The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across the Political Divides by Arnold Kling

Author:Arnold Kling
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: bethani, ian, theron, ronda, Hannah, Kelsey, audiobook, pay_royalty_done, Art_Recommend_adult, Sierra_Tyler, Willa_Colombia, jesse, brenden
ISBN: 9781944424466
Publisher: Cato Institute
Published: 2017-05-09T07:00:00+00:00

11

Donald Trump and the Three-Axes Model

Donald Trump shook up the political landscape. In hindsight, one can say that he capitalized on a public mood of suspicion toward established elites and what is called the “liberal international order.”

In his important book The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri points out that the latest communications media have empowered new popular movements everywhere, from the Arab Spring to Brexit. Gurri paints a picture of a nihilistic public, offended by what they see as a corrupt and inept ruling class.

It is well to recall that in the United States, the electorate has long had an ornery streak. Voters frequently hop on bandwagons to support relatively inexperienced presidential candidates running against Washington veterans: Jimmy Carter vs. Gerald Ford in 1976, Ronald Reagan vs. Carter in 1980, Bill Clinton vs. George H. W. Bush in 1992, Barack Obama’s primary challenge against Hillary Clinton in 2008, and Obama vs. John McCain in 2008.

In only one presidential election in my lifetime has a candidate with considerable Washington experience defeated an outsider. That was in 1988, when the elder Bush trounced former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis.

One can see Trump’s defeat of Clinton as more typical of the pattern in which voters prefer political innocence to experience. It seems that a significant segment of the American public views Washington as corrupt and alien. Clinton’s experience may well have been a handicap. Many Americans instead are enamored of the ideal of the amateur citizen-crusader.

Yet Trump was an extreme case. Unlike any previous successful outsider candidate, he gained almost no endorsements from major party figures in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. And unlike Obama, for example, Trump had to fight through mostly negative media coverage.

To the extent that one can find a coherent theme to the public’s revolt that brought Trump to Washington, it would appear to be one of trying to minimize America’s exposure to globalization. In the 2017 edition of this book, and drawing on David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, I suggested that Trump mobilized voters who were anti-Bobo. The Bobos are the cosmopolitan “bourgeois bohemians,” Brooks’s term for the contemporary American elite, who seem more at home in Prague than in Peoria.

In his book, published in 2000, Brooks illustrated elite taste by listing some prominent individuals whom he believed the Bobos regarded as insufficiently intellectual to merit respect. First among those was Donald Trump. Today, many Bobos despise Trump and his supporters, and the feeling is mutual.

A cosmopolitan vs. nationalist conflict has emerged in other countries as well. Italians elected a government consisting of two parties that disagree on virtually everything other than opposition to the cosmopolitan elite. Nationalist, anti-elite sentiment also has found expression in elections in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Eastern Europe.

Thus, the triumph of Donald Trump probably should not be viewed as a victory for purely traditional conservatism. Instead, the Trump coalition added some anti-cosmopolitan swing votes to those of traditional conservatives, even as the candidate alienated a few of the more cosmopolitan conservatives.

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