http://www.weeklystandard.com/trump-creationism-whos-responsible-for-creating-donald-trump/article/2000427Tom Nichols has a thoughtful and pretty persuasive piece over at the Daily Beast arguing that Trumpmania is the direct consequence of the militant PC radicalism that has infested American society over the last decade or so.
Here’s a flavor of Nichols' piece:
The American left created Donald Trump.
When I say "the left," I do not mean the Democratic Party—or, solely the Democratic Party. Rather, the pestilence that is the Trump campaign is the result of a conglomeration of political, academic, media, and cultural elites who for decades have tried to act as the arbiters of acceptable public debate and shut down any political expression from Americans with whom they disagree. They, more than anyone else, created Donald Trump's candidacy and the increasingly hideous movement he now leads. . . .
Today, however, we have a new, more virulent political correctness that terrorizes both liberals and conservatives, old-line Democrats and Republicans, alike. This form of political correctness is distinctly illiberal; indeed, it is not liberalism at all but Maoism circa the Cultural Revolution.
The extremist adherents of this new political correctness have essentially taken a flamethrower to the public space and annihilated its center. Topics in American life that once were the legitimate subjects of debate between liberals and conservative are now off-limits and lead to immediate attack by the cultural establishment if raised at all. Any incorrect position, any expression of the constitutional right to a different opinion, or even just a slip of the tongue can lead to public ostracism and the loss of a job. (Just ask Brendan Eich.) There is a huge vacuum left by this leftist attack on speech, and Trump is filling it. . . .
When The New York Times tells the rubes that it's time to hand in their guns, when The Washington Post suggests that Jesus is ashamed of them for not welcoming Syrian refugees the week after a terrorist attack, people react not because they love guns or hate Syrians, but because their natural urge to being told by coastal liberals that they're awful people and that they should just obey and shut up is to issue a certain Anglo-Saxon verb and pronoun combination with all the vigor they can muster. And if they can't say it themselves, they'll find someone who will, even if it's a crude jerk from Queens who can't make a point without raising his pinky like a Mafia goon explaining the vig to you after you've had a bad day at the track.
These brutish leftist tactics radicalized otherwise more centrist people toward Trump not because they care so much about gay marriage or guns or refugees any other issue, but because they're terrified that they're losing the basic right to express themselves.
It's a great piece; you should read the whole thing.
In response, one of my favorite progressive writers, Kevin Drum, notes that Nichols has a point (or at least "a germ of a point"). But even so, Drum doesn't think that Political Correctness created Trump. "Conservatives built the monster named Trump," he says, "not liberals." This is a persistent theme you hear from the left. Depending whom you ask, it's either "conservatives" or "Republicans" who created Trumpism.
But it's unclear that there's much evidence for this belief. From the beginning, people have misunderstood the nature of Trump's supporters. Originally the media assumed that he was being pushed aloft by the Tea Party. Later it was assumed that his supporters were traditional conservatives. But the polling has always painted a very different picture: Trump's support draws from across wide spectrums of both ideology and political identity.
The most recent snapshot of this comes from a giant poll conducted by Civis Analytics in which they looked for the party registration of Trump supporters: he takes home 29 percent support among registered Republicans; he has 40 percent of folks who are unregistered Republican leaners; and he gets 43 percent—his best number—from voters who lean Republican but are registered Democrats.
Couple the polling data with the issue matrix: Conservatives (and Republicans, for that matter) have spent most of their political and intellectual capital over the last 20 years opposing abortion and gay marriage, proposing reforms of entitlements and the tax code, and promoting a hawkish foreign policy committed to spreading democracy. Never mind their batting average—what's important is that Trump does not seem committed to any of these goals. In fact, it's not even clear how many of these propositions he supports in the abstract.
We should stipulate that Trumpism (or whatever we eventually wind up calling this movement) is the result of many factors, both seen and unseen, including: immigration, income inequality, the housing bubble and resulting financial crisis, middle-class wage stagnation, globalization, transnationalism, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and worldwide Islamic terrorism, and much else. I'd include in this Nichols's thesis about political correctness and the Maoism of the modern left. You could probably add your own contributing factors to the list.
What's interesting is the extent to which these factors seem more cultural than political. Because of that, it might be reasonable to suspect that Trumpism is merely the political result of a cultural revolution. Or perhaps, the political result of the reaction to a cultural revolution.
But perhaps not. When you go back to that list of factors driving Trumpism you can probably pull out any one of them—perhaps even immigration—without compromising the whole movement. But there is one factor without which it is almost impossible to imagine Trumpism having bloomed. That factor is Barack Obama.
I suspect that when we look back on the Obama years honestly—not just through the filtered light of the ceremonies as they dedicate his monument on the Mall—we will see that he ushered in a new era in American politics where ideology gave way to identity and tribalism.
And that by marrying the politics of identity to expanded executive authority and hyper-partisanship, he fundamentally changed America's political compact. Think about the list of Obama's most important accomplishments: the passage of Obamacare; the Obergefell verdict; mass amnesty; the Iran nuclear deal; the climate change treaty; and now his dictum on firearms. Not one of these programs had a solid majority of public support. And consequently, none of them were accomplished by normal legislative means.
It is difficult to imagine Trumpism arising in the shadow of either Bill Clinton's administration, or George W. Bush's—or even Hillary Clinton's, had she been elected in 2008—because all three of these figures have traditional views on coalition building, legislative authority, and (small-r) republicanism.
Yet perhaps what's most telling about Donald Trump's rise is that the reaction of his supporters has not been (so far) to search for a leader who will return the political order to the old equilibrium. Instead, they seem to assume that the post-Obama political world will continue along tribalistic lines. And they want their own strongman.
