In this lengthy essay, Rick Perlstein talks about how modern historians have systematically missed the big picture when it comes to analyzing the American right.
The principled conservatism of William F. Buckley was never representative of what was really going on in the American public, he says. Conservatism has always been about resentment against minorities and immigrants and violence—both official and unofficial—to keep control in the hands of “real” Americans—a seething, angry, bigoted, violent mob periodically spun into a frenzy by the con men, hucksters, and liars leading the movement.
Important point. But so very well known to most of us already, that I had no urge to click the link.
When someone shows up pretending that Trumpism is different from post-modern Republicanism, please point out that *overlap between Romney voters and Trump voters is huge. * That Trump won but Romney didn’t is NOT due to party switching — only a tiny set switched from Romney to Hillary, only a tiny set switched from Obama to Trump — it was due to Trump attracting votes from the “Right-wing but usually don’t bother to vote” crowd.
I dunno. He makes a case for what “conservative historians” (whoever they might be) got wrong. However, using this essay to explain all the actions of The Right does not make much sense.
Two points jumped out in his first couple of paragraphs.
[ul][li]He asserts that Trump won the presidency without acknowledging that Trump did not come close to winning a majority of voters, thus ignoring the errors of strategy that Clinton and the Democrats made that allowed Trump to get in using the Electoral College.[/li][li]He asserts that “conservative intellectuals” (however he defines them) “quickly embraced” Trump.[/li][/ul]
His first assertion presumes a race in which Trump was running against an opponent who was not, herself, a very polarizing figure, (leading to a large number of potential voters simply refusing to vote).
I do not think he made his case for his second assertion. Is he claiming that people such as Paul Ryan–a standard issue politician trying to get his own agenda by the current executive–are “conservative intellectuals”? I have never included Ryan or McConnell among a list of intellectuals of any sort. I continue to see people whom I regard as actual conservative intellectuals either gritting their teeth and working with Trump to promote actual issues favored by conservatives without actually “embracing” Trump or else standing up and opposing Trump’s excesses.
The take-away for this essay, (particularly on the SDMB), is going to be “See! Conservatives are nothing but racist, sexist, homophobic, isolationist haters. Even their own historians admit it.” That will be an understandable reaction among many, but it misses the point and simply allows many on the Left to fail to understand either recent history or actual conservative positions.
Will a conservative party attract a disproportionate number of white racist, sexist, homophobic, isolationist haters? Sure. Because those people are always going to be drawn to imagined memories of how good is used to be (“MAGA”) when they did not feel threatened by efforts to eliminate racism, sexism, homophobia, and isolationism.
Focusing on that group and dismissing them as ugly allows the Left to sprain their arms in back-patting and self-congratulations while ignoring any serious criticism from actual conservatives that the Left should engage in order to make sure that its own proposals do not self-destruct. The Left also as its share of haters; they just tend to to be easier to marginalize in the current environment. The collapse of the U.S.S.R. and the economic right turn in which China has engaged has pulled out any major support for many on the Left, forcing them to either hang out with progressives or liberals or move so far to the left that they become the sort of jokes that reflect the Sovereign Citizen movements on the Right.
Whenever I see these supposed reasons for the rise of Trump I first filter it with this: Trump got fewer votes than Romney. Trump did not ride a cresting wave of populism, he just outlasted a faltering HRC. The essay really doesn’t seem to fit with this observation.
My impression of the right is that a huge segment is like what the OP describes, people who feel they are the ‘real americans’ and who do not fundamentally respect democracy or civil rights in their eagerness to keep their culture clean from impurities like minorities, gays, liberated women, etc.
But libertarians are also a big part of the right in the US. They generally do not act like this, and I think libertarians make up about 1/3 of the GOP.
[QUOTE=Deeg] Trump got fewer votes than Romney. Trump did not ride a cresting wave of populism, he just outlasted a faltering HRC.
[/QUOTE]
Popular vote 2012:
[ul]
[li]Obama: 65,915,795[/li][li]Romney: 60,933,504[/li][/ul]
Popular vote 2016:
[ul]
[li]Clinton: 65,853,516[/li][li]Trump: 62,984,825[/li][/ul]
Clinton did not do much worse than Obama. Trump got 2 million votes more than Romney. It was never a story of Clinton being a “weak” candidate. Trump legitimately found support that Romney didn’t.
I think tomndebb pretty well nailed it. And I say that as a leftist.
“The Right” is already a misnomer. Once we decide to artificially create two and only two teams then make every American choose one or the other we pretty well guarantee each team will be an incoherent grab bag of people and attitudes. With a few knights and plenty of knaves to go around.
The article’s assertion that, e.g., Buckleyism was never the center of rank and file rightism is brilliant, Brilliant I say. Right up there with asserting that water is wet.
A valid observation is that historically the “official” version of rightism tried to be largely intellectually respectable while being willing to take help *sub rosa *from what Clinton so memorably labeled as “the deplorables.” Can you say “Southern Strategy”?
Just as Progressivism (my creed) has over the last decades been willing to take the electoral help of the “I want free stuff with no obligations” crowd while tsk tsking (at least quietly to friendly audiences) that such attitudes are unhelpful and unProgressive.
Overall I give the article 4 "Well Duh"s on a scale of 5. The subtitle might as well be “Ivory tower caught navel-gazing!”
*I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.
A historian of conservatism looks back at how he and his peers failed to anticipate the rise of the president.
By Rick Perlstein*
Concerning politics and elections, it’s Perlstein’s opinion that modern historians are wrong. And that they were wrong in the past. According to Perlstein.
It’s also Perlstein’s opinion that his failure must somehow be Trump’s fault (or anyone else’s fault) that Perlstein misread/misunderstood what was actually happening during the last election.
He claims that he didn’t understand conservatism before Trump was elected, but now he does. I can easily believe him in the first case, but I see no reason to believe him in the second.
Seconded. I always find his (or their?) posts extremely helpful in my attempts to understand American politics, a subject which I now own that I was far less familiar with than I’d thought.
Democracy isn’t smart, wise or efficient. It is not the most rational form of government, it is simply the most just. It has lots of problems, most of them are us.
I think he’s overthinking it. Sure, it would be simplistic to dismiss conservatives as racists. But at the same time, Republicans would not have the power that they do if racism (or tribalism if you will) weren’t strong electoral motivators. What we had was an aberration, the election of an entirely unsuitable person due to interference from the Kremlin and the FBI. Take either of those out of the equation, and Hillary is in the White House. Take gerrymandering out of the equation, and Nancy Pelosi is Speaker. Replace Hillary with Joe Biden, and Schumer is majority leader. A lot more happens by luck and by happenstance than can be explained by any scholarly analysis.
True, there’s a certain… flailing? there, isn’t it. At least he admits that as a historian he tends to come at it from a more liberal bent, but still, every single thing he mentions was not news to anyone who bothered to pay attention. Of course, part of the issue is that many people were* not *paying attention.
The Tea Party and a large portion of the Trump movement within the GOP both came from slightly different segments of a spectrum who did however coincide in saying, “hey, ‘Movement Conservatives’, where the heck are all the things you’ve promised for 40 years?”. That confrontation was gonna happen sooner or later.
Sure but that will get you from the other side the retort about that if grandma had wheels she’d be a bicycle. And the alternative is to throw up our hands and say it’s all unpredictable chaos.
And frankly the right has been very successful at taking existing tribalism and leveraging it into votes via effective messaging.
The number of people who voted for Trump who believe wildly false ‘facts’ about, say, “illegals” who are supposedly pouring over the Mexican border, is staggering. The right relentlessly pounds in the ‘unworthy people are stealing your stuff and living off your hard work’ concept, day in and day out–until many of these people are absolutely convinced that the solution to all their problems in life is to expel all brown people from the USA, and (of course) the GOP will do that little thing for them.
Possibly the most consequential selling of a fake idea that the Right accomplished: the almost universally-cited-by-Trump voters fiction that Trump is “a smart businessman.” If only we had a time machine and could go back to tell the DNC: lay off the “Trump is a disgusting bully” ads—these voters ADMIRE bullies—you need to be spending your cash on exposing Trump as the born-rich, ran-a-fortune-into-a-shoestring business failure that he is.
I would like to suggest that everyone consider something that might sound like a side issue at first blush, but I think it’s fundamentally important going forward.
We need to differentiate terms a lot more than we do with this.
I submit that there is a VERY significant difference between “conservatism” and “what a lot of yokels do.”
There is a difference between “The Right” and several terms too often conflated with it, including “Republicans” and “conservatives” and “patriots,” among others.
I see a LOT of useless flailing going on these days, between people who THINK they are attacking all their opponents at once, but because they do such a lazy job of identifying everyone, what they mostly accomplish is to drive a lot MORE people in to a larger alliance.
It appears to me, that the article linked to this thread similarly lumps a lot of different elements together and declares them to indicate “Right Wingedness,” without legitimately examining whether or not such designations are logical or not.
It might be sloppy, and no I don’t think all Republicans are racist rednecks, but in the end what matters is how they vote. And a whole bunch of them (62,984,825 as noted up thread) all voted for Trump. Unless we’re talking about someone hat voted 3rd party, there really isn’t a functional difference between the right, conservatives, and Republicans. They all (at least the ones in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania) helped Trump win.