Zooming In at The UnPopulist

Subscribe to Reactionary Minds: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | YouTubeReactionary Minds is a project of The UnPopulist. Hosted by Aaron Ross Powell. Produced by Landry Ayres.The following is a transcript of Reactionary Minds’ interview with writer Damon Linker, founder of Eyes on the Right, a Substack newsletter. The transcript has been lightly edited for flow and clarity. Aaron Ross Powell: I'm Aaron Ross Powell, and this is Reactionary Minds, a project of The UnPopulist. The mainstream of the American right, as well as the Republican Party, looks quite a bit different today than it did 10 years ago. Trumpism's rise and its near-total take over the GOP has fundamentally changed our political landscape.To talk through what's going on and to explore the best ways to approach understanding the evolution of the liberal right, I'm joined today by Damon Linker, author of the Substack Eyes on the Right. He's also a senior fellow with the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center and a weekly participant on the Beg to Differ podcast at The Bulwark. Both of our projects, Eyes on the Right, and then this podcast Reactionary Minds, are about understanding the forces of illiberalism that appear to be more threatening today than they seem to have been in the recent past. What's your approach to getting at that deeper understanding?Damon Linker: First of all, thanks for having me on the podcast. I value quite a lot what you're trying to do and do think it's a shared project that we have here, and the more the merrier, the more the better for our politics. I guess what I try to bring to the discussion and analysis, it was something I talk about in my inaugural post for Eyes on the Right, which is a kind of empathy for what is driving people to embrace the populist right.Now, by that, I do not mean making the case for them. What I mean is trying to think our way into the minds of people who will find these messages appealing. What is it about the liberal order that has them feeling discontented? What has them receptive to these severe critiques of the liberal order? The method behind the madness, the goal of this approach is to construct a more effective response, to actually try to meet the populist right where it is and speak on the basis of its premises, rather than always begin from liberal premises where what you end up with is just talking past each other and rejecting each other's starting points without ever actually engaging with them directly.I guess the rationale would be, you have to move the two parties a little bit closer together before they can really duke it out over what's really at stake. That's, in abstract terms at least, what I'm trying to accomplish.Aaron: In that opening essay for Eyes on the Right, I had underlined that part about empathy because it sometimes feels hard for—I have a lot of friends who are deeply involved in gay rights and trans rights, for example, and to say to them, you should approach with empathy, understanding of people who are labeling you groomers and saying you can't have pictures of your same-sex spouse on your desk if you're a school teacher, or people who want to institute a Catholic theocracy over the country, these are really threatening things and really immediately dangerous things; Proud Boys showing up at pride events. It can be hard to say, if you're in that situation, just to think I should be trying to understand at an empathetic level, the people who are calling me groomers.Why Empathize With Extremists?Damon: Yes, I totally understand that, and it's a natural human response. In that respect, what I'm advocating is difficult. It's a challenge, and it works against the instincts that are provoked by our politics where both sides—I am guilty of often using the formulation "both sides", but I don't usually mean a kind of moral equivalency. It's a formal mirroring that tends to happen in partisan politics. What I mean is that both sides in our politics have an activist sensibility these days where the goal is not simply to really persuade the persuadable. It's also to provoke your enemy.You try to say the most outrageous, insulting thing, the most caricatured version of your opponent in the hopes that they will then lash out against what you are saying in an extreme way which will then help you in your own position. You see this a lot obviously in the entire right-wing media edifice that is out there constantly. Part of it involves something else I talked about in my inaugural post about the fallacy of composition, where the fallacy involves you take one part of a whole that is particularly provocative or outrageous or insulting, and you direct huge amounts of attention to that and treat it as if it is exemplary of the whole.Is it true that professors, especially in the humanities and social sciences on the whole lean to the left? Absolutely true, indisputably the case. Is it true that all professors or nearly all professors are left-wing activists who have contempt for conservatives and centrists and want to humiliate students who come from those ideological starting points in the classroom? No, not at all.Yet, we now have a whole infrastructure on the right where a series of websites are out there trolling, asking for young conservative students to send examples of particularly outrageous left-wing professorial, pedagogical transgressions, which then get promoted on those websites, that then get picked up by Tucker Carlson, who then runs a 15-minute segment on prime time for 4 million viewers on Fox News, the premise of which is, "Look at how terrible all these left-wing professors are. Don't send your kids to college because they're going to be brainwashed to be leftist authoritarians." That's the process in a nutshell.There is a way in which it also works in reverse where the left will fasten on to the most egregious, fascistic statement of someone on the right and then try to make it seem as if everyone from Liz Cheney on over to Trump and then past Trump to Proud Boy, neo-fascist like this guy Nick Fuentes. Everything between them is all equally terrible. Now, why would someone who's a Democrat or another kind of progressive want to say that? Well, because you want to win the election. You don't want anyone anywhere to vote for the other side. You try to collapse the distinctions and assimilate everyone who's your opponent in an election to the worst example of the other side. It's a temptation that I think does need to be resisted. Maybe not always at the level of political contestation where this can be a very effective tactic, but at the level of intellectual reflection. For understanding's sake, we need to try to not let ourselves be triggered in the way that our political opponents very much would like us to be for their own benefit.Trump’s Unique DangerousnessAaron: When we're approaching that task, should we be distinguishing—let's just stick to assessing the right, although I think this argument applies, as you said, to looking at ideologies more broadly, but should we be distinguishing, say, conservatism generally as a political ideology from the base of people who think of themselves or ordinary voters who think of themselves as conservatives, but may hold as we know from political science data, people's self-described labels often affixed to wildly diverse viewpoints that are often in direct conflict with other people affixing the same label to themselves, versus the people actually in power: the ones who are controlling or have access to the levers of the state and how it directs its coercive forces. Because it seems like one response to what you've just said is yes, of course, we shouldn't pick out the most extreme examples of bad stuff on the right and say that's representative of everyone, just like we shouldn't do that for the left or any other group, but it does seem like one thing that's happened in the last say six years is that the most extreme parts of the right have gained control of the levers of power. They're the ones who are setting the broader agenda for what happens when the right is in control, even if the base is much more moderate.Damon: Yes. I take the point and I'm glad you brought up the topic of distinction making because that's yet another thing that I’m impressing in the Substack and in my writing lately. I'd love to talk through that. I'm actually working right now on a relatively short post in response to an op-ed that the writer and columnist Max Boot published in the Washington Post today, which is Wednesday, July 6th, in which he says, in effect, looks like Trump might not be the nominee in 2024 after all. It could be Ron DeSantis, and actually, he's worse because he's more disciplined and smarter, and so forth. He's a bigger threat than Trump.I'm pushing back on that on the basis of distinction-making. Let's walk this through and it touches on a lot of what you raised in your question. I don't think there is anything written in stone that what conservatism or right of center politics in a liberal democracy, what its policy matrix has to be. From Ronald Reagan through, say, the Mitt Romney campaign in 2012 in the United States, what did conservatism mean?Well, it pretty much meant suspicion of big government, support for cutting taxes whenever possible, generally in favor of free trade, in favor of pretty much open immigration policy, a muscular foreign policy directed towards spreading democracy around the world, and opposing authoritarianism, and then finally, a principled moral traditionalism on social issues that ranged from appointing judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade, which has recently been a success after 49 years of trying, to opposition to the series of reforms that have come up on the progressive left from racial issues through to women's rights, gay rights, trans rights, and so forth.That's what it meant to be a conservative until pretty recently now with Trump—it became with Trump and is now becoming the broader consensus among conservatives, that actually what it means is, yes, cutting taxes in government, on the whole, is good, but if those things can be used to help working-class Americans, then maybe those things aren't so bad.For similar reasons, free trade is often not good because it hurts working-class people supposedly. Similarly, immigration isn't usually good because that's also not good for that economic consideration, but also for broader identity reasons. The ethnic and racial makeup of the country changes in ways a lot of Americans don't like, at least conservative Americans don't like, and then a much more—well, also suspicion on foreign policy using American power for moral goals is suspicious now.Finally, the moral traditionalist argument on social issues hasn't really changed, but it's more aggressive and it's metastasized, and touched more areas of policy. Is there anything illegitimate about that latter group of policies in and of itself? Should that not be permitted within liberal democratic politics to have the right side of the spectrum be defined that way?I actually don't think there is any principled reason to think that that should not be allowed to be the right-leaning contesting party's position. Now, the problem is that some of those positions brush up against moral commitments that put into question some of American principles, but those principles themselves evolve over time. So I would prefer that those policy questions get debated in the political arena as has always been the case. I do think it's okay for the right-leaning party to change what it cares about.Where things get really dicey is when those policy shifts get combined with what we see, actually, I think in the United States more acutely than any other country contending with this shift, is that the right-leaning party that has shifted in this way can barely win elections because those positions aren't that popular, and the way they are interacting with America's peculiar electoral system with multiple levers and all kinds of counter-majoritarian trip wires leads us to a situation in which we get January 6th and everything that led up to it.People talk about Viktor Orbán and Hungary a lot as an exemplar of how dangerous he's at the leading edge of where this is going. I don't like Orbán. I would never vote for him. I think he's pernicious, he's done all kinds of negative things, but I think Trump is actually much more dangerous than Orbán. Orbán actually, even if he puts his thumb on the scale a little bit in various ways to give him and his party, the Fidesz party, an edge in an electoral contest, he actually does, and his party does, win votes.His party won in 2010 before he became a full-on populist and made a lot of those reforms. His share of the vote and his party's share of the vote hasn't changed markedly between then and now. He doesn't win 90% of the vote like Saddam Hussein or another dictator or Soviet dictator would've in the old days or even Putin today. He wins a little more than half. Then there are all these jiggered things within the electoral system that then enhances that slight edge into a much stronger majority within the legislature, but that's common. It happens in the UK, where in the last election, the conservatives won a bit more than labor, but they won way more seats than labor because you get amplification.Whereas in this country, not only is the Trumpist populist impulse a little troubling because it does push the policy matrix a little bit away from the consensus liberalism that preceded it, but that is combined by the fact that Trump and the Republicans can barely win power given that their position isn't overwhelmingly popular and has a huge, very strong opposition. They then combine that marginal ability to win with contempt for the very institutions that would freeze them out of power if they lose.That institutional attack, I think, is more profound than what even someone like Victor Orbán is attempting in Hungary, and we need to distinguish between all of these things. The last point before I stop blathering, to go back to my original statement about the Max Boot column, I think Max is wrong on this, that actually as bad as DeSantis would be, and again, I would not vote for the guy, I would be a critic of his from beginning to end if he actually became president, but would he do what Trump did on January 6th? I doubt it. Maybe he would. I guess we don't have a huge track record on the guy, but in general, I don't fear that with him in the same way that I do with Trump.That means that Trump shows and displays a contempt for the rule of law and instinctual authoritarianism that is sui generis to him, and he's spreading it to his most devoted followers and supporters. But it is so far still relatively contained to that sub-segment of the right. If we could run various scenarios about 2024 in which the Democrats can't win again because of inflation and other problems, I would vastly prefer DeSantis, Tom Cotton, Nikki Haley, any number of the mini-Trumps that are out there on the right over Trump himself again. Trump himself again is a toxin to liberal democracy that makes him a unique threat. All of these distinctions, I think, are important to make between bad, worse, and worst of all.Aaron: Well, let me pick up on that then because it is the case that, at least as of right now, Trumpism is the dominant force on the right and within the GOP. There's this constant cycle of hopeful articles from centrist and left political commentators saying, "Ah, it looks like his hold on the party is slipping. This is a handful of candidates he picked out, didn't win, his hold is slipping," but they always seem more wishful thinking than reality.Going into 2024, it seems like Trumpism will be the dominant thing whether he's the candidate or not. Certainly, people like DeSantis continue to present themselves as Trumpists or inheritors of the Trumpist mantle, but there's long been this question of whether Trump discovered his audience or created it, discovered his base or created it.What I've wondered and I'm curious for your thoughts on is how much of Trumpism, however we define that, and it could be hard to pin down what the ideological characteristics of Trumpism are, but how much of Trumpism as a movement within the GOP is an ideological movement that can be inherited, say, by someone like DeSantis or that it is effectively a cult of personality, that it is just this fealty to this man, this investment in the Trumpists or whatever it is about Trump they really like, and it doesn't really matter what the ideas are behind it, it's more of just his personality such that if Trump disappears from the stage, so he chooses not to run again, he's indicted, whatever the case is, that this older style GOP, the Reaganite GOP that you talked about earlier, can reestablish itself. Does Trumpism disappear when Trump disappears or is this a fundamental ideological characteristic now of the right?Damon: Great, great question. There's so much in there, so much that could be said. It's obviously a very complicated [chuckles] situation. All right. At one level, clearly, if you know the history of the American right, you know that the general dispensation that Trump represents ideologically has been there for a long time. There's one story you can tell about the right that had been told for many decades by people in the National Review circle.I think an heir to that would be Matt Continetti's new book The Right which is a new history of the right in America. That version goes something like this, that the right prior to, say, World War II was paleocon. It was suspicious of alliances and trade and very knee-jerk traditionalists about morals and suspicious of Washington and government. It was a folk libertarianism to quote my former colleague Bonnie Kristian who is now writing as an independent author and had a Times op-ed about this recently. So that was the right.Then after the end of World War II with Buckley founding National Review, you have the attempt to found a more internationalist right. It ends up taking a side in the cold war very hawkishly in favor of the United States and democratic capitalism against Soviet communism.It sort of cosmopolitanized the right a little bit. Now, the original paleocon instinct remained there and it remained there all along. Buckley tried to police the margins of it, tried to excommunicate the Birchers and other small groups that were more rooted in that more conspiratorial folk libertarian attitude, the kind of people who thought that Eisenhower was a communist, the great general who won World War II in Europe, who was president and a Republican, he was a communist plant. This kind of an attitude.That Buckley-ite policing of the boundaries and then expanding what conservatism could appeal to and the electorate reached its greatest apotheosis in the victory of Ronald Reagan, and from Reagan, once again through, say, Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign, you have—conservatism is that. The paleocon stuff's still there, still showing up usually on election day to vote for the head of the party and to vote for local offices for the Republicans, but yet a little disgruntled, not very happy, going along. You get moments of populist rebellion, like 1992, Pat Buchanan challenges George H. W. Bush in his reelection campaign and gives this blood-thirsty speech at the Republican Convention.That's the narrative that leads to a conclusion that Trump didn't make this. He saw that establishment Republicanism that had governed the party and the country often starting with Reagan had weakened and was ripe for being toppled. He tapped into the increasingly angry rest of paleocons who had been there all along for about the last 90 years, grumbling in the background, and became their champion, and what we've seen over the last six years is a revolution in which that base of paleocons over through the Reaganite elites, and they're now in charge. A lot of that is tied up with the policy matrix that I mentioned earlier, the shift on trade and immigration and foreign policy, and all those things.There's another argument too, another tendency, which you also mentioned and talked about, which is just Trump as a person embodying a populist impulse, which is not limited to the American scene, but is a perpetual threat to liberal democracies everywhere. Which is a demagogue who comes up and gains power through deploying very hostile rhetoric against the establishment, against those people in power, whether they're allied with my enemies politically or my allies, whether they're in politics or business or entertainment, it doesn't matter. It's them, the elites, and I am the champion of the “true people” and want to overthrow them.Trump was, it turned out to be, one of the greatest demagogues in American history and maybe world history. We can't judge that yet, let's see how all of this works out, and I say greatest in the sense of incredibly talented, but execrable. The guy is a genius at fastening on to the thing that will make the crowds cheer and mixing in a kind of humor with it at the same time, that makes it sound like he's not taking himself too seriously, winking about how it's all an act at the very moment that he's doing the most vicious things possible with language, attacking the press, journalists, seeming like he's stirring up violence against them, while joking that like, "Well, of course, we're not going to let you attack the journalist, let her go." He's just very, very good at that.Now, your question to set this up was which is it? What is it that has infected the Republican party? The truth is it is a blend, I think, of the two. One of the problems I'd say that Tom Cotton has, Tom Cotton also would love to run for president in 2024. He has given speeches, including at the Reagan Library several months ago that I wrote about, that are very clearly Trumpian speeches on the side of the first category that I just ran through. Very conservatism inflected with paleocon themes on the "new correct side" on all of these issues of foreign policy and trade and immigration and social issues, very rabidly engaged in the culture war in a way that is redolent of Trump.In all those ways, he sounds like a Trumpist, but he's boring as hell and has no charisma. He sounds like a wet noodle standing up there and looks like a geek who tried to make the basketball team and was cut in the first round of cuts. That makes me very skeptical that he could succeed in this environment. DeSantis on the other hand has been shrewd enough and talented enough to combine or tried to combine both in a way that I haven't seen in another candidate. I think it's one reason why so many on the right like him.He stands abstractly in favor of a lot of the policy changes that Trump brought in, but as the governor of a state, he has more power than one of a hundred senators like Cotton to actually do certain things to show, "See? I'll use power to achieve these things." Then he also combines that with a really swaggering obnoxious populist demagogic rhetoric that includes him getting up on a stage in front of some high school kids wearing masks during the worst pandemic in a century and berating them in front of the cameras to "Take off your damn masks. Freedom."I don't know what your language rating is for this podcast, but I'll at least stoop to say, you can bleep me out if you need to, he's performatively an a*****e. That is part of his schtick. That I think makes him a more plausible successor to Trump because you do need both. You need that kind of anti-cosmopolitan issue conglomeration that Trump has now put at the center of the right, combined with a pure populist and demagogic attack on the people who would police us morally in positions of power, to basically stick a middle finger up at them and say, "I'm going to say anything I want. F you. I don't care."You need both, and Trump has both, and DeSantis among all the options out there I think comes closest to matching that. He might not have Trump's instinctual genius at it, but he clearly I think—he at least understands that he needs to include that in his message, not just the what, but the how in the message, and has enough talent at the latter that he can at least be a potential rival as the leader of that faction.The Global Rise of the Populist RightAaron: I want to pick up on another thing in your inaugural essay for Eyes on the Right because I liked it quite a lot as a statement of purpose for the broader project. One of the things you mentioned is a pushing back on what we might call American provincialism, which is to analyze all of this in the context of what is happening in America. You mentioned Orbán, who's an example of this populism in Europe, but this rise of far-right reactionary populism is not limited to the United States. It's not limited to Donald Trump.We have seen it happen in other countries in forms that look—they're distinguishable from Trumpism, but they share a lot of common features. What has happened in the last decade or so to lead to this renewed movement of right-wing reactionary populism on a more global scale?Damon: Well, another great question, and another big answer, which I will try to keep within reasonable limits. I mean, it's obviously very complicated because now, we're not only talking about a continent-wide liberal democracy of 330-odd [million] people, but now we're talking about the broader world with all the differences across countries and regions and histories and so forth.I do think there are certain commonalities that we can point to. Clearly, after the end of the cold war, there was kind of a consensus in countries across the free world that, if not full Francis Fukuyamaism, which I've also written about on the podcast, as an exemplification of a certain form of this, but at least that consensus that, well, obviously, far-right politics including fascism and totalitarianism on the far right, that is off-limits.Most countries, say, 30 years ago, thought that was like not even open for debate, but now with the fall of the Soviet Union, it appears that the leftward side of the spectrum has now been cut off as also legitimate. What we're dealing with is that politics going forward in free societies will take place within the 40-yard lines. There will be contestation, there will be elections, and they will be between a center-right party or parties and a center-left party or parties.They will be about whether to cut taxes or raise taxes a little bit, expand government, or cut government a little, whether to choose this or that battle with a revanchist authoritarian state somewhere, maybe in the Middle East or elsewhere, whether to get involved in this war or that war, whether we'll all get together in a coalition of the willing to do battle with them and show them they have to join the club, start taking loans from the World Bank and the IMF and so forth, and whether immigration should be completely open and free or somewhat limited, whether it's going to be for like Canada does for the sake of meeting certain demands for labor within a country for a certain period of time, or it's just going to be open to all comers.These will be our debates. Yes or no, little more, little less, again, within the 40-yard lines of the field, and that's about it. Now, this worked pretty well through the '90s and even into the 2000s, though in the United States because of 9/11 and then eventually Europe, when they had terrorist attacks, this was jolted, it was pushed, but it was pretty resilient, at least until after the financial crisis of 2008, which began in the United States, and then rippled throughout the global economy, caused loss of a lot of wealth.Of course, one of the big economic changes in the post-Cold War world has been the opening up of the finance sector to small-time investors in the form of retirement accounts, and then the companies that handle pensions abroad, investing in the stock market around the world, global markets, and all of that took a big hit in 2008. That bred resentment, then added to resentment about immigration in a lot of countries.It's a little different in Europe than it is in the United States. Here, there always has been more openness to a harder right-wing critique of some of these neoliberal trends. I'll use the term "neoliberal", which no one can seem to define to describe the Fukuyaman tendency of the 40-yard lines defining politics. In this country, there always have been people on the right, they were allowed to make a critique and say, "Maybe we should cut back on immigration. Maybe we should care more about rising crime rates. Maybe we should make certain other changes," but in Europe, Muslim immigration, for instance, in France has been much, much higher, much higher percentage of the population there than here, partly because of the colonial history of the country and allowing immigrants from, say, Algeria in over other countries and then some of it is a result of guilt over the legacy of this.For various reasons in different countries, Germany has a lot of Turkish immigrants for historic reasons because of labor. In the post-war decades, they brought in a lot of Turks to, again, like Canada to fill holes in the labor economy in the country. Because of the history of fascism on the continent and shame about colonialism and its moral legacy, there was more of a sense in Europe that you can't really object to having, say, high Muslim immigration because then you're evil, you're a racist, and that's not allowed.Maybe in Europe, it became not between the 40-yard lines. Even on the right, it became like the 45-yard line. You combine that kind of limiting of the margins with resentment over in this country about how the war on terror was waged and our inability to actually decisively win these battles around the world and wondering why we even did them in the first place and why the intelligence about weapons in Iraq was so terribly flawed, and then add in terrorist attacks in Europe after 9/11 in Spain and France and other places, and feeling like the elites here who are in charge defending those margins, the 40- or 45-yard lines, are inept. They won't actually allow us to debate these things. The anger about the lack of a justice-driven response to the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2008.You get the sense, looking back, it's clear there was a boiling pressure building up from the lower classes, from people who are not members of this neoliberal elite consensus of the government is not responding to our anger about these things. You have to listen to us and you have to listen to us and you have to listen to us, saying it over and over again.I do think that whether it's the rise of what Orbán has done in Hungary or the perpetual return of the same Le Pen challenge to the French center, the Brexit vote in the UK, the rise of Trump, the rise of the League in Italy, you go around the world, Bolsonaro in Brazil, what's ended up happening in Turkey with Erdogan where he's ended up versus where he started, Modi in India.In all of these contexts, you have variations on this same story of, "We let you neoliberals run the show for a couple of decades and we're not happy with the results, that you are illegitimately marginalizing the boundaries of political debate." I think one way of understanding what we've been living through is to see that those boundaries have to be fluid. They have to be permitted by the institutions of liberal democracy to shift leftward and rightward, even if they threaten to begin to touch up against something that looks a little like illiberal communism on the left or illiberal fascism on the right, because the attempt to forestall that, to prevent it, to say, "You can't have that opinion, it's illegitimate, it's racist, it's immoral," doesn't make it go away. All it does is increase resentment toward the very institutions that are preventing it. We need a more supple understanding of the fringes if it will, that if you don't let some of it in, you risk a more turbulent reaction against the rules that prevent it from getting in.The last thing I'll say is that an interesting case study, the German situation is a little sui generis both because of Germany's incredible power economically and politically within the EU structure and also because of their distinctive shame over national socialism, which is almost in its own category of awfulness, but it is interesting that the Alternative for Germany, the AfD party, cropped up in the same period, middle of the 2010s, really scared a lot of people, rightly so.It surged to around 15% nationally in Germany which was enough again to scare a lot of people and to throw the coalition government there into a little bit of unsettledness because 15% is enough to mess with coalition formation if all the parties refuse to make a deal with and govern with that party because it means that now your total set of potential coalition mates is a lot smaller because 15% of the votes are now off the table for negotiation.The interesting thing is that Germany did not ban the AfD party, they didn't allow it to sit in a government, but they did allow it to be the main opposition party to the Christian Democrat-led Merkel government at the end of her very long reign. The result is that the support for the AfD has come down. It's now getting 9%, 10%. Can a liberal democracy survive with a far-right party that gets around 10%? I think, yes. Maybe it's better to just allow it to be there, make its case, and then lose by the normal rules of democracy.Germany also has a 5% electoral threshold. If it sinks a lot more, it could even wink out of existence at the level of the Bundestag, which would be a very good thing. Because it could come back if it got more support, but it shows that the system is open to those who are angry on the margins. Again, that can be scary for those of us who would like the—we don't want the 40-yard lines to be enforced from the top. We would prefer, at least I speak for myself, I would prefer it to be roughly within the 40-yard lines but by free choice. [chuckles] I want the electorate to want politics to take place in those somewhat narrow terms. If there starts to be rebellion on those margins, you can't keep it within the 40-yard lines by imposing it from the top down.Aaron: Then bringing this back to the context of the US, our final question, I'll ask another that I fear might be a big one, as far as combating illliberalism in the US, one disadvantage that we have is we don't have a multiparty democracy, so we can't relegate it to a 10% or 15%. We have two parties, and that 10% or 15% can take over one of them and then effectively—and then achieve White House, achieve dominance in the legislature, and so on, be able to exercise power well beyond their 15% support within the electorate.The real worry, I think, is—one of the perennial questions about Trumpism is, does Trumpism represent a genuinely fascist movement? Fascism is another thing that it's awfully hard to come up with a single definition of it, but it does seem to have a lot of legitimately fascist characteristics, and there's a real concern that, say, if Trump wins again and has the control and is able to exercise more control, that he'll push things even in…I Trump would be an authoritarian if he were able to get away with it. Within the US context, how do we take those lessons that you just articulated on the international scene and apply them looking forward two years, 10 years, to try to make sure we don't slip into something that we can't easily recover from?Damon: Yes, again, another great question, and you're completely right that the US situation—I began in one of my first responses and talking about how we have to make distinctions and Trump is worse than DeSantis. There's a way in which the American situation is uniquely alarming in the international context precisely because of what you're saying. We are not a parliamentary system in which the executive sits in the legislature and really has no independent power apart from the multi-coalition government that is in charge at any given moment.That makes our president much more of a potential dictator if he can get away with it. Then we also have a two-party system where it's either one side or the other. If one side, namely the Republicans, becomes devoted to a fascistic leader, then it could potentially control the whole ballgame. Especially with the way upcoming Senate elections are looking, it is at least within the realm of possibility that in 2025, we could have a reelected Donald Trump as president with 61 Republicans in the Senate, which is a true horror show scenario, and it really does scare me.I don't have any great magic bullet response to this. My response is to give a version of the popularism argument that is often made about the Democrats because we haven't talked much about the Democrats in our conversation, but they are the other party. As commentator David Frum said in a very pithy tweet the other day, I won't be able to quote it from memory, but to paraphrase the point he was making in the single tweet, that because of the shape of the different electoral coalition, if the two parties in the US, and the way that those coalitions at the present moment are interacting with our uniquely, distinctively weird American systems, which are really not built for ideologically sorted parties in the way that we have them now. We're in a situation where the Republicans are able to run a politics that is geared toward placating its most radical, committed elements in a way that the Democrats cannot do and win.The Republicans can win by becoming ever more extreme, and that parenthetically, just so your listeners grasp why this might be, it has to do with the fact that both the Senate and the electoral college involve winning states, and Republicans are spread around many more states than the Democrats tend to with a majority. There are more people living in blue states, in states that vote for the Democrats, but there are fewer states that vote, so they get more electoral votes, but not enough to compensate for the fact that the Dakotas and Nebraska and Kansas and all these largely empty states vote for the Republicans, giving them an edge in both of those institutions.That's one-half of the equation that Frum talks about. The other half is that the Democrats, although they cannot placate their left-wing agitating base as much and win, their potential winning coalition is much larger. It's very unlikely that the Republican, say, presidential candidate in 2024 is going to win, say, 55% of the popular vote. That's almost impossible to imagine.It is possible to imagine that a Democratic candidate could do that. Now, I don't know if it would be Biden or Harris or who it could be, but in terms of potential, the Democratic message appeals to more Americans. To see how this interacts with their institutions, all you have to do is look at the results of the 2020 election. Biden won seven million more votes than Donald Trump, but if 50,000 of those votes flipped to Trump in three states, Trump would have won anyway.That is a horrifying prospect for the legitimacy and stability of American democracy because it means that—George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000 while losing the popular vote in one state by a very small number, like a few thousand votes. Trump won in 2016, winning the electoral college while losing the popular vote by almost three million. If Trump had managed to flip those 50,000 or 60,000 votes in three states, he would've been reelected president while losing seven million.These tendencies are increasing over time. It's conceivable that in 2024, you could have a Trump or DeSantis win the presidency while losing the popular vote by 8 million, 9 million, 10 million people, which is going to be very dangerous for American democracy because I do think there are limits to how much losing the Democrats are going to be willing to take if they're actually getting that many more votes in the aggregate.My medium answer to your very complex and important question is the Democrats need to do whatever it takes to prevail. If that means moderating on some social issues, that will alienate some of their more agitated activist base, they should do it for the promise of winning more votes away from the Republicans in the center. Because, really, that's the only thing that the Republicans are going to understand and that could moderate them over the future, which is to realize you can't actually win power saying and doing the things that you're doing.They need to learn that lesson. If they keep being able to squeak out victories doing this, they're going to keep doing it out of simple self-interest. Anyway, that's my unsatisfying answer. I'm never entirely satisfied with how I answer those kinds of questions, including in the post that went up today I made a version of this argument, and after I do it, I think, "Oh, no wonder nobody likes me." [chuckles] It's not very satisfying to say that we have to be the reasonable ones. We have to be the ones to say, "Sorry, you passionate supporters on my own side, you got to sit on it so that we can win later." I get why that pisses some people off.[music]Aaron: Thank you for listening to Reactionary Minds, a project of The UnPopulist. If you want to learn more about the rise of illiberalism and the need to defend a free society, check out theunpopulist.substack.com.Accompanying Reading:Damon Linker, Eyes on the Right’s inaugural post From The UnPopulist: Shikha Dalmia, Populism Sans the Popular Vote: A Dangerous Formula H. David Baer, CPAC Is Going to Hungary, Never Mind Viktor Orban’s Attacks on ChurchesGarvan Walshe, Angela Merkel Helped Defeat Germany’s Populist Far Right Without AppeasementAndy Craig, Trump’s Next Presidential Run Could End the Peaceful Transfer of PowerCopyright © The UnPopulist, 2022. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Subscribe to Reactionary Minds: Apple Podcasts | SpotifyThe following is a transcript of Reactionary Minds’ interview with Stephanie Muravchik and Jon A. Shields, authors of the book Trump’s Democrats. The transcript has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.Aaron Ross Powell: I’m Aaron Ross Powell, and this is Reactionary Minds, a project of The UnPopulist. A good way to understand the appeal of Donald Trump is to talk to the people who voted for him. One of the most interesting ways to approach that is to talk to voters and counties that flipped, long voting for Democratic Party candidates until suddenly in 2016, they didn’t. That’s the background for Trump's Democrats, a book that looks at three communities that turned to Trumpism after having been solidly blue basically forever.I’m joined today by its authors, Professors Stephanie Muravchik and Jon A. Shields of Claremont McKenna College. Their fascinating book explores why Trump clicked with these voters and why many of the very things that turned so many of us off about him were the very things they found so appealing. We’ll discuss machine politics, political bosses, honor cultures, localism and what it means to identify strongly with a narrowly circumscribed place. The story that emerges is a good deal more complex and nuanced than the easy tales we sometimes tell ourselves about us and them.Stephanie, Jon, your book is part of a genre we have seen come out of the Trump years, with academics and journalists going to small towns that voted for Trump, sitting in diners and asking Trump voters why they believe what they believe. I think your book is the best example of that I have come across, the one that I certainly have learned the most from and the one that puts the most work into really getting at the ideas motivating Trump supporters. Can you tell us a bit about what prompted this and how you approached this project?Jon A. Shields: Yes. Thanks, Aaron, for having us, and thanks for the compliment. This is a book that really started on election night in 2016. Like lots of Americans, and, I’m sure, like yourself, we were up late that night watching the returns come in. It was really the most astonishing and surprising election in our lifetime, in our living memory. Immediately, we were eager to get outside of our little academic town and get a feel for what happened.In the weeks that followed, our sense of surprise really deepened. First, we discovered that there were all these Obama-Trump counties. There were all these places that had voted for Obama on two occasions—in fact, there were over 200-some counties that did this—and then flipped for Trump. That itself is very surprising and unusual, especially in this age of polarization, where partisan IDs and loyalties are especially sticky. But then, quickly, we not only discovered that there were all these Obama places that flipped for Trump; we also discovered that a lot of these places had voted Democratic for a very long time. Many of these places had a pretty unbroken record of voting for Democratic presidents, some stretching back to Reagan, some to Nixon, some much further back. In fact, one of the counties we ended up studying was a place that had never voted for a Republican president in its history. This is a county formed in the 19th century and—it’s really astonishing—had never voted for a Republican. In the Western world, that’s probably the longest streak of any polity voting for just one party.That was interesting. Of course, we’re accustomed to thinking and talking about the Nixon Democrats in ’72 or the Reagan Democrats in ’84. In some ways—in lots of ways, actually—the Trump Democrats were much more interesting. Nixon won in a huge landslide in ’72, as did Reagan in ’84, so it’s not so surprising that in those years, you get lots of Democratic places that flip. That’s not weird. In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote, and yet he managed to win some of the most loyal Democratic communities in the country despite that.So we got really interested in not just the red-blue divide, but a divide that had opened up in blue America. We were curious. We wanted to make sense of what had happened. In our college community, Trump is a loathed figure, a sort of proto-authoritarian, a dangerous person. We more or less agree with that point of view. I think there’s a lot to that, but then there are all these other Democratic communities that see him in a radically different way.They see him as one of the greatest presidents in American history, and so we were really deeply interested in that question. Then all these places we studied in 2016, I should add, remain loyal to Trump in 2020. These are places that are really drifting into the Republican Party. Trump is the character who shepherded all these communities into the Republican column, and so that’s quite interesting. That’s how we got interested in the project.Not Your Tea Party TypesAaron: You mentioned Nixon and Reagan and so on, and we have seen that Trumpism represents a populist movement. We have seen prior waves of things that look like populism, the most recent probably being the Tea Party movement. As you point out, the three communities that you looked at, they didn’t go Republican. They didn’t vote Tea Party candidates. What was different? Was it something that had happened to them—i.e., economic changes that hurt these communities and they said, “Now, it’s time to vote for a Republican”? Was it something about the community, or was there something that really set Trump apart from past populist candidates or waves?Stephanie Muravchik: Well, I think one piece of it is just how deeply blue these communities were. The Tea Party really emerged out of places that had some significant Republican organization movement identification, and there simply weren’t enough Republicans on the ground to get attention for that in most of the places—Iowa might have been a little different, but certainly in Rhode Island and Kentucky. We had one Democratic local-level party leader in Rhode Island—we were asking him about his relationship with Republicans—and he said: “I don’t know any Republicans in this town. I don’t think there are any.” There just weren’t enough even for the most knowledgeable Democratic leadership to know them. So I think part of it was that it would have been hard to get the attention of the local Democrats.Then the other piece that I think stands out is that there was a lot of libertarian rhetoric out of the Tea Party. There’s some controversy about how top-down that was, how “astroturf” that was, et cetera, but that libertarian rhetoric is really not at all resonant with the Democrats that we talked to. That was not the piece of the populism that appealed to them. I think that’s another piece of the answer. Jon?Jon: Well, I would just simply add—I guess this is really echoing what Stephanie said— you have to keep in mind that these are really one-party towns. The party, locally, for these folks is really the individuals who lead the party: the county-level or town-level elected officials. So these are mayors, city council people, county commissioners, and they’re really the face of the party. The other thing to add is that they really insulated these local communities from national politics in some ways. In a lot of ways, these places were pretty provincial. When they thought about the Democratic Party, they didn’t think about national leaders for the most part. They thought about people in their own community, and so Trump really shook these communities. It was a shock to them and really got them thinking about national politics and questions and controversies. It really took someone like a Trump to do that. The Tea Party was something that just didn't—it was a movement that was pretty remote from a lot of these places.Boss Politics and Honor CultureAaron: One of the really interesting parts of this book is when you’re talking about how politics worked or works in these small towns, and I’m reading it sitting inside the Beltway, having that as my frame of reference for politics. I’ve mostly lived in big cities and so on, where national politics is about—during the Trump years, he’s pushing against the guardrails, if not leaping right over them.We have our norms and institutions, and that’s the way that we tend to talk about these things. It was fascinating, the stories that the two of you tell about how different politics is in these small communities. Can you talk a bit about that? That also, you say, plays into a part of Trump's appeal.Jon: Yes, sure. One of the things that really struck us, Aaron, is that in these communities, politics is much more Trumpian in all kinds of ways. It was Trumpian before Trump, right? The local public officials reminded us of Trump in various ways. They were thin-skinned. They were brazen. They were tough. They were macho. They were the local daddies of their communities. They were there to take care of their flock—that is to say, they weren’t particularly ideological; rather, it was a sort of friends-and-neighbors politics. They were going to do particular favors or provide for particular constituents. It echoed back to a sort of machine politics, which has deep roots in the Democratic Party. Politics in these places weren’t very ideological really. They were much more boss-centered. They were really about providing for and taking care of local constituents. Political leaders were expected to do favors for their constituents. We saw all of this in all kinds of ways. Maybe Steph wants to jump in and give some examples, give some flavor and feel for some of these characters.Stephanie: In all three of the places in this town in Rhode Island, in this city in Iowa, in this county in Eastern Kentucky, there had been a strong-boss politics—perhaps most strong in Kentucky. These little rural counties are often dominated by these people called judges. They’re not judicial figures. They’re county executives essentially. There was a man in the county that I was looking at who had held office almost continually for about 30 years.When I arrived there during the Trump administration, he had been out of office due to the fact that he had been brought up on federal charges in a votes-for-gravel scheme. This was after about some 30 years in office. The county had fallen on hard times. The main way that he was able to show his friendship to voters was by providing loads of gravel to them at county expense. A lot of these people live on little far-flung farms in this rural district. They need to have little roads that connect their farmsteads to the main public arteries.The roads need to be constantly refreshed with gravel, and he was dumping loads of gravel in the months leading up to an election. The Feds came after him, and he pled. He had to deal with them basically so he would be free, but he pledged never again to run for office. The county’s political imagination had been very much shaped by this man’s long reign. He remained a very popular—although controversial—figure in the county when I was there.Jon: There were echoes of this, too, in another town we studied, which is Johnston, Rhode Island. On the surface, you might think it would be a place with a radically different politics than Appalachia, right? It’s in New England. It’s a suburb of Providence, but in many ways, actually, the politics was really similar. It’s a very Italian-American community, and they still practice old-style machine politics.The mayor there is Joe Polisena. He rules with an iron fist. Again, he’s like everyone’s daddy, right? People go to Joe. They need something done. They need a favor. Sometimes they ask for things he can’t deliver. When we asked Joe about this, he said, “Yes, sometimes they’ll come in, my constituents, and they’ll ask for something off the wall.” Joe would have to tell them, “Gee, I can’t do that. That’s illegal, but I can do something else.”Likewise, people in that community feel like if they don’t support the machine, if they don’t support Joe Polisena and other Democratic candidates, they’ll be basically shut out. They won’t be able to get any goods from the city, because they’ll be punished by the mayor, who can be very vindictive. Again, very different, seemingly, kinds of communities. They’re regionally different. One’s rural, one’s suburban, et cetera, but a very different style of politics. It’s a kind of politics that used to dominate the Democratic Party.We forget about it in college towns and big urban cities because we’ve cleaned up this kind of politics, right? We want a politics that’s more policy-oriented—politics without nepotism, without wheeling and dealing in this sort of favoritism—but it’s a kind of politics that survived in a lot of these Democratic communities. It survived in those places because there are fewer college-educated, good-government types who wanted to clean up this kind of politics and get rid of it. That’s one way in which the politics of these places was distinctive, but they also had a particular political culture, and we could talk about that if you like, Aaron.Aaron: Just briefly before we turn to that: I’m curious, do the people in those towns view this as a kind of politics that needs to be cleaned up but just can’t for various reasons, or do they think this is the right way to do politics, even if it sometimes is a little messy and looks corrupt?Stephanie: Yes, I think there’s definitely a view among some voters—and they’re all men; these men are all somewhat controversial and have their detractors—who don’t like how personalized the politics are. I spoke to one. Mayor Polisena in Johnston, Rhode Island, is very widely popular. He gets very high margins in elections, and lots of people had lots of good things to say about him, but he did have his detractors.I was trying to talk to one of them, and he was quite anxious about talking to me and said, “Well, you know how things are in this town.” Then he paused a beat, and then he said: “Well, you’re not from here. Maybe you don’t.” There was this sense that there were critics, and they would often say: “This is too personalized. There’s too much retribution for disloyalty. This is America. We should be able to express alternate opinions and not be personally penalized by the powers that be in our locality for this.”One colorful example from Elliott County was an executive who was no longer in office because of this federal deal and had one very outspoken opponent in the community. When they would be paving roads, like county roads, the new asphalt would stop at this man’s property line and then start up again at the next property line. Only in front of his farm would there be no paving. That kind of stuff rubbed some people the wrong way for sure.Jon: I would just echo that. I think it was somewhat mixed, but I think there was also a sort of sense in these places that this is just how one does politics. These are the main models of politics. It wasn’t clear to many, I think, what the alternative to this might look like. In many ways, it’s a sort of model that grows up out of their own community. It’s the kind of politics that grows out of a traditional family in some ways. It’s the sense that, “Well, there’s a patriarch who’s the head of the household but also the head of the community.” They should provide and take care of their community. In exchange, they should get the loyalty of their constituents and their supporters.There’s also a sense that their loyalty is the main way that they pay back their benefactors, those who have supported them. Even if they have some misgivings or grumblings, or they think the mayor can be a little too iron-fisted or whatever, there’s also a sense that they should be loyal to that person because they owe them something.Aaron: Given all of that, and given the personal and transactional nature of the politics and the politics as extended family, as you describe it, the initial motivation of this book and the ethnographies that you conducted was that there was something new about Trump or Trumpism, or Trump as a candidate. It attracted what had been historically very, very exclusively blue communities. These were Democratic strongholds.Given all of this, within this context, what does it mean for them to have been Democrat? You said this wasn’t really about policy per se, so were they meaningfully Democratic in the way that we would think about it, from the perspective of looking broadly in American politics? Democrats represent a set of policy preferences and a certain coalition. Do they even fit within that? Or was it more just that this was a label, but they could have had a different one slapped on, and it wouldn’t have been meaningfully distinct?Stephanie: Yes, I think one thing that became very clear was that because of the relationships with these party elites in their local community, what the party meant, meant relationships with these local party leaders. What they understood “Democrat” to mean had been very much reflected or filtered through these local party leaders. A lot of their, I would say, social-cultural ideas were quite conservative.Some of them made a point of saying, “I’m a Democrat and I’m a conservative.” For example, we met a woman in Rhode Island who was from a deeply political family herself and had been a low local-level political leader—so not someone who was out of touch or disengaged at all. She talked about the revelation that Democrats were pro-choice. For her, this was a shock.She had to wake up to this fact because she herself and her family were fierce Democrats. She had been told since she was a child that if the Republicans get into power, we’ll all starve. It was that kind of rhetoric we've heard from a lot of people. But she was also from this deeply Catholic, church-going, mass-going family. She said she would go to mass and see her elected local leaders also taking communion.It never crossed her mind that these people would not be pro-life. On a lot of the social-cultural issues in Elliott County, which was very rural, one big issue had to do, of course, with guns and the Second Amendment. All the Democrats were very pro-Second Amendment in Elliott County. They didn’t feel a sense of cognitive dissonance because their understanding was so local.Jon: And as Stephanie suggested, too, in some ways, they do have a sense that Republicans are the party of the rich. That resonates with what a lot of Democrats might say about the Republican Party and have said for a long time, but it’s a very class-bound, New Deal, Democratic sense of the parties. Indeed, in some of the restaurants in these towns, it’s not uncommon to find pictures of JFK or FDR.They had a sense that those were the patron saints of the party. They did have a sense that they were part of something larger than their own local, particular community. It’s like the culture wars were this thing that was blowing beyond their own local lives, and they didn’t have a sense of where the parties landed on guns or abortion or those kinds of questions. That surprised us. That was interesting.In lots of ways, of course, these people, on a lot of these issues, they’re kind of conservative. They’re pretty pro-Second Amendment. They’re fairly pro-life. Although on economic questions, they’re more moderate or even left-leaning. Ottumwa, Iowa, for example: It’s a place with a meat-packing plant. There’s a strong tradition of unionism there. Basically, it’s as if you froze the Democratic Party in the North in 1960 and took a peek at it; that’s more what these places are like. It almost felt like going back in time a little bit. We got to peer at the old Democratic Party, as it used to be. We were reminded that it didn’t all change overnight—that there are still these vestiges of this old party that have endured partly because they’re isolated and they have this strong localism. The local leads buffer them from some of the big changes that are happening at the national level.Indeed if you talk to local people, one of the major things they’re trying to do is create their own brand, because they know that there’s a big ideological divide between them and the national party. They want to keep the Democratic Party as localized as they can. Trump has made that a lot harder for them in all kinds of ways, because a lot of these folks are starting to become more aware of the national party and the ways in which it’s different from their local party.Localism versus CosmopolitanismAaron: One of the broad theses of your book is that Trump appealed to these communities in part because the very things that those of us in our coastal, rootless, cosmopolitan enclaves were often dramatically, viscerally turned off by about him were the very things that felt the most familiar about him to the voters in these communities. As just discussed, he looked like the politicians that they’re used to. What we saw as wild corruption and nepotism and so on was just business as usual—that’s of course how politicians operate.I want to move to another one that you discuss, which is honor cultures, because Trump for many of us was this famously belligerent but thin-skinned bully who couldn’t back down. Constantly, anytime anyone said anything, he needed to come back at them, even if he looked ridiculous doing it. It seemed very off-putting to all of us. As you point out, this is like a quintessential “honor culture.” What is an honor culture, and why do we see it in communities like this?Stephanie: Well, an honor culture is a way of understanding reputation and conflict that makes it imperative that a person, particularly a man, demonstrate his toughness, his willingness to meet any insult—or certainly an assault—but even just an insult with a kind of fierceness and a willingness to use violence to avenge his reputation, to reestablish his reputation.Men in all these communities have all kinds of personalities, just like in any other community, but they understand that they’re expected to do this. If they don’t, they risk really losing status in their communities, and they also risk inviting further insult and even violence. I think it was pervasive in all three communities. I think some of the most colorful examples probably come from Ottumwa, from Iowa. Jon: Well, there’s a lot of examples. I would just say by way of defining honor culture that on the one hand, it’s unfamiliar to a lot of folks who live in highly educated bubbles like college towns and blue urban centers, but it’s the default culture in a way, right? It exists around the world. It still exists in lots of places in the United States. It’s a much more common mode of conflict resolution than we often imagine.The play Hamilton reminds us that it used to exist in our national political culture, because, after all, Hamilton died in a duel defending his honor. But that play misleads us, too, because it suggests that this honor culture is some ancient, barbaric, strange cultural thing that existed in the past and that we’ve done away with it. In fact, as Steph said, it existed in all these communities.I guess we should give some examples. I guess before I get to Iowa, I would start with Rhode Island. The mayor, Polisena, very much practiced this honor culture. We really first saw this in action during a town council meeting, because every month or so, Joe Polisena holds court and various citizens come. They have various complaints and they want to give the mayor a hard time.Mayor Polisena doesn’t do what politicians might do in, say, a college town when they hear a complaint. When people come to complain to Polisena, he gives them hell. He starts calling them names, and it doesn’t matter who they are. In fact, this one old woman used to consistently go and complain to him, and he would just let her have it. Polisena would say, “You’re a malcontent.”Later, as the meeting spilled out into the parking lot, he even audibly called her a douchebag. He doesn’t mince words, and we asked him about this. We said, “Joe, what are you doing? Why are you so rough with these constituents? Why can’t you do what Michelle Obama suggests? She said, ‘When they go low, we go high.’ Why can’t you take the high road?” His response was very telling. He said, “No, I can’t do that. If I do that, they’re just going to roll over me. I’m just going to show my weakness. They’re going to take advantage of me.” He said, “Look, I have to be a street fighter when it comes to politics. I have to be tough, because that’s the only thing that people understand, is strength.” We saw this again, as Steph suggested, in Ottumwa. There, a fight nearly broke out at a local Democratic county meeting. This is back in 2016 during the primaries. The county commissioner was a guy named Jerry Parker. He supported Hillary Clinton. There was a guy named Alex Stroda, who was on the other side. They were fighting over who to endorse. It nearly came to blows. There was a belly bump, but not an actual fight. Again, those were two guys who couldn’t just talk it out. There was a sense that an insult had to be forcefully confronted. That was normal in these places and that’s also how Trump operates, right?For Trump, you’re either a strong person or you’re a weak person, and that’s how he divides the world. Nationally speaking, some of the candidates that gravitated toward Trump early also shared some of that honor culture. You think about guys like Rudy Giuliani or Chris Christie. They too have some of that in them. That’s a flavor for this culture. To sum up, I guess the final thing I would say is that Trump—I think you said this well, Aaron—but Trump to us, to people in our community, seems like he’s pathologically thin-skinned. And maybe he is, right? I’m sure Trump has all kinds of personality disorders, but that’s not how it’s necessarily read in the communities we studied. To them, his behavior is totally normal. Of course you punch back. Of course you don’t let things roll off your back. That’s not how politicians behave in their communities. He doesn’t seem weird even if he does have all kinds of personality disorders, which I’m sure he does. He doesn’t read quite that way in these places.Aaron: You’re conducting these interviews after Trump has been in office for a bit, so they’ve gotten to see him not just with the bluster of a candidate, but actually as the leader of the free world. Was there a sense of the disconnect between how they perceive him and how he is perceived elsewhere? For example, you quote a handful of people about this. One guy, and I’ll just read the quote, he says, “I think other countries are afraid of him, which I think is a good thing. I hate to say it, but with Bush and Obama, they were pushovers. With Trump, he’s not a pushover. You’re going to have to deal with him. There’s no playing games with him.” This is really striking because it became very clear in Trump’s presidency that other world leaders were just constantly playing games with him. They saw his thin skin, his reactivity, his susceptibility to flattery, and they just manipulated the hell out of him. They were maybe afraid of him in the sense that he was a loose cannon, but they weren’t afraid of him as a tough guy that they had to take seriously. Were the communities aware of that disconnect, of how he was perceived on a world stage?Stephanie: No, I think that the idea of a leader that might speak quietly and carry a big stick just doesn’t make a lot of sense to them. In their own sphere of understanding, the way that you make people understand that you will not be messed with is through this thin-skinned response. It’s this kind of machismo. I think that that was how they understood. I was at a church service in Kentucky and the minister there was trying to get the churchgoers to be more assertive in their faith.He said, “Growing up, my big brother always taught me”—basically, he meant in the context of working at a job site like a construction site—“don't back up. Never back up.” That was seen as a deep truth that had application in all realms of life. They heard Trump making those sounds. It’s a pretty policy-wonkish person who could then read and trace actually what the consequences might have been, which you were just alluding to. Jon: I think it’s important to bear in mind that what’s happening here is a kind of identity politics. When they see a candidate like Trump who behaves in ways that are familiar to them, in ways that they might behave, in ways that their leaders might behave, it signals to them that this candidate is one of them. That’s how most voters behave, right? They don’t think very systematically, for the most part, about politics or ideology. Really, they’re interested in candidates and the extent to which they feel some sort of a social proximity to them. The closer they feel to them, the more they feel like they can trust them. I think the people we talked to just have a sense that Trump, because he seems familiar, because he seems trustworthy, will do the right thing on the international stage in these contexts that are removed from their knowledge or expertise. In that way, they’re really different from the wonky people one might meet in Washington, D.C., who are pulling their hair out because Trump is getting rolled by China and Putin, et cetera.Class, Not RaceAaron: One of the other things that is characteristic of Trumpism—and it was certainly present throughout Trump’s campaign—was nationalism, and then what often looked like racist dog whistles, if not just quite audible whistles. What has seemed to be characteristic is that Trumpism and Trump’s supporters are intensely nationalistic and often have—let’s call them racially charged views. What you found pushes back on that, at least in some ways, and you argued that it has more to do with the sense of place. Can you talk about how sense of place plays out and what that says about nationalism as a Trumpist phenomenon?Stephanie: All three of these were places we chose precisely because they represented a larger group of counties mostly that had voted twice for Obama and then flipped. We were interested in part because that seemed to be complicating what seemed like a clear-cut story of the kind of bigoted appeal, the appeal of bigotry that the Trump campaign represented. Then spending time there, what really stuck out in all three of the places was the localism and we've talked about some facets of that.These were all places where the people who lived there felt deeply, deeply connected to their hometowns and even so much that in the Johnston Rhode Island community that we were in, they had long had a phrase that was Johnston First—long before Trump was on the political landscape, that there was a sense of belonging to each other and needing to help each other and work for the community. This sometimes then resonated out to a nationalistic commitment. For example, in Ottumwa, Iowa where there were these strong unions, where there had been the car industry, it was difficult to buy a non-American made car in Ottumwa.They linked Ottumwa to the nation in a sense. In all of these places, there was that intense localism. For example, I was asking some women in Elliott County, Kentucky early on. One of them mentioned that they had read Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance and there was some other women at the conversation that I was having and the other women hadn't heard of the book, but they said, "Oh, was he from Elliot?" Then the response was, "No, because he's actually from another county that's an hour or two away, also part of Eastern Appalachia." Fairly indistinguishable from my eyes, but when they were told, "No, not from Elliot county, from this other county," they all laughed like, "Oh, okay, well that's a different county, we don't know about that county." Even the county boundaries of this tiny rural county really mattered to the civic imagination of the residents there.Jon: The other thing I'd say along these same lines is these are all places that are struggling to varying degrees and have been for quite some time. When Trump came around and said he was going to Make America Great Again, what they heard is not so much that he was going to make the nation writ large great again in some general way, what they heard rather is that he was going to make Ottumwa Great Again and Elliot Great Again and Johnston Great Again. That very nationalistic rhetoric, they heard in this very localized way. The fate of those communities matter to them partly because their social identities are so connected to those places.In these communities is where they're really socially known, where they really have reputations, where all their kin are, where all their kin are buried, and so to leave those places because they can't find the jobs or that they might need, for example, is a social death. Here it's a really a class-based difference. If Steph and I get offered a job at, say, Harvard and we go, our social reputation actually enhances because the nature of our communities is really different. It's not neighborhood-based, it's not especially place-based. Our communities are much more based in our professions. We're having this conversation with you across thousands of miles and that's the nature of our community.We don't know our neighbors all that well and it's certainly not the center, it's not really where our social identities are fundamentally based. The fate of these communities matters in a existential way to them in a way that I think it's sometimes hard for those of us who are part of the professional class to notice and to see. The other thing I'd say about race is, as we mentioned, these are places that voted for Obama twice. In that way, they're also different from places that were touched by the Tea Party. As soon as Obama's elected, you get the tea party, and I'm sure some of that was racially driven. He's our first black president but notably, it wasn't these communities. Obama really didn't create some massive counter mobilization in these places. These are places that voted for him twice, Obama was their president for eight years. Some of these places did grow disenchanted with him in the second term, and particularly in Elliot county where the policies of the Biden administration was particularly hard on the coal industry there. But for the most place, these weren't places that had some allergy to Obama. These were places that, in fact, voted for him and supported him.In general, I think we would say that to those studying Trump is that I think it is true on the one hand that these folks, they do think of Trump as a patron of the white working class in some ways. I think that's true. I do think, especially today, things have become more racialized. I'm sure if we went back into these communities in the wake of BLM and everything else, the racial politics has changed. Perhaps they think of themselves more fundamentally as white citizens and that's probably likely. But when we arrived there, I guess we were struck by the fact that they didn't particularly think in those terms and their social identities were much more class-based, they were much more place-based. I think we have to keep in mind that however much race plays a role, their politics aren't reducible to race either, that they have other social identities. I think that's hopeful in some ways.Stephanie: Just to put a point on the comment with one example that comes to mind in terms of Elliott County. Elliott county, Kentucky, is a particularly white area. There's very few people that are non-white.Jon: In fact, if I could just add, I think it's the whitest county that voted for Obama, which makes it interesting.Stephanie: All the political conflict there that sometimes can be racially charged in other places all happens within whites. For instance, when there's lots of grumbling about welfare and they're all looking at their white neighbors who are ethnically, religiously identical, racially identical to them. One thing I discovered among some of the older, this is not common among the younger, but the older people in Elliott County will sometimes complain about foreigners. When they talk about foreigners, they mean people from Ohio who are coming across the border or other counties, other white people.When there's lots of talk about invidious distinctions between us and them or between “othering” someone in the jargon of the academy, but in this case, they're “othering” white Ohioans, so the racial divisions aren't always the most important divisions to them.Jon: Just a quick footnote to that. It should remind us that, in some ways, their identities are much more provincial than whiteness. White America, that's a pretty big group of people. For the most part, it didn't seem like that was a community they felt especially close to. As Steph said, they feel like they're white neighbors and a neighboring county are, in some ways, outsiders and not part of their community.Aaron: The main issue of Trump's campaign, the thing that he ran on and drove home from early on his presidency was anti-immigration. That was his hobby horse. Is it then the case that for these communities, an anti-immigration view is less about race, ethnicity, nationality, immigrants with their weird languages and weird foods and more that if your community is intensely socially interconnected in a way that makes it look more like an extended family, then the immigrants look like the person who marries into that family and has a hard time fitting in because they didn't grow up in it, then they physically look different from us?Jon: Yes, you could see this in, I think, most notably actually in Ottumwa, Iowa, which of the three communities we studied has the highest level of immigration and they've come there really to work the meat packing plant. I do think there's something to what you're saying. There's a sense that these folks are outsiders who don't quite share our norms, and therefore, it's harder to have the tightly knit homogeneous community. We know from research on social capital that ethnic diversity, at least in the short and median term, undermines community and feelings of trust and belonging, and so diversity is a challenge to community.If your community is fundamentally neighborhood-based, then immigration can be a cost to those communities. Again, it's really quite a contrast from our college town. Here, we benefit from immigration on all kinds of ways. We pay immigrants in California, some in California, they cut our lawns, they clean our houses, they care for our children, they allow us to neglect our neighborhoods and tend to the communities that we care about, which is really our broader, professional, more diffuse, virtual kinds of communities. But in places like Ottumwa, those communities, again, are much more neighborhood-based.There is signs though that does sort of change over time as immigrants become part of the community. This is why I think it has more to do with culture than race. One Ottumwan, for example, told us about one of his neighbors, really about the Latinos in the community. Generally, he said, well, they're not even Mexican anymore because they don't speak Spanish. It was an interesting way of saying this was fundamentally about race. They may look a little different, but what matters is that they've socially and culturally integrated into the community.Policy Is Not the AnswerAaron: Looking forward then for those of us who are deeply worried about what Trumpism represents on the national stage, look back at the four years that he was in office and the real damage it did to American institutions and so on, and are worried about the continuing prevalence of this fundamentally illiberal views in the American electorate, what lessons should we draw from this? These people are speaking to genuine interests in cultural needs and affiliations. The book is very good at pointing out how much those of us in the cosmopolitan cities don't understand the way that class really works.There's a very nice line in it where you mention how much in colleges the future generations of progressive leaders are taught lots of courses in gender and race, but very little, if anything at all, in class and how important class is to this conversation. What lesson should we draw from what you've learned in these communities as far as understanding and preventing some of this from turning into the really dangerous illliberalism that we all fear?Jon: I think it is certainly heading that way. When we were in these communities at the time, it was still relatively early in their romance with Donald Trump, so they were not talking a lot of crazy conspiracy theory. Now we're really at a different place and I think partly what it highlights is the dangers of identity politics in some ways. There's a sort of cultishness that has really grown around Trump. Again, we were there and saw the beginnings of that, but we were just, in fact, at a rally in Wyoming, and Trump was there to officially nominate Harriet Hageman who's taking on Liz Chaney. It was everyone was in their Trump gear. Everyone had Trump T-shirts, lots of folks had Trump flags.If you've been to an NFL game, it had that feel to it like everyone's on the same team rooting together. Maybe that would be okay if Trump was less reckless. I think in many ways, we're in this moment because of Trump's bad character. Not so much that he appealed to people's place-based or class-based identities and mobilized this group of folks, but the power of that social connection has been so badly abused by him and so recklessly done, exploited. In a way, I think there'll be more responsible people. I hope there'll be more responsible people who will follow some of his example and leave other parts of it behind.I think there's responsible ways to appeal to these folks. I think it's important to remember, there's a decent part of this world. There's a decent morality there. Not all of it exports well up to the national level. I think honor culture, for example, for reasons we can explain, we think that maybe it's not great anywhere, but it works much better locally, and when it's exported up to the national level, it doesn't play out well. There are folks who I think are trying to take some of the Trump's playbook. One good example is this candidate for governor in Pennsylvania, Fetterman, who's a Democrat, and very Trumpy in all kinds of ways.If you haven't bothered to look, on one of his forearms, he has a huge tattoo of a ZIP code of his hometown. Talk about appealing to place-based identities. This guy's really figured it out. On his other arm, he has the names of all those who died in his community while he was mayor. Very personal concern about his own hometown and community. Look, I don't know what kind of governor he would be if he makes it that far, but it strikes me that's, particularly for Democrats or even really Republicans, who are thinking about how do you mobilize some of these social identities in a way that's less reckless than Trump, I think it can be done.Again, I think it'd be done responsibly and that's partly because there's something admirable and something to like about the localism of these folks.Stephanie: Yes, I think a lot of the things that we found that we highlight in our book, the moral vision behind them has to be understood. Even something like the boss nature of politics, which is often something that's considered very sleazy in the kind of communities that John and I have lived really has a lot to do with this ethic of friendship and loyalty. It's a way that voters understand friendship and loyalty more than any policy-minded way of assessing candidates. I had one woman tell me, actually, a few people say things like this, but one woman comes to mind in Kentucky who was a very disengaged voter and worked a minimum wage, a pretty crappy job.She was one of the defenders of this disgraced county executive and she said: "At least when David was in office, you could get a load of gravel when you needed one." It was her sense of this was a true mark of friendship. I think that certainly the boss style politics, which has to do with personal loyalty, which, of course, resonates very large with the unusually intense following that Trump has at the national level, the localism, again, is about community and loyalty. I think candidates that can speak that cultural jargon can signal that it's more important to signal that than it is to have policies. The policies aren't the draw I guess. I saw some Trump voters who said to me Trump Democrats in Kentucky who said, "Oh, we have great internet. We got that under the Obama administration," but there was no sense that they gave credit to the Obama administration for this policy that clearly helped them. They giggled about. Or the same with Obamacare. We saw people in Rhode Island say, "Oh, well, yes, I am dependent on Obamacare," but didn't give much credit. I think what they want is a feeling of being represented by someone they can identify with and trust and they're much more attuned to social-cultural clues, maybe all of us are, when picking candidates.Copyright © The UnPopulist, 2022. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Subscribe to Reactionary Minds: Apple Podcasts | SpotifyWelcome to the inaugural episode of Reactionary Minds, a podcast from The UnPopulist that I’ll be hosting every month. This is a show about why some people reject liberalism and what the rest of us can do about it. This first episode is all about introducing the problem Reactionary Minds exists to address. In it, Shikha Dalmia, the editor of The UnPopulist and fellow at the Mercatus Center's Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange, discusses the biggest challenge of our times: The resurgent threat of populist authoritarianism here and abroad. Every regime has its pathologies and populist demagoguery is the pathology of democracies. The “liberal” in liberal democracies is supposed to keep this genie in the bottle, but now that it is out, can we put it back in?This transcript has been lightly edited and condensed for clarityAaron Ross Powell: Welcome to the show.Shikha Dalmia: Thanks for having me, Aaron.Aaron: What is populism?Shikha: It's a good question, and as you've noticed, the name of my newsletter is The UnPopulist, and its addressed at the authoritarian currents we are seeing around the world. Then the question arises why am I calling it The UnPopulist and not the anti-authoritarian or something like that? Partly, because it's cuter, but the more serious reason is that the kind of illiberalism and the kind of authoritarianism we are seeing around the world has what is essentially a populist element.Now there's a lot of confusion around the word populism, and there is actually a great deal of effort on the left to try and take back this word which it thinks has been unfairly characterized in the last six years with the rise of the Trump era and the MAGA era. I, in some ways, feel for some of the left-wing writers, like Thomas Frank who's a public intellectual and an author and something of a Bernie Sanders progressive. He wrote a book not too long ago defending the term populism because he sees populism as essentially a movement of the people. Roger Cohen, a New York Times columnist, similarly wrote in 2018, shortly after Trump, where he also was lamenting the fact that the term populism has acquired this negative connotation.Now, I actually feel for some of these liberals because, as you and I know, we are still grieving the loss of the term liberal. However, I think they fundamentally misunderstand what populism really means and why it has a bad connotation.To some extent, it's a semantic issue, you can give any phenomenon any name, but populism, for the longest time has had a bad odor. They [Frank et al] see populism as essentially a popular movement that is supposed to do the most good for the most people, and those most people are not the rich people. They are generally lower or middle-income people who are the vast majority of the population.But that's not what populism really is. It's not a popular movement. A populist movement, if you read the literature on it, which admittedly is murky, it's about pitting the “real” people against some other entity, and that entity is the elites. The elites are considered to be these corrupt oligarchs, and the people are supposed to be something pure, representing something good.There is instantly this division between the elite, which controls “the establishment,” and the pure people whose interests are being avoided. Now, even that exactly doesn't capture the problem with the term populism. The term populism gets its bad odor from the fact that it's not just that the real people are trying to get their way and have their preferred policies enacted, it is more that they want to flatten certain elements of liberalism, the deliberative process, the representative process, because they believe it's been captured by some bad people, by The Establishment which is not representing them.It's an effort to flatten certain institutions of liberalism, not improve them, not reform them, but simply to either side step them or do an end-run around them, or even just get rid of them so that the real people can have their will.Now, obviously, the real people can't govern. There are too many of them, somebody has to govern for them. So in some senses populist and authoritarian seem like anti-poles. But inevitably they come together because whenever you have a populist movement some authoritarian figure or demagogue arises who will say they're representing the people. And we saw very clearly with Trump, we the people became me the people…they are not representing the people, they are the people. Populism inevitably goes hand-in-hand with a certain kind of authoritarianism, and so therefore, the term unpopulist and therefore why populism is something to be worried about.Aaron: I think that's one of the interesting things about watching the rise of populism in the U.S over the last five or six or seven years, has been that it's framed as an anti-elite movement and “drain the swamp” is an anti-elite thing. We're constantly hearing about these coastal cities where these out-of-touch elites who don't understand the real people are. The real Americans in this context really just means rural working class whites. But then you look at their leadership and it is fantastically wealthy, though we don't know quite how wealthy [in Trump’s case], because his finances are a little sketchy, but a fantastically wealthy businessman.Then in Congress the figureheads for this movement, or at least people trying to claim that mantle, tend to be Ivy league law school educated, pretenders to the common-man identity. You're right, it is this odd thing what begins as a movement framing itself as of the people turns into a personality cult that's no longer about the people's identity, it’s about the people building their identity through fealty to this strong-man leader, which is then how it can very quickly turn into an authoritarian movement, because either that leader's power when he has to do something is seen as absolute, because he's the embodiment of our hopes and dreams and cultural identity, or when that leader's position is threatened, as we saw when Trump lost the election, it can morph quickly into violence in defense of that leader's status. Not so much the working class or the common man status, but defending that leader from perceived failure.Shikha: That's right. Now, populism can be of both the left wing and the right wing varieties, and we have seen them throughout history. Latin America has had populism of every strain. In every instance it has led to the cult of the personality, but there are two things in populism. There is a cult of personality, which is the leader, and then there is a cult of the people too. There is a certain deification of the people that they are true owners of the society, their will needs to be respected.The two, the cult of the leader and the cult of the people, build on each other, they both deify each other. Whether it is Hugo Chavez, whether it is Bolsonaro right now. The Bolsonaro is interesting and he's losing some of his popularity, but Trump is a classic phenomenon of a cult leader, of a demagogue who is leading in the name of the real people, and then the real people deify him. He really was a deity in certain MAGA circles, and he in turn deifies them in his rallies.If you watched some of his rallies, which I tried to avoid as much as possible, but he was constantly flattering the people there. It was, "You people are great, and you are being ignored." Yes, there is this mutual cult of the leader and the cult of the people that goes hand-in-hand in a populist movement.Nomenclature and TaxonomyAaron: I want to stay for a moment on our terms and taxonomies, because the purpose of this show, ultimately, is not just to critique illiberal and populist ideas, but to try to understand them, to try to understand where these people are coming from, what the philosophies and personality traits and historical perspectives that inform them because it's hard to challenge ideas without understanding them deeply and, to the extent you can, fairly.We've talked about what populism is, but this show is not called the authoritarian mind, it's not called the populist mind, it is called Reactionary Minds. Where does the term reactionary fit into all this?Shikha: Aaron, this is your show! You and I both talked about why we like Reactionary Minds. I'll give you my side and perhaps you can say something about why you like it. The textbook definition of reactionary is a person or a sensibility that is opposed to economic or political liberalization of any kind. Usually, it goes along with a certain conservative mentality.I think there's another element to the reactionary sensibility, and that is, it is also anti-ideas, and it's anti-intellectual. The reason is ideas and intellectual theories can lead to change. They require a certain amount of openness to the world and to knowledge, and those can be intensely threatening to existing cultural orders. In that sense, reactionary minds, I think, is a good way to describe the show because you and I are both quite troubled and perturbed by the last six years.Things are happening in America that we never thought would be possible. We think that there needs to be some kind of a response to this, but we can't really fight these ideologies unless we understand them. We do want to understand the reactionary movement that's brewing in America on its own terms. That's the reason I like the term reactionary minds.Aaron: Yes, I agree with all that. What I would add is, I think that you can make the case that political ideology, moral ideology, and so on is, to some extent, downstream of personality, that we tend to have different personal and personality preferences, and then we sometimes look around for theories or intellectual edifices that provide structure to them or support them or don't really challenge them.In that regard, reactionary it is a personality type that says I am turned off by, sometimes threatened by diversity, by change, by things being different than the way that I'm used to, or people who aren't like me being more prominent than they used to be, or higher status than they used to be, or the way we talk about language is changing and that bugs me, and I don't like these kids asking me to use different pronouns or different terminology. There is this set-in-my-ways-ness that drives a lot of this.It's not an accident that Trump when he was first running for president, he led with anti-immigration, with a xenophobic perspective and a nationalism that was the corollary of that, because for a lot of his most faithful followers, it's “America is looking different than either the way I was used to it being, or the way that I imagined it being, or the way that I would like it to look demographic.”On the far fringes of the populace, we get the Great Replacement Theory about they're trying to change the demographics of the country to make it less white than it used to be. There is this very “I don't like difference” and then reacting strongly against that, then that feeds into political preferences, which is, "I'm going to vote for the person who will stop the change, whether that's preventing immigrants who don't look and talk like me from coming into the country, or will elevate the status of the people who have the same preferences I do against the people with the diverse preferences that I dislike."That's another thing that I want to dig into on the show is the way that there is such a thing, I think, as a populist or an authoritarian or reactionary psychology as well. There are ideas that inform it, but there's also just beliefs and values and attitudes and they end up mixing together into this very toxic political outcome. That was the attraction to me of the reactionary minds, because it gets both the notion that this is an ideological perspective, but also that this is just an attitudinal perspective.Shikha: Right. That's very well stated, Aaron. I would, however, push back just slightly in that we do want to make a distinction between the conservative mind and the reactionary mind. Bill Buckley's very famous statement when he launched the National Review was he wants to stand athwart history screaming or yelling stop. There is a way in which, even though I am not a conservative, never have been, never will be, I can understand the urge to be careful about change and reform, and to be a little deliberative. You don't want to simply throw out existing social arrangements just because some fad has taken hold of the land.There is a way in which the conservatives, even though I'm not a conservative, they can be incrementalists, but not completely opposed to reform. Reactionaries, I think, is conservatism on steroids in that sense. Reactionaries simply don't want change because they don't like change. Usually, reactionariness is a phenomenon that's associated with conservatism, but to the extent that it's not just any change that reactionaries are opposed to, it's actually liberalism that they are opposed to. To the extent its liberalization they are opposed to, they can even come from the progressive side.Like communists when China liberalized its economy, there were reactionaries in China who wanted the communist order to hold and they didn't want liberalization. In that sense, I like the term reactionary because potentially, it will even capture the leftist reactionaries.Leftist ExcessesAaron: I think that often manifests in the contemporary American left as an intolerance of difference. That is, it's not the same as the intolerance of difference that we see from the right, which is obviously very much there, but rather, the left thinks we have advanced, we have liberalized, so certain behaviors that used to be socially unacceptable are now considered normal, or certain underprivileged groups that used to be underprivileged are now considered no different than everyone else.That liberalization is good. That's the kind of liberalization we want, but there is a tendency among some people on the left to then to be incredibly intolerant not of difference in the political realm. It's one thing to say yes, we should — people who want to re-criminalize gay marriage or gay relationships that's bad, but it's people who themselves in their own lives are not affirmatively supportive of these things need to be stamped out, need to be punished.This often can manifest in the lefts wanting to punish businesses that weren't supportive of gay weddings, baking cakes for gay weddings. The small conservative baker says, "That's against my conscience. I don't want to bake a cake for your wedding." In a genuinely liberal society the answer to that is, "Okay." Like, "I will go somewhere else and get a cake from somewhere else and no harm, no foul."The liberalism that manifests on the left is like, "No." It's not enough that you are just saying, "Hey, I don't want to participate." You have to participate and embrace, or we are going to, in this case, try to use the state to punish you, to destroy your business, to find you, to drive you out, because you're not one of us. That ends up with this ratcheting up of the reactionariness because then what that says to the people who are more culturally conservative is, "I need to dig in even deeper because if the culture drifts in a more liberal direction, that's even more ground for me to be punished often with state force. I need to fight even harder because  I won't be tolerated.Shikha: That's exactly the dynamic we are in right now. The problem with the left is that it's too impatient and, to some extent, one can understand its impatience. I think systemic injustices are prevalent, systemic racism is a thing! We all do need to grapple with legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, all of that is correct. But the left doesn't want to do the real hard work of changing hearts and minds. It wants to grab power nodes and exercise and push on them to engineer change.It's not just the levers of the state that they are using, it's also the levers of corporate power and what have you. Not all of [these tactics] are illicit. Some of them are perfectly acceptable. Certain kinds of boycotts against views clearly beyond the pale are probably acceptable. But they have lost the capacity of making distinctions between good-natured fear of what they are asking for — and a reactionary fear, I guess.It's this lack of calibration and this lack of finesse in their techniques, which is a big problem. This, in some ways, is driving a more reactionary attitude on the part of the conservatives, bringing out their worst tendencies.But I actually don't want to simply blame the left . I think the conservatives always wanted — there was a certain kind of conservative mind that was always uncomfortable with certain social changes, gay marriage, what have you. They've also been looking for a pretext to dig in. I think to some extent, the left is giving them a pretext [by its excesses]. It's not a reason, it's a pretext for their reactionariness. It's hard to untangle all of this, I admit, but all these currents are right now with us.Aaron: At their core they're all ultimately a rejection of genuine liberalism, which is if nothing else, it is a belief in a social tolerance and social pluralism. If we're going to live together in a big society, commonly governed, we have to get along with each other. The way that you get along with each other given our diversity of viewpoints and values and preferences and backgrounds and so on is to tolerate difference. To say: "I'm going to let you live the way that you want to live and I'm going to live the way that I want to live. Even if I'm not celebrating the choices that you make, I'm accepting them as part of this liberal consensus."So much of what we're seeing now seems to be a rejection of that liberal consensus of saying, "No, it's not just that I think I am right in… All of us think we're right in our own preferences and values or we wouldn't hold them. It's not just that, it's saying, “therefore, anyone who differs from my preferences and values is wrong and is wrong to an extent that they are dangerous or a threat or impure, or in some other way, need to be, whether it's with the state or other mechanisms, need to be shut down, excluded, punished so that we can have a higher degree of uniformity that happens to align with my preferences.”Shikha: When Obama became president he was against gay marriage. He was against all kinds of pro-gay policies, and then, of course, during the course of his presidency he changed his mind. I wonder if there is any room for Obama in the current left. Room for evolution of thinking.Now I think Obama was always there and he was holding back for strategic reasons, which turned out to actually be not bad reasons. You can see the growing intolerance of the left in that it's not just being censorious against the right, but it's also being censorious toward its own. That’s why, in a way, I'm a little less worried about the left, because the left, in its demand for purity and consistency, in a way is becoming less united and is at that stage of devouring its own.The left is now generating healthy pushback. I actually think if Trump had not arrived on the horizon, there was so much concern within the left about the left that right now we would be in a much better position with respect to the left. But with Trump arriving on the scene, I feel myself pivoting. I think there is no bigger threat in this country than the right because it has become so completely not just reactionary, but authoritarian and illiberal in 30 different ways that I've had to drop my attention on the left and now right is the big problem.Before Trump arrived, I remember Vox, very much a progressive publication, had published a piece by a liberal professor saying something to the effect, "My liberal students terrify me." This piece went on to say that conservative students his class, this was a professor who's in a liberal arts college, who said the conservative students in his class will push back, might not like his ideas, but are still willing to discuss them. Liberal students were not willing to do that.Now what we are seeing on the other hand is that the right is no longer simply pushing back against what were legitimately called left-wing excesses. It wants to just crush them. Now you are seeing bills banning the teaching of critical race theory. That's where the reactionariness comes in. This is no longer now about calibrating the pace of the change, it's not about that. Now we are only going to impose our vision from like 200 years ago. Now it’s in a completely different orbit.The Roots of Modern Day Right-Wing PopulistsAaron: We talked about Trumpism as exemplary of the kind of populism that we are concerned about, but is Trump the major figure, or who are the other figures that are important to understand when looking at the lay of the land on American populism, left or right, the main, I guess, influencers, as the kids say?Shikha: Well, populism in America, depending upon how you use the term, has a long history. The first populist movement was the People's Party in 1890, which was a third party. It was this agrarian movement and labor movement against the industrialization that was happening. In the building of the railroads, lots of people were dispossessed; traditional livelihoods were lost. That is generally regarded as the first populist movement in this country. It got co-opted by the Democratic Party, which became the labor union party. The People's Party put it's a lot behind William Bryan Jennings. When he lost the election that year, it spelled the end of that party, but it got co-opted by Democrats.You've seen certain other populist movements arguably whether George Wallace, he was a populist phenomenon, very much appealing to the same kinds of anxieties that Trump now appeals to. In between, you had The Tea Party movement, you also had the Occupy Wall Street movement.The difference is that the Tea Party, I think, was the beginning of the turn towards MAGAism. Although interestingly, the Tea Party movement was very much pitching itself as this constitutional movement. It wanted to return to the Founders. It wanted to limit the scope of the government, all of which went out of the window when Trump came along.I think Trump is not sui generis. Partly, the Tea Party is behind him but partly, I think we had the phenomenon of right-wing radio with the advent of Rush Limbaugh who started pushing all kinds of populist tropes. He was a nativist. He was anti-left. The preoccupation with the leftist enemy is a huge, huge part of the right, right now. I think that's the single biggest motivating force. Even the anti-immigration and the anti-immigrant animus is not quite as powerful a force as the fear and anger and the hatred of the left, actually.I think Rush Limbaugh started stoking that, and then you had a whole slew of copycats on the right. That paved the way for Trump. The right was primed for a populist takeover, and then Trump came along with his MAGA message and at that stage, all the right wanted to do was use the levers of the state to smash the left and impose its vision of a insular, insulated, closed America polity.Aaron: This isn't new, even with Trump, even with Rush Limbaugh, this is what we watched in the '50s and '60s with anti-communism, was the Soviet Union was a legitimate threat, although maybe in retrospect, not as big of a threat as we thought it was at the time. There were communists in the country, although they weren't going to win out. America was not going to turn communist, but they did exist, and communism was very bad.The American right used that as a way to exert the power of the federal government to punish particularly culturally left people or people who were calling for liberalization of the positions of Blacks or gays or women and so on. That the urge to define an enemy and then use a potentially an inflated threat of that enemy — or mischaracterizations of that enemy or strawman version of that enemy — to justify a reactionary turn is very strong.A moment ago we were talking about Trump and you said had Trump not come along the left would have fractured more than it did. What's interesting about Trump is that he unified both the right and the left into these deeply tribally opposed camps. For decades, the conservative movement was split between — there was the base that looked very much like Trumpism does now. The conservative right’s reactionary base has been around as long as there has been a right. But you had the elites, the Bill Buckley types or the Ronald Reagan or the Paul Ryan who controlled the GOP and pushed it in a more, if not liberal, at least more liberal-adjacent on its best days direction.That went away with Trump and suddenly the elites all either swore fealty, or at least shut up about their criticisms of the really reactionary right. And then on the left, you had exactly that, that the left, those fault lines went away because we had a unified enemy. Trump won't be around forever, and so there's a sense in which that potentially gives a way out when that enemy has gone away.There are other people like what DeSantis is doing in Florida right now, he's clearly trying to tee himself up as the inheritor of the Trump mantel. But it's questionable whether any of the people trying to do that have Trump's — I'm going to call it — charisma, but a lot of people think of it as such, but Trump's showmanship. There's something about him and his celebrity and all of that that made him successful in the way that someone who had just spouted the same views probably would not have been. Is there cause for hope there that if the populist leader goes away, then the sides will become more pluralistic than they are now?MAGA’s Ugly Progeny: Integralists and NationalistsShikha: It's a good question. No, I'm actually not optimistic about that. Look, what Trump did was he didn't really unite the Republican Party, what he did was he united a certain element within the Republican Party, and the rest of those who didn't agree with him were either purged — Paul Ryan didn't last a year after Trump came on the scene — or became persona non grata within the party.That's actually a classic populist move. It's not just that they don't respect parliamentary institutions and they don't respect the opposition, they actually turn their own party into an embodiment of themselves, and you've seen that with Trump. It's literally classic populism. In that sense, I think he's been hugely damaging to the Republican Party in a way that I'm not sure the Republican Party can recover from it for a very long time. Or at least I think it has to be in the political wilderness for a very long time. It has to be punished at the polls repeatedly before it will give up this populist formula.I think even though there may not be a charismatic figure like Trump, and the reason I was laughing when you said charismatic, because I know to you and me, he's just so utterly not charismatic. It's hard for us to see his appeal, but there'll be other populists who will try and copy him. They may not be successful, but their very presence is going to be damaging. That's one.The bigger danger of Trump is not Trump but Trumpism. Trumpism is essentially an illiberal mindset that doesn't respect the checks on executive power. It gives various factions within the conservative right, therefore, the permission to use the levers of the state to promote their own vision. You've written about this, the integralist movement. Why is that emerging now? The national conservative movement, why is that emerging now?He's actually fractured whatever little uneasy fusion/consensus there was in the right and allowed these illiberal monster children of MAGAism now to assert themselves. I actually think things are going to get much worse before they get better.Aaron: Let's turn briefly to the integralist movement and the national conservatism movement which somehow overlap but are distinct in other ways because they represent an interesting move on the part of the conservative elite to try to take on the energy of Trump's populism, but intellectualize it too because, Trumpism is basically all id.There's not an intellectual philosophical through-line there, but the national conservatives and the integralist are saying, "No, there is a philosophical case against liberalism, that liberalism has failed for reasons inherent to it, and that we need to embrace non-liberal, well thought out philosophical positions." If Trump is spouting id, the integralists and the national conservatives have legitimately thoughtful and often interesting thinkers articulating these views in ways that are I think they're wrong and I think they're often dangerously wrong, but they're not stupid and they're worth wrestling with.It is interesting watching these very elites. These are law professors and philosophy professors and theologians trying to take this energy and reapply the intellectual veneer that used to exist with Buckley, the National Review but was shed under Trump.Shikha: The difference between Buckley and the [Adrian] Vermeules of the day is that Buckley was still trying to promote a certain conservatism within a broadly liberal framework and a broadly liberal understanding. He agreed that checks and balances were a good thing, checks on executive power were a good thing. All of that is now out of the window with these new movements.Discontents with liberalism are always there because liberalism is an uneasy equilibrium between all kinds of different interests that don't comfortably fit together. Minorities are not happy with liberalism because liberalism doesn't give them the levers of power to instantly correct all the injustices against them. They are always unhappy. Of course, the majority is unhappy because, especially in a liberal democratic society, if pure majoritarian rule were to exist, it would get its way far more frequently.Everybody is always unhappy with liberalism. But there has always been this understanding there that life on the other side of liberalism is nasty, brutish, and short, so we better stick with liberalism. That consensus that liberalism may be wanting, but there is no other real alternative, that understanding is completely gone because some people have come to believe, thanks to Trump's assault on liberalism, that they can have the whole cake.The integralists, and you wrote great stuff about this — integralists, as you've pointed out, are a really weird movement because they're Catholics, they are actually a minority, and integralists within Catholicism are a really small minority, so why would you want to give up liberalism? The answer is that they think that any conservative state will give them more of what they want than they'll get from a liberal state.Ultimately, even a reactionary like Trump will give them more than anybody else will. Hence they have turned on liberalism because they feel they're getting less out of it. Every faction within conservatism I think is making a similar bet. You have national conservatism, which is a very, very diverse movement. You have Yoram Hazony who's an Israeli intellectual, who's the godfather of this movement, weirdly enough. You also have standard nationalists who just feel like there should be more flag-waving in the United States. You have somebody like Rich Lowry, who was actually [initially] a Never Trumper, and now feels that there needs to be some kind of America First-ism in America. He's flirting with something like blood and soil nationalism based on geography and ancestry. That will rule me out as a robust American citizen, I'm not sure about you. Geography it means Americans need to love the landscape of this country. The Shenandoah Valley is something that every American should do a pilgrimage to. It's all goofy stuff. They all feel whatever was missing in the liberal arrangement in America now they feel it's up for grabs, and they're all trying to make a bid for it very quickly to get what they can.Aaron: In the time that we have left, I want to turn to the future of this podcast. This is the inaugural episode of Reactionary Minds, we plan to do a lot more of these. Our goals, why we created this show, and what we're hoping to get out of it. I can start on this one. I touched on this a bit earlier, but I think my goal is this rise of liberalism is really troubling. As someone who has dedicated his career to advancing a quite radical conception of individual and economic liberty and individual autonomy and self-authorship, this is a direct assault on the values that not only I hold, but I think are the ones that lead to the best world for everyone.This has always been with us, but it has ramped up considerably. We're seeing some of it on the left, we are seeing one of the two major parties, more or less, entirely overtaken by it. We have seen it embodied in a president, we are seeing an increasing number of intellectuals come out in support of it in one form or another. This is a real threat. The value of a show like this is in trying to understand where that's all coming from, and what it is the people who hold these views actually want, why they want it? What are the ideas that are leading them to it or providing support for it?I don't want this to be a superficial understanding or a dismissive or they're all just evil kind of way because that's easy and ultimately uninteresting. My goal is to really try to understand them on their own terms and then to critique it from the perspective of the value of radical liberty.Shikha: That's exactly right, Aaron. That's why I'm excited that you are doing this. I think this is going to be a great podcast. As you've said, the plan is to understand this illiberalism and its appeal at every level, psychological, social, political. I'm sure you will be having guests that address all of it. Marxism makes this distinction between theory and praxis. You and I, we both have a penchant for an intellectual understanding of things. We like to understand things at a theoretical level, it's almost an end in itself. But in this case, we cannot fight this phenomenon without actually understanding it. [On the praxis side], The UnPopulist is not going to shy away calling the right reactionary and taking on specific political figures who are behaving in an illiberal fashion. It’s not going to shy away from taking sides. We know what we are opposing. But to me the theory of Reactionary Minds is going to inform the praxis of The UnPopulist. So there is a yin and yang here that I’m super excited about. I really look forward to this.Copyright © The UnPopulist, 2022. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

I am very excited to announce that on May 6, Friday, The UnPopulist will roll out a new feature, a monthly podcast hosted by Aaron Ross Powell called Reactionary Minds.The series will open with a wide-ranging conversation between Aaron and yours truly that takes stock of the world as it is right now — and how this podcast will advance the mission of The UnPopulist, defending liberal principles — pluralism, toleration, freedom — from the resurgent threat of populist authoritarianism here and abroad. Neutralizing this threat requires the readiness to call out its protagonists whether Viktor Orban in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India or Donald Trump in the United States. But it also requires understanding the allure of their illiberal ideologies on their own terms. Why are people so ready to throw in their lot with them despite the extraordinary success of liberal and open polities to deliver peace and prosperity? That is the task Reactionary Minds will take on.There is no better person for the job than Aaron Ross Powell. A classical liberal and a veteran podcaster, he is the founder of Libertarianism.org. He also hosts his own podcast (Re)Imagining Liberty. He will conduct in-depth conversations with psychologists, sociologists, economists, political scientists and more who’ve been studying the rise of the illiberal ideologies and ideologues. In the spirit of open debate and discussion, he might occasionally invite the ideologues themselves.Stay tuned but sign up today for this exciting new podcast.Shikha DalmiaCopyright © The UnPopulist, 2022. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net