just something deeply seductive about the idea of society being run by a strong father figure or some wise council of experts.

This is particularly true among the class of people who believe they should be on just such a council. They cast their gaze abroad and look for examples of societies doing things the “right” way and then insist we should be following that example. That’s what countless intellectuals in America said in the 1920s and early 1930s about fascist and communist regimes in Europe, and, like a dog returning to its vomit, they do so today.4

William Easterly, one of the most brilliant scholars of development economics alive today, documents how this cult of authoritarianism thrives among the global caste of development experts and the journalists who rely on them.5 Part of the problem of looking to “successful” autocracies as models is that it is something of a statistical mirage. It’s true that in the last fifty years nine out of ten of the countries with truly extraordinary economic growth have been autocracies. This suggests that autocracy offers the best path to prosperity. The problem is that, over that period, there were eighty-nine autocracies. In other words, being an autocracy, under the best of circumstances, offers perhaps a one-in-nine chance of leading to prosperity. But even this is misleading, because the policies implemented by the successful autocracies tend to move countries away from despotism.6

Lee Kuan Yew, the founding dictator of Singapore, is the global elite’s favorite benign despot, and for good reason. His policies did lead to amazing economic growth. But how did he do that? By wrenching out the corruption—both in the conventional sense and in the way I’ve been using it—from Singaporean society. He was an at times brutal modernizer. In the 1990s, Singapore had one of the highest per capita execution rates in the world.7 Under the “Singapore model,” graft and other forms of bribery are ruthlessly proscribed, and the rule of law, including property rights and contract enforcement (under British common law), is just as ruthlessly protected. Lee Kuan Yew believed in low regulation, low taxation, and free trade.

In other words, the crucial ingredient of Singapore’s growth wasn’t despotism but the imposition of market mechanisms and, to some extent, the legacy of British colonialism. Lee Kuan Yew’s success no doubt depended in part on his ability to not be corrupted by power and keep the country on a path to modernization—and, I would wager, eventual democratization—but it also stemmed from the unique nature of Singapore itself, a small island nation. But for every Lee Kuan Yew there are many more Hugo Chávezes, Fidel Castros, and Robert Mugabes. Betting on authoritarian states on the assumption you will get a Lee Kuan Yew is playing a lottery with millions of lives.

The more important point, however, is that fawning on dictatorships is morally grotesque. It is ultimately just a form of power worship. For instance, New York Times columnist and best-selling author Thomas Friedman has spent much of the last two decades gushing over China’s enlightened authoritarian capitalism. Look to China, he insisted in column after column, speech after speech, and book after book. They only care about “optimal policies”!

Well, okay, let’s look to China. Authoritarianism under the emperors and then under Mao immiserated, oppressed, or murdered hundreds of millions of people in China. Then, in the late 1970s, China introduced rudimentary markets and property rights. And, suddenly, the Chinese economy took off. For the first time, hundreds of millions of Chinese people could eat meat, enjoy electricity, and acquire other things long considered staples here and unattainable luxuries there. Yet, here in America, and around much of the developed world, the reaction to China’s success was “Wow. It must have been the authoritarianism.”

Friedman was in many respects the head cheerleader:

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.8

It’s worth explaining what Friedman means by “one-party democracy.” At the time he wrote this, the Democratic Party controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House. But the party in the “one-party democracy” Friedman lamented was not the ruling party but the minority party, because it refused to capitulate to the majority. The benefit of autocracy is that it is autocratic and can dispense with persuasion and impose the best policies.

In his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America, Friedman has a chapter titled “China for a Day (but Not for Two).” In it, he openly pines for America to be like China—but just for a day. On this day there would be no rule of law, no constitutional safeguards, and no democratic debate. Instead “enlightened” experts would simply be able to impose the best policies—i.e., the policies Friedman agrees with.

This is a perfect example of how words can camouflage things. His columns are full of the sorts of buzzphrases and jargon that fill the air at Davos meetings and TED talks. But what does “China for a day” mean that is substantively different from “king for a day” or “tyranny for a day” or, for that matter, “Nazis for a day”? Saying “China for a day” gives the “argument” a certain cachet, but that cachet is just a different label on the same ancient bottle. (Also, if there is any lesson worth taking to heart from the last thousand—or 10,000—years, it is that if you give people absolute power “just for a day,” expect them to find reasons to give themselves an extension. Absolute power is like being granted a wish by a genie: The first thing you do is wish for more wishes.)

Ultimately, wanting to be “China for a day” is no different from talking about how our politics should be like the “moral equivalent of war” (another argument Friedman employs constantly, saying that we must fight climate change the way we fought World War II; “green” he explains, “is the new red, white and blue.”)9 We are hardwired to dispense with pleasantries and protocol when under attack. The technocrats understand this, which is why the Obama administration loved the phrase “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” And it is why the Trump campaign was—and the Trump White House is—so eager to describe America as a violence-plagued hellscape when it serves their political agenda. “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” the president declared in his inaugural address,10 which he concluded with an upraised fist.

How we talk is merely a reflection of what we think. No wonder, then, that the state of public opinion in the West is depressing. A majority of young people no longer believe democracy is “essential.”11 Support for liberty is literally dying out. Among those born in the 1930s, 75 percent of Americans and 53 percent of Europeans say living under democratic government is “essential.” Among people born in the 1980s, the number drops to the low 40s in Europe and the low 30s in America. Only 32 percent of millennials consider it “absolutely essential” that “civil rights protect people’s liberty.”12

“Citizens in a number of supposedly consolidated democracies in North America and Western Europe have not only grown more critical of their political leaders,” write political scientists Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk in the Journal of Democracy. “Rather, they have also become more cynical about the value of democracy as a political system, less hopeful that anything they do might influence public policy, and more willing to express support for authoritarian alternatives.”13

There is ample evidence that support for the core rights that define a liberal order is eroding, most precipitously among young people (though it is possible that, as a reaction to the Trump presidency, some young people might develop a heightened appreciation for civil liberties). The younger you are, the less likely you are to support free-speech rights. Forty percent of eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds told Pew they thought that speech offensive to minorities should be banned.14 A survey of college students in 2015 found that a majority of students favor speech codes for both students and faculty. More than six in ten want professors to provide students with “trigger warnings” before discussing or presenting material some might find offensive. A third of the students couldn’t name the First Amendment as the part of the Constitution that protects free speech. Thirty-five percent said the First Amendment doesn’t apply to “hate speech” (it does), and 30 percent of self-identified liberal students said they believe the First Amendment is outdated.15

Presumably, most young liberals do not think support for free markets, democracy, and free speech is itself “hate speech.” But it is remarkable how quickly activists can conclude that support for such things are “code words” for hateful ideals. (The Harvard Crimson has a long history of running articles insisting that the eminent scholar Harvey Mansfield, one of the last conservatives at Harvard, is a practitioner of “hate speech.”) Duke historian Nancy MacLean published a book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, in which she argues that the libertarian economics movement, specifically the public choice school, is a thinly concealed racist scheme designed to undermine democracy. Despite the fact the book was torn to shreds for dishonest and shabby scholarship—a work of “speculative historical fiction,” according to MacLean’s Duke colleague, Michael C. Munger—it was, as of this writing, a finalist for a National Book Award. Apparently the thesis is too seductive to care about the facts.16 Just try to talk about individualism, inequality, merit, etc., on a college campus and see how long it takes before someone is offended. In many places where the new class controls the commanding heights of the culture, free speech has come to be defined as assault, and assault as free speech.17

Before the Obama administration’s deception about a video causing the attacks on the American diplomatic outpost in Benghazi was debunked, liberal op-ed pages and radio and television shows lit up with calls to “fix” the First Amendment and curtail free speech in America, as if rioting barbarians halfway around the world have a heckler’s veto on what Americans can say.

It is inevitable that, when the way people think and talk changes, the shape of our politics will change too. Across Europe, illiberal movements have been gaining steam for more than a decade. Marine Le Pen’s National Front has the wind at its back, forcing artificial coalitions between traditional conservatives and socialists to keep it out of power. Emmanuel Macron succeeded in defeating Le Pen, but he needed to form a new party to do it: La République en Marche or simply En Marche, which in English is translated, variously, as “Forward!” or “Onward!” or “Working!” or “On the Move!” As of this writing, it is too soon to form a lasting judgment on Macron, but it appears that he has something of a Napoleonic streak to him. He pledges to go around the French Parliament and impose most of his reforms by decree. He has already extended the state of emergency declared in the wake of some horrific terrorist attacks in 2015.18

In Austria, a coalition similar to Macron’s narrowly prevented Norbert Hofer from becoming the first right-wing nationalist leader of a Western European country since the end of World War II. In neighboring Hungary, president Viktor Orbán routinely talks of “building an illiberal new national state” modeled after the regimes in Russia, Turkey, and China.19 “Liberal democratic states can’t remain globally competitive,” he insists.20 Orbán’s biggest political competition is Jobbik, an ultra-nationalist party that is economically left-wing and anti-capitalist and feeds off a deep reserve of anti-Semitism in the country. An estimated one in five Hungarians have extreme animosity toward Jews.21 In Bulgaria, the nationalist-socialist party, Ataka (Attack), has made huge strides blending a populist anti-immigrant agenda with conventional economic and racial socialism (which, again, are more often than not synonymous historically).

In Greece, a hard-left nationalist party, Syriza, dominates, while the authoritarian right-wing party Golden Dawn is in a close third. Golden Dawn marches under a banner conveniently reminiscent of the official Nazi flag, displaying a black meander against a backdrop of red.22 The party’s lodestar is the Greek pro-fascist dictator Ioannis Metaxas, who ruled from 1936 to 1941.23

In Britain, the triumph of the Brexit movement, while salutary on the whole, arguably owed its relatively narrow margin of victory to an undercurrent of nativist and nationalist sentiment (fomented to some extent by Vladimir Putin’s social media troll army). More troubling is the illiberalism of Jeremy Corbyn, the unreconstructed leftist who leads the Labour Party and rejects Tony Blair’s project to reconcile the party with liberal democratic capitalism. A left-wing populist and fervent opponent of all things “Zionist,” Corbyn struggles to avoid the charge of anti-Semitism while pandering to members of his coalition who cannot avoid the charge.

Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in just a few short years, has gone a long way to meld the illiberal policies of Atatürk with the illiberal theology of the Ottomans, persecuting journalists and imprisoning political opponents by the thousands. As of this writing, Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro continues to prove that things can always get worse under a populist-socialist dictatorship. The oil-rich basket case is now in the throes of Weimar-level hyper-inflation. Parents are forced to give away their children because they cannot feed them as Maduro blames the country’s economic woes on the “bourgeois parasites.”24

In July of 2017, President Trump visited Warsaw, Poland, and gave a stirring defense of Western civilization, much of which I agreed with. But the speech had an overlay of nationalism to it that did not go unnoticed by the increasingly authoritarian Polish government. The ruling party, Law and Justice, is committed to a campaign of delegitimizing the press, the independent judiciary, and even the apolitical nature of the military under a program called “repolanization.”25

Tragically, the dream of liberalism is dying away in illiberal countries as well. The “Green” movement in Iran has been crushed from above but has also withered from below. “The educated young who were the backbone of the Green movement are now demoralized and apathetic thirty- and forty-somethings—a transformation not unlike what happened to China’s pro-democracy movement after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre,” writes Sohrab Ahmari.

“…The situation is equally grim in the Arab lands,” he adds. “Save for Tunisia, the Arab Spring uprisings of 2010 and 2011 have everywhere yielded civil war, state failure, or a return to the repressive status quo ante.” Public opinion surveys “suggest that the region’s young aspire to stability, not political freedom.”26 The demoralization of young Arabs is understandable given the failure of the Arab Spring to deliver on its promises, but one has to wonder whether some of that despair derives from the growing global consensus that democracy is losing its appeal.

THE TRUMP ERA

And then, of course, there’s Donald Trump. Though you wouldn’t know it from the writings of many liberal intellectuals and journalists, President Trump is very different from far-right and neo-fascist demagogues in some important respects—but, of course, he’s dismayingly similar in others. The differences are worth discussing first.

Unlike Marine Le Pen, Norbert Hofer, Viktor Orbán, and other illiberal politicians, Trump is not deeply immersed in nationalist ideology—or any ideology. In no way whatsoever is Trump an intellectual. To say someone isn’t an intellectual does not mean he is not intelligent. The question of Trump’s intellect is an open one to all but his most committed followers and detractors—and to Trump himself, who constantly insists that he is man of unimpeachable genius. He certainly possesses a formidable cunning that often catches his opponents off guard. But it is also clear that he knows very little about American political history, and that makes him a fascinating political creature.

For instance, many of his favorite slogans—“the silent majority,” “the forgotten man,” “America first,” and even “Make America Great Again”—have deep historical roots that he appears to have no appreciation for. He learned the phrase “America first” from a New York Times reporter who was trying to understand his political philosophy.27 “America first” has a complicated and storied pedigree in American politics, as it was the rallying cry of a broad coalition of non-interventionists who wanted to keep America out of World War II in Europe. Over time, it took on a particularly sinister connotation, as the most vocal faction in it was objectively pro-German in the European conflict. In an interview with the Washington Post, Trump was informed that the phrase “the Silent Majority” was used by Richard Nixon in his 1972 campaign.28 It remains unclear whether anyone has explained to him that “the Forgotten Man” was FDR’s slogan in his effort to appeal to the disaffected masses of the Great Depression. Even “Make America Great Again” is not original to him; it was used repeatedly by Ronald Reagan in his 1980 campaign (though he meant something very different).

Trump’s ideological commitments are similarly inchoate. Over the last thirty years, he has been consistent about only a handful of ideas—protectionism, the wisdom of “taking the oil” from Middle Eastern countries we invaded, and some fairly vague platitudes about cutting back regulations—but, beyond that, he’s been all over the map on guns, immigration, abortion, taxes, health care, etc. Unlike traditional American conservatives, his lodestars have never been limited government, the Constitution, individual liberty, or, needless to say, “traditional values.” There is little reason to believe that he has anything more than a thumbless grasp of such concepts. Rather, his watchwords have always been “winning” and “strength.” His key promise to voters was that America will “win again” and that, if elected, our leaders will no longer be “weak.” “Winning solves a lot of problems,” Trump said in an interview with the Washington Post.29

It should go without saying—but doesn’t today—that winning and strength are entirely amoral values. Successful cheaters and murderers “win.” Good parents do not teach their children that the only thing that matters is winning, nor do they insist that being strong is more important than being decent. A morally and philosophically serious person does not place personal victory as the highest value.

For Donald Trump, “winning”—at business, in television ratings, and in politics—is all that matters. Suggesting that one of his opponents was akin to a pedophile and that another was the son of an accomplice to Kennedy’s assassination are justified by the fact that he won. He even explains away the fact that he constantly whines on the grounds that it is a useful tool for winning. “I keep whining and whining until I win.”30 Hence his commitment to render all news reporting that doesn’t show him as a winner as not just unfair or biased but “fake.”

Trump’s ignorance of the politics that came before him, it turned out, was a great advantage politically. The elite political class—on the left and the right, but most importantly in the fiercely arrogant middle—invested too much in the power of political shibboleths and taboos. Trump simply steamrolled over them, speaking in his own authentic manner. For those of us who place a great deal of importance in words, Trump sounded not only ignorant but vulgar. But for millions of voters he sounded real, and his vulgarity proved he wasn’t part of the “establishment” that so many blamed for the sorry status quo. This was his greatest advantage over Senator Ted Cruz, a deeply establishmentarian politician who knew all of the lyrics of populism but could not convincingly carry the tune.

Similarly, Trump’s anti-political political rhetoric is a clear echo of the language of the 1930s, on both sides of the Atlantic. “The time for empty talk is over,” Trump declared in his inaugural address (and again at his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference [CPAC] in February of 2017). “Now arrives the hour of action!”31 He loves to talk of the “blood of patriots.”

The 1930s marked a high-water mark in the international cult of “Action!” FDR, Mussolini, Hitler, and countless other leaders all tried to tap into the widespread belief that decadent Western capitalism and “Manchester liberalism” were inadequate to the challenges of the day. In America, FDR tapped into this intellectual fad in an attempt to preserve democracy (if not necessarily capitalism) when he promised “bold, persistent experimentation.” To this day—I have learned to excess—progressives fail to appreciate what is implied in a policy of “experimentation.” The very idea of experimentation presumes that there are no a priori dogmatic, principled constraints on the investigation. “Take a method and try it,” FDR said.32 It sounds so reasonable, but the implication is that democracy, property rights, civil rights, etc., are not prior constraints on political behavior. The whole point of our Constitution was to put certain questions out of the reach of rulers and voters alike. “Experimentation” says all options are on the table—the very definition of the authoritarian method. “I’m a conservative, but at this point, who cares?” an exasperated Donald Trump remarked at the California Republican Party convention. “We’ve got to straighten out the country.”33

“Fascism appealed, first of all, to the pragmatic ethos of experimentation,” observed the late John Patrick Diggins.34 Ideology was a deadweight, holding back nations from reaching their true potential. Hitler despised theorists who spoke of principle and doctrine, calling them “ink knights.” What Germany needed, according to Hitler, was a “revolt against reason” itself, for “intellect has poisoned our people!”35

The point is not that Trump is a Hitler. He’s not: Hitler could have repealed Obamacare quite easily! Nor is he an FDR or a Mussolini. It is that he represents a reversion to a natural type of leader who speaks and thinks in tribal terms. His thinking and rhetoric are less interesting than the fact that his thinking and rhetoric found purchase with so many Americans, particularly supposed champions of constitutionalism and limited government.

Trump is a thoroughly romantic figure in so many ways. He puts his faith not in God or the Constitution or any abstract rules but in his own instincts: “I’m a very instinctual person, but my instinct turns out to be right.”36 “Experience has taught me a few things,” Trump explains. “One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper.”37 In numerous interviews, Trump has explained that his instincts are more reliable than facts. If it feels right to him, it’s right. That’s why he once explained in a sworn deposition that his net worth depends heavily on how he feels about himself any given morning.38 That is also why, as a businessman, he was happy to lie to business partners, abuse eminent domain, and do anything he could get away with under the law.

As the Trump presidency has unfolded, it’s become clear that Trump’s feelings—particularly his insecurities, his megalomania, etc.—determine the vast majority of his decisions. His refusal to stop attacking the parents of a slain Muslim-American soldier during the campaign was indicative of his entire approach to life. If you disagree with or criticize him, you deserve whatever insults and attacks he can muster. And his attacks on a judge of Mexican descent highlighted how democratic norms and decorum have no weight when balanced on the scale of his feelings.

And while his capacity to personalize every conflict and relationship is the central theme of his psyche, his reliance on feelings does have broader policy and political consequences as well. As a candidate, he encouraged crowds to “knock the crap” out of protestors.39 As president, Trump has condoned and celebrated excessive force for police officers.40 He famously admires Vladimir Putin, and whenever he’s pressed on the fact that he admires a murderous autocrat, he throws America under the bus, arguing that Americans have no right to judge because we do terrible things too.41 There is no venue where he will forgo advancing his own political interests or settling some score, be it an address to a Boy Scout jamboree or to uniformed military.

Were Trump able to check his id and think beyond the horizon of his instincts in the moment, he would be a far more formidable demagogue. Fortunately, he cannot, and so the constitutional architecture of our government, combined with the patriotic commitments of most of the people who work for him, is more than adequate to constrain his will to power as president. Still, it is precisely these qualities in him that make him so fascinating. Beneath his suits and his abnormally long ties, he is a throwback, a kind of generic prototype of premodern man, obsessed with being the alpha of the group. Because he is bereft of any coherent ideology and largely immune to any of the norms of good character, Donald Trump is, in many respects, a perfect example of how capitalism, absent the extra-rational dogmas of morality, creates creatures of pure appetite, guided only by the most rudimentary software of human nature. He cares about sex and power, dominating others, and having his status affirmed. He puts family above all other considerations, but defines the family’s interests in terms of wealth and dynastic glory. He views others as instruments of his will whose value is measured in their loyalty to him, a loyalty that is rarely reciprocated. When asked what sacrifices he made comparable to those of parents who lost a child in war, he couldn’t even name any sacrifice at all.42 He is a knight, in the Nietzschean sense, and he makes his own morality.

Alas, rather than see these facts as flaws, many voters saw them as admirable features. Donald Trump’s improvisational, almost glandular style of politics, combined with his unapologetic ignorance of democratic norms and undiluted resentment toward elites, made him an ideal vessel for the frustrations and anger of not just the Republican base but millions of disaffected non-traditional and Obama voters who felt they had no voice in politics as usual. Indeed, doctrinaire conservatives were among the last to rally to Trump’s banner, a fact easily forgotten now that so many conservative ideologues and intellectuals have retrofitted their worldview to rationalize and accommodate Trumpism.

In short, Donald Trump is the most successful populist politician in American history, with the possible exception of President Andrew Jackson. Many conservative commentators have convinced themselves that Trump’s victory was the product of his own incredible political genius. There is scant evidence to support this claim. This is not necessarily a slight against Trump. Politics is about moments more than anything else. The right politician at the wrong time will almost always lose against the wrong politician at the right time. Trump flirted with running for president in 2000 on the Reform Party ticket and again in 2012. Both times he opted not to, at least in part because he had no chance of winning. The point is simply that Trump won the presidency because the time was ripe for him to do so, and even then he barely pulled it off.43

Just as it’s always advisable to be a well-stocked water seller during a drought, it’s good to be a populist at a moment of widespread thirst for populism. It’s worth remembering that there were two authentic populists in the 2016 presidential race, the other being Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. There is reason to believe that, if the Democratic establishment had not circled the wagons around Hillary Clinton, the quintessential technocratic progressive new-class candidate, Sanders could have won the Democratic primaries. Even if that were not the case, the fact remains that populism is high in the saddle on both the left and the right, here and abroad.

THE PERILS OF POPULISM

Populism, which essentially means nothing more than “peoplism,” is not a doctrine. It is an orientation and a passion. In theory and in its rhetoric, it elevates “the people,” but in reality it only speaks for a subset of them. It shares with nationalism a romantic glorification or sanctification of the group. Those in the group are part of the tribe, the cause, “the movement,” or any other abstraction that triggers “the coalition instinct” discussed earlier. They are us, we, the ones we have been waiting for. “The people” simultaneously claim to be victims and superior to the victimizers, with a more rightful claim on power. They may claim to be “the 99 percent”—they aren’t—but they mean that they are 100 percent of those who matter. “For populists,” writes Jan-Werner Müller, “this equation always works out: any remainder can be dismissed as immoral and not properly a part of the people at all. That’s another way of saying that populism is always a form of identity politics (though not all versions of identity politics are populist).”44

As an outspoken conservative critic of the president, I’ve been subjected to near-constant anger and scorn from Trump supporters, including many who were once admirers of mine. (Indeed, one of the most painful revelations of the last two years has been to discover so many people disappointed in me for not living down to their expectations.) I bring this up because it’s been fascinating to hear from so many Trump supporters who fly under the banner of “We the People.” It is a constant refrain. But it’s also untrue. The Trump supporters’ use of “We the People” is a perfect illustration of Müller’s point. Donald Trump lost the popular vote and, as of this writing, has approval ratings in the mid-30s. Donald Trump, by any objective metric, is not the paladin of “We the People.” He is the representative of the people his supporters believe to be the only people who matter.

Populism and nationalism often go together, but not all populist movements are nationalist, nor are all nationalist movements populist. Before he took his populism to the national stage, William Jennings Bryan was, properly speaking, a Nebraska-firster. Likewise, George Wallace was populist for “the people of Alabama,” by which he meant the white people of Alabama who supported Jim Crow. Al Sharpton rose to fame as a populist demagogue representing himself first and a subset of blacks in Harlem second. Donald Trump talks often about “the American people,” but his definition of who qualifies as the American people often begins and ends with those Americans who support Donald Trump. The “only important thing,” Trump announced at a rally in the spring of 2016, “is the unification of the people—because the other people don’t mean anything.”45

Populist movements in America have tended to be cast on the left side of the political spectrum—except when they’ve been avowedly racist or anti-Semitic, in which case liberal historians and political analysts go to great lengths to disassociate and exonerate progressivism from any such associations. In Europe, where the upper classes have replaced the old notions of inherited nobility and aristocracy with elite technocracy, populism tends to be associated with demagoguery, pandering, and backward thinking. The bankers and bureaucrats scoff at the little people who resist the tides of globalization as bitter losers.

And there’s some truth there. Populist movements do tend to be coalitions of losers. I do not mean that in a pejorative sense but in an analytical one. Populist movements almost by definition don’t spring up among people who think everything is going great and they’re getting a fair shake. Populism is fueled by resentment, the sense that the “real people” are being kept down or exploited by the elites or the establishment or, in the numerous extreme cases of populism, shadowy conspirators. “Conspiracy theories,” Müller writes, are “not a curious addition to populist rhetoric; they are rooted in and emerge from the very logic of populism itself.”46

FDR came up with the phrase “the Forgotten Man” not because he himself was much of a populist but because he needed to siphon off support from his many populist challengers. But the phrase was a brilliant encapsulation of the source of populist discontent. To be forgotten is to feel disrespected, left out, left behind. It breeds a soul-poisoning sense of ingratitude for the status quo and a burning sense that things were better in the past. It was this sentiment that the romantic nationalists of Europe tapped into. All of us are familiar with the way paranoia can fester when we have been excluded; we invent theories about how our enemies—or friends—are working against us.47 Populism often works under the same dynamic, but on a mass scale.

The first populist movements in the United States were mostly agrarian and rural. Farmers, for obvious reasons, were not at the cutting edge of social change. The rapid industrialization and urbanization of American life understandably led rural communities to feel that their country was getting away from them. The tendency of young men to leave their communities in search of a new life in the big city aroused feelings of resentment among those who stayed behind (and amplified feelings of alienation and rootlessness among those who left). The ever-increasing sophistication of financial capitalism made many feel like tools or pawns of forces outside of their control.

This is one reason why populist movements, here and in Europe, are attracted to various forms of “producerism,” an economic doctrine that distinguishes between “good” economic activity—building with your hands, toiling in the soil, etc.—and the mere manipulation of capital. William Jennings Bryan distinguished between those who worked with their hands making things and “the idle holders of idle capital.”48 Producerism is often associated with “right-wing” populist movements, but one can see its relationship to Marxist notions of the labor theory of value and exploitative capital. When Benito Mussolini was transitioning from socialism to fascism, he stopped calling his newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia (The People of Italy), a “socialist daily,” in favor of a “producers’ daily.”49 To listen to Donald Trump, the only jobs that matter are manufacturing and construction. He talks about the trade deficit obsessively, never mentioning that America has a significant trade surplus in services or that trade deficits are the product of large foreign investment in America.

Historically, the demonization of “idle capital” provided a fertile medium for the oldest of conspiracy theories: anti-Semitism. Thomas E. Watson, a prominent Georgia populist, started out as a defender of poor blacks and whites alike, arguing that the poor needed to unite against the monied interests. But because populism has no limiting principle save the need to feed off and stoke resentment, he eventually embraced white supremacy, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Semitism. The 1892 Populist Party platform proclaimed, “A vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents, and it is rapidly taking possession of the world.”50

In Europe in the 1930s and in much of the Arab world today, the widespread belief that the Jews or Zionists are the author of every problem of the world has made anti-Semitism the easiest route to pander to the masses.

“Populists…look at the supposedly secret deals that run the world ‘behind the scenes,’ ” observed Christopher Hitchens, This is “child’s play,” he added. “Except that childishness is sinister in adults.”51 Hitchens was making a more profound point than he might have realized. The corruption of democracy comes from human nature, and children are always closer to our natural state than adults. Adults—hopefully—have been civilized. Children are born barbarians, and their instincts are the same in every era. Populism is a barbaric, childish yawp coming out of democratic man.52

Donald Trump’s constant insistence that “the system is rigged”—even as he runs the system—fits neatly into the mainstream of the populist tradition—as does most of the rhetoric from Bernie Sanders and, to a slightly lesser extent, Elizabeth Warren. At times, Trump’s persecution complex is quite amusing. His relentless tweets asking why the government hasn’t done this or that make it sound like he can’t actually ask his employees directly. But Trump’s indictment of the “globalist” conspiracy against “the people” has some more ominous echoes as well.

In the final weeks of the 2016 presidential race, Trump’s campaign went into overdrive. In an October 13 speech, he railed against “the global special interests” that “don’t have your good in mind.”53 In an ad touted as his “closing argument,” Donald Trump railed against a global “political establishment” that has vampirically “bled our country dry.” Over images of various supposedly villainous globalists—most of them Jewish—Trump inveighed against this sinister cabal. While the screen showed Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Trump declared, “It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”54 (The fact that large swaths of his administration are run by the Goldman Sachs/Wall Street/Davos crowd is a stirring tribute to his lack of ideological—or just plain logical—coherence.)

The ad invited vociferous charges of anti-Semitism, with some likening it to the nineteenth-century anti-Semitic conspiracy forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Such complaints might be heavy-handed, though it doesn’t seem inconceivable that Steve Bannon, Trump’s avowed nationalist campaign manager, was feeding the troll army of alt-right bigots he helped bring out of the floorboards. I don’t think Bannon or Trump are anti-Semites, but it’s much harder to defend them against the charge of gross cynicism in their willingness to play fast and loose with populist rhetoric and their willingness to feed an army of racist and anti-Semitic trolls.^*2

But, again, the important point is not that people in Trump’s orbit—or their kindred spirits in Europe—traffic in populist and nativist appeals. It is that we have blundered into a time when such appeals work. There have always been populist opportunists in every country and in every age. But healthy societies with healthy institutions can usually fend them off like a weak virus. The rhetoric of the demagogues is drowned out by the much larger conversation. The dismaying thing about the moment we are in is that demagoguery on the left and the right is in such high demand.

Demagoguery—appealing to the gut instincts of the mob or the crowd—is an ancient form of rhetoric. The term comes from ancient Greeks who first defined a demagogue as a leader of the common people. Only later did it come to mean playing on the passions of the public to foment immediate and unthinking action or hatred toward the system. Demagoguery is quite obviously linked to romanticism, because both elevate the importance of emotion and feelings above reason and fact. But the practice of demagoguery is far more ancient, because it is grounded in human instinct. In primitive societies, where strangers are presumed to be enemies and where survival requires inflaming a zealous defensiveness of the group and demonizing hatred for the other, the ability to see the world in black-and-white is a competitive advantage. A talent for stirring up passion—and the ability to have one’s passion stirred up—is a source of strength. For unity is the fruit of passion. In other words, demagoguery is a natural human trait. Containing, channeling, and dispelling dangerous popular passions is what civilizations do. The Constitution does many things, but one of its chief functions is to blunt and divert the power of demagogues and the masses that listen to them. This was once understood and celebrated by conservatives. Not so much today.

Again, if Trump had been able to keep his instincts in check, he would have been a much more formidable president and a more effective demagogue. If he had a better read on the moment, he would have given a very different inaugural address, reaching out to Democrats for some massive share-the-wealth program of big-infrastructure spending and the like. He would have siphoned some of the populist passion that drove the Sanders campaign. Instead, as so many new presidents do, he misread the election results, antagonizing Democrats and appeasing his most zealous supporters. As a conservative and as an American, this makes me happy, at least in the short term, because by galvanizing opposition against him, he has unwittingly strengthened the system of checks and balances. But in the long term I worry more, because he has demonstrated that conservatism, at least as expressed by the Republican Party and its more loyally allied media outlets, is not immune to the tribal desire for strongmen.

Donald Trump did not cause this corruption on the right; he exploited it. And, having succeeded, he is accelerating it. If civilization is just a conversation, then Donald Trump is already a very consequential president, because he has profoundly changed the conversation of our democracy.