At the core of Donald Trump’s political success this year are the grievances of a sizable and now vocal block of disaffected voters, many of them white and working-class, and a Republican Party that has sought and benefited from their support while giving them almost nothing tangible in return.
The New York businessman’s position as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination has plunged the party into a contentious debate and raised some of the most troubling questions about its future since the Watergate scandal in 1974 or Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat a decade earlier.
Campaigning on Friday, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who is seeking to deny Trump the nomination, put the threat in apocalyptic terms. If Trump becomes the nominee, he said, “He will split the Republican Party, and it will be the end of the modern conservative movement.”
Trump and so-called Trumpism represent an amalgam of long-festering economic, cultural and racial dissatisfaction among a swath of left-out Americans who do not fit easily into the ideological pigeonholes of red and blue, right and left.
James Ceasar, a professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, describes the eruption behind Trump as less an “ism” and more “a mood” that has been at a near-boil for some time. But why has it hit with such force in this election?
“They have a leader who can articulate it,” Ceasar said.
The sight of establishment Republicans recoiling at Trump strikes some analysts, particularly on the left, as ironic. These GOP critics see Trump’s appeal as the logical result of decades of efforts by the GOP to discredit government and more recently of the party leadership’s passive acceptance of virulent and in some cases racially tinged opposition to President Obama. Having sown the wind, the argument goes, the party now reaps the whirlwind.
Others, however, say that Trumpism, no matter how much it threatens the existence of the modern-day Republican Party, is a broader manifestation of the uneven impact of globalization on a significant segment of the population, a rejection by these voters of institutions and elites in both parties, whom they see as having failed to listen to or respond to their plight.
In reality, it is both, a problem and a constituency that has had implications for both major parties over a period of years but that has become particularly acute for the Republicans at this moment.
One can scroll back over a half-century to find reasons or explanations for the rise of Trump. The Republican Party has long been engaged in recurring struggles between its long-dominant establishment wing and various embodiments of an anti-establishment, conservative insurgency seeking to upend the status quo.
Goldwater won that battle for the nomination in 1964 over the eastern elites, led by then-New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, but split the party and went down to a crushing defeat in the general election. Out of the ashes came Ronald Reagan, who though twice elected governor of California, nonetheless was long viewed with disdain by the party’s eastern elites.
Reagan’s challenge to then-president Gerald Ford in the 1976 primaries represented the next great anti-establishment challenge by the party’s conservative wing. That battle went all the way to the national convention in Kansas City, Mo., where Ford prevailed. When Ford lost the election to Jimmy Carter, Reagan and his antiestablishment conservatism laid claim to leadership of the party and eventually to the presidency.
In the eyes of anti-establishment Republicans, the election of George H.W. Bush in 1988 restored the establishment wing to power. Within two years there was another revolt, this one led by then-Rep. Newt Gingrich when Bush abandoned his pledge not to raise taxes as part of a controversial budget deal with the Democrats.
The 1990 rebellion contributed to Bush’s defeat to Bill Clinton in 1992. Two years after that, the Gingrich-led forces swept to power in the House in 1994, Gingrich became speaker and the balance again swung away from the establishment.
Six years later, after Gingrich and his revolution faltered and had left the speakership, the establishment reasserted itself when then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush was elected president.
“We reverted to the norm, and the old order came back again,” Gingrich said.
Many of these battles pitted familiar wings against one another: moderates vs. conservatives; the business wing vs. the evangelical wing; the mainstream wing vs. the populist wing. Many assumed this year’s Republican contest would be a rerun of contests between the establishment and a conservative insurgency. Trump’s candidacy has scrambled those assumptions and for what are now obvious reasons — the changing composition of the Republican coalition.
In the 1970s and 1980s, white working-class voters in the north fled a Democratic Party they saw as too liberal on cultural and racial issues and migrated to the Republicans. Once a linchpin of the Democratic coalition, they later were dubbed Reagan Democrats, but the migration began long before his presidency. They joined white Southern conservatives who had earlier defected from the southern Democratic Party to become Republicans.
Many of these white, working-class voters coexisted uneasily with the party establishment and at times with the purer strains of conservatism.
“The white working class left the Democratic Party because it concluded that the party was committed to groups and objectives that were inimical to their economic interests,” said William Galston, a Brookings Institution scholar and former White House domestic policy adviser in the Clinton administration. “The Republican Party promised to do better, but it never delivered.”
Trump wasn’t the first to tap into this anger. Galston points to the 1992 and 1996 presidential candidacies of Patrick J. Buchanan. The conservative commentator challenged Bush in the 1992 primaries and in 1996 led a populist revolt he described as “peasants with pitchfork.” He ran on a platform similar to that of Trump today: anti-free trade, tough on immigration and focused on the plight of the white working-class ethnics.
“Trump stood up and said in effect (to the white working class), these Republican elites, they haven’t done squat for you,” Galston said.” If you want someone who will stand up and defend your values and interests, here I am.”
