The Roots of Trump-Style Politics

David Brooks

My favorite op-ed columnist David Brooks writes in "The Coming War on Business" that everything Donald Trump stands for was presaged some decades back by an essayist/cultural critic named Sam Francis. Brooks knew Francis when the two of them worked at the Washington Times in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Francis opined that:

• Globalization was screwing Middle America.
• The Republican and conservative establishment did not understand what was happening.
• Politics was no longer about left versus right. Instead, a series of smaller conflicts — religious versus secular, nationalist versus globalist, white versus nonwhite — were all merging into a larger polarity, ruling class versus Middle America.

Pat Buchanan

Pat Buchanan shared these views when he ran unsuccessfully for president in the 1996 Republican primaries. But this version of populism and nationalism wasn't yet ready for prime time. By 2016, it was ready. Donald Trump now sits in the White House as our president.

Brooks quotes Francis:

Middle American groups are more and more coming to perceive their exploitation at the hands of the dominant elites. The exploitation works on several fronts — economically, by hypertaxation and the design of a globalized economy dependent on exports and services in place of manufacturing; culturally, by the managed destruction of Middle American norms and institutions; and politically, by the regimentation of Middle Americans under the federal leviathan.

Globalization, in this view, is what was killing American farms and blue-collar manufacturing jobs. That's why the remedy needed to be nationalism. Francis: "A nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives. The sooner it comes the better."

So, what does our future look like now? Brooks posits two alternatives, the first bad and the second good:

1. That "Trump may not be the culmination, but merely a way station toward an even purer populism." That is, Trump's nominal pro-business stance will fall away, and "the next populism will ... take his ethnic nationalism and add an anti-corporate, anti-tech layer. Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple stand for everything Francis hated — economically, culturally, demographically and nationalistically."
2. Or, that a "cancer [will] destroy Trumpism" — the particular cancer called racism. Francis was a racist who wrote, "The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people."

I vote for option #2. If this country is to be saved from the Trumpian politics of nationalism and an outlook based on the principle of us-versus-them aggression, it seems to me it can only be because our willingness to set aside the original sin of America — slavery, with its aftermath of ongoing racial disharmony — ironically provides the ultimate salvific impetus.

This is why the removal of Confederate memorials and statues is such a marvelous sign ...