Questioning the Ethno-Nationalist Backlash
One of the popular frames in 2016 was crystalized by NYT columnist Ross Douthat of a new political divide, which pits Cosmopolitisan Finance Capitalism vs the Ethno-Nationalist Backlash, defining Brexit and Hillary v Trump. It was understandable, as there seemed to be rich anti-racists dominating coverage of one side, and poor racists dominating coverage of the other.
But this framing actually never seemed right to me.
Here’s a weird thing: both campaigns were run out of New York City (the two hippest boroughs even.) In the past this would have been unconscionable for a Presidential campaign: you put your HQ in some state your candidate has “roots” with to show they aren’t just big city coastal elites. Republicans run their campaigns from Texas or Michigan, Democrats from Tennessee or Illinois.
And there was a sense in which… this pretense just didn’t matter anymore. The “New York celebrity” aspect of both HRC and DJT were treated as assets and rewarded lavishly, by voters in Donald’s case and by fundraisers and art producers in Hillary’s.
If there was an Ethno-Nationalist Backlash , why did a field of Republicans from every type of conservative state get creamed by a financier who sits in a golden tower in New York City and had a public history of divorce and adultery?
Mumble mumble, something about how the ENB voters were so angry, only an idiot as offensive as Trump could satisfy them. He was the most blunt in proposing racist policies, so he ran away with the voters.
Why not the Duck Dynasty guy? Why not Mike Huckabee? Why not anyone with some sort of connection to the supposed parochial tribalists who only like people who share their cultural signifiers? Traditionally a parochial candidate should be a non-ideological, pragmatic wiseman who has the trust of their community and the free hand to follow whatever policies and allies he deems wisest.”
The much more parsimonious explanation seems not that Trump succeeded because “there’s Molochian drift towards the centralized elites in this country and now a backlash from the dispossessed decentralized is taking the most monstrous form it can find” but rather “there’s Molochian drift towards the centralized elites in this country and Trump is one such elite.”
He’s not part of some Southern network of established donors, like Jeb Bush was. He’s not the successful governor of a rust belt state, like John Kasich was. He was a star from the finance center of the universe, and he played the game like one.
And what’s interesting is that while there was undoubtedly some ENB sentiment, it was channeled into the system created by a CFC hegemony: celebrity, centralization, and ultimately economic deregulation. If both your candidates identify with New York City, then no surprise that both candidates would appoint Goldman Sachs officers to high economic positions.
Cute and clever, but ultimately not strong enough.
The nature of Trump’s base makes it impossible to frame this setup as pure “Molochian drift towards the centralized elites.” It’s not like we got a fight between two elite factions – say, startup-culture tech-bro libertarians versus social-justice-y Ivy League progressives – and everyone else in the country was just swept along for the ride. I can imagine that world, but it’s not what happened. All the elites were on one side. (Not literally true…but more so than in any other election I can remember, because so many traditional Republican elites held their noses and fled screaming from Trump.) The Donald may have been a New York real estate tycoon running his campaign out of New York, but in the end, no one in New York voted for him.
And, well, if you listen to what Trump voters actually have to say, it’s very hard not to understand it as something like an ethno-nationalist backlash. This is not an idea that the pundits are pulling out of nowhere.
Now, all that said: why is a New York real estate tycoon best-situated to become the standard-bearer of our ethno-nationalist backlash? That is a damn good question, and probably one that hasn’t gotten enough attention. I bet there’s a really good essay to be written about the ways in which all the various American cultures have been hollowed out and redefined by (urban corporate) media, such that a professional TV nasty-man is much better at projecting “I am the culture hero who will save you from the nasty liberal bigwigs” than any actual bona-fide exemplar of non-urban culture could be. Or maybe it mostly boils down to “Trump is a fluke; you’d have to be cuckoo-nuts to think that it’s worth investing in a presidential campaign if you’re actually not any kind of politician, but right at this moment it turns out that large numbers of people really really wanted Actually Not Any Kind of Politician, and Trump is in fact both cuckoo-nuts and extremely rich.” I dunno. Lots of theories seem plausible.