The United States has had a two-party political system since the election of 1800, but from outside that two-party system have often emerged the political outsiders who have shaped the destiny of the nation. American political parties are composed of coalitions of people with often seemingly conflicting interests, but, to be successful, they share enough in common for all or most of the factions within the party to support a consensus candidate, usually from the establishment center of that party. It is only during a time of general dissatisfaction with the status quo and uncertainty over the future that an outsider arises to challenge or usurp the establishment of one or both of the two major parties. These outsiders usually appear about every 30 or 40 years and, even when unsuccessful, they have changed the political landscape and conversation of the country. This year we have two of them, New York real estate mogul Donald Trump and Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, and they are changing the political future of the United States in ways that we are only beginning to see.
William Jennings Bryan
Prairie populist William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) emerged during the great depression of the 1890s, promising a progressive anti-corporate policy agenda, a national income tax to redistribute wealth, federal aid to small farms, and a loose money financial plan that would free the American worker from the tyranny of the gold standard. Three times a Democratic nominee for president (1896, 1900, and 1908), Bryan reinvented the Democratic Party for the 20th century. Every progressive Democrat from Franklin Roosevelt to Bernie Sanders is a direct political descendant of the Nebraska congressman and future Secretary of State in the Wilson administration. The Sanders and Clinton pledges to make the 1-percent highest tax bracket pay for a vastly expanded health care system, break up the big banks, and provide government subsidized college for all would have been enthusiastically supported by Bryan and his Midwest prairie progressives.
The first and most significant political outsider of modern times was Nebraska populist William Jennings Bryan in the election of 1896, an election over issues and class warfare that resonates with the one taking place in 2016. Bryan is the father of the modern progressive Democratic Party, and his legacy can be seen in the candidacies of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Barack Obama, and Bernie Sanders. Before Bryan, the Democratic Party was the party of small government, a political party that had as its base the former Confederate states and the Catholic immigrant vote on the East Coast. It stood for segregation, business expansion, and states rights, which is why only one Democrat, Grover Cleveland, had won the presidency since 1860, and only because he was a virtual clone of his Republican rivals, James G. Blaine and Benjamin Harrison. Bryan would present a clear contrast to his Republican opponent, Ohio Governor William McKinley, in the most ideological and class-divided election since 1832 and before 1932.
In 1896 the United States was in the fourth year of a severe economic depression that rivaled the one we call the Great Depression. A year into this deep depression, in 1894, an Ohio failed businessman named Jacob Coxey attempted to lead a march of the unemployed to the nation’s capital to demand economic reforms. This ragtag army of the poor, most of them riding the rails, never made it to Washington, having been stopped by federal troops who removed them from rail cars and blocked them on the roads. In those days the U.S. government had a very low tolerance for civil disorder. Jacob Coxey and the plight of the unemployed discredited the Cleveland administration and what passed for the Democratic establishment of that time, paving the way for the rise of the Bryan and his prairie populist agenda.
For a 36-year-old Nebraska congressman to challenge the governor of Ohio, a Civil War veteran of the Battle of Antietam backed by the very powerful political machine of Mark Hanna, was an audacious undertaking that would have been an uphill fight under any circumstances. Bryan not only sought the White House, but at the same time he sought to change the very trajectory of his party, redefining what it meant to be a Democrat for the next 120 years. In the first quest he failed, but in the second he was more successful than he could ever have hoped. Probably the most inspirational orator of his time, although only a few recordings of his speeches survive, Bryan attracted the kind of crowds that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have been able to garner in 2016. He called for what at the time were radical changes that included an income tax on the rich to raise federal revenue, the breakup of Standard Oil and other large corporations, financial aid for family farms, the popular election of U.S. senators, women’s suffrage, a pacifist and anti-militarist foreign policy, and his keynote issue, taking the United States off the gold standard to increase the money supply. Bryan was also an ardent prohibitionist who believed that government should regulate social policy.
William Jennings Bryan shares the dubious distinction with Henry Clay of being defeated three times in presidential elections, twice by William McKinley and once by William Howard Taft. His progressive message was picked up by both parties in what would be known as the Progressive Era that lasted until 1917. Elements of Bryan’s agenda — including a national income tax; the direct popular election of senators, previously chosen by state legislatures; and the expansion of the franchise to include American women — became permanent law as ratified in Constitutional amendments, and the gold standard for the dollar, which he regarded as an onerous burden on the working class, was abandoned by the Nixon administration in 1971. His antiwar pacifism and opposition to military spending would become another feature of Democratic politics, carried forward, not always successfully, in the foreign policies of Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, and both of the Democratic contenders in 2016.
A century ago the presidential candidates of the major parties were chosen by delegations picked by state legislatures. It was the era of the smoke-filled room, where the most powerful figures within a party establishment would gather around a table in a closed room, chomp on Havana cigars, and choose a compromise figure who could win enough state delegations at the national convention to unite the party in November. A classic example of this was the Republican convention in Chicago in 1920 when dark horse Warren Harding won on the tenth ballot ahead of the front runner, the war hero General Leonard Wood, progressive Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette, and a host of favorite-son candidates to go on to win the presidency that November. As recently as the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, this was the method by which Hubert Humphrey, who hardly bothered to enter most of the primaries, was chosen by Democratic power brokers, ignoring insurgents like Eugene McCarthy, who had done well in the primaries, and George McGovern, who inherited the delegates of the assassinated Robert Kennedy. It was not really a democratic system, but it did make it very problematic for outsiders to capture a party’s nomination.
The smoked-filled-room nominating process began to be undermined when the states started to adopt primaries and caucus elections to choose the makeup of state delegations, beginning in 1912 and becoming almost universal by 1916. Voters in the primary and caucus states did not, however, vote for the candidates but for delegates, who favored but were not committed to vote for those candidates at the national conventions. This is why candidates were rarely nominated on the first ballot, or even the second or third and sometimes not even the 100th, as at the 1924 Democratic National Convention, where John W. Davis won on the 103rd ballot. The national convention was a wheeling-and-dealing affair, where the power brokers for the candidates made deals with each other, trading the state delegations or individual delegates in their pockets for the vice presidency or a cabinet position or an ambassadorship appointment. Much like making blood sausage, the nomination of a presidential candidate was an unappetizing process that worked better than it should have, giving the country Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, as well as mediocrities like Rutherford Hayes, Grover Cleveland, and Warren Harding.
This system of nominating candidates ended after 1968 with the McGovern-Fraser Commission reforms that provided for open election of delegates who would henceforth be committed by the rules to vote for the candidates on the first ballot. A major result of these reforms was that most states, aside from a few eccentrics like Iowa and Nevada, adopted primaries instead of caucuses. Ballots listed candidates for president rather than the names of individual delegates, which made the process not only more democratic, but also more open to insurgent outsiders. The Republicans, as well as the Democrats, adopted the reforms or were subject to them by state laws governing primaries. Coming out of the chaos of 1968, this revolution made the smoke-filled room a thing of the past and decided the nomination of the candidate in both major parties weeks and often months before the national convention. Since 1968, every presidential candidate has been nominated on the first ballot, transforming the national convention itself from a political battleground into a love fest and cheerleading session for the nominee.
None of this would have happened without the influence of outsiders in the race, and 1968 was the year of the outsider. There were no less than three outsider candidates in 1968, and their profound influence continues to this day, opening a deep and permanent fissure in the American body politic. One was a liberal antiwar senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy; another was the segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace; and the third was the very conservative governor of California, Ronald Reagan. The first two were Democrats, and yet they could not have been farther apart on every issue or in the cultural values of their supporters. The Republican had only been involved in national politics since 1964, and already he was being discussed as a viable candidate for president. None of them would succeed in winning their party’s nomination that year, but they would lay the groundwork for what the American political argument would be for the next five decades.
We accept today as gospel many myths about the politics and cultural revolution of the 1960s. One of the biggest and most enduring myths was that a majority of the generation born since the end of World War II embraced the youth counterculture of that time. In fact, it was a relatively small and predominantly affluent part of that generation that succumbed to the antiwar and cultural Marxist ideology of that counterculture. Before the autumn of 1967, it appeared to most political pundits that Lyndon Johnson, a transformational president if there ever was one, was well on the road to reelection. Despite the rising tide of campus protests against the Vietnam War and the draft, and terrible race riots in Detroit that left much of that city resembling a war zone, a substantial majority of Americans supported the U.S. commitment in Vietnam and the use of National Guard and federal troops to restore order where anarchy and violence overwhelmed local police and made a mockery of law. All that national unity and confidence would soon change, ending any hopes Johnson may have had of winning a second term with the same ease with which he had won his first.
This iconic moment during the Communist Tet Offensive in late January 1968 changed the course of a presidential election and altered the outcome of a crucial battle in the minds of the American people. The chief of the Saigon police had just summarily executed a Vietcong terrorist who had murdered members of this South Vietnamese official’s own family. These stark images from Vietnam, usually taken out of context by the media, elevated the candidacy of antiwar insurgent and Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, who came in a close second to sitting President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. McCarthy’s success encouraged other insurgent outsiders, including Robert Kennedy and George McGovern, to enter the race. From then on, the Democratic Party — a party until then dominated by hawks — was increasingly the peace party and would remain so through Vietnam, the Cold War, and the wars since 9/11.
The single event that paved the way for insurgent candidacies in 1968 was the Communist Tet Offensive in late January 1968, possibly the first time in U.S. history that the news media defined the outcome of a military battle for the American people and the world. While the widespread atrocities of the Vietcong, including the systematic massacre of 3,000 South Vietnamese officials and their families at Hue, were largely ignored or downplayed by the news media, the searing image of the pivotal battle for most Americans and people around the world was the Life magazine Pulitzer Prize–winning photo of the Saigon police chief shooting a Vietcong terrorist in the head. And while tens of thousands of Vietcong soldiers were killed during February and March 1968, and none of the enemy military and political objectives were achieved, the story that received by far the most coverage was the penetration and temporary seizure of the walled grounds of the U.S. Embassy compound in Saigon by a Vietcong suicide squad. What would have been called a major victory in an earlier war was defined as a humiliating defeat by the American media, including the highly respected dean of the network correspondents, Walter Cronkite, who told the American people that this was a war that could no longer be won on the battlefield. From that point on the intellectual elite in the liberal media, academia, and in Hollywood turned against the war and questioned whether the United States was even on the right side in the conflict.
Eugene McCarthy
In the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, who had actually announced his presidential run in November 1967, entered the New Hampshire primary to challenge Lyndon Johnson, the first time a sitting president had been seriously opposed for his renomination since 1912. McCarthy was a leftist Democrat who proclaimed himself “the peace candidate” and blatantly appealed to the youth vote with his antiwar message and personal image as a poet and intellectual. It was the first time any candidate had made a conscious appeal to a demographic of those under the age of 30, and it worked for him. McCarthy became a cultural icon on college campuses and in the youth counterculture, a rock star status later achieved by Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders more than four decades later. Johnson had not even bothered to enter the primary, and consequently his name was not on the ballot and had be a write-in candidate by his supporters. The president and his campaign staff were still shocked to learn that the insurgent McCarthy had won 42 percent of the vote, coming in a relatively close second to Johnson, who had won 49 percent. Demoralized by the casualty lists from Vietnam and the New Hampshire results in early March, Johnson appeared on television a few weeks later to announce a bombing halt and his decision not to seek reelection. It was hard to believe from his television speech that this was the same Lyndon Johnson who had won a 49-state landslide four years earlier.
The results of New Hampshire, however, were misleading. It was discovered in polling that half the people who voted for McCarthy opposed Johnson because he had not fought the war hard enough to achieve a decisive victory. There was widespread opposition to Johnson’s Vietnam policy, but it was split between those who wanted the United States out of Vietnam and those who wanted the war expanded and intensified to end the strategy of attrition and instead achieve victory using unrestrained American power. What McCarthy did achieve, and what makes his outsider candidacy so relevant, is that it started the great shift in the Democratic Party that ended the bipartisan foreign policy that the United States had conducted since Pearl Harbor. McCarthy would soon be joined in the race by other antiwar candidates, including Robert Kennedy and George McGovern, who would capture the soul of the Democratic Party, losing in 1968, but winning in the long run. By 1972 the antiwar leftists would be in the mainstream of the party. Today they are the establishment.
Before 1968 Democrats and Republicans were in general agreement on containing Communist expansion around the world, the necessity for maintaining a strong nuclear deterrent, and support for the government of South Vietnam against Communist subversion through three administrations of both parties. After 1968 the leaders and constituency of the Democratic Party began to doubt the legitimacy and morality of this great ideological struggle for the world and gradually became conscientious objectors in the Cold War. The last and most crucial decade of that struggle under Ronald Reagan was in large measure a Republican effort, fought at every step of the way by Democrats opposed to increased defense spending, ballistic missile defense, the arming of indigenous forces fighting Communist expansion in Central America, Afghanistan, and southern Africa, and confrontation with the Soviet Union and its global clients. It probably was inevitable that the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy would end, but McCarthy as an outsider led the way and, along with McGovern and Robert Kennedy, changed the political debate inside the United States.
George Wallace
The second Democrat outsider of 1968 was former Alabama Governor George Wallace. Wallace had achieved national notoriety with his unrepentant segregationist stance during the Civil Rights era of the early 1960s. To the elites of both parties he was anathema, a demagogue tainted with the racist brand, and his popularity until 1968 was largely confined to the deep South. That perception of Wallace changed after the sit-ins and peaceful marches that characterized the Civil Rights struggle until 1965 were overshadowed by the ghetto riots in Watts, Detroit, and Harlem and the soaring crime rates that followed. Suddenly Wallace did not sound so extremist as the unrest on college campuses by young men with student draft deferments and the burning of ROTC buildings by youthful Marxists sporting “Che” Guevara T-shirts and brandishing Mao’s Little Red Book and Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals repelled millions of lower middle class whites in the North and South whose sons went to Vietnam and who felt disenfranchised and ignored by the liberal elites. They found their candidate in George Wallace, who tapped into their resentments, fears, and anger.
Adopting a populist law-and-order platform, Wallace dropped out of the Democratic race, where his kind of Democrat was increasingly marginalized, and ran as the candidate of the American Independent Party with former Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay as his running mate. LeMay’s formula for winning the war in Vietnam was to carpet bomb the enemy “back into the stone age,” a strategy that some present-day candidates have borrowed to deal with the ISIS threat. The base of Wallace’s support were the people outraged by the antics of the radical left, disgusted by the changing morality and sexual freedom that were transforming the popular culture, and fearful of losing the middle class prosperity that they had gained after World War II to liberals who asked for higher taxes and income redistribution to benefit minorities. To these people it seemed like anarchy and only Wallace seemed to know how to deal with anarchists. The Alabama populist promised his enthusiastic supporters that “if any anarchists lie down in front of my automobile, it will be the last automobile they ever lie down in front of.”
Wallace became the only third party candidate since the Bull Moose Party in 1912 to win electoral votes in a presidential election. And no one has done it since, not John Anderson in 1980 and not even Ross Perot in 1992. He won five states with 46 electoral votes and 10 percent of the popular vote, which was no mean achievement. The winner of the 1968 race, Richard Nixon, listened to the advise of a young campaign advisor, Patrick J. Buchanan (who would make a third party challenge of his own in 2000) and made law and order in the cities and on college campuses a central part of his own campaign, and it worked. The long-term result of Nixon’s appeal to the Wallace voters was that the solid Democratic South started to move inexorably toward the Republican Party, helping to give Nixon a 49-state landslide in 1972 and Ronald Reagan his 49-state landslide in 1984. George Wallace, whatever else he may be, was the precursor to the Moral Majority, the Tea Party, and the phenomenon of Donald Trump. If he was not the right man to win with that conservative populist message, then others would follow who could win with it.
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan, arguably the most successful political outsider of the 20th century, staged a grass-roots revolt against the Republican Party establishment in 1976 and 1980. Reagan’s insurgency challenged long-held GOP positions on maintaining high taxes to balance budgets, liberal social policies, détente with the Soviet Union, and general agreement with Democrats that no federal program or bureaucracy can ever be scrapped or defunded. Before Reagan, the GOP was a party with many prominent moderate and liberal figures. Since Reagan there have been few Republican candidates not claiming to be conservative and virtually none claiming to be liberals or progressives.
The politician who would win with that message was Ronald Reagan, who, in 1968, was 56-year-old former motion picture and television actor who had been elected governor of California in 1966. In October 1964, it was Reagan’s landmark speech, “A Time for Choosing,” in support of Barry Goldwater that almost overnight had made him one of the leaders of the American conservative movement and heir presumptive to Goldwater, who had returned to the Senate after his historic defeat by Lyndon Johnson. Reagan, however, had been active in politics since the late 1940s, when as president of the Screen Actors Guild he had been instrumental in driving Communists out of that union. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Reagan had been a spokesman for the General Electric corporation, usually talking to groups of GE employees about politics and world affairs. This was no political amateur, but a man immersed in the political ideas of the New Right that had started with the founding of the National Review by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1953. If Buckley and the young Turks of his National Review writing staff reinvented conservatism as an anti-Communist, free market and traditionalist ideology, it was Reagan who would transform that ideology into practical politics and win state and national elections with it.
Until the fall of 1967, it was presumed by the pundits that the leading contenders for the 1968 Republican nomination would be moderates from the Rockefeller wing of the party, including Michigan Governor George Romney and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller himself, who had been jeered off the stage during the 1964 national convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. The mainstream view was that Conservatism and its adherents like Barry Goldwater were discredited by the drubbing they had received in 1964. And in any ordinary time that might very well have been the case, but 1968 was not an ordinary time. As the left became more radical and more extreme, the right reacted to this by adopting more hardline conservative positions. It was, in effect, a cultural and ideological civil war for the soul of America, a civil war that has never been resolved in a country that is still irrevocably divided.
Ronald Reagan was a movement conservative in the Goldwater mold with a populist appeal that Barry Goldwater never had. As California governor, Reagan stood up to the campus protestors at the University of California at Berkeley, sending in riot police to arrest radicals who were blocking entry into university administration buildings and stopping students from attending classes. Defying the political correctness of the time, Reagan frequently made statements that outraged the establishment left and made him even more popular among the conservatives. When facing down conservationists over the harvesting of California’s redwood trees, Reagan commented, “If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.” When asked about antiwar protestors at state universities, Reagan angrily retorted, “Get them out of there! Throw them out! They are spoiled and don’t deserve the education they are getting at taxpayer expense.” On Vietnam, Reagan said, “We should declare war on Vietnam. We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it and still be home by Christmas.” In the wake of the Kent State shootings, Reagan warned, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” This was the kind of inflammatory populism from the right that made Reagan, an outsider with only a few years of government experience, the great white hope of conservatives within the Republican Party.
The speculation over a Reagan run in 1968 turned out to be just that, speculation, although there was serious consideration of choosing him the nominee right up to the second day of the Miami convention in August. It showed just how shallow the support was for Romney and Rockefeller. Already afflicted by Potomac fever, Reagan certainly wanted to run for president in 1968, but in 1967 his administration in Sacramento was rocked by a sex scandal involving some of the Governor’s key aides in a homosexual relationship. At that time being gay was not an acceptable form of human behavior, a despicable vice, illegal in most places, and viewed by most Americans as only slightly less morally offensive than performing a backroom abortion. While Reagan and his wife were personally tolerant of gays, as were most people in the Hollywood community, he was astute enough to realize that it was too much of a scandal to overcome in that election year and might damage his future prospects. The other candidate in the race acceptable to conservatives was identified by William F. Buckley to be former Vice President Richard Nixon, who would end up disappointing Buckley and almost every other movement conservative when he affirmed and built upon Johnson’s Great Society programs.
Before the rise of Ronald Reagan, excepting Goldwater, the differences between the Republican and the Democrat in a presidential race were largely over details. Since Wendell Willkie won the GOP nomination in 1940, both parties had been in general agreement that the New Deal and Great Society programs of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson were permanent institutional bureaucracies, proving Ronald Reagan’s great truth that “the closest thing to eternal life in this world is a government program.” The establishment leaders in both parties found consensus in accepting that the Communist enterprise of the Soviet Union and its empire of captive satellite states could never be rolled back, its conquests were permanent, and, at best, its expansion could only be contained. Tax rates could never be reduced because that would only benefit the rich and increase the budget deficit. Ronald Reagan refused to accept any of these premises. Today, all the Republican candidates call themselves Reagan Republicans, even those who clearly are not, and no candidate ever claims to be Rockefeller or Jerry Ford moderate. That is profound change.
Bernie Sanders
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is in many ways the heir to the political legacies of William Jennings Bryan and Eugene McCarthy. As a socialist with a program for a radical transformation of the U.S. economy, he is emulating Bryan by moving the Democratic Party from the center left positions that had allowed it to win the popular vote in five of the last six national elections to a far-left social democratic agenda that would be indistinguishable from that of the socialist governments of Greece, Denmark, and Spain. Sanders is unapologetic about this and, to his credit, makes no effort to soft-sell or disguise his plans for the country. This is no Manchurian candidate deceptively sneaking radical change through the back door. If Sanders is elected, and that is no longer an impossibility, the American people will have no one but themselves to blame for the transformation that will come. His enormous appeal to young voters, especially those in college, has not been seen since the youthful enthusiasm for McCarthy and Robert Kennedy in 1968. Today, for a variety of reasons, university students are notoriously ill informed about how the free market economy works. Their candidate of choice seems to be proving the old axiom that if you promise to rob Peter to pay Paul, you can count on getting Paul’s vote. This year the proverbial Paul will be voting for Bernie Sanders.
Donald Trump
In 2016, the year of the outsider, Donald Trump dominates the election cycle and turns conventional American politics on its head with a bravura performance combining controversial comments and a bold promise to make the country great again. Appearing self-satisfied as always, the Donald, as of this writing, has won two important primaries with major leads over his principal opponents and appears, although he has a long road ahead, to be on a clear path to the GOP nomination in Cleveland. Whether Trump is nominated or not, the Republican nominee will need to adopt much of the Trump agenda in order to unite the party, including a security wall of some kind along the border with Mexico, a foreign policy that has U.S. national interest as its prime goal, and a trade policy with the world aimed to protect U.S. workers and businesses from unfair competition and cheap labor abroad. Trump’s revolution, and it is a true revolution, has overthrown the GOP establishment and put the outsiders and Young Turks of the party in the ascendancy.
The great outsider in the 2016 race is real estate mogul Donald Trump, who has defied all the laws of political gravity since declaring his candidacy for president in June 2015. Trump has successfully challenged the core establishment of the Republican Party, while at the same time making controversial statements in debates and on social media that would have ended the careers of most professional politicians. Here is a man who has taken on President Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, the Bush family, FOX news, the Mexican and Chinese governments, ISIS, illegal immigration from Mexico, Muslim migrants, the British parliament, and Pope Francis, among others. Whether he can win the nomination is still in question, as Trump has a self-destructive instinct that he does not seem to be able to restrain, but his influence on the Republican Party, no matter what happens, will be long lasting. A century from now historians will probably be debating the Trump factor in American politics. This reality TV star has almost single-handedly founded a new and vigorous faction of the big tent coalition that is the Republican Party, the nationalist wing, and its core constituency are from the same demographics that once supported George Wallace and Ronald Reagan.
Trump is the first nationalist politician since Patrick Buchanan in 1996 to win a state primary and the first since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 to have a real shot at winning the general election. There are only four kinds of Republicans: (1) evangelical voters for whom morality issues like abortion, gay marriage, and religious liberty are paramount; (2) corporate conservatives for whom cutting regulations, free trade, and lower marginal tax rates are the issues that matter most; (3) libertarians to whom legalizing drugs, preserving gun rights, lowering prison incarceration rates, and ending electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency are the issues that will define the party in the 21st century; and (4) nationalist conservatives who see border security, immigration, economic protectionism, and an America-first foreign policy as essential to save the country from permanent decline. Trump’s nationalism has resonated with voters who are fearful that they are losing the country in which they were born and frustrated by the steady decline of U.S. military power and the nation’s capacity to influence events abroad and protect the homeland.
Most American politicians, if asked what makes America great, will tell you it is the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the liberties codified in the U.S. Constitution. The conventional view is that the United States is a creedal nation where all people from all places in the world can come here to find opportunity and freedom, becoming part of the American family by embracing its founding creed. An American nationalist takes a somewhat different view of what makes America great. Trump’s core supporters believe that what makes America great are its historic traditions, industrial and technological capacity, natural resources, military power, and the patriotism and social cohesion of the people who are already here and those who came here legally to become Americans and not just to take advantage of the social services provided by U.S. taxpayers.
The Trump nationalists are suspicious and resentful of too much immigration from the surplus populations of Third World countries where democracy, capitalism, religious tolerance, freedom of speech and the press, and civil society have never existed. They generally believe that Americans workers should be protected from competition by low-wage workers in China and Mexico and mass immigration by low-skill workers at home, a position they share with the supporters of Bernie Sanders. That means opposing the Pacific Partnership Trade deal, which corporate conservatives overwhelmingly favor because the deal will generate huge profits and opportunities for those who have the knowledge and skills to take advantage of it. Unfortunately, that does not include the vast majority of American workers.
In foreign policy, Trump has promised a foreign policy that will be geared to U.S. national interests and national security. As in the words of President John Quincy Adams, Trump will not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. His America will be the well wisher of freedom and independence for all, but will be the champion and vindicator only of her own. There will be no crusades to secure human rights of people who have never had or wanted such things and a reluctance to continue to pay for the defense of rich allies well able to protect themselves. Nor will a Trump administration try to remake any part of Islamic world in America’s own image. Regions infected with Islamic fundamentalism, along with Jihadi and terrorist-breeding cultures, are never going to embrace Jeffersonian democracy and let their women wear bikinis at the beach.
In a century when all the forms of nationalism, ethnic religious and traditionalist, will be the most influential geopolitical forces on the planet, Trump’s message will continue to resonate with Americans who feel abandoned by an ineffectual government that no longer responds to their needs and concerns. Trump may not win the Republican nomination, although he has surprised me in the past with his resiliency and his GOP rivals have appalled me with their ineptitude. He will, however, be in the race all the way to the convention in August, and the enormous effect this outsider has had on the race will be reflected in the eventual nominee, no matter who that might be. The Republican Party will never again be able to nominate a candidate who favors amnesty or a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants or a candidate who will not protect the jobs of American workers. Thanks to Donald Trump, love him or hate him, nationalism is here to stay in American politics. And thanks to Bernie Sanders, progressive socialism is here to stay as well. Welcome to a brave new world.
Ray Lyman worked for Paladin Press for more than 20 years, during which he authored Paladin’s popular line of military history calendars. Another function he so ably filled was chief historian and fact checker. In the days before Google, Ray was our go-to guy on any historical, political, military, or current events question. Through this column, Ray is simply resuming that role for Paladin.