Populism stands for the people against abusive elites. Right-wing “populism,” on the other hand, is a grift, a cynical counterfeit of the real thing that actually serves those abusive elites by exploiting public grievance that could otherwise be turned against them and directing it, instead, against weaker, even powerless, groups like immigrants, Muslims, the LBGTQ community and other minorities. The protofascist variant of “populism” that has emerged in the U.S., most prominently identified with Donald Trump but a style increasingly adopted by political and media elites, also tries to appeal to progressive values widely shared by most Americans, even large numbers of them who would never consider themselves “progressive” and would be appalled, even furious, if anyone else slapped that label on them. These appeals are, in general, cynical, entirely unserious and laughably superficial but they’re a means of not only attenuating a politics that is otherwise grossly unappealing but of building support for that politics; telling people it isn’t so bad, giving them permission to go along if they can stomach the bad, misleading them into throwing their support behind some little glimmer of hope in a political system in which the only “choices” are usually between two really bad options.
Last year — 30 June, 2022 — I was poking around Twitter and came across a large number of Clintonite “Democrats” who were venting their rage at a screenshot of old 2016 tweets by various political commentators talking about Trump running to Clinton’s left on several issues. They were furious that anyone in media would suggest Trump was left of Clinton on anything. I made a thread about the subject, one of no small importance, even if I perhaps failed to offer any particularly original insights into it. It has all the usual limitations of Twitter but I reproduce it here:
This screenshot of some tweets from 2016 has drawn some abuse in recent days, but the observations of these journalists and pundits were, at the time, fairly routine, as Trump, in that campaign, did routinely run to Clinton’s left.
For some reason — no small one being the hideous regime that followed — this seems to have disappeared down a Memory Hole but staking out positions to the left was an integral part of Trump’s 2016 strategy, part of what won him the presidency.
It would be a fool’s errand to even try to make any case for Trump being at all serious when it came to that kind of talk — he was always a charlatan, mendacity his trademark — and the effects it had on his standing in that campaign are variable. Often, though, substantial.
When Trump was repeatedly condemning NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] and the TPP [the Trans-Pacific Partnership], attacking big business, Wall Street & bribery-and-donor-service corruption, raging against constant military interventionism, signaling a willingness to embrace single-payer healthcare, etc., he was running to Clinton’s left.
Resolute opposition to the system of bribery-and-donor-service corruption, which allows entrenched interests to murder democracy, control the levers of power and game the system to their own benefit at everyone else’s expense, is foundational to American progressive politics.
Trump, in perhaps his most popular campaign slogan, pledged to “drain the swamp,” hurling a constant stream of rhetorical bombs at influence-purchasers and peddlers, lobbyists, dark money, super PACs and promising to crack down on all of it.
Hillary Clinton, who had been a key figure in convincing Dem pols to embrace this corruption, spent most of that campaign prostituting her potential presidency to entrenched interests, a virtual poster-child for that rotten system. Bombs away:
Trump refused super PAC aid from his own supporters:
“‘Mr. Trump is self funding his campaign and has disavowed all Super PACs,’ campaign spokesperson Hope Hicks said in a statement to The Post on Friday when asked about the group’s continued activity.”
Against Clinton, the arch-warhawk, Trump called for a non-interventionist foreign policy, moving away from trying to run the world and its affairs, nation-building, etc.
Contra Clinton — and in the face of attacks by his own GOP rivals — Trump called for government-funded healthcare for all.
“We do need health care for all people,” Trump said at a rally here this week. “What are we gonna do, let people die in the street?”
Trump proposed “the most liberal student loan repayment plan since the inception of the federal financial aid program…”
Trump: “[D]ebt should not be an albatross around [students’] necks for the rest of their lives.’”
“[W]e will eliminate the carried interest deduction and other special interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors, and for people like me, but unfair to American workers.”
Trump savaged the grant-superpowers-to-multinationals agreements misleadingly labeled “free trade,” which have stripped the American industrial base in the name of corporate profits, taking particular aim at the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA):
“Trump: NAFTA is the Worst Trade Deal Ever Signed”
During the campaign, Trump absolutely carpet-bombed this message into the Rust Belt, where communities have been devastated by such trade policies for decades, and this was almost certainly key to putting him over the top in the states that ultimately won him the presidency.
Trump pledged to protect, rather than dismember, Social Security, which — like a lot of the things outlined here — angered both the Republican-right and Clintonite-right punditocracy.
And so on. While that screenshot that began this thread has upset some, Trump’s moves to the left, often outflanking Clinton, were widely noted at the time. For example:
In this one, Thomas Frank warned the Democrats about this:
And…
“Pssst… Trump Won By Running To Clinton’s Left”
Alongside this progressive talk, though, co-existed Trump’s raving about Mexicans being rapists and killers, American Muslims celebrating in the streets on 9/11, etc. Ugly appeals to the worst, most reactionary, viscerally anti-progressive impulses.
People have been arguing over which of the two were most important to Trump’s success. A mini-genre developed for a time wherein Clintonite-right analysts unconvincingly argued for dinosaurish racism being the secret of Trump’s appeal. The truth is that both went into his win.
It isn’t as if politically active progressives were ever fooled by Trump — they were calling him out all along — but the progressive values Trump was routinely trying to exploit in 2016 are very broadly held by Americans of all political persuasions.
Trump 2016 also regularly employed a “firehose of falsehood” approach, sending often contradictory messaging in every direction, letting his audience hear what they want. Example: the Washington Post’s breakdown of Trump’s many positions on the minimum wage:
“A Guide To Donald Trump’s Flip-Flops on the Minimum Wage”
Trump would advocate anti-interventionist foreign policy, alongside belligerent talk of foreign enemies (real and imagined). His actions in office utterly contradicted his progressive campaign rhetoric. He raged against NAFTA, then reinstituted it as president.
2016 Trump damned tax loopholes for the wealthy; in office, his top major accomplishment was a tax-cut for the rich. 2016 Trump was to protect Social Security; President Trump tried to cut it every year. 2016 Trump was “drain the swamp”; he became it:
Trump’s 2016 political style was a kind of protofascism. Like the real thing, it’s politically omnivorous — gobbles up public discontent, whatever the source, and turns it into campaign material.
There was lots of material from Americans who have long been abused by elites but whose problems and concerns aren’t addressed by a political system dominated by those same elites, and certainly not by Hillary Clinton, a servant of those elites.
For even a far-right figure like Trump, it proved a target-rich environment.
The entire experience is a huge warning to Democrats. If they aren’t responsive to Americans’ needs, if they don’t offer sane, progressive solutions, the Trumps of the world can always play this game.
APPENDIX
The Clinton cult thinks it smears Bernie Sanders to insist that Trump’s use of left rhetoric mimicked Sanders. How any sane person would see this as an indictment of Sanders is anyone’s guess, but the premise also ignores the far more prominent precedent Trump followed: Running to Clinton’s left is how Barack Obama defeated Clinton in the 2008 Dem primaries. And, in fact, 2016 saw massive defections of Obama voters to Trump. By the various estimates, Obama voters amounted to 13.3% to 14.6% of Trump’s total voters.
[That appendix was added to the original thread on 2 Nov., 2022, and concluded it.].
Some parting thoughts: The “warning to Democrats” ending of that thread was rather perfunctory but as is often the case with Twitter threads, the point was to stimulate discussion about a subject that should be of much interest to those who follow U.S. politics. The Democratic Establishment — the donor class, party officialdom, the leadership among the elected officials, the associated individuals and entities — creates the political environment or, perhaps more to the point, the political vacuum within which this sort of right-wing faux-”populism” can exist and, properly nurtured, thrive, not only by insisting on a donor-driven politics that lets Americans’ problems pile up and fester unaddressed but by actively — rabidly — working to suppress the emergence of any progressive alternative.
Right-wing politicians, meanwhile, are working on honing their cosplay “populism.” Some even recently made a show of siding with union railworkers in the workers’ quest for paid sick-leave, while the “Democratic” Biden administration was opposing it. They’re proffering visions of reinventing the GOP as the “working-class party,” and hoping their “populist” grift can make that a reality.
Stay tuned.
— j.
