The president is at the vanguard of a worldwide movement.
It’s easy in hindsight to say that Donald Trump’s ride down the Trump Tower escalator a decade ago changed everything. It’s more accurate and helpful to say that his journey merely heightened and channeled trends that were likely to emerge anyway.
Ten years ago, virtually no one was talking about populism or a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, working-class-based Republican Party. Democrats believed in the Rising American Electorate theory, which held that increased Democratic Party dominance was demographically assured because older, conservative whites were dying off and being replaced by young, Democratic-leaning voters plus people of color. The intra-GOP debate focused on which approach to the future was more compelling: doubling down on fiscal and social conservatism (Senator Ted Cruz was the most visible adherent of this view) or moving to the Left on immigration and same-sex marriage (the infamous RNC 2012 “Autopsy”).
Trump proved all three groups wrong. He ostentatiously ran against both GOP arguments, championing a hard-line immigration policy, attacks on free trade, and a notable unwillingness to compete in the GOP’s quadrennial “who’s the most religious candidate” primary pageant. He then upended the Democrats’ theory by attacking their soft underbelly: their reliance on blue-collar, Northern and Midwestern white votes. He assembled a coalition few had dreamed of, one that sacrificed moderate, college-educated whites for somewhat conservative non-college whites combined with the GOP’s conservative core.
Most people then and now ascribe that success to Trump’s personality, and that surely had something to do with it. But we now have a decade of elections around the world to examine, and we see that the same type of voters who moved from the Democrats to a Trump-defined Republican Party have been gaining ground throughout the West.
Brexit’s unexpected victory in 2016 rested on the British version of the Trump coalition, as did the Conservative Party’s 2019 landslide. Giorgia Meloni’s 2022 triumph was essentially the same thing, as she smashed the old right party (Forza Italia) and created a new right-populist coalition with the old guard firmly in tow. Poland’s Law and Justice Party is essentially a Polish version of the modern GOP, as is Hungary’s Fidesz.
Even countries that have yet to see a populist prime minister have blue-collar right-populist parties represented in parliament in such numbers as to deny old center-right parties their ability to dominate government. No conservative party can govern in Scandinavia without populist backing, and conservative parties elsewhere that eschew populist support must form grand coalitions with their old center-left adversaries.
Everywhere it is the same type of voter, animated by the same type of concerns, that gravitates toward parties broadcasting a Trump-like message. Having a charismatic leader often helps those parties gain broader support more quickly, but the message rather than the messenger is the thing to focus on.
What this means for America is that Trumpism will outlive Trump. There may be post-Trump infighting amongst the wannabe heirs to the MAGA throne, but the problems Trump and others are talking about cannot be solved in a mere three years. Making America—or Britain, or Germany—great again is a multi-year, likely a multi-decadal, project.
There will be no conservative return to a pre-Trump consensus. America will either move in a Trumpward fashion as savvy MAGA leaders expand his coalition into a larger and more theoretically cohesive party, or it will shift sharply leftward as failure persuades the less committed to embrace a left-wing version of populism.
Without Trump’s golden journey, America might be where much of Europe is today, only starting to recoil from elite consensus arrogance and failure. Because of it, America will likely provide the global example for conservative populists everywhere of how to—or how not to—make the West great again.
The American Mind presents a range of perspectives. Views are writers’ own and do not necessarily represent those of The Claremont Institute.
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