"Daisy Arabella Only"

I ‘There are some things that you just can’t imagine happening in your life. This is one of them.’ So spoke Mitt Romney on 2 February 2012, at the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. We can reasonably infer that his statement of disbelief contained some recognition of the situation’s inherent absurdity. The leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination had flown to Las Vegas to receive the blessing of a famous hotel and casino mogul, tabloid king, marketer of eponymous steaks, vodka, a university, and a reality-TV programme in which he intoned ‘you’re fired’, from a leather armchair, for 14 seasons.

At the time, however, Donald Trump was also associated with an important political idea: that Barack Obama did not legitimately occupy the office of the presidency. The reason, never coherently stated, was nonetheless obvious. Trump mouthed functional gibberish about a missing birth certificate, but the only salient truths about the president were that his skin was black and his African father had been born a Muslim. Romney’s own father, George, had been governor of Michigan, had allied himself with Martin Luther King, Jr, had refused to support Barry Goldwater in 1964 because of Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act, and ran for president in 1968 as a representative of the liberal- to-moderate Republicanism that used to thrive in the North. Mitt clearly

Closing Argument

Donald Trump’s America

Dana H. Allin

Dana H. Allin is Editor of Survival, and Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy and Transatlantic Affairs at the IISS. Portions of this closing argument previously appeared on the Survival editors’ blog, ‘Politics and Strategy’.

Survival | vol. 58 no. 2 | April–May 2016 | pp. 221–228 DOI 10.1080/00396338.2016.1161919

222 | Dana H. Allin

revered his father and has striven to emulate his essential decency, and so we should charitably assume that, in embracing the endorsement of a noxious purveyor of racist conspiracy theory, he had decided that there are trade-offs in life necessary for advancing the conservative political ideals in which he believes.

Four years later, on 3 March 2016, Romney delivered a speech in Salt Lake City, Utah. This time he called Donald Trump a ‘con man, a fake … a phony, a fraud’.1 Now something unimaginable really was happening. Trump had won ten out of 15 state nominating contests, and looked well on his way to winning the Republican Party nomination for president. Leading Republicans were speaking seriously of the end of the party of Abraham Lincoln – not just an aesthetic or moral demise, but its actual collapse. The night of Romney’s speech, on the Republican candidates’ debate stage in Detroit, Trump assured his supporters and other viewers that there was ‘no problem’ with the size of his penis.2 This was in the first ten minutes of the proceedings, which did not become more edifying as the night progressed.

II In the film of national life, this is the dream sequence. It is a dream from which America has been struggling, in leaden panic, to wake itself since sometime last summer. Or it is the reality-TV version of The Great Gatsby – except that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby was truly, if shadily, self-made, not the mediocre steward of an inherited fortune; Gatsby’s strivings for lost love and green-light redemption followed a lyrical trajectory; and he was a character in a novel. As a third alternative, Robert Kagan, the neoconservative historian and public intellectual, proposes Greek myth. ‘Today’s Republican Party is our Oedipus’, Kagan wrote in late February. ‘A plague has descended on the party in the form of the most successful demagogue-charlatan in the history of U.S. politics.’3

For all of his unusual success, however, Trump is a known charac- ter in history. His American antecedents include Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Father Coughlin and George Wallace. In contemporary Europe, the late Jörg Haider of Austria’s Freedom Party offered a similar mixture of xenophobia, media savvy, appeal to middle-class anxieties, and attacks on

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the complacency and corruption of establishment political parties. Haider’s successor, Heinz-Christian Strache, ploughs the same swampy fields, as have France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter-successor Marine.

The big difference is that the European far-rightists are mainly third- party forces, challenging but not supplanting the establishment parties. Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, a Trump-like demagogue, was an exception, and both Poland and Hungary are today governed by rightist, illiberal parties. The general pattern in Western Europe, however, is that while far-right parties pose significant dangers, the mainstream has a way of uniting to fight back, as in 2002, when French socialists fell behind Jacques Chirac in the second round of voting for president rather than risk a Le Pen victory.

In an entrenched two-party system like America’s, radicalism is more likely to take hold if it takes over one of the parties. Here, too, there is pro- logue. The writer Peter Beinart has compared the Tea Party conquest of the Republican Party to what had happened to Democrats after vice president Hubert Humphrey lost narrowly to Richard Nixon in the 1968 presidential election.

Between 1968 and 1972, grassroots activists—many of them incubated in

the anti-war movement—took over the Democratic Party, state by state.

In 1970, activists rewrote Michigan’s party platform so that it advocated

reparations to North Vietnam. In Washington state, they demanded

amnesty for draft evaders and a ban on the building of missiles.4

George McGovern, the Democratic nominee in 1972, was really a con- ventional, Midwestern liberal in the mould of Humphrey – and a Second World War hero to boot – but he was driven left by the zeal of this move- ment and his own anger about the truly senseless war in Vietnam. My own most vivid memory of the campaign is how the McGovern team lost oper- ational control of the Democratic nominating convention; the candidate had to deliver his acceptance speech well after midnight, a time when few Americans were awake to hear a message that they would have tuned out anyway. Nixon, running for re-election, trounced the hapless Democrat, who lost every state except Massachusetts.

224 | Dana H. Allin

Yet the Democrats quickly re-centred themselves. Their next nominee, Jimmy Carter, came from the right of his party, although from the left of the great civil-rights struggle in his native South. After Carter lost his re- election bid to Ronald Reagan, his party put forward two sedate Northern liberals, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. And after both lost, the southerner Bill Clinton led his party in accepting that it would have to engage the national debate on terms that had been set by Reagan. This meant taking more seriously middle-class anxieties about urban crime, and it meant purging the party of residual pacifism. Clinton was lucky on both counts. Crime fell sharply for reasons mainly unrelated to policy, and he inherited a uniquely benign international environment.

It was arguably under Clinton that Republican right-wing radicalism took off. ‘Movement conservatism’ had started with Goldwater. Reagan was a creature of it, but his presidency was pragmatic. So was that of the classic New England moderate, George H.W. Bush. During Clinton’s presidency, however, the Newt Gingrich ‘Contract with America’ became the foundational text of the first Republican majority in the House of Representatives since the 1950s, promising a ‘historic change [that] would be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public’s money … the beginning of a Congress that respects the values and shares the faith of the American family’.5 Gingrich had already prom- ised a ‘civil war’ against liberals, saying in a 1988 speech to the Heritage Foundation that it ‘has to be fought with a scale and a duration and a savagery that is only true of civil wars’.6 In 1990, his political action com- mittee advised Republican candidates to ‘speak like Newt’, by describing Democrats with words such as ‘decay, traitors, radical, sick, destroy, pathetic, corrupt and shame’.7 It was an approach that gave spirit to the later impeachment proceedings against Clinton.

For their presidential nominees, Republicans still put forward conven- tional conservatives, if not moderates: Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney. Bush as president presided over the radical misadventure of Iraq, and he authorised forms of torture for terrorist suspects. Yet he later appeared, in behaviour if not words, to recognise that the torture was a mistake, and he remained faithful to other fundamental

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liberal principles. Paramount among these, he recognised and worked against the danger of an anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11.

III Barack Obama was the first Northern liberal since John F. Kennedy to win the presidency. He came to office in a time of economic crisis and near catastrophe, and with brief Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress he was able to apply the traditional liberal remedy of stimulus spending, together with financial and industrial rescue packages. In enact- ing expanded access to health insurance, he completed a liberal agenda that Harry Truman had proposed six decades earlier. He used his execu- tive powers to regulate carbon emissions and to exercise considerable discretion regarding the status of illegal immigrants. All of these meas- ures offended the philosophical principles of a Republican Party that had moved significantly to the right.

And yet – it is impossible to ignore the racial divide that coincides with these ideological disagreements and which has constituted the central drama of American history. To the poisonous legacy of slavery there is now added the cultural, economic and religious panic induced by Hispanic immigration and growth, and the association of Islam and jihad- ist terrorism. With credit to George W. Bush, the anti-Muslim backlash did not occur on his watch, but it started darkly, almost inexplicably, with the 2010 proposal in New York City for a ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ that was not really a mosque and was definitely not at Ground Zero. (Gringrich, again, took an agitating lead.) Net immigration from Latin America has, since the economic crisis, become negative, but the growth of Hispanic popula- tions continues. Lower-middle-class whites are stuck in an economy of stagnant real wages, even as the wealth of the rich multiplies prodigiously; they have experienced an increase in mortality reminiscent of post-Soviet Russia; and they are watching their country’s complexion, and even its language, change around them.

And so Republicans have had a lot of anger to ride. The right–populist Tea Party faction advanced impressively in Congress two years after Obama’s election, and two years after his re-election, installing some very

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right-wing representatives and senators, including Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. But the Tea Party has proven an inadequate vessel to contain the anger – fear and loathing, really – which has now metastasised into the phenomenon of Donald Trump.

Robert Kagan argues that his party, like Oedipus, brought the plague upon itself. Trump, he insists, is the natural consequence of the ‘party’s wild obstructionism — the repeated threats to shut down the govern- ment over policy and legislative disagreements, the persistent calls for nullification of Supreme Court decisions, the insistence that compromise was betrayal, the internal coups against party leaders who refused to join the general demolition’. Trump’s bigotry has also been ‘enabled’, Kagan insists, by the party’s attacks on immigrants, its trafficking in Islamophobia, and by its drumbeat of ‘Obama hatred, a racially tinged derangement syndrome that made any charge plausible and any opposi- tion justified’.8

Republican leaders, to their credit, are genuinely dismayed by Trump’s reckless demagoguery, which could further poison America’s already polarised politics and ruin America’s reputation. But they are also worried about his heterodox opinions, which are attracting lower-middle-class whites who resent multi-racial liberalism but who also are unmoved by conventional conservative orthodoxies: low marginal tax rates; a deci- mated welfare state; unfettered free markets including free trade; and, at least implicitly, a large supply of cheap immigrant labour.

Trump thus threatens his party’s orthodoxy and its decorum. Does he pose a broader threat? Elsewhere in this issue, Michael J. Boyle writes of a growing challenge to the post-war liberal order, citing politicians such as Trump and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, as well as the possible emerg- ing illiberal alliance of such powers as Russia, China and even India and Brazil.9 Anne Applebaum speculated recently that we could be two or three elections away from the demise of the West: with help of another terrorist attack or major scandal, Trump could become president of the United States and Marine Le Penn president of France. Britain could leave the European Union and commitment to alliances and principles could more generally fade away.10

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Who knows? As Applebaum also notes, Europe came back from ‘years of lead’, terrorism from the Red Brigades, the Red Army Faction and the IRA without, in the end, sacrificing democracy or the rule of law. The United States around the same time overcame a fierce southern backlash against the enactment of civil rights for black people. If Trump wins the nomination, Hillary Clinton appears likely to defeat him.

Some heightened vigilance seems like a good idea, however. Kagan was among the 100 Republican foreign-policy analysts and operatives who signed an open letter, circulated on the same day as Romney’s speech, vowing that they will not support a Trump campaign if he wins the nomination.11 But Kagan in his February op-ed intimated strongly that this would not be enough. ‘For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.’ On the reasonable, though by no means certain, assumption that Trump continues to be successful, the central drama of the next six months will be how many Republicans follow Kagan’s renunciation. Some have spoken instead of backing a third-party candidacy, which would probably have the practical effect of ensuring a Democratic victory, and which also might split the Republican Party irrevocably. Trump’s fellow candidates, however – Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and John Kasich – were asked at the end of the 3 March debate whether they were still committed to supporting the party’s nominee, even if it is Trump. They all said yes.

Notes

1 Mitt Romney, speech at the University of Utah, 3 March 2016, available at http://time.com/4246596/donald- trump-mitt-romney-utah-speech/.

2 Gregory Krieg, ‘Donald Trump Defends Size of His Penis’, CNN, 4 March 2016, http://edition.cnn. com/2016/03/03/politics/donald- trump-small-hands-marco-rubio/.

3 Robert Kagan, ‘Trump is the GOP’s Frankenstein Monster. Now

He’s Strong Enough to Destroy the Party’, Washington Post, 25 February 2016, https://www. washingtonpost.com/opinions/ trump-is-the-gops-frankenstein- monster-now-hes-strong-enough-to- destroy-the-party/2016/02/25/3e443f28- dbc1-11e5-925f-1d10062cc82d_story. html.

4 Peter Beinart, ‘Palin is the New McGovern’, Daily Beast, 20 September

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2016, http://www.thedailybeast.com/ articles/2010/09/20/palin-the-gops- mcgovern.html.

5 Newt Gingrich et al., ‘The Contract with America’, 27 September 1994, available at https://www.udel.edu/htr/ Psc105/Texts/contract.html.

6 Sheryl Gay Stolberg, ‘Gingrich Stuck to Caustic Path in Ethics Battles’, New York Times, 26 January 2012, http:// www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/us/ politics/the-long-run-gingrich-stuck- to-caustic-path-in-ethics-battles.html.

7 Ibid. 8 Kagan, ‘Trump is the GOP’s

Frankenstein Monster’.

9 Michael J. Boyle, ‘The Coming Illiberal Order’, Survival, vol. 58, no. 2, April– May 2016, pp. 35–66.

10 Anne Applebaum, ‘Is This the End of the West As We Know It?’, Washington Post, 4 March 2016, https://www. washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald- trump-and-the-end-of-nato/2016/03/04/ e8c4b9ca-e146-11e5-8d98- 4b3d9215ade1_story.html.

11 ‘Open Letter on Donald Trump From GOP National Security Leaders’, War on the Rocks, 2 March 2016, http://warontherocks.com/2016/03/ open-letter-on-donald-trump-from- gop-national-security-leaders/.

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