As the Trump bandwagon continues its lamentable progress across the American landscape, bedecked in virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric, political observers in the United States have begun assembling an intriguing account of the nature of his political appeal, one which resonates with the European experience of right-populism. Donald Trump’s blustering style is, itself, no innovation. Nor is his vitriolic hostility to immigration, which has marked American politics off and on since at least the 1850s. What makes Trump interesting is that his emergence marks the first clear example in the United States of the sort of lower-class “welfare chauvinism” that increasingly marks European right-populism. Here, I argue that Trump’s support is shaped by the structure of the Republican base, and consider how the Trump phenomenon resembles and differs from European right-populist movements.
There is a particular school of thought in the United States about the Republican coalition, perhaps most associated with the author Thomas Frank and his What’s The Matter With Kansas?. Frank’s analysis, which is current in the US, describes the Republican Party as a coalition between wealthy neoliberal elites, mainly concerned with depressing tax rates and limiting government spending and regulation, and lower-income white voters. Though their economic interests clearly diverge, Frank argued that they were bound by appeals to an ostensibly shared social conservatism and aggressive nationalism, what political scientists might describe as “post-materialist” appeals of a “right-authoritarian” type.
Perhaps more important than even shared religious or cultural values, though, was and is a certain view of the American body politic. American politics can be conceived as a battle between those with a broad conception of who belongs in the American national community, and those who believe – implicitly or explicitly – that only whiteness confers true citizenship. As Sean Wilentz, Stephanie McCurry and others have noted, the pre-Civil War South explicitly based citizenship on race. It was the only way to reconcile the egalitarianism inherent in universal manhood suffrage – adopted in most parts of the South in the early 19th century – with the deep inequalities in class and income prevalent among white Southerners in a semi-feudal plantation economy. Equality was premised on skin colour, and the exclusion and subjection of African-Americans was crucial to delimiting the political community. That conception of American citizenship has been attenuated over time, but never truly died, and the Southern whites who embraced it defected from the Democrats to the Republicans in the late 20th century in protest of Kennedy and Johnson’s embrace of civil rights.
In this interpretation, the neoliberal elites in the Republican Party have a dense network of shared cultural and racial identities – many of them post-materialist – that allows them to rally lower-income voters against redistributive or statist policies. They can demonise the Democratic elites who propose them as out-of-touch intellectuals or deviants, who threaten heartland social values (as Domenico Losurdo notes, there’s a long history in conservatism of portraying intellectuals as dangerous, rootless aliens). Perhaps more potently, they can demonise nonwhites, and paint welfare and progressive taxation as an unjust redistribution of resources to undeserving nonwhites. These bonds explain Frank’s observation that working- and middle-class American whites “vote against their interests.”
These sorts of cross-class alliances can be found in European politics as well, past and future. One contemporary example would be the Unionist parties in Northern Ireland; until the late 20th century, sectarianism also produced a strong Protestant working-class constituency for the Conservatives in parts of Scotland. Christian democracy included Catholic labour movements in several countries, bonded in a hierarchy with parts of capital. More recently, the decline of industrial working classes, greater social fragmentation and individualism, and the discrediting of social democracy and other Marxist philosophies, has created more room for orthodox right-wing parties to fish for working-class voters, while preaching a neoliberalism very similar to the orthodox Reaganite variety.
What is new, at least for the American scene, is Trump’s public abandonment of at least some of the free-market, supply-side dogmas that have barely been challenged in the Republican Party for at least the last twenty years. Trump has loudly promisedprotectionism, portraying globalization as a rigged game that demeans and diminishes the United States. Perhaps more shockingly in the context of the American right, he has called for more progressive taxation, specifically citing the example of hedge-fund managers benefiting from low tax rates on certain kinds of earnings (the marginal capital gains tax rate in the US in 20 percent; the marginal federal income tax rate is 39.6 percent, excluding certain surcharges for Obamacare). Trump is marrying a nativist, nationalist, anti-Washington (s)creed with a call for social justice and redistribution … but only for deserving Americans, who are implicitly white Americans (or at least not undocumented immigrants, or those ethnically similar thereto).
It is Trump’s combination of “welfare chauvinism” and redistributionist politics with nationalist appeals that makes his story so relevant to those of us who study European politics. Right-populist parties in Europe are almost always protectionist, a sentiment often expressed through their Euroscepticism. Many are also openly in favour of increasing or protecting social spending, if only for the correct ethnicity. Take the Danish People’s Party. During and after the 2015 general election, the People’s Party sought more generous provision for social spending, in contrast to the largest mainstream right-wing party, the Liberals (Venstre). But once the Liberals took office in a minority government, all four right-wing parties cooperated in cutting asylum-seekers’ benefits. There are admittedly several right-populist parties whose leaders espouse neoliberal or classical-liberal policies, such as the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and the Norwegian Progress Party, but their supportersusually ignore these positions and unite around a shared anti-elitism. Even the claim that Trump’s wealth grants him independence has been heard before – much the same was said about Silvio Berlusconi, who, on an individual level, is probably the European politician Trump most resembles.
Nevertheless, there are key differences between the Trump movement and European right-populists. For starters, the US has no significant heritage of fascism, so Trump and his movement do not carry this stigma which still attaches to some European parties of the far right (the Front National, the Freedom Party of Austria and the Sweden Democrats, for example). European conservative camps are also sometimes divided between social liberals and social conservatives – for example, the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom saw significant internal dissension when David Cameron pushed for the legalization of gay marriage (enacted in 2013), which encouraged some social conservatives to defect to UKIP. The Republican Party no long has a significant socially liberal wing.
Another key difference is the source of Trump’s support. In Europe, right-populists derive votes not only from other right-wing parties, but often from the left. Europeans who once had industrial jobs embedded in working-class structures, institutions and ideologies no longer have any of these structures; the social democratic parties they once voted for now embrace neoliberalism, social liberalism and progressive cosmopolitan elites. Their jobs are mostly gone. So they vote for the populist right, which promises some of the old industrialist and welfarist policies while battling the left-liberal elites and the immigrants, with ethno-nationalism replacing socialism as the binding creed.
The United States has also seen the decline of labour unions, and Trump seems to be appealing to these “modernization losers,” but it never had a politics of class or of socialism. So lower-income white voters had before move to the Republican camp on the grounds of race or post-materialist concerns. Race has anyway traditionally been a much more salient cleavage in the political system than class. Thus, Trump’s movement draws exclusively from the Republican camp.
The racial aspect of American right-populism is not unique to America per se. The British National Party once limited membership solely to white Britons. Andrew Hussey claimed that the relationship between France and its North African immigrants remained essentially colonial. But whiteness has only rarely been a marker of citizenship in Europe itself (unlike in European colonies) – this sort of color bar is essentially a feature of settler societies. Most right-populists are as hostile to white immigrants from Eastern Europe as they are to nonwhite immigrants from beyond Europe. It is unclear whether ethno-nationalism has a larger constituency in the American electorate than it does in Europe, and thus whether Trump might be able to appeal to a larger pool of voters than a comparable right-populist movement. What is unique about the United States is that this racially constructed view of American national identity and belonging has specific regional bastions, which isn’t the case in most European states.
The final – and perhaps most obvious – difference between the Trump movement and European right-populism is that Trump’s movement is playing out within the Republican Party itself; no new party has developed. Many books have been written explaining why the United States has but two major parties – this one is good – but suffice it to say that no third party has had more than passing success since the current party system developed just before the Civil War, 150 years ago. If a welfare-chauvinist, right-populist party takes its place in the American party system, it will be the Republican Party.
There can be few more American figures than the populist huckster. One almost expects him to don a seersucker suit and mount a soapbox – perhaps in a bid to sell us a monorail. But Trump’s moment is taking American politics in a European direction, and demonstrating how the effects of globalization are causing similar dynamics of alienation and revolt across the First World, albeit expressed through different structures in the United States.
Ben Margulies is was recently awarded his doctorate at the University of Essex for a thesis on liberal political parties. He has recently published articles in the Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica and Comparative European Politics.
Image: Gage Skidmore CC BY-NC
