Donald Trump and the Crisis of American Populism<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In the 1960s William F. Buckley famously quipped that he'd rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston phone book than by Harvard's\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/2016\/01\/donald-trump-and-the-crisis-of-american-populism\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Donald Trump and the Crisis of American Populism\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In the 1960s William F. 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{"id":16934,"date":"2016-01-05T00:10:24","date_gmt":"2016-01-05T04:10:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/?p=16934"},"modified":"2016-01-04T11:45:03","modified_gmt":"2016-01-04T15:45:03","slug":"donald-trump-and-the-crisis-of-american-populism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/2016\/01\/donald-trump-and-the-crisis-of-american-populism\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump and the Crisis of American Populism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I know, there\u2019s usually nothing new under the sun, and hopefully we will only look back on Trump\u2019s candidacy as a repeat performance of segregationist George Wallace\u2019s formidable but unsuccessful 1968 campaign. The fact is, a segment of the American electorate has a taste for race-baiting and religious bigotry. Those themes have popped up with regularity in the history of American politics.<\/p>\n

But the Republican party has some serious soul-searching to do, no matter who gets the nomination. Yes, there are serious candidates in the GOP primary this year. But the party has split between Romneyesque \u201c47 percent\u201d Wall Street types, and working-folks populist types like Sarah Palin. George W. Bush was the last consensus GOP presidential candidate, because he had the blessing of both factions with his aristocratic lineage and faux-working man Texas airs.<\/p>\n

The populist wing has produced its share of once-promising candidates, including Palin and Mike Huckabee. After her remarkable 2008 GOP convention speech, Palin\u2019s credibility dropped like a rock. She has appropriately become a fading reality-show star and devotional author<\/a>. As I noted last summer at the Washington Post<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0Huckabee, like Palin, squandered a strong showing in 2008 by becoming a fixture at Fox News Channel. Huckabee cozied up with discredited history writer and GOP activist David Barton, opining that \u201call Americans [should] be forced \u2014 forced at gunpoint no less \u2014 \u00a0to listen to every David Barton message.\u201d Soon thereafter Thomas Nelson Publishers had to withdraw Barton\u2019s\u00a0The Jefferson Lies<\/em>\u00a0from circulation because its contents were so embarrassing. (Ted Cruz has more directly cozied up to Barton, who is now the head of Cruz\u2019s Super PAC, a fact that has gone almost unnoticed in the media.) <\/span><\/p>\n

Signs of the GOP populist wing\u2019s influence are everywhere. They are behind the enduring success of conservative talk radio stalwarts like Rush Limbaugh, they buy Ann Coulter\u2019s books by the millions, and they put Fox News luminaries like Bill O\u2019Reilly and Brian Kilmeade at the top of the New York Times<\/em> bestseller list. And their new champion is Trump.<\/span><\/p>\n

I would love<\/em> to see a GOP candidate emerge who is not beholden to the Chamber of Commerce wing, and who really<\/em> cares about the plight of working-class folks. Someone who understands the need for family-friendly reforms<\/a>, who recognizes the ever-wider gulf between the haves and have-nots in America, and who is serious about national security and terrorism, but who is not eager to keep sending our working-class sons and daughters off to shoulder the burdens of interminable wars.<\/p>\n

The problem is that I\u2019m not sure there is a constituency for such a candidate in the GOP. Too many rank-and-file GOP voters, Fox News watchers (in spite of Trump\u2019s faux-contentiousness with the network), and talk radio listeners don\u2019t want an honest-to-goodness friend of working people. They prefer bombast, misogyny, and more racial animosity.<\/p>\n

It remains to be seen if the populist or the Wall Street wing will win this time. (If Trump wins the nomination, we\u2019ll have the worst of both worlds \u2013 a pretend populist who\u2019s really a Wall Streeter!) Either way, it seems likely that the result will be a Hillary Clinton presidency.<\/p>\n

[<\/span>Friends, you can\u00a0<\/em>sign up here<\/a><\/em>\u00a0for my Thomas S. Kidd author\u00a0newsletter.\u00a0Each newsletter will update you\u00a0on what\u2019s happening in my writing and offer thoughts on the best practices for productivity. It will contain unique material available only to subscribers, and each will help you keep up with my blog posts, books, and other items from around the web. Your e-mail information will never be\u00a0shared. Thanks!<\/em>]<\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"