There was a telling moment in the middle of the Republican primaries, when a reporter asked Donald Trump to comment on charges that he really wasn’t a conservative. “It’s called the Republican Party,” he answered. “Not the conservative party.”
Understand that, and you’ll understand the path Trump took to victory — through Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan, not through the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) or K Street. It’s something nearly everyone on the left missed, from the academy to fake-news sites like the Washington Post. They painted him as an arch-reactionary, at best Barry Goldwater but more likely George Wallace. He’s neither of them, of course.
He’s a proud New Yorker, at ease with modern society, with same-sex marriage, with Social Security, with the idea that our health care laws should look after the most vulnerable Americans.
He’s not in any way a bigot, and the only blinkered folks who would think he is are people who can understand the world only through the prism of race and gender, and who moreover are eager to smear their opponents.
Here’s what Trump isn’t: a right-wing ideologue, a member of the Republican Party of Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz, of checklist conservatism and of the idea that 47 percent of Americans are “takers.” That party died in 2012, a victim in part of its own heartlessness. It took with it the right-wing intellectuals who, after all, aren’t so very intelligent and the right-wing thinkers who aren’t well-read either; and who so closely resemble the left in their contempt for Trump’s supporters.
What unites those at the extremes of our politics is a belief in the rottenness of ordinary Americans.
For the left, it’s a story of racial prejudice, of misogyny and gay-bashing. For the right, it’s a story of moral decay, of shiftless, Oxy-sniffing degenerates from broken homes. For both, it has spawned a redneck-porn literature in which the upper-class reader is encouraged to hug himself in delight as he contemplates the awfulness of those beneath him, the coal miner, the struggling housewife, the laid-off worker.
Trump wasn’t having any of that. He didn’t think that Americans were bigots, or that anyone lost his job because he sniffed Oxy. Instead, if anyone sniffed Oxy, it’s because he was demoralized because he didn’t have a job. Trump trusted in the basic goodness of Americans and thought that fixing the job situation is the only moral rearmament crusade we need or could have. The voters got it, and so did extremists on the right and left, which is why they hated him.
Trump bids to create a different kind of Republican Party. As America’s natural governing party, it would be one that more closely resembles Eisenhower’s Republican Party, with its interstate highway and Great Lakes Seaway programs, or John F. Kennedy’s Democratic Party, with its space exploration and tax-reform policies.
Those were parties that took pride in America, and would not have been satisfied with anything less than American Greatness.
The Democratic Party used to be one of noble ideals, best articulated in Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, a speech one can’t read today without feeling a tremendous sense of loss. One heard an echo of it from President Obama in 2008, but these were themes he quickly abandoned in favor of identity politics, divisiveness and a supercilious contempt for his opponents.
That left a hole in American politics, a hole filled by Trump, and by a new Republican Party that bids to render obsolete all the former distinctions in American politics. The old right-left axis is dead. In its place, new ones will arise — between political virtue and the corruption of crony capitalism, between compassion and the callousness of right-wing ideologues and left-wing haters, and between great- and small-souled people, those who believe in American Greatness and those content with mediocrity.
Trump is a shape-shifter, the agent of transformation, who utterly changed one political party and confounded the other. He is the artist of Trump Tower, and will shortly be the artist of the White House.
Trump’s faith in the American people earned him the contempt of extremists on the right and left. That’s as it should be. As Oscar Wilde noted, when critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.
F.H. Buckley’s most recent book is “The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America.”