The last 35 years have seen a resurgence of the Jacksonian populism that once defined politics across much of the white South. The culture and political beliefs of the post-Reconstruction South, moreover, have dramatically expanded their reach: Jacksonian America is no longer confined to the Ozarks and Appalachia. The spirit of resistance to the Eastern financial and cultural establishment, to the quasi-official national culture the establishment promotes, to a federal government largely shaped by establishment values, and to local politicians and powerbrokers who align themselves with the snooty and imperious Ivy League Yankee Northeast, now dominates much of the country.
For those with eyes to see, there were many signs of a looming explosion. But for much if not all of the last eight years, the pro-business, pro-international engagement wing of the Republican Party turned a blind eye to what they didn’t want to see. Many Reagan Republicans were as confused by the defection of their political base as they were horrified by the rise of Donald Trump. Stirring calls for American world leadership and hymns of praise to a free-market economy had worked wonders for Ronald Reagan and brought George W. Bush to the White House. But when presidential candidates blew the old trumpets in 2016 and again in 2024, nobody came running. Instead, the voters flocked to Trump rallies by the tens of thousands, leaving the Reaganites on the fringes of a party they once had dominated.
Veterans of the Bush 43 administration expected to benefit from the policy failures and cultural miscues of the Obama administration. After all, they reasoned, Reagan in his day benefited from voter disenchantment with the failures of Democratic progressive ideas. Evangelical Christians flocked to his banner. Those who thought Jimmy Carter was too weak or too liberal were the mainstays of the Reagan political establishment. And while voters were genuinely angry at the Democrats, didn’t they understand that the Reagan Republicans were also against progressive misfires ranging from the pronoun madness to soft-on-crime prosecutors?
Caught up in the intoxication of the 1990s, establishment politicians in both parties paid little attention to the rumblings below. Economic issues, immigration, and identity politics were primarily responsible for the Jacksonian resurgence that, as of Nov. 5, 2024, left many feeling flattened once again by the Trump steamroller. Like the equally unwitting dwarves in Moria from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, establishment Republicans in particular had awakened a Balrog that would soon wreak havoc in their orderly domain.
Only in their case, by the time they were done, they had helped awaken three.
Let’s start with the changes to the labor market. It is not just a question of wages. Under the regulated “blue model” economy of the post-World War II era, American workers enjoyed, by historic standards, a rare combination of social mobility, employment security, and wage growth. As more factories went South, Southern workers shared in the bounty, but outside of some blighted Northeastern mill towns dependent on the textile industry, the factories were still humming across the Rust Belt. Factory work was only one of the economic pillars of blue- and pink-collar prosperity. In the age before word processing software and spreadsheets, armies of typists and clerks earned stable livelihoods in offices across the country. Switchboard operators kept the phone company running.
Meanwhile, a tightly regulated economic structure made bankruptcies rare, and disruptive technologies entered the workplace much less frequently than in our own tumultuous time. Europe and Japan were still recovering from the massive devastation of World War II, and their limited production capacity left them with little ability to export surplus production to the American market. Only a tiny handful of East Asian countries were beginning to pursue the export-oriented growth strategies the American South had pioneered, and the cheap plastic goods and paper umbrellas they produced were no threat to American industry.
One by one, these favorable conditions disappeared. Europe and Japan entered American markets in a substantial way in the 1960s, and first German and then Japanese cars began to disturb the lives of America’s major automakers and their workers. Thanks to the nascent computer revolution, companies began to shed clerical workers. Deregulation made companies ranging from telecommunications to finance to airlines more conscious of the bottom line and gave them greater freedom to innovate. The pace of technological change steadily accelerated, making companies ever more focused on profitability and productivity. As emerging market countries joined Europe and Japan in the export business, the pressure on American producers steadily rose. With the creation of NAFTA, giving low-wage Mexico better access to the American market, continued liberalization of trade through the World Trade Organization and, most dramatically, the admission of Communist China to full participation in the world trading system, many American blue-collar workers felt under siege.
Worse, they felt betrayed.
In the South, this meant a gradual revival of the old populist wing of what was now the Southern Republican Party. From the time of the Redeemers to the time of Newt Gingrich, the promise of pro-business establishment politicians had always been that a pro-business economic model would allow the South to attract the investment that would make the region bloom. After Reconstruction, Yankee investors would shift production from textile mills in Massachusetts and Connecticut to Alabama and North Carolina. In the post-World War II era, both the “Big Three” car companies—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—and foreign automakers looking to step up their North American production would eschew expensive, unionized Detroit to invest in Tennessee and South Carolina. This worked, and as both U.S. and foreign investors opened new production facilities across the South, financial services firms followed, and a once-blighted region began to prosper.
But in the 1990s, this began to change. Not only were low-wage countries like Mexico and China adopting the old Southern development strategy, but American trade policy, with the enthusiastic backing of Southern Republican progressives like Gingrich and Bush 43, was making life easier for foreign competitors. Factories weren’t moving from Detroit to Smyrna, Tennessee, anymore. They were moving from Birmingham and Gastonia to Juarez and Chongqing—and Republican politicians were helping them do it.
For many blue-collar white Southerners, this was not only a blow to the pocketbook. Ever since the Civil War, the Redeemers and their heirs had presented themselves as the guardians of the special interests of Dixie and its citizens. They were not making arguments about laissez-faire economics and Adam Smith. They were proposing a focused strategy to rebuild the South. Pro-business white Southerners justified their collaboration with hated Northern industrial and financial interests by pointing to the benefits the partnership brought to the region. Now, as Southern whites appeared to lose out to foreign competition, Reagan Republican hymns to the virtue of free markets fell on deaf ears.
To many and ultimately perhaps to most Southern Republicans, the Reagan-Bush dedication to free trade, even when it appeared to hurt rather than help Southern and more broadly American workers, confirmed their deepest suspicions. The pro-free-trade wing of the Southern Republican Party was ready to sell their fellow Southerners out to Mexico and China. They weren’t just misguided. They were untrustworthy. They were evil.
Meanwhile, de-industrialization across the Rust Belt and beyond was changing both the attitudes and the political orientation of many blue- and pink-collar Americans outside the South. Neither Reagan Republicans nor Rockefeller Republicans had answers to their concerns. The gap between increasing populist anger among grassroots voters and a Panglossian party establishment convinced that everything was for the best in this best of all possible worlds inexorably grew.
The second Balrog that unwitting Reagan Republicans awakened in the depths was the issue of immigration. Here again, the combination of profound ignorance of basic American history and a naively dogmatic approach to questions of morality and policy ensured that Trump’s establishment opponents had no idea of what dangers lay ahead, and no way of meeting them intelligently when they appeared.
Immigration, of course, is a fact of American life. Successive waves of immigration, from the British Isles, from Germany, from the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires, to say nothing of our neighbors in the Caribbean and Central America and both Asia and Africa, are what have made this country. Some, like the enslaved Africans, came unwillingly. Others, like the indigenous peoples of the continent, experienced migration as an invasion. Every wave of immigration has brought social tension; many have brought violence. It has never been a smooth process, but over the centuries it has made us a richer, wiser, and more dynamic people than we would have been otherwise.
But given this, the actual history of immigration to America has been a more tumultuous and difficult process than most Americans realize, and our collective failure to understand it has helped to put us in a difficult place. It also created a major opportunity for a man like Donald Trump to harness the power of an issue that establishment politicians mostly tried to avoid.
The last era of mass migration to the United States ended abruptly in 1924, when Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, a law that effectively cut immigration by 80%. With its proponents ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to the faculty of Harvard, it was one of the most popular laws of the 20th century. It was so strict that untold numbers of Jews attempting to flee Hitler were blocked from entering the United States. It was so popular that not even the politically dominant Franklin Roosevelt dared to touch it, and Dwight Eisenhower bolstered his popularity by organizing what was then the largest wave of deportations in American history.
Immigration had not always been popular in the United States, and pre-Civil War surges in immigrants due to exceptional circumstances like the Irish potato famine and the failure of the 1848 revolutions across Europe triggered spasms of nativist sentiment. But on the whole, Americans welcomed or at least accepted continuing immigration up through the final decades of the 19th century. At that time, however, things began to change.
Technology was one factor. For generations, immigrants came to the United States on wooden sailing ships. Those ships had limited passenger room, could not cross the ocean very many times in a given year, and could not sail at all during times of rough weather. The only people who could board those ships were people who lived near enough to a port to get there on foot or by wagon.
That all changed. Giant steamships could carry hundreds of passengers at a time. They could cross the ocean in all weather and could make many crossings in a year. European railroad networks extended their tentacles into remote and landlocked provinces, opening a path for migration to, literally, millions of people.
At the same time, the mechanization of farming was forcing many farmers off their land. Populations in most of Europe were rising rapidly. The cost of travel was falling. And as more migrants came to the United States, more people in Europe had friends or relatives on this side of the Atlantic, often writing back home to tell friends and family about the better lives they were building here.
Migration levels shot up, and so too did the percentage of Americans born outside the United States. With higher migration levels came greater political tension around the issue. Labor unions were originally pro-immigrant, as many migrants were eager to join and support the struggling union movement. But over time, opinion shifted. Migrants were competition for domestic workers, forcing wages down and giving employers access to desperate workers willing to break strikes. Some, with the racist attitudes of the time, took exception to what they saw as the dilution of the supposed purity of America’s old stock. Others worried about the diverse religious beliefs of the newcomers, or about whether people coming from European empires were willing or ready to support American democracy. Reformers believed that corrupt big city machines exploited immigrants and used their votes to boost their power. Many of the new immigrants were influenced by anarchism and Marxism, and some Americans feared that these alien ideas would infect the country’s politics.
In the late 19th century, the voices calling for immigration restriction were isolated, but over time they moved toward the mainstream. By the 1920s, nativist sentiment was so strong that the Ku Klux Klan was able to rebuild itself as an anti-immigrant organization, and this time it expanded out of the South to become a major force across much of the East and Midwest. It was impossible in many states for politicians to hold office without a Klan endorsement.
Anti-immigrant sentiment strengthened and united all the forms of racist feeling that were latent—and not so latent—in the America of the day. West Coast nativism focused on immigrants from China and Japan, forcing a series of restrictive bills through even before the Johnson-Reed Act. Antisemitism flourished among anti-immigration activists. So did anti-Catholicism.
Obviously, the factors driving our contemporary migration wave (numerically, the greatest in American history) bear some resemblance to those driving earlier waves. War and famine continue to drive people from their homes in search of a better life. And just as railroads and steamships changed the nature of migration in the 19th century, the rise of air travel and highways around the world makes migration easier and cheaper today. As in the past, the large groups of immigrants here from other countries are in touch with friends and families back home, and with social media and cellphones so prevalent, those friends and family members have a better idea than ever before of what is possible.
We are also seeing the repeat of other past trends. Just as sentiment among recent immigrants turned against open immigration 100 years ago, so now many legal immigrants do not want more low-wage competition. While union leaders continue on the whole to support very liberal migration policies, the rank and file is turning significantly more restrictionist.
We are seeing, too, that as concern about levels of migration grows, the issue contributes to bitterness and even paranoia among many Americans. We are not, thankfully, seeing yet another Klan renaissance today. But opposition to open borders is clearly an animating force behind the rise of some extremist movements. This concern helps feed the paranoia about vast conspiracies like the “great replacement” theory.
In some ways, the current set of immigration controversies is even more dangerous and polarizing than the controversies of the past. For one thing, the distinction between “legal” and “illegal” immigration, a distinction that simply did not exist before restrictionist sentiment began to appear during the “great wave,” greatly exacerbates public concern about the border. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson’s administration dramatically increased the cap on migration adopted in 1924 and abolished the old law’s distribution of quotas among different countries and regions—a system that discriminated against Asian, African, East European, and Middle Eastern immigrants. But the overall numerical cap kept some continuity with the old law and provided some assurance that the number of immigrants would be limited.
Today, with the collapse of border enforcement, those concerned about immigration do not just see a cap that they would like to shrink, or a set of geographical mandates that they would like to change. They see an effective policy of almost unlimited migration into the United States from anywhere in the world, including enemy countries and places where radical ideologies deeply inimical to American values are widely held. Moreover, they see this being carried out undemocratically—that is, by a federal government that is failing to enforce duly enacted laws.
It would be hard to imagine an immigration policy more likely to trigger enormous backlash, encourage xenophobia, and lead in the end to extremely restrictive changes both to immigration law and to the way it is enforced. As Vice President Kamala Harris discovered to her cost, any association with a policy this misguided and provocative is toxic. No one familiar with the troubled history of American immigration policy would have counseled this kind of approach. That a majority of Americans now favor mass deportation of illegal immigrants is the natural and inevitable result of one of the most sustained acts of political incompetence and humanitarian malpractice in the history of the American presidency.
The South is the part of the United States with the least experience of mass migration, the least confidence in its ability to assimilate foreign migrants, and the greatest concern about the preservation of its historic culture. After the Civil War, very few immigrants chose the South, and with good reason. Not only was the region desperately poor, with low wages and very few factory jobs; it was xenophobic. The largest mass lynching in the South was of Italian immigrants in New Orleans. The lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish resident of Atlanta, came amid horrifying libels against Jews in general—and the leading populist politician Tom Watson helped drive on the mob. Only after World War II did more than a trickle of Yankees move into the South, and both North and South Carolina had vanishingly small Catholic populations as late as the 1960s.
But today, a more prosperous South is experiencing the greatest wave of immigration since its original settlement. In many communities, first generation immigrants from the Western Hemisphere outnumber Blacks. And the global nature of today’s wave of immigrants is fully reflected in the ethnic, racial, and religious diversity of the immigrants settling in Dixie.
The South is doing a lot better with the immigrants than some would have expected. But the backlash is real. To Southerners feeling betrayed by Reagan Republican support for free trade with China and Mexico, frightened and angered by the specter of a unified establishment pushing an anti-Christian, anti-American “replacement ideology,” and feeling the competition and dislocation from a new wave of immigrants—many arriving in violation of U.S. law—the appeal of a populist politician like Donald Trump rather than a Reagan Republican is close to irresistible.
Another Balrog was loose in the basement.
The third Balrog the American establishment unwittingly awakened was, of course, identity politics, or what is more vaguely referred to as the culture wars. The salience of race and ethnicity was nothing new in American history. For well over 100 years, frustrated Marxists have blamed America’s failure to develop a “true” mass socialist movement on the power of the ethnic, regional, religious, and racial fissures in American society. The efforts of Southern white populists like Tom Watson to form cross-racial coalitions against powerful business elites almost always fell short. City and state politics in much of the North were historically often driven by rivalries between “old stock” nativists and large immigrant groups like the Irish and Italians. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s culminating in the Black Power era and urban riots of the late 1960s and early 1970s saw identity politics rise to the fore.
But the new age of identity politics in the 21st century seems more consequential and potentially more explosive than before. Both the rising number of migrants following the end of the half-century when the United States sharply limited the number of new immigrants, and the increased ethnic, racial, and religious diversity of those immigrants led some Americans to hope, and others to fear, that a new American majority was emerging. This multiracial, multiconfessional new America would make us a “minority-majority” nation as centuries of white demographic preponderance came to an end. This would be more than a change in skin color. It would involve sweeping changes in culture and political ideology.
Moreover, the coming changes would be deeper and more far-reaching than a few adjustments in social policy or a rewriting of the narrative of American history to make room for the voices of formerly marginalized groups. It would go even deeper than replacing the “harsh” capitalist morality of old America with something kinder, more communitarian, and greener. The new America was going to eschew traditional Western Judeo-Christian sexual morality and family life. The cis-hetero-patriarchy was going to go and something more fluid and genderqueer would take its place.
This project was always deeply unrealistic. As the 2024 election returns demonstrated, the United States is very far from being the postwhite, gender-fluid, pronoun-sensitive society that the most online of wokitarians want it to be. Many immigrants, including people of various colors and religious orientations, quite like the old American society. They come to the United States from Nigeria and Guatemala because it is different from those countries and offers more opportunity to newcomers. They would rather be insiders than outsiders and want nothing to do with “successor ideologies” that reject the very things (like economic and personal freedom) that drew them to the United States in the first place.
But like many superficially attractive ideological fads, this one caught fire among the class of poorly educated but highly credentialed professionals our dysfunctional educational machine has been turning out lately. It therefore exercises more influence in HR departments, educational institutions, newsrooms, and government bureaucracies than its real political strength would ordinarily give it. Its demands are large and tend to grow over time. It impinges on the lives of tens of millions of Americans who don’t like it, didn’t vote for it, and don’t want it. Like Prohibition and other upper-middle-class movements of social uplift and reform in American history, it is partly about an ideological argument between different worldviews, and partly a crusade through which the privileged upper-middle classes attempt to improve their “unenlightened” fellow citizens through a mix of earnest persuasion, cultural nudging, economic pressure, social exclusion, professional cancellation, and if all else fails, the power of law.
Thanks to that, the culture war tends to fuse with class conflicts and ethnic identity in unpredictable and explosive ways. Working-class people often see bossy HR managers as the embodiment of the economically privileged, out-of-touch elites who neither understand nor respect ordinary Americans. Delicately raised students in extremely expensive private liberal arts colleges “discovering” new genders, ritualistically sharing their pronouns, and making fatuously pious “land acknowledgments” infuriate millions. As it turns out, many of them are Trump voters who, thanks to the widespread use of social media, can now see the follies of a narcissistic upper class more clearly than ever before.
Progressives made another series of Balrog-awakening errors around the culturally charged issues of crime and authority. If someone wanted to spark an irresistible wave of right-wing activism and political engagement, pushing to “defund the police” and failing to enforce laws against shoplifting, urban rioting, and other crimes in the name of racial justice is the right tactic to try. When, during the COVID pandemic, politically clueless but aggressive public health authorities banned church and synagogue services as public health threats while endorsing mass protest marches as harmless outdoor activities posing no threat to public health, the double standard was too great for many Americans to overlook. And if one wanted to ensure that the rage and fear stirred up by this foolishness became a major source of support for Donald Trump, one should then pull out all the stops and invent new legal theories to indict the former president. The picture of an establishment that turned a blind eye to the crimes of some Americans while using its full prosecutorial powers against its political opponents was clear.
The final turn of the screw was a consequence of efforts to normalize the acceptance of the LGBTQ agenda through accustoming children to once-taboo manifestations of LGBTQ culture ranging from “Drag Queen Story Hours” in public libraries to LBGTQ-friendly children’s books and sympathetic treatment of queer forms of sexual identification in the classroom. For many parents, especially though not only in the South, this approach constituted a direct assault by “groomers” on their children. And as the trans movement became more prominent in the broader LGBTQ movement, issues like allowing middle school boys identifying as girls into girls’ bathrooms brought the culture wars to kitchen tables across the country.
Trump campaign ads highlighting Vice President Harris’ past support for government-funded sex reassignment surgeries for prison inmates and illegal aliens in immigration detention seem to have played a significant role in his electoral success. But inside Republican politics, these issues contributed to the rise of Trumpian populism and the decline of the Reagan conservatives seen as less zealous or committed on culture war issues. Indeed, efforts by non-MAGA Republicans to shift the conversation away from the “embarrassing” cultural issues that many grassroots Republicans saw as a clear and present danger to their young children towards economic issues where pro-market, free-trade Reagan Republican stands were broadly unpopular, highlighted the widening gap between the party Reagan Republicans thought they were leading and the actually existing party stampeding toward Trump.
Once again, the revival of identity politics helped energize Southern white populism while also driving many Americans to sympathize with this movement. Throughout American history, white Southerners have often felt themselves under threat. Now, Confederate monuments were being destroyed, the family was under attack, “whiteness” was being stigmatized as a great social evil, and an uncontrolled wave of illegal immigration was changing the demographics of their cities and towns.
Outside the South, not many Americans cared about preserving statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, much less about preventing the renaming of military bases named for Confederate military figures. But they cared quite a bit about the cultural, social, and governmental pressure against “whiteness,” of men’s participation in female sports, the repetitive sessions of meaningless “diversity training,” and the many ways, large and small, in which a deranged subsection of the upper middle class was attempting to reshape a nation and a culture that it did not understand.
One way to read Trump’s second victory in three elections is that the movement for a post-American America with a successor ideology and post-Judeo Christian cultural and ethical foundation aimed at fundamentally changing American society has reached its sell-by date. Its social base, in a deeply dysfunctional upper-middle class, is too weak, too faddish, and too narcissistic for the hard work of remaking society. Too many of its concrete proposals are too unpopular or too unrealistic to bear fruit. The immigrants and “outs” whose support it hopes to mobilize are too diverse themselves, and for the most part too interested in integrating into American society to unite in a hammer to break it.
Yet there is one thing it has accomplished: It has woken another Balrog from its sleep. Once again, minority identity politics sooner or later lead to majority identity politics. The specter of a radically transformed America that hates Christianity, sees no difference between women and men, actively discriminates against whites and especially white men in the name of equity, and seeks to regulate every economic and social interaction with a puritanical fervor not seen since Oliver Cromwell has angered and frightened enough Americans to create a mass movement of resistance centered on the person of our new president-elect.
And so here we are. Trump has not only beaten the Democrats. He has crushed the Reagan Republicans to pulp. After the Republican trifecta of 2024, Democrats are licking their wounds and pondering the lessons of their defeat. The pro-business, pro-international engagement wing of the Republican Party has been defeated much more comprehensively by its intraparty opponents and must engage in even deeper and more searching reflection.
Some Reagan Republicans have left the party in a mix of anger and despair. Some, like former Vice President Richard Cheney, supported Vice President Harris in the recent election, but with no visible impact on voters. The possibility of having to win a primary campaign against Trump-endorsed MAGA candidates fills most of the remaining Reagan Republican officeholders with fear and dismay.
One reason for this is that the Reagan-Bush establishment never dealt with the crippling and poisonous legacy of the Iraq War. It was bad enough, though by Jacksonian standards it was forgivable, that the United States launched a war to stop a WMD program that turned out to be much less robust than advertised. But to compound the initial error by turning the Iraq War into a war for democracy in Iraq was perhaps the greatest political misjudgment by any administration in modern American history. There was simply no way the base of the Republican Party would sustain this kind of policy in the long haul.
The white South has always been allergic to idealistic Yankees with plans to “reconstruct” foreign countries. Jacksonians don’t believe in social engineering and are much less concerned with the form of government in foreign countries than are Wilsonian democracy advocates. More, they hate, and that is not too strong a word for it, the idea of a federal government that thinks it can send Americans to fight and die for visionary goals of this kind. If being a Reagan Republican means fighting wars all over the world to bring democracy to other countries, or, worse, fighting wars all over the world trying and failing to bring democracy to other countries, Reagan Republicanism will be relegated to the margins of American politics for a very long time.
And yet as one after another well-funded, well-spoken, well-briefed establishment Republican candidate fell before Donald Trump’s onslaught, Republican leaders simply did not understand what was happening to them. They understood neither the history nor the culture of the people they wanted to lead.
Offended by Trump’s style and rhetoric; appalled by his indifference or even hostility to the foundational ideas and values of America’s post-1945 global policy at a time when world peace hangs by a thread; disgusted by his willingness to engage with outright racists, Confederate apologists, and antisemites; frightened by his disregard for the norms and limits that safeguard democratic order and the rule of law; nauseated by the stench of corruption rising from some of his entourage; alternately sickened and contemptuously amused by the charlatans and grifters who fasten themselves on the Trump movement like barnacles on a ship; and shocked by his embrace of populist economic nostrums and policy proposals, many old guard Republicans see Trump’s conquest of their party as the triumph of darkness over the light.
This is understandable. It is even, from a moral standpoint, admirable that people who see Trump in these terms have chosen to recuse themselves from involvement in a political project they view with revulsion and horror. But the underlying judgment is not quite right. Trump is not the reincarnation of “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman or James “White Chief” Vardaman. Nor is the South of today the same place it was when those furious populists stormed the barricades to overthrow the Redeemers and their successors. Nor is the battle between populists and Reaganites necessarily zero-sum.
The political history of the post-Civil War white South is complicated. Pro-business Southern politicians lost many races to populists, but they learned from those losses and competed effectively against the populists for well over a century. The populists were often better at criticizing what they didn’t like than at solving economic and social problems, and when pragmatic pro-business leaders responded effectively to populist concerns and adopted the style of populist political campaigns to their own ends, they often if not always blunted the populists’ appeal. Republican strategist Lee Atwater understood all this much better than the political consultants who succeeded him.
There were other methods by which the pro-business wing was able to influence both the trajectory of policy and the outcomes of elections. Not all politicians who rose to power on populist slogans and cultural politics were sincere. Even fewer were rigid. Some were simple grifters who, once office was obtained, were only too willing to accommodate the concerns of generous donors. Some discovered in office that the slogans of the campaign trail did not provide useful guidance for those deeply engaged in managing the affairs of the country. And some encountered such effective counter-campaigns and propaganda that they found it necessary to modify their more radical stances to win.
Donald J. Trump is a political genius, a once-in-a-century talent combining an instinct for showmanship with the ability to read the frustrations and longings of potential supporters. But a real populist like Tom Watson would likely denounce Trump as an impostor: someone using the vocabulary and style of populism to advance a more orthodox economic vision. Trump has chosen a couple of high-salience issues like protectionism that mark him as a maverick, even as he appoints a Wall Street-friendly deficit hawk to head the Treasury Department.
Trump has not revived one half of the old white Southern Democratic Party. Instead, he has revived and nationalized the whole white Southern political system. Populists and the pro-business forces jostle for power inside the Trump movement, just as they did in Southern politics of old. Trump can choose between them as his political interests and the economic situation of the country demand.
It is much too early to guess how future historians will regard this towering figure in American politics, and the deepest fears of his harshest critics could still prove prophetic. But the passions that brought him to power are part of a political culture that has sustained the world’s longest-running experiment in democratic governance for 250 years.
The openness of the American political system to populist revolt is a feature, not a bug. The country badly needed a reset. Voters may or may not be ultimately satisfied with the results President Trump achieves in office, but they knew what they were doing when they voted for change. Since the chattering classes in both parties lost touch with reality in the “end of history” euphoria following the collapse of the Soviet Union, we’ve seen a generational failure in leadership that has left the United States and the world exposed to conflicts comparable to World War II—made almost infinitely more worrying by the proliferation of both nuclear and non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction and other technological miracles that could so easily be turned to the destruction of human civilization. Future generations will compare the frivolity and futility of the national leadership of our times with that of the miserable series of failures and miscalculations that brought on a second world war just two decades after the end of the first.
Domestic politics offers a similarly grim picture of political and cultural incompetence, fiscal fecklessness, incompetent policymaking, and moralistic dogmatism driving this nation to the edge of disaster. Donald Trump did not awaken the Balrogs, nor did he create the public hunger for the persona and the message that he offers. The earnest denizens of what ought to be the vital center, well-intentioned but muddleheaded, did that. And they continue to do it, earnestly and uncomprehendingly undermining the edifice in which we all live.
The Reaganite remnant in the Republican Party would be in an almost infinitely better state today if its leaders had been better Balrog whisperers in the 21st century. Had they understood how the foreign and domestic policy mix of the George W. Bush administration was steadily undermining the position of Reagan Republicanism among the party’s electoral base, the “Orange One” might never have descended the Trump Tower escalator to wreck their political fortunes and transform their party in ways that even today many lifelong Republicans can neither understand nor accept.
But the genie is out of the bottle, and the Balrogs have broken free.
This is not the end of the world. America’s political genius has never been to suppress populist forces. We’ve learned to respond creatively to populist demands without wrecking the economy on which everything depends. Unlike Argentina, where the Peronist movement throttled what could otherwise have been an epic half-century of economic progress, or many European countries where political resistance to the economic flexibility that lasting prosperity demands has hobbled some of the most technologically sophisticated and capital-rich economies in the world, the United States long managed to respond to populism without mortgaging the future.
Donald Trump the human wrecking ball has stormed back to power determined to wreak all the havoc he can. The coming years will be disturbing and, at times, distressing. But, like Andrew Jackson before him, Trump is not antimarket. He is not antibusiness or anticapitalist. Jackson’s idee fixe about the iniquities of Nicholas Biddle’s Bank of the United States led him to make some expensive mistakes, but the net result of his presidency was to embed market capitalism more deeply than ever in the American psyche, even as the rise of mass democracy reduced the power of the propertied elites.
Will Donald Trump’s second term end equally well? Thanks to a generation of poor political choices, pro-business Republicans have no option but to hope that it will. In the longer run, they need to regain the kind of deep knowledge of the American people and their cultural and political history that can inform a new generation of politicians who have the wisdom that democracies require from those seeking to lead.
To read Part I of this two-part series, click here.
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