15 August 2017

Will American conservatives save themselves from the Trump mob?

By Dominic Green

Donald Trump rode the tiger of white male resentment all the way from the Birther fringe to the White House. As he dismounts, he risks being bitten. He must also assume awkward poses.

Trump is even vainer than Obama. He will not apologise for having stroked the underbelly of the American psyche. Instead, as we saw yesterday when he finally denounced the racism that led to rioting and murder in Charlottesville, Virginia, he will disavow his alliance with the fringe and walk away.

The idea that all of this — the Bannons, Breitbarts, the Internet militiamen and the white nationalists — is Trump’s fault has a definite appeal, because then the problem could easily be fixed. But Trump is only a symptom of the diseases affecting America’s body politic. Though he has exacerbated that affliction for personal gain, he is not its cause. Like all parasites, he does not want his host to die; if America were Made Great Again, he would be enriched.

The worst parts of the condition — the racism and scapegoating, and the recourse to demonisation and violence — are hereditary. They are as much a part of America’s DNA as the impulse to liberty and egalitarianism. The American Revolution turned out better than any other modern revolution, in that it stopped short of tyranny. This should not blind us to the violence at its heart: the slaveholding, the tarring and feathering of suspected enemies, the expulsion of the Loyalists, the fetish for personal weaponry.

Admittedly, fanaticism and violence are latent in all societies. And democracy, with its Enlightenment hope that “the mob” could elevate themselves into “the people”, is especially vulnerable to these impulses. But America is especially vulnerable, because of its founding legend of righteous violence; because the Civil War made the unthinkable repeatable; and because America is an artificial nation, geographically and culturally bigger than the western European nations states from which it emerged.

American society is broader than it is deeper. Hence the flexibility with which Americans remake their identities and economic life. Hence too the speed with which the egalitarian surface cracks, and the volcanic force with which resentment and violence can reach the citadels of government. The abandonment of ordinary Americans by the Democrats under Bill Clinton and the Republicans under George W. Bush had already created the conditions for the social catastrophe of mass unemployment. The political disease began to break out during the Obama presidency with the Tea Party and Black Lives Matter.

In a typical modern democracy, the voters hold their leaders beneath contempt. In the American republic, the people still try to pay their leaders the ultimate backhanded compliment: assassination. Reagan and Obama both entered office at times when America was in economic and geopolitical disarray. Reagan narrowly survived assassination. Obama received more death threats than any modern president — and probably, given the increase in population since the 1860s, more than Abraham Lincoln.

So the violence in Charlottesville carries a weight in America that a similar confrontation would not carry in a western European state. Especially because Trump has, by Tweets and nudges, encouraged the racist fringe to show its moral deformities in public. Here again, though, he has fanned a flame that he did not spark. The Internet and social media had already united the cells of small-town bigots and backwoods Hitler lovers into a digital public. All he did was encourage them to march from the digital commons to the Republican rally, and thence to Charlottesville.

The leadership of the Republican Party, with honourable exceptions like John McCain, has either allowed itself to be dragged along behind the Trump crusade, or has moved aside in case it becomes a target for the mob. Too many conservatives preferred the end to the means. They endorsed Trump as the ABC (Anyone But Clinton) candidate, and have continued to rationalise his behaviour. When the digital mob turned on the Never Trumpers, the pro-Trump conservatives were shamefully slow to respond.

Again, it would be nice to think that Trump and the most lumpen aspects of his support have nothing to do with the Republican Party and American conservatism. But they do. All broad parties have this problem. In Britain, the Monday Club lived on the fringe of the Conservative Party for 40 years, until Iain Duncan Smith purged it in 2001. (The social democrats in the Labour Party failed to purge their lunatic fringe when they had the chance, and are now paying the price.)

In 1961, the year of the Monday Club’s founding, William F. Buckley used his pulpit at National Review to erect an ideological barrier between the mainstream Republican Party and the racists, Confederate nostalgists, anti-Semites and anti-Communist fruitcakes of its fringe. The cordon sanitaire held until the early 2000s. Globalisation, the Internet and the Great Recession have turned the social gap between the Republican leadership and much of its base into an economic and ideological chasm.

Again, long before Trump, Republican leaders were pandering to the angry base. They were already mouthing unspeakables in order to retain the support of the deplorables. Trump just did it better. Thus far, he has managed to break the Republicans’ nomination process, by forcing it to its logical conclusion as a reality television knock-out contest. If he breaks the party’s appeal to the centre, he will cut away one of the legs of the two-party system, and with it the presidency. His halfhearted initial condemnation of the foul scenes in Charlottesville was disgraceful. And it was issued by a Republican president who won election with the support of many prominent American conservatives.

There was nothing particularly Republican about Trump, a historical Democrat who, until recently, played golf with Bill Clinton. But if the Republican Party and American conservatism in general do not disavow the worst of Trump’s opinions and associations, he will define their image for decades — and rightly so.

Dr Dominic Green is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and teaches Politics at Boston College