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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   28366 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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Do Trump Supporters Actually Want To Win?

Prompted by this sanctimonious, if interesting, FT column. Emphasis mine:

Just because liberals have always feared the emergence of a competent demagogue doesn’t mean populist voters have yearned for it to the same degree. How much of his base did Trump lose after failing to build that wall on the Mexican border?

DeSantis believes that politics is downstream of culture, that culture is shaped in institutions, that conservatives have ceded those institutions to the organised left. The Gramsci of Tallahassee doesn’t just diagnose the problem. He is creative and dogged in installing a rightwing counter-hegemony. Ask Disney. Ask the educational bureaucracies of Florida. This is more thought and work than Trump has ever put in to the cause. It is also perfectly beside the point. I am no longer sure that populist voters want to win the culture war.

For a long time, a certain pro-Trump (or anti-anti-Trump, if you want) narrative on the 'intellectual right' was that there was no real alternative to Trump. Sure, they conceded that most criticisms of Trump-the-man were correct, but this was the Flight 93 Election. The alternatives were all versions of Mitt Romney or Marco Rubio, who didn't say the things Trump occasionally did. We can restate the Flight 93 theory like this:

"Trump is vulgar, he's a liar, he's a cheat, he violates conservative or even general principles of decorum and morality. However, he's the only person even discussing the things we care about with a large public audience, and therefore it is a conservative responsibility to vote for him even if this amounts, merely, to a roll of the dice. If he wins, there's a chance he might do some of what he promises. The only alternative to Trump is certain defeat."

DeSantis' presence complicates the Flight 93 theory. DeSantis has a record of some competence on conservative issues. Certainly not enough for the very online dissident right, but they had soured on Trump by late 2017 themselves, and so have no horse in this race. Whether DeSantis of Yale and Harvard is a 'true believer' is a complicated question, but then again the same could be said about Trump of New York via Wharton; the former certainly seems a much more capable administrator.

The column posits that Trump's success against DeSantis in this phony war stage of the 2024 primary campaign is a case of "vibes based politics" winning over 'substance based politics'. In 2016, intellectual conservatives could defend Trump because - whatever the vibes were - he was the only candidate on substance, too. In 2023, the banality of Trump's support is more clear. Ironically, it leads to a case for an interesting question - if Trump had merely attached his vibe to Ted Cruz' political platform in 2016, would he still have won? Was it less 'build the wall' and more who the frontman for building the wall was? The smart case for Trump would seem to be reducible to:

  1. DeSantis is a "phony" or establishment conservative who will turn in office and resign himself to implementing the Mitch McConnell checklist of tax cuts, deregulation, more money for the military and cutting some welfare spending. The problem with this is that Trump was in office and accomplished little but (some of) the above, and hardly has a lifelong history of staunch conservative politics himself. If the problem is associating with elite circles, Trump has a long history of the same.

  2. DeSantis can't win the presidential election even if he takes the primary, Trump can. This argument is more persuasive, if only because Trump's record shows he has technically convinced enough people in the right places to vote for him to show he can win. But Trump also lost a presidential election, never hit a 50% approval rating (even once, something Biden has apparently managed) and seems not to be experiencing any great groundswell of public support from swing voters. The promise of Trump is now tainted by the reality of Trump, so MAGA might ring slightly more hollow to those who aren't true believers.

liberals have always feared the emergence of a competent demagogue

I love this line because thinking about what your enemies fear is often an interesting thought experiment. Republicans are being presented with a choice between Trump and an American Viktor Orban. Nothing is settled, but they appear to strongly prefer the former.

I am no longer sure that populist voters want to win the culture war.

One could argue that this misapprehends the problem. Populists might only want to win the culture war, and don't give a fuck about the policy war, which is what is being conflated here. The whole point is that the Republicans are trying to fight hte culture war with policy, and not very well. Trump never had any policy, but he fought the culture war like a champ.

Trump never had any policy

Perhaps. But I keep seeing reports of court cases where a reasonable ruling or dissent comes from "____, a Trump appointee".

That’s like saying “we only care about winning the war; we don’t care about winning the war of bullets.” You can’t win the former without winning the latter.

I don't think so. Policy is part of how politics works, but the media landscape, cultural institutions, academia etc. are not really about policy at all. In short, the culture war is a bunch of stuff related to politics that isn't really politics. In the aggregate, politics is not about policy, almost no one gives a shit about policy. They care about group competition. Republicans still contest policy, but they gave up the culture war ages ago. The mainstream "conservative" voices are people like David French.

Trump was terrible at governing, never had a handle on how the place worked, and his policies were almost uniformly unsuccessful. The ones that were successful were mostly bad for his base (bump stock ban, etc.). But he was the first to fight the culture war on the national stage, without apology or dissembling. It is my thesis that this explains both the unprecedented hatred, and unprecedented support.

The left has been using culture to fight politics for a long time. Andrew Breitbart recognized this weakness ages ago, and deliberately set out to create parallel cultural institutions to engage in that fight. His project has slowly come on line, although he's been gone a while. It is now being co-opted by the reigning conservative money groups. But any fight needs a figurehead to go out and duke it out in the media, on Twitter, in court etc. And because the Republicans wouldn't do it, finally a shady real-estate grifter and reality TV show host took up the mantle.

I’m not suggesting doing only policy. That is pointless. But you can’t eschew policy either.

but he fought the culture war like a champ.

The "fought" here does a lot of work. If you understand it as "engaged", then yes, he engaged a lot. If you understand it as "won", then no, we aren't tired of winning the culture war, in fact we're not even close to it, and Trump didn't do much to stop the victorious march of wokeness through the social institutions. All the feeble attempts he made were instantaneously reversed once he was gone, except maybe for the SCOTUS which has and will deliver some important wins, but even there it's not assured, and also SCOTUS can't rule the country or the culture, it's not its function. So I am not sure he really deserves the title of "champ" here.

It's not hard to be the best when there is zero competition. The Republican party is almost entirely estranged from its base.

True enough but Trump is not really helping this, viciously attacking people in his own party when they try to become his competition, and often even when they don't but he feels (justifiably or not) slighted by them. This helps his personal brand, but doesn't help neither the GOP nor the base which needs things done, not an idol to worship. Well, to be honest, some do need an idol to worship, but it's not healthy and not helpful to them. Ultimately, they want the win (or at least a win) in the culture war, not a tragic hero that whines on Truth Social about how everybody prevents him from achieving true greatness.

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