The Failure Of American Institutions, Not Of Conservatism, Made Donald Trump…

Source: The Federalist | October 25, 2016 | Ben Domenech

The Failure Of American Institutions, Not Of Conservatism, Made Donald Trump Possible

Trumpism is not the same as populism or the New Right. . . It is what happens when no one trusts anyone any more.

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This strikes me as a more accurate description of Trumpism, a description of the right pre-Buckley and pre-Reagan. Its particular form is not a direct consequence of the failure of conservative intellectuals, nor even of the conservative movement. Those failures exist and are manifest, of course, but in seeking root causes we shouldn’t fall into that trap, because this is about something much bigger.

From Reagan through George W. Bush, conservatives largely agreed on the traditional three-legged stool of the fusionist GOP: national defense, limited government, family values. All of that blew up in the aftermath of the Bush years. Conservative intellectuals perceive what’s happening now as a crisis because the political universe has changed so dramatically thanks to Iraq, the Wall Street meltdown, and the lackluster growth that’s followed. But a good part of that crisis mentality could be due to the fact that they still haven’t come to grips with how much the Bush presidency damaged perceptions of conservatism, even among Republicans, and made the old frame of fusionism impossible.

Many Americans today are very angry about 1) lost jobs, lost wars, lost money, broken families, broken neighborhoods, broken government, thought and speech policing, and 2) what they view as an aristocratic class who rigs the system and doesn’t care about any of these issues, and thinks people who do care are dumb. Trump won because he pretended to respect the people who care about 1), and framed those who opposed him as being part of 2). His aggressive tone made up for years of supporting all sorts of policies the old fusionist frame never would have allowed. And he’s still doing that even now.

Ask yourself why so many of Trump’s voters, even the middle class ones, are willing to listen when he says even something as big as a presidential election can be rigged against them. All this is happening because American society is in collapse, and no one trusts institutions or one another. It is due to the failure of government institutions, largely stood up by the progressive left, to live up to their promises of offering real economic security and education and the promise of a better life. It is due to the failure of corporate institutions, who have warped America’s capitalist system to benefit themselves at the expense of others. It is due to the failure of cultural institutions, like the church and community organizations, to help the people make sense of an anxious age.

The point is that while conservative intellectuals have their problems, this is much bigger than anything having to do with conservative intellectuals. The aims of conservatives, whether they are the “populist” or “intellectual” sort (an unsatisfying frame, given that Reagan was both), depends on a certain level of societal flourishing. As Yuval Levin writes in The Fractured Republic:

Our highly individualist, liberationist idea of liberty is possible only because we presuppose the existence of a human being and citizen capable of handling a remarkably high degree of freedom and responsibility. We do not often enough reflect on how extraordinary it is that our society contains such people.

There is a reason progressives spent half a century slowly eroding society’s pillars to the point where the people produced by our families, communities and schools no longer desire this, a point at which a reversion to this form of reactionary nationalism is possible. Trumpism is not the same as populism or the New Right, and it speaks to something much worse than an intellectual crisis. It is what happens when no one trusts anyone any more.

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