In one of the infinite parallel universes entertained by theoretical physics, the United States is identical to the one we know on our own Earth. Except for one crucial difference: in place of its immovable party duopoly of Democrats and Republicans, this other country – call it US-Prime – boasts many more factions that routinely and successfully jockey for power.
Like on our Earth, two parties predominate: the Progressives, mainly representing urban professionals and technocrats; and the New Whigs, the vehicle of mildly conservative suburban affluence. But neither can ever clinch sufficient votes to govern alone. More often than not, the Progressives and the Whigs have to form grand coalitions with each other, or else partner with one or more of several smaller factions. These, among others, include the Justice Party (a left tendency with its base in the professoriate and elements of the organised working class); the Greens (the name gives it away); and Faith and Soil (a regional farmers’ movement, based in the South and Midwest, which exists to counter the Greens’ climate initiatives).
Then there are the Sons of Buchanan – the name is a reference to the 1990s populist firebrand Pat Buchanan – known popularly as “the Sons”. Founded by a disaffected cryptocurrency baron, the Sons of Buchanan give voice to the non-union working class and the stressed lower middle classes. Their policy mix blends protectionism, libertarianism and immigration restrictionism; their rhetoric at times edges into racism and conspiracism. Though the Sons garner a significant plurality of ballots each time voters head to the polls, they have yet to translate their agenda into public policy. This is because US-Prime’s political system allows the other parties to contrive to lock the Sons out of power.
The result is a great deal of stability in US-Prime politics. Unlike with American politics in our world, US-Prime never took a sharp populist turn. But this comes at a high price: political scientists, even those of a liberal bent, increasingly question the democratic legitimacy of a system that permanently shuts out the preferences of nearly half of the populace. Academic gripes aside, the system is haunted by the fear that the Sons will one day secure majority power, perhaps amid some financial crisis. They would then avenge themselves by implementing the angriest, most radical version of their politics.
Substitute any number of European political parties for the fake ones above, and the “US-Prime” of my thought experiment could easily double as a description of politics across much of Europe today in the era of rising national populist movements. The Sons’ predicament isn’t unlike those of Britain’s Reform, Alternative for Germany, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and Vox in Spain. While there are exceptions – the Sweden Democrats are in a governing coalition – the general pattern has hardened to a remarkable degree: populists win votes, but they aren’t allowed to govern.
Then there is the real-world United States. Utterly defying the pattern, the Republicans – once the party of suburban affluence, of free markets and social conservatism – has morphed into a populist vehicle. Following Donald Trump’s takeover beginning in 2015, the party has won over a significant share of the non-college majority, consolidating the white lower middle class and the “small-time rich” while making inroads among working-class people of colour. And unlike the Sons on US-Prime, the GOP can win and wield national power.
The Trumpian Republican Party has achieved this by addressing itself to a sector of the electorate whose preferences had long gone unfulfilled. These are Americans who harbour protectionist or welfarist views on the economy even as they are alienated from most institutions. They love the Social Security Administration but hate “the admin state”. And they are culturally but not socially conservative – meaning that they tend to be more concerned with preserving their community’s demographic and religious identity than upholding Christian moral standards, which often elude their own messy lives.
With its intuitive genius, the American political system has managed to accommodate a combination of impulses that has so far been thwarted by the mainstream across much of the developed world. In bringing about this epochal transformation, Trump has made the GOP more popular – and, in some respects, more moderate – than it was before 2016, even as he has also normalised racial insults and crackpot views.
The American founders hated political parties. The Federalist Papers warned against “factions”: organised interests threatening to unravel self-government. That prospect could be forestalled so long as the privilege of rule was reserved to those blessed with property, people who had an interest in the preservation of “liberty” and weren’t vulnerable to demagogic appeals.
But it didn’t take long for the young republic to spin off factions, with local Democratic-Republican clubs gradually challenging the regency of the propertied quasi-aristocracy. Under Andrew Jackson in the late 1820s, this uprising gelled into the modern Democratic Party and expanded the franchise to property-less white men (even as, in some cases, black men were disenfranchised in the bargains struck between rich and poor whites).
The modern Republican Party took shape a little later, in the years immediately before the Civil War, as the vehicle of anti-slavery Whigs united with Democrats fed up with their own party’s subservience to the Southern slavocracy. It was the new party of the entrepreneurial class, reflecting the hard-won lesson that old-school aristocratic themes were far less useful at the ballot box than the language of self-help and aspiration.
In that era of early party formation, and ever since, there have always been third parties in the United States: from the Anti-Masonic Party to the Know-Nothings, the Populist Party to the Farmer-Labor Party, Bull Moose to Ralph Nader’s Greens. Some of these would prove hugely consequential, pioneering policies later taken up by the two major parties. But none managed to overthrow the duopoly of Democrats and Republicans.
America’s small-c constitution – the complex of rules and practices that give effect to the capital-C Constitution – upholds the duopoly in a thousand little ways. The result is that American political factions have to work within one of two large coalitions of class-based, regional and ideological interests. Today’s Democrats encompass a diverse cross-section of high capital, much of the professional classes, and a resilient legacy core of the labour and civil rights movements.
A similar capaciousness and susceptibility to realignment has made possible Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party. Notwithstanding the gripes of Never Trump conservatives, Trump revivified a GOP whose old agenda had effectively rendered it deeply unpopular.
Put another way, precisely what appears as the duopoly’s rigidity, the impossibly high bar it imposes on third parties, also makes possible a great deal of flexibility within the two major parties. If there is a genuinely popular political demand “out there” in the electorate, chances are, it will get translated into a governing agenda. The pre-Trump GOP of 2015-16 was a perfect vehicle for the latest realignment precisely because few outside its donor and intellectual circles wanted what it used to offer: futile regime-change wars, entitlement cuts and evangelical moral hectoring. Already in the earlier Tea Party movement there were signs of brewing populist discontent with the GOP mainstream (though those rebellious energies were soon channelled into conventional conservative grooves).
Yet even as it invites popular impulses to express themselves in the party system, the duopoly dilutes and moderates them. For one thing, successful partisan actors (including those mounting hostile takeovers) must situate their politics within the traditions of the party they’ve adopted. For another, the various impulses and interests housed within each party are forced by necessity to bargain and compromise. Winning national power demands further moderation. The Trumpism of 2024 reflects all these pressures.
Start with the question of party traditions. Trump couldn’t claim a lineage from the neoliberal or neoconservative tendency that dominated the Republican Party from the age of Reagan through the Obama years. Instead, in a move little noticed or commented upon, Trump restored the GOP’s Eisenhower-Nixon tradition. The pillars of that tradition are relative restraint in foreign policy and peace with the entitlement state.
One couldn’t but hear echoes of Richard Nixon when, in 2016, Trump told local radio in Wisconsin (home to the arch-libertarian Paul Ryan, then House speaker): “I’m not going to cut” Social Security, “and I’m not going to raise ages, and I’m not going to do all of the things that [Republicans] want to do.” Likewise, there is something deeply Nixonian about Trump reportedly praising Hitler for doing “some good things” – even as he proclaims that “the blacks” love him and holds rallies in the Bronx that are heavily attended by Hasidic Jews and black and brown audiences not usually seen at Republican events.
All this should put to rest the illusion that the GOP would be more popular but for the Orange Man. There is no denying that Trump’s rhetoric and behaviour – especially the 2020 election denialism that helped fuel the 6 January riot at the Capitol in which six people died – are disturbingly extreme. But on the policy front, the old Bush-Cheney consensus was far more extreme and unpalatable to all but a narrow sliver of the populace.
Bringing in more secular-minded voters has also moderated the party’s social stances. Having helped overturn Roe vs Wade by installing a conservative Supreme Court majority, today’s Trump can’t run away fast enough from an anti-abortion movement deeply unpopular at the polls (losing popular referendums in even deep-red states). The Trump-Vance campaign now also promises to publicly fund in-vitro fertilisation, a procedure prohibited by conservative Christian theology.
The typical “conservative” is no longer a five-decades-of-the-Rosary-a-day Catholic, but a middle-income, exurban American male with an associate’s degree who supports same-sex marriage; who believes women have a right to abortion up to a certain point (but not as far as Democrats would go); who thinks immigration levels are too high and “the gender stuff” has gone “too far”.
Many American intellectuals and pundits wish we inhabited something like US-Prime, where the populists are permanently and more or less openly suppressed. But that is not the system the US political tradition has bequeathed to Americans.
The American party system allows populists to stage the political freakshows characteristic of their movement, and leaves it up to voters to decide whether they can tolerate such vulgarity and ugliness. A clear example in Trump’s case was his recent rally at Madison Square Garden, at which a comedian mocked the US territory of Puerto Rico as “an island of garbage”, while Tucker Carlson falsely described Kamala Harris as a “Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor”. The racist jibes, amplified on Spanish-language media, followed soon after Trump’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, in which the former president yet again ranted about having won the 2020 election.
Usually, it’s the opposing party that dishes dirt as a way to sink a nominee’s chances at the 11th hour, known as the October surprise. Trump’s disastrous New York rally might amount to a case of a party mounting an October surprise against itself. Or it could be that, as with countless earlier instances, “Teflon Don” and his voters will brush off media condemnation, sending him back to the Oval Office.
Either way, there is much to be said for a democratic model that invites populists inside, softening them or disciplining them when they misbehave (as happened to Trump during his first term). We should be grateful for release valves for public sentiment – especially on issues of immigration and integration – that are elsewhere bottled up. Given American history, right-wing populism in the US would be a lot more terrifying were it not for the pressure valves built into the party system.
[See also: Has Kamala Harris blown it?]
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This article appears in the 30 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, American Horror Story