Stephens:
Democracies that trade substance for charisma don’t last. Trump is America’s answer to Hugo Chávez.
Democracies that trade substance for charisma don’t last. Trump is America’s answer to Hugo Chávez.
If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re
appalling.
If you have reached physical maturity and still chuckle at
Mr. Trump’s pubescent jokes about Rosie O’Donnell or Heidi Klum, you will never
reach mental maturity. If you watched Mr. Trump mock fellow candidate Lindsey
Graham’s low poll numbers and didn’t cringe at the lack of class, you are
incapable of class. If you think we need to build new airports in Queens the
way they build them in Qatar, you should be sent to join the millions of forced
laborers who do construction in the Persian Gulf. It would serve you right.
Since Mr. Trump joined the GOP presidential field and leaped
to the top of the polls, several views have been offered to explain his
popularity. He conveys a can-do image. He is the bluntest of the candidates in
addressing public fears of cultural and economic dislocation. He toes no line,
serves no PAC, abides no ideology, is beholden to no man. He addresses the
broad disgust of everyday Americans with their failed political establishment.
And so forth and so on—a parade of semi-sophisticated
theories that act as bathroom deodorizer to mask the stench of this candidacy.
Mr. Trump is a loudmouth vulgarian appealing to quieter vulgarians. These
vulgarians comprise a significant percentage of the GOP base. The leader isn’t
the problem. The people are. It takes the demos to make the demagogue.
There will be other opportunities to write about the radical
affinities and moralizing conceits of Democrats and liberals. For now let’s speak
plainly about what the Trump ascendancy says about the potential future of the
Republican Party and the conservative movement.
It says that we may soon have a conservative movement in
which the American creed of “give us your tired, your poor” could yield to the
Trumpian creed that America must not become a “dumping ground” to poor
immigrants from Latin America, as if these millions of hardworking and
God-fearing people are a specimen of garbage.
It says that a party that carries on about the importance of
e pluribus unum and rails against the
identity politics of assorted minorities is increasingly tempted to indulge the
paranoid (and losing) identity politics of a dwindling white majority.
It says that a sizable constituency in a party that is supposed
to favor a plain reading of the Constitution objects to a plain reading of the
14th Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and
subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of
the state wherein they reside.”
It says that a movement that is supposed to believe in
defending old-fashioned values and traditions against the assorted degradations
of the postmodern left might allow itself to be led by a reality-TV star whose
meretricious tastes in trophies, architectural and otherwise, mainly remind me
of the aesthetics of Bob Guccione.
It says that a party that is supposed to believe in the
incomparable awesomeness of America thinks we are losing the economic hunger
games to the brilliant political leadership of . . . Mexico. It says that a
movement that is supposed to believe in economic freedom doesn’t believe in the
essence of economic freedom: to wit, the free movement of goods, services,
capital and labor.
It says that many of the same people who have bellyached
nonstop for the past seven years about the cult-of-personality president
currently in the Oval Office are seriously willing to consider another
cult-of-personality figure on the off-chance he’s peddling the cure America
needs. Focus group testing by pollster Frank Luntz suggests that Mr. Trump’s
fans could care less about his flip-flopping political views but responded
almost rapturously to his apparently magnetic persona.
When people become indifferent to the ideas of their
would-be leaders, those leaders become prone to dangerous ideas. Democracies
that trade policy substance for personal charisma tend not to last as
democracies. They become Bolivarian republics. Donald Trump may be America’s
Hugo Chávez, minus the political consistency.
***
Because the Republican Party has not lost its mind—at least
not yet—I doubt that Mr. Trump will be its presidential nominee. A single bad
poll could break him. The summer before an election-year summer tends to be a
political clown-time. Voters, like diners in a fancy restaurant, may entertain
the idea of ordering the pigeon, but they’ll probably wind up with the chicken.
Still, Mr. Trump’s political star is rising in a period when
fringe politics, both on the right and the left, are making a comeback in the
West. Marine Le Pen in France. Beppe Grillo in Italy. Jeremy Corbyn in Great
Britain. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party. Every now and then some of
these characters get into office. Look at Viktor Orbán in Hungary, or Alexis
Tsipras in Greece.
Republicans like to think of America as an exceptional
nation. And it is, not least in its distaste for demagogues. Donald Trump’s
candidacy puts the strength of that distaste to the test.
