Main Edition
US
FR
Republicans or Trumpians? Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle/ Getty
The real loser this week? To many Americans it’s obvious. Not “democracy itself” — at least, not yet. And not, really, the Democrats who have a good deal of support and may well win the presidency.
Nope. The loser is Jeb Bush.
It’s him and his country club set. All those genial folks at home in board rooms and hunting lodges, sniffy about the public finances, untroubled by trans rights, unflustered by abortion. They have copped it big time.
All those Republicans did one of two things in this election; either they voted for Trump, hoping the party might gently ease its way out of his clutches in years to come, or they did not vote at all and prayed for a repudiation that might allow them to recapture the bucking bronco.
Oops.
The bronco has bolted, with Donald Trump atop. Even if Joe Biden wins, the lesson many Republicans are going to take from this is that the way to keep the Democrats out of power in the future is to super-serve those at the bottom of the pile. The rougher, courser brigade. Those working the tables at the country club.
Because win or lose, Donald Trump wins. Not necessarily a second term in office, but the party – Lincoln’s party – is now his in an important and longer lasting sense. It has been shown a path that works. It’s a path to victory, or near victory, ploughed with the vigorous anti-intellectualism of the Trump brand. As some wag said as the ballots for Trump were piling up, “people voted with their middle finger”.
To be sure that is not an entire programme for government. The middle finger vote does not sort out America’s chaotic and vastly expensive healthcare system. It does not do much to combat climate change. All manner of complex problems which demand complex and nuanced approaches go rather by the wayside. I am old enough to remember when George W Bush was accused of waging a “war against science” – well the middle finger voter is no Einstein.
But he (yes, the middle finger often belongs to a he) knows what he likes. He wants big business reigned in. He wants immigration kept low and illegal immigration vigorously suppressed. He wants no more foreign wars and a supply chain that goes no further west than California, and preferably no further than Texas. He couldn’t give a monkey’s about the national debt and is comfortable with government spending on pensions and benefits for the working class.
As Erick Erickson, one of the leading lights of the evangelical Trump supporting right, told the New Yorker in the days before the election: “The Party today is more populist than conservative… and it’s the populism of a growing percentage of Americans who feel shut out. It’s younger, blue-collar voters—a coalition of grievance. They’re not conservative or liberal. They have grievances against the élite.”
There are dangers in all of this. When you say goodbye to Jeb Bush, you run the risk of saying hello to all manner of newbies who might make you wish you were back at the golf course.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, for instance.
She won a Georgia seat for the Republicans in the House of Representatives. She’s an open supporter of QAnon, the conspiracy theory campaign which believes that a secret cabal of Satanic cannibalistic paedophiles controls American government. Goodness knows what she will make of Washington DC. And while there are always some oddballs returned from both parties, this feels like something different from the Mr Smith goes to Washington distrust of the old ways of doing things. To many Americans, this politics has a nasty, unpleasant edge. And it is a place from which the Republicans, even in a divided age, cannot win regular majorities with regular folk.
But to concentrate on the extremes post-Trump would be a mistake. There is a more subtle side of Republicanism that recognises the Trump victory over the old guard and seeks to build something with firmer foundations and more coherence than the Donald can manage.
Among those doing this work is a former domestic policy director in Mitt Romney’s failed presidential bid named Oren Cass. He is no fan of Mr Trump personally, but the work he is doing at his think tank American Compass may well form the beginnings of the post-Trump party, a party that does not repudiate the President but builds on his achievement.
Cass recently described to Ezra Klein how the Trump impact on the party could be seen in a positive light:
“I think there’s a fascinating dynamic on the right-of-center right now where if you look within institutions — if you look at individuals working the various think tanks in media and in agencies and congressional offices — there’s just a ton of fascinating people doing fascinating work: rethinking first principles, challenging orthodoxies. It’s really exciting. Some of that is just a result of Trump sort of wiping the table clean and there being a sense that anything goes.”
The post-Trump future, according to Cass, allows the party to escape from the low-tax low-spending gloom that, in his view, did so much to damage the nation, and to propose, instead, a new economic agenda. As Klein put it, this is “a vision that puts families first, eschews economic growth as the be-all-end-all of policymaking, and recognizes the inescapability of government intervention in the economy”.
The issue for the party is whether the 2024 Republican primary (oh yes, it’s never too early to plan for the next US election) is going to be a re-run of 2016, but as though Donald Trump had never been there. Just get the same characters – or younger family members – onto the stage and thank the Lord Mr Trump is absent.
This is definitely a scenario that some have hankered after; there are even some who believe that such a thing could still come to pass. But the events of this week, the ability of Donald Trump to get people to vote, the holding on to the Senate (if that comes to pass) surely make this view of the Republican future less tenable, less attractive to those who want to win.
Much more likely is the cementing of GOP in a new foundation – never mind the corporate class and the corner office. Hello, instead, to small business owners, to electricians and plumbers, to people who draw salaries. This party emphasises employment – but, more important, it focuses on the dignity of work.
In that place, steering clear of the conspiracy theorists of the far-right and gradually embracing a view of America that appeals to hard workers of all ethnic backgrounds, there is electoral success aplenty for the Republicans in the future. This is what plenty of post-Trump thinkers believe.
The future of the party is not going to be dominated by the man himself, but he has made his mark. Donald Trump captured a party. It struggled a bit to get away from him. The struggle now has finished. The argument now is about building on Trumpism, not repudiating it.
Justin Webb presents the Americast podcast and Today on Radio Four. His Panorama documentary “Trump the Sequel”, is available now on Iplayer
JustinOnWeb 
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeAs a country dwelling manual worker, it seems that policies that serve metropolitan liberals, do not work for me. It would seem to be the same in the States.
That’s a very well put succinct point. The only question is how does the election of a person like Donald Trump make things better for anyone?
Metropolitan liberal elite (at least based on the current voting) voted against Trump by 4m votes.
A decent article and yes, the Republican party right now is the party of the workers and doers. The Democrat party is the party of the elites and those who do noting useful whatsoever. In that sense.
Any line-up for the Rep primaries in 2024 would surely include Rand Paul, Tim Scott and Dan Crenshaw. I’m not sure if Candace Owens would be old enough, and of course she has no direct political experience, but it would be great to see her run. She might be a little too hard-edged and truthful, although that didn’t do Thatcher any harm.
And yet the party of the elite got over 72M votes. 4M more than the Republican party.
Justin is a BBC nabob who learned nothing about the USA ,telling us nothing that mattered.
And why would he? Easier to sniff down at the rubes from his Georgetown grief hole as the workers, the decent of America got stiffed.
But with Kennedy flair and Tony Bennett type cool. Hence Obama and the likes of Reich and Cuomos.
Yes, the likes of Jeb are toast. But that’ll sadden Webb’s coterie who crave a McCain or Romney to bleat pitifully as a national dud, but always honoured at their funerals by the Democrats that stuffed them.
No . Trump won. Hell not go without evidence that he wasn’t cheated out of his sterling,selfless work for REAL Americans. Not Beeboid Blowhard Cucks like Webb.
Supreme Court asap. Please.
“selfless work”? His main “achievement” was getting a very wealthy congress to agree to tax cuts almost entirely benefitting the very rich – like trump himself. The rest: N. Korea, China, etc. was a complete failure.
This article seems to be spinning out of the air some kind of theoretical political underpinning to the Trump Presidency; I fear there is none. Trump defined himself (if such an expression meant anything) against what had gone before. I would not regard it as anti-establishment as such, just anti. Had he wished to, when he became President he had a friendly Congress and many State Houses and State legislatures who could have assisted in laying down policy but, no. He started his Presidency as he meant to go on, whining. He was obsessed at the start in trying to prove that the crowd at his inauguration was as big as Obamas. Probably his most used word was “unfair” he seems to be in a state of constant complaint and, as The Lincoln Project found, was dead easy to wind up. His four years have to go down as the laziest of anyone’s, few appointments or meetings and lots of time in his office watching TV and tweeting. His persistent calling people nicknames ceased to be funny after a week or two though. if “Sleepy Joe” has got the better of “Flabby Donald” then there is sweet justice.
I agree 100%. But what my fellow Americans have to understand is how such a person could become president. It is directly attributable to the disatrous 1787 Constitution which among other points established the undemocratic electoral college, an over-powerful presidency (based on a monachy – power of pardon, for God’s sake), lifelong supreme court and federal judges. They were elitists and gave us an elitist system which works well in the plutocracy that is modern America.
I wouldn’t blame the Founding Fathers. They created a system with checks and balances. Presidential power certainly has crept beyond what the Constitution envisaged (the President is mentioned third after the House and the Senate) though mainly in regard to foreign policy and security. What the Founding Fathers did not envisage was the rise of political parties in the way they have and that has become intensified in the last 40 years.
There have been dreadful presidents (Andrew Johnson, Warren Harding) and ones which have preferred to take a back seat (Coolidge, Eisenhaur Reagan) but the system has dealt with them, the tragedy has been that the Senate became inactive under Trump when action was needed.
The role of the Supreme court has, it is true, become politicised but the Justices tend to grow into their role, Gorsuch and Kavenagh have already voted “against” Trump on several occasions. This election proves to me that the US is a lot greater than Trump.
Article 2 of Constitution is presidency. Legislature (Senate and House combined) is article 1. But Madison wrote in the Federalist that in a Republic the legislature is the most powerful branch. The problem with checks and balances in a party system (and we had one within a decade of the Constitution) is that when one party controls House, Senate, Presidency, and Judiciary (a la Trump 2017 – 2019) the “checks and balances” become full speed ahead.
Madison (and the rest of the founding fathers) got one thing wrong – human nature.
Is that surprising?
Weren’t most of them slave owners, running in effect a Plantocracy not a Democracy?
To Great Britain’s eternal shame we didn’t strangle this ‘poisonous infant in the cradle’ when we had the perfect excuse between 1812-14.
An opportunity missed indeed, and one the world has lived to regret.
The point isn’t that Trump personally created a new political direction. It’s more that he was media-savvy enough to see weakness and personal opportunity in the system. Specifically a swathe of Americans left behind by globalisation and technology. He didn’t do anything to help people, other than make populist gestures such as the coal mines, but it would be foolish for either Republicans or Democrats to go back to political life as normal. As long as there is deep inequality across the US, there will be fertile ground for demagogues. At the very least, Trump needs to be remembered as a warning of how fragile our democracy is.
sadly only one uptick. Your comment deserves 100.
This is all well and good, but the only meaningful policy differences I see between the Trump administration and the old Republican platform is that he seems to have no appetite, thankfully, for stupid foreign military adventures. Even on immigration, he seems content to make inflammatory but ineffective symbolic gestures instead of doing something meaningful like shoring up eVerify. He likes his cheap illegal labor at Mar a Lago as much as Jeb Bush does.
Well he tried to bring back manufacturing jobs, which is contrary to the Rep platform of recent decades. (Apparently the first Bush was akin advocate for NAFTA and merely handed it to Clinton). He also started to release a number of prisoners who were serving multi-decade sentences for non-violent crimes as a consequence of Biden’s 1994 Crime Bill. Bush didn’t do that and I don’t suppose McCain or Romney would have done so either.
He said he would bring back manufacturing jobs, but I’m not aware of him actually doing that aside from haranguing an executive or two publicly. He certainly doesn’t seem to have an industrial policy. The Republican donor class is still steering the ship on economic policy as much as ever, if not more so. He expressed NAFTA skepticism and then replaced it with the same thing rebranded.
Manufacturing jobs are gone – look at the numbers.
You don’t bring jobs by tweeting.
Fracking? Oil?
Renewables create more jobs and don’t wreck the planet either. Unless you want giant fires consuming swathes of America.
He differs on NATO, trade agreements, working with allies, and sucking up to dictators. All presi\dents back to Reagan refused to meet with the N Korean leaders so as not to give them credibility and publicity. Those are real and important differences.
He claims to. Did he actually make any changes to NATO? Not that I ever saw. He blusters about what his Justice Department should be doing as if he is not the head of it. He’s no different on foreign policy, for the most part. As for trade agreements, I don’t recall any exempt for his NAFTA clone which replaced NAFTA. As for meeting Kim, it was worth trying and didn’t do any harm. The supposed “credibility and publicity” you cite has not changed anything one iota. Tnat is just the sort of nonsense the brain dead foreign policy establishment like to go for.
I will give Trump credit for being right about two things–all the foreign policy “experts” were predicting the world would end when he moved the embassy to Jerusalem and again when he assassianated Soleimani. On the contrary things have improved in Mideast relations somewhat.
If the Republican Party is to define a new economic agenda, promoting “the dignity of work” as you put it , and generally intervening more in the economy ( to cut the price of drugs for instance ? to promote greener policies ? to invest in infrastructure ?) how is this compatible with the laisser faire economic policies that traditional Republlcan supporters and paymasters favour ? Do the think-thankers like Cass seriously think they would welcome these kind of “socialist” measures with open arms, especially if they had to pay higher taxes to finance them ?
“the dignity of work” This is real, it is very real, those of us who work physically at hard tedious, often dangerous, work understand this. I really dislike my work, it is hard, tedious, and you get hurt if you let your mind wander off this repetitive, uncomfortable, grind. But at the end of the day or week I can know I did something useful and skilled, something society needs and most cannot do, and fewer ever would. I have been building things long enough I do not get so much pride in the finished job, but that I take up tools and do hard work that makes needed stuff, there is some pride in that. I believe it is genetic as humans who had dignity of work worked hard at things they did not want to, and so were successful. Anyway, it is a real thing, and one which is a good thing.
Hear hear. Good for you.
Thanks for this spirited answer ! All power to you ! Let me ask you whether the pride in what you do is reflected in the wages you are paid ? Aren’t there many in America who are the frequently documented “working poor ” ? Do you get good health care if you are unlucky enough to injure yourself on the job ? Can you or will you be able to send your kids to college ?
As a European, I find it diffcult to understand why the call for universal health care and free college tuition is often derided as “socialist” in the U.S, particularly by Republican voters. Is not a way of promoting unity in society (and goodneess knows, America is a destructively divided society) for those who have earned or inherited money to be taxed a little more in order to help those hard workers like you to benefit from policies that can tide you over in bad times or give your kids more opportunities ?
The point about pride is it’s more than the money. The European attitude seems to be that equal outcomes is the most important thing and people are happy to be dependent on a redustributing State. That goes against human nature and its why Europe has had more feeble growth and virtually zero innovation over the past 50 years.
The liberals in the US have a misguided admiration for Europe and believe a big nanny state is morally superior. It’s not moral or fruitful to pay people for doing nothing. They would rather have jobs – and not prestigious ones – than being taken care of by the government.
Philip Wharton says: “The European attitude seems to be that equal outcomes is the most important thing and people are happy to be dependent on a redustributing State.” I’m going to stick out my neck and suggest instead that the Europeans believe that a healthy and well-educated citizenry supported by a functional and accessible infrastructure is far less fearful and fractious than a citizenry constantly in terror for its health, property and general wellbeing, with only ancient gods to blame.
Your comments are an unhelpful caricature of the European situation. Europeans are just as keen as anyone to have a job rather than live on benefits. However, if they lose their job, they will not, while looking for a new one, lose their access to healthcare or the house they live in. Many Americans do, and as we have seen over the last four years, this often drives them to find scapegoats, usually foreigners, sentiments that Trump has shamefully exploited for political gain while doing very little to actually help them.
I agree with Jeremy. It is simplistic and wrong to just say Democrats = Elite.
There is going to be a battle for the forgotten man (generic use of word and of course includes woman) and Trump for all his horrific persona did tap into these people. To a lesser extent Boris did the same. Any party that seeks to govern in either country must really be inclusive – that’s the challenge
The Republicans did very, very well on all the down-ticket elections. That means millions voted Republican while repudiating Trump. They don’t want the radical left. They don’t want Trumpism.
Someone that worked for Mitt, that talks to Ezra Klein, planning the future of the Republican Party. One of the most horrifying things I’ve ever heard.
Donald Trump didn’t reform the immigration (although his policies have suppressed illegal migration). He didn’t fix Obamacare as he promised. He didn’t balance the books as he promised.
Trump, like all populist (although he is uniquely deranged) is incompetent.
That is the problem with populism across the Western World – INCOMPETENCE.
The Republican party can not be financed (and it is right now) by the Rich while promoting policies that are against their base voters.
To create the conditions of ignorance, poverty and resentment and then get the most affected to vote for you is better than the three card trick. A remarkable achievement by the GOP.
It is common to ask, Who has the most to lose, Trump or Biden? Well… Trump could conceivably get carted off to jail without Oval Office protection while Biden will have to go home and babysit Hunter. Biden, definitely, has the most to lose.
Surely it is Biden who is more likely to be carted off to jail, having conspired with this son to take millions off the Chinese. And that is just one of his many, many crimes.
by a short head I would say you are the most gullible person on Unherd
It’s a crowded field. I think there’s some kind of algorithm on 4chan that detects which members are over 18 and it sends them here.
Your assertion has no evidence. Are you a Qanon member?