Trump’s popularity belies Americans’ desire for an “outsider” voice.
The pundits say that Donald Trump’s perch atop the Republican primary polls is due to Trump himself: that he’s different from the others, that he talks off-script and tells the truth. But Mr. Trump owes his recent political success to something systemic in American politics, namely, the absence of a coherent political agenda that adequately addresses mounting social inequality in the US. The resulting detachment and alienation experienced by so many people has made an “outsider” spouting extreme and often nonsensical views seem attractive.
Mr. Trump owes his recent political success to something systemic in American politics.
Much has been said of the Trump phenomenon, but we want to question the emphasis on his personal qualities and the notion that he is a charismatic figure. Political observers attributed the August 6th primary debate’s blockbuster ratings to the “Trump show”; we take a different view. To us, his ascendancy suggests that there are considerable swaths of the electorate who are disarticulated from the party system; that is, folks who used to heed the call of their party no longer do. These voters, mainly on the right, are willing to listen to someone who at least sounds different even if that difference lacks substance.
Mr. Trump’s rise is not the only indicator of this. US voter turnout has not broken the 60 percent barrier since 1968. The recent rise of extremist views, especially on the right, is similar to what we have seen in Europe. There, disillusionment with mainstream parties has created a surge of support for anti-immigrant third parties such as the Dutch Party for Freedom, UKIP, and National Front. In all these cases individuals espousing extreme, racist views have drawn support across large sections of the population.
We put these developments down to two factors. First, this kind of political chaos tends to take hold in moments of recession and during crises like war, which dramatically limit the ability of parties to use their unique tools to gather supporters. For example, in a recession there is less revenue to go around, which means that using social programs or tax cuts to cultivate constituents becomes less possible; consequently these voters become up-for-grabs to challengers. As we know, the United States has been in the midst of a bruising war since 2003, and is just now recovering from the worst of the Great Recession; Europe, where the far right’s appeal has grown, is equally in the midst of a deep recession.
Second, neither party has a coherent political agenda that seriously challenges social inequality under capitalism. The inequality gap between the richest and poorest Americans is the largest it has been in a generation due largely to deindustrialization, globalization, and the dismantling of unions and the welfare state. Working class communities of color have disproportionately borne the brunt of these changes over the last 40 years, leading to the current mass incarceration of unemployed minorities. This is to say nothing of the related incidents of police violence against African Americans in cities across the US. The American two-party system, with few exceptions, has been historically resistant to a leftist critique. Social policy passed in one generation is often undercut by a conservative backlash in the next. This has been true as much of the social safety net as it has been of civil rights.
Neither party has a coherent political agenda that seriously challenges social inequality under capitalism.
This status quo allows unrequited dreams of social mobility and other frustrations to run loose and undirected in institutional politics. In Europe, leftist third parties like Podemos and Syriza have been able to rise, but in the United States there is no such alternative. As institutions, the Democratic and Republican parties are both “neoliberal,” meaning that they both hew to the notion that free markets and free trade are the best hope for widespread prosperity. Democrats are of course more willing to use government resources to blunt the cruelest dislocations of global capitalism and are marginally more pro-union, but they, too, are neoliberal. (After all, President Obama’s advocacy of international trade deals would undermine union security in the long-term.) Bernie Sanders, a self-described social democrat, is addressing the problem of social inequality head-on, but Mr. Trump is also an alluring figure under these circumstances because he seems to speak from “outside” the system.
Even as he provides temporary distraction from the clear absence of a coherent political agenda, it’s not really about the Donald. If no one inside or outside the political system is able to step up and challenge neoliberalism at a time when the institutional parties are badly weakened, then we can only look forward to more Trumps from here on out. And what’s more: we will deserve them.
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Cedric de Leon is Associate Professor of Sociology at Providence College. He is the co-editor of Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society and author of Party and Society: Reconstructing a Sociology of Democratic Party Politics (Polity).
Manali Desai is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Cambridge and author of State Formation and Radical Democracy in India (Routledge) and co-editor of Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society.
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