The Summer of Trump has long changed to the winter of Republican discontent. Calls for calm to wait out the eventual self destruction of the Trump candidacy continue, but a growing segment of the party is pondering the unthinkable: a Trump candidacy. Commentators like David Brooks, Michael Steele, and any conservative intellectual palatable to the media’s need for equivalency bias have been wrong at every turn. Now is the time to ask what part of the Trump candidacy these pundits got wrong. We are long overdue for an honest examination of the Trump candidacy.
Our first realization needs to be that the allure of Trump isn’t purely novelty. If that were the case we would have seen his poll numbers stall or sag, not increase. The uncomfortable truth is that Trump speaks compellingly to the nativist white wing of the Republican party. Professional political operatives who helped form the contemporary Republican coalition have not been bashful about admitting to playing to fears of integration and the general other in society. This point is illustrated in stark terms by Kevin Phillips’ work The Emerging Republican Majority, where Nixon’s voting block plus that of segregationist George Wallace would break the New Deal coalition, making Republicans the dominant national party. In more graphic terms, we can take the word of Lee Atwater, George H.W. Bush’s campaign director and former head of the RNC:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
The saddest part about this strategy is that it worked. From 1968 to 2008, Republicans won 7 out of 10 presidential elections, including the most lopsided victories in history, Reagan ’84 and Nixon ’72. Republicans retook the House of Representatives in ’94 after 40 years in the minority. Democrats, once the dominant party in the South, are now faced with a world where no white deep south democrat sits in the house of representatives. Reorienting the Republican party in this manner is undeniably the greatest political event of the second half of the 20th century.
These voters, co-opted on the race issue, gradually saw their hate metastasize to fill a larger space. With the rise of right wing radio and specialized media, Republicans could fully form an ideology of hate to bind voters to a perverse corporatist agenda. Stagnant wages among this largely poorer demographic only increased the potency of these appeals to identity. Democrats for their part also deserve blame for failing to pick up on this trend and adapting appropriately. After Reagan’s dominance, Bill Clinton and the new Democrats adopted the posture of Rockefeller Republicans who were no longer the dominant force in their own party, rather than creating a compelling alternative ideology. NAFTA, CAFTA, Welfare “Reform”, and more were things that eluded Reagan and H.W. Bush were signed into law by Clinton. These pieces of legislation further hurt the economic condition of the angry white Republican voter.
This all brings us to the current election. These voters are angry ,and the traditional tactic of dog whistle words won’t mobilize them. They’ve just lived through 7 years of a black president, the leading candidate for the Democrats was patient 0 in the radio hate contagion, and are confronted by the growing reality that their time in a position of political dominance is up. Additionally, the Republican party has yet to have a snap back candidate. Whether it’s Goldwater after Nixon’s defeat or Reagan after Ford, the Republican party has a tendency to nominate out of ideological purity after moderate defeats. 2012 should have been that candidate but they got Romney instead. Base voters are committed to not getting fooled again.
This analysis holds up to the reality of the latest polling. Cruz, Trump, and Carson are currently leading the pack appealing to this wing of the party, begging the question: how is Trump speaking to these voters more compellingly? The dirty secret is that on a substantive level, there isn’t much daylight between any of the major candidates, and Trump has a lack of consistency illustrated in support for single payer and open warmness with Bill Clinton to contend. Instead of being anathema to the party it actually plays well in the conspiratorial tone taken by activist media like Breitbart or Drudge. When other candidates bring up these seemingly reasonable objections to Trump, they can be cast as main stream and trying to break the will of the base voter.
It’s appropriate to then analyze tactically what Trump has done to actively engage these voters. Counterpunching alone doesn’t explain the movement. Jeb and the other mainstream candidates openly avoided addressing Trump in his nascent stages because of this. Trump did something none of the “moderate” candidates could do and maintain respectability; he fully adopted the positions and, most importantly, tone of the angry activist wing. Things which once could only be housed in the Breitbart editorial page and various internet comment threads could be said by Trump and then rebroadcast through mainstream media, much to the horror of the GOP establishment. These voters were always voting Republican, but by keeping them out of sight and out of mind, the rest of the country couldn’t grow alarmed by their political bedfellows. Now average Americans are seeing openly disparaging remarks about blacks, women, and latinos, and not soliloquies on dependence, planned parenthood, and immigration. Even the settings for Trump rallies illustrate this when he draws a uniformly white crowd of 10,000 in Birmingham Alabama, who then later beat up a black activist. This is the same Birmingham Alabama of Bull Connor. Don’t forget that Trump was at the forefront of birtherism, which while completely without merit, plays to this idea that black isn’t part of the American identity.
Demographics mean we are long overdue for a political reckoning in this country. Once an emerging majority, this Republican party will become a permanent minority. The fear and hate among these voters is likely to get worse confronting this reality. They will demand someone who sounds like them to stem the tide of multiculturalism and implement barriers to voting and electioneering that keep them in the majority. As scary as it sounds, we may be underreporting Trump’s strength in the Republican primary. Given the perceived threat these voters in particular feel, we could see Trump outperform his current projections in polling. Coming full circle with this terrifying reality, it would be appropriate for the Bush dynasty and others to publicly admit what kind of coalition they willfully built to endanger America. Whether it’s the Willie Horton ad in 1988 or Bush 2’s campaign whispering about John McCain’s supposed black baby, the house of Bush is intimately aware of who these voters are and need to admit responsibility in empowering them and threatening the body politic. To put it in the terms of the illustrious 2012 Republican campaign, “They Built This.”