Will the real populist please stand up?
Various liberals as well as conservatives are confused by what the media is calling this "populist" moment in Republican/MAGA/American politics. People are genuinely stumped by what appear to be shifting alliances, as the Trump wing of the Republican party successfully recruits new people to their base of support, to the shock of the many pundits who were predicting only ten years ago that as demographics changed in the USA, the Republican Party would soon become irrelevant.
Even as Trump 2.0 moves quickly in the direction of dictatorship, seizing all kinds of powers that either the Constitution or centuries of legal precedent say he doesn't have; even as he is throwing metaphorical grenades into various spheres including international relations between traditional allies, basic notions about how government departments and the line of command operate, basic understandings of what the executive branch can and can't do, there is a pretty minimal response to all these developments visible on the streets of the country, as far as I can tell.
The lack of response is about many things, I'm sure. But part of that lack of response could be on account of the growing feeling among so many people in this country that is represented by the popular term, "politically homeless." Polls not long ago indicated that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump had a seriously overlapping base of support, when people were asked who they might hypothetically vote for in different circumstances. The same kind of phenomenon can be found in other countries.
In my various social circles it ends up being the case that I know a lot of people I might characterize as political liberals who are completely appalled by Trump and everything he does or stands for, and have no idea why anyone keeps voting for him.
But I probably know at least as many people who are often struck by what appear to be shifting political alliances, who have become increasingly alienated by the rightward lurch of the Democratic Party leadership over the past many decades, who would once have described their politics as some form of leftwing, but who are now no longer comfortable with the term, as it increasingly seems to lose all association with the kinds of ideas once associated with it.
I thought it might be helpful to take a step back from the onslaught of news about the latest presidential decrees, and look at the different issues that are being brought to the fore in the process of Trump's efforts to consolidate his dictatorship, and possible reasons why they aren't inspiring the kind of street response we might expect. I'll present the MAGA view first, then the DNC/NPR argument, then the sorts of views I hear among those who might describe themselves as some kind of leftist, of the "politically homeless" variety or not.
Election Fraud
Trump complains of election fraud, while his people work hard to change laws all over the country to prevent his opponents from voting. The DNC says US elections are free and fair. But most of the people I know think the US democracy is totally corrupt and ruled by money, and the elections are therefore never fair.
The FBI
The new head of the FBI talks about closing the J Edgar Hoover Building and turning it into a Museum of the Deep State. The mainstream liberal view coalesces around the prosecutions of January 6 defendants, and how the FBI stands up for law and order, rather than insurrections. Most of the people I know think the FBI has been primarily on a mission to neutralize the American left since its formation as a national police force at the beginning of the twentieth century.
USAID
They've shut down USAID for being "a viper's den of Marxists." The liberals say USAID is so good because it provides lots of food and medicine and programs like that around the world. Most of the people I know think USAID has been serving the agenda of American empire for generations, in how it defines things like human rights and democracy.
Trade Wars
They want to put tariffs on everyone, because apparently everyone has treated the US unfairly in the course of global trade, which is supposedly why there's a trade deficit. The liberals these days say free trade is good, except with Russia and their allies, and tariffs are bad, except in the case of China. Most people I know were critics of the whole agenda of corporate globalization in the first place, with its accompanying outsourcing of US industry. They would like to see all kinds of radical changes to trade policies, but not the ones either the Trumpists or the DNC support.
Tulsi Gabbard/NATO
The Trumpists are tired of footing the bill for NATO's collective defense, they say. They've now got Tulsi Gabbard in a prominent position in the administration. A prominent former Democratic senator and combat veteran, she has a record of criticizing US imperialism, and praising folks like Edward Snowden for revealing secret, illegal spying programs being conducted by the NSA. The Democrats overwhelmingly seem to think NATO, US imperialism, and the NSA are all hunky dory, Edward Snowden is a traitor, and Tulsi Gabbard represents an existential threat to NATO and US imperialism. Most people I know think that would be great, if it were true.
RFK, Jr./CDC
Another prominent former Democrat, the Trumpists like him because he was critical of lots of different aspects of public health policy during the pandemic, and for entertaining Covid origin hypotheses that weren't the approved version of reality. The liberals hate him for the same reasons the Trumpists now love him, as well as for other things. Most of the people I know don't buy most of RFK, Jr's ideas, but a whole lot of people in the US were alienated by what struck many as authoritarian overreach and blatant social media censorship that authorities engaged in during the lockdown periods in particular, so they don't necessarily subscribe to DNC positions related to RFK, Jr, either.
Mass Deportations
Embracing a very old xenophobic trope, the Trumpists blame "illegal aliens" for crime and all sorts of other things, and they want to deport them all. The liberals, whether or not they have a majority in both houses, are never able to figure out what to do with the undocumented, other than continuing with the status quo of having tens of millions of superexploited workers be a so-called "essential" part of the economy. Most people I know are horrified by the mass deportations, but they're also horrified by the status quo of millions of super-exploited undocumented workers, and the race to the bottom involved with having a society in which those workers have to compete for jobs and housing with everybody else.
Anti-"Woke"
The Trumpists are sick and tired of hearing about marginalized people all the time. All the Democrats to the right of Bernie Sanders abandoned working class politics long ago, so all they talk about are marginalized people, who are, collectively, the closest thing that passes for their base. Most of the people I know are genuinely concerned about all kinds of marginalized groups, but they can see how the Democrats talk about marginalized groups because they have no class politics to stand on anymore, and they're sick of the way they think they can just continually keep us worried about marginalized groups, while the basic realities of life for the working class of all backgrounds continues to decline.
DOGE
The Trumpists claim that the Deep State permeates the federal bureaucracy, and regardless of who gets elected, the Deep State does what it does. They also say there's a lot of money being wasted, and with the federal debt being what it is, radical measures are required. The liberals think the government works fine when you don't destroy it, and the responsible thing to do as far as the debt goes is to continually increase the debt limit and pay ever more of our tax dollars to service the ever-mushrooming federal debt. Most folks I know think the size of the debt is totally crazy, and we should be taxing the rich like we used to back when Eisenhower was president.
Now, of course, the real reason the Trumpists obsess about election fraud is not because they're actually concerned with election fraud, but so that they have a good position from which to deny the outcome of an election that doesn't go their way. The real reason they want to radically transform the FBI is not because it's been suppressing dissent for the past century, but because they want to use the secret police for their own particular purposes. The reason they just disappeared USAID from existence isn't because of opposition to it's promotion of "Woke" politics or opposition to imperialism, but because they want to weaponize foreign aid to work for their particular agenda, which differs from what used to be the bipartisan imperialist agenda -- there's a new variety of imperialism in town now.
The political position of the liberal mainstream on these and other issues is totally indefensible, nothing close to what is needed to meet our current moment, and this has been true for a very long time now. The position of traditional Republican values of capitalism and imperialism are also indefensible, and hard to run a successful campaign on.
What the new Republicans have done under Trump, on each of the issues I've mentioned and with others, is to adopt a warped sort of doppelganger version of what might appear to be a popular radical position on very problematic institutions like the FBI, the NSA, NATO, USAID and others.
One well-documented and fairly well-understood tendency of fascists is to seek dictatorial control, unhindered by things like legislative oversight or special prosecutors or independent government departments abiding by longstanding rules.
But another well-documented tendency of fascists is to adopt the popular ideas of the left and warp them to serve their authoritarian agenda, and they're doing that.
For a long, long time in this country, it has been the liberals who have had politics that at least resembled a watered-down rendition of some left analysis. In so many ways, such as those mentioned above, this is no longer the case. It is now the Trump wing of the Republicans that has learned to deliver a twisted version of some left analysis, and they've learned to do this more convincingly than the modern Democrats.
Liberals can keep on asking despondently on every available forum how it could possibly be that anyone could vote against the status quo and vote for Trump and his nefarious agenda. Spending another four years doing that again, rather than seeking to understand and respond to the appeal of the particularly doppelgangerish set of beliefs that drive his base of support, will go a long way to making a future JD Vance administration that much more predictable.
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