By Peter Oliver
The unshakable political support that Donald Trump continues to enjoy has liberals scratching their heads, if not tearing their hair out. How could such a pathologically mendacious, morally vacuous, intellectually lazy charlatan still be regarded favorably by roughly 40 percent of the U.S. population?
For one possible explanation, let me start with a personal anecdote. In 1994, I was invited to the annual meeting of Colorado Ski Country USA, where I was to receive the Lowell Thomas Award for journalism. Just before I came up to the stage to accept the award, Jack Kemp, then a presidential candidate and later the 1996 vice-presidential running mate of Bob Dole, delivered the meeting’s keynote address. In it, he railed against the cultural and economic hegemony of “Ivy-League-educated liberals from the Northeast.” Upon my award acceptance, I refrained from revealing that I fit Kemp’s characterization exactly.
Kemp was tapping into a vein of deep resentment toward coastal elites that has long festered in America’s South and heartland. The perception: Elites, abetted by an elitist media, hold the reins of power, wielding that power against honest, hard-working, non-elitist middle Americans. They do so with an arrogant superciliousness, believing themselves to be smarter, morally purer, and, simply, better than the rest of America.
Kemp’s anti-elitism wasn’t part of a new political strategy. Richard Nixon also courted the so-called silent majority, those ordinary Americans believed to be treated with disregard, even contempt, by influencers in places like New York, Washington and Los Angeles. Invisible in their silent ordinariness, these were people, Nixon figured, who desperately wanted a seat at the political table.
Kemp and Nixon might have exploited anti-elitism, but Trump has gone further, inciting the anger driven by anti-elitist sentiment. Vilifying elites at every turn, Trump gives his followers license to stomp their feet and scream, like Howard Beale in the movie “Network,” “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.” He has identified the enemy, and he makes it fun, too; Trump rallies are raucously in-your-face celebrations of anti-elitism.
Here at last was a leader willing to eschew the game of niceties played by elitist politicians, liberals and conservatives alike. (When respected Republicans like Colin Powell or Mitt Romney or Michael Steele condemn Trump, they do little to tip the political scale. They are simply elitists, Republican-style.) Trump encourages his followers to revel in their disdain for institutional elitism: the conspiratorial deep state of career public servants, the self-proclaimed “experts” in any field, and especially the media. His anti-science approach to the pandemic and climate change might seem to arise, catastrophically, from willful ignorance, but it’s all good with his base; science and research are, after all, the products of academia, the shining citadel of elitism.
A lot of this is pocketbook stuff, based on a kind of zero-sum calculation. The thinking is that when more federal dollars are directed toward the needs of minorities or populous cities, fewer dollars go the needs of ordinary Americans. Real racism might indeed infect Trumpism, but most anti-minority sentiment arises from a feeling that bleeding-heart elites historically favor minorities over equally needy whites.
It matters little if what Trump says is childish, imbecilic, mean-spirited, manipulative, blatantly false, or all of the above. If it gets those Ivy-League-educated liberals hot and bothered, the base loves it. The silent majority finally has a champion getting under the skin of the elitist bullies.
The mystifying thing about Trump’s appeal to middle America is not his successful politicization of anti-elitism. It is that Trump himself is not only a card-carrying member of the coastal elite but has spent a lifetime flamboyantly promoting elitist culture. Admittedly, his method is often farcically rococo – ostentatious buildings, gilded toilets, beautiful women as props, the baubles of the rich and famous. His whole business model has been built on grandiosity, stomping on the American ordinariness that is a badge of honor for his base. I suspect that Trump himself, for years a political chameleon, is surprised that this cohort of ordinariness, representing his social and cultural antipodes, is the constituency that has finally transformed him from a blowhard in his own political sideshow to the most powerful politician in the world.
Nixon or Kemp, perhaps constrained by a modicum of decency, went only so far. Not Trump. He has put a political match to the tinder of anti-elitist resentment and turned it into a pyre of bitterness and anger. Now that the fire is burning red-hot, the incendiary ideas of fringe groups (QAnon, Charlottesville, Richard Spencer, etc.) are easily consumed in the conflagration. It is a hideously confrontational shade of American politics, but regardless of who wins in November, expect it to endure for a while.
Peter Oliver lives in Warren.
