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I’ve been struggling quite a bit to understand the whole Trump phenomenon. Despite the rivers of ink spilled on the topic, we still don’t have a robust theory of what makes him appealing to voters. A complex multicausal explanation involving loss of institutional prestige, social media, economic changes, and the like seems attractive, but there are good reasons to be suspicious of such explanations.
Maybe it’s just immigration. The single biggest failure of Western Democracies that sticks out like a sore thumb is their complete inability to control immigration. The UK is the prime example of this. The people voted to leave the European Union, causing easily foreseeable economic damage, because they were tired of immigration. Then the Conservative government in power proceeds to not actually lower immigration.
If you live in a Western Democracy and you want a secure border and less immigration, you can’t just vote for someone who says they want a secure border and less immigration. You have to vote for someone who viscerally hates immigrants. Someone who hates them personally, and who hates the very idea of what immigration represents. If their heart isn’t in it, they will predictably fold. Arguably Trump himself doesn’t go far enough here. We didn’t even get a wall last time.
He literally just ran a campaign wherein he successfully appealed to voters. Have you tried looking at his actual appeals to voters, and what voters say they found persuasive about them?
What about the wars? What about cost disease? What about culture war? What about Institutional trust and social cohesion?
This all seems quite straightforward to me, and I'm at a loss where the confusion is coming from. Blue Tribe achieved a high degree of social and political dominance. They became The System. They then failed to deliver appreciable progress, and their failed efforts burned institutional trust and social cohesion. Because of that loss, the public is now rebelling against them en-masse.
I wanted to vote against the dominant foreign policy consensus, typified by endless, pointless foreign wars. Trump seems like the best candidate available to do that.
I wanted to vote against the dominant economic consensus, typified by offshoring and free trade, the service economy and the decline of industrialization. Trump seems like at least one of the best candidates possible to do that.
I wanted to vote against the dominant social consensus, and particularly against the repeated and coordinated attempts at forcing epistemic closure on the part of major political, media and corporate institutions. Again, Trump.
I want to vote against rule by an unelected, unresponsive and uncontrollable federal bureaucracy. Again, Trump.
I want to vote against crime and unaccountable political violence. Again, Trump.
I want to vote against entrenched corruption on the part of government officials. Again, Trump.
I want to vote against censorship and propaganda coordination between the government and major media corporations. Again, Trump.
I want to vote against the disastrous educational policies that have been shambling forward like a zombie for the last fifty years or so. Again, Trump.
None of this even seems to require "multicausal" explanations. I want to break the social and political dominance of Blue Tribe. All of these are just expressions of that dominance, and the insulation from consequence or accountability that has resulted from that dominance. And sure, there's a lot of Trump voters who probably wouldn't describe their view in the way I have above: they'd say something like "everything's gone to shit" or "I don't trust the democrats or the media" or something along those lines. Tomato, tomahto.
Trump had many failures last time. But given the record of how his last administration went, it's hard for me to grasp an argument that the problem was Trump, and not the entrenched elites working to foil and destroy him from the second the 2016 election ended. This goes well beyond immigration, into a whole variety of very serious illegalities and norm violations taken in an effort to end or at least stonewall his presidency and to protect his opponents.
A lot of people support Trump because they want to fight back against a system they perceive to be deeply pernicious and entirely insulated from accountability. They want that system removed, because its continued existence forecloses their ability to hope for a better future.
Where it gets complicated is that at least some of these things could theoretically be achieved by other Republicans like DeSantis who wouldn't have Trump's ability to make unforced errors (with an idiot-savant ability to tell how much his party is willing to tolerate).
And yet, Trump blew them all out in the primary.
Desantis's entire campaign which burned through hundreds of millions of dollars was a train of unforced errors from horrible staff picks to position picks
basic interaction with Trump supporters should make clear they thought Desantis was a fraud like so many other Republicans, especially ones with neocon tendencies who claim their idol is George HW Bush
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De Santis was not working to achieve these things prior to the rise of Trump in 2016. He fell in line behind Trump after Trump was already ascendant. If the Blues can successfully destroy Trump, I am not confident he will not simply tack back to the center. He is efficient and effective, but not reliable.
Blues have made destruction of Trump an overriding priority, and therefore a legible proxy for their control. Reds, it seems to me, correctly perceive defense against such destruction as a Schelling point to coordinate around. We believe that our own party has been grifting us for decades, and we are attempting to weed out the grifters, to align the party with our values in fact rather than only in appearance. Part of that is rejecting the sort of "compromises" that have been used for decades to sell those values out. A good way to avoid those compromises with our enemies is to force them to compromise with us instead. Trump is excellent at accomplishing this, and the "never Trump" movement has successfully removed a large proportion of these people from our party.
If Trump had lost the primary, the argument would be that "Trumpism" had clearly failed, and that it was time for "moderation" and "reconciliation" and for the Republican Party to "regain its sanity". In other words, total capitulation to the Blue consensus. We know this because this was the argument for why it was a mistake for the Republican party to support Trump in 2024. And if it had worked, the argument would have smoothly transitioned to "The republican party is still tainted by the shadow of Trump, and all his supporters/policy goals/constituency must be purged". And once this was accomplished, in another few years all the articles about how the current Republican candidate was actually Hitler would start back up, and Cthulhu would continue swimming left. We need our leadership to reject the authority of Blue Tribe in total. We need them to ignore and delegitimize the media and the knowledge production apparatus generally. We need them to break the bureaucracy. They can't do that if they're convinced that fighting is doomed and "compromise" with Blues is the only path forward.
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