April 14, 2023
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Donald Trump and the
Counter-Revolution
Friends,
I normally don’t watch CNN. But a recent online
essay by senior political analyst, Ron Brownstein, caught my attention.
In his piece Brownstein makes some of points that
I have been making over the past few years (since the Trump election in 2016),
and that have much to do with the tectonic shift in the nature of the
Republican (or better said, conservative) base of voters, the fact that the GOP
has become largely a "blue collar" workingman's party. Certainly, university
educated professionals still fill a goodly proportion of leadership positions,
but that proportion has been decreasing.
In my view, the growing MAGA portion of the GOP is
analogous, impressionistically, to other broadly-based populist
counter-revolutionary movements which have existed since the late 18th
century violent convulsions of the French Revolution and of other revolutionary
movements occurring since then. Rightwing populism and populist
counter-revolutionary movements did not begin with MAGA.
Let me
mention an historical lineage or genealogy for what I am talking about.
Let's begin with "conservative," or more
accurately, counter-revolutionary opposition to the French Revolution (1791-1794
and beyond). We are talking here about the vast Catholic rural areas of Western
France, the peasantry of the Vendee, the Chouans of Brittany and Normandy, who
opposed by force of arms the totalitarian actions of the revolutionary French
Directory, its anti-clericalism and anti-traditionalism, its oppression of small
farmers and suppression of regional liberties. These "pitchfork"
brigades were not composed of "egalitarians"; no, actually, they defended
the old ways and traditions, the importance of the Church in public life, and they were led
by the real and natural local aristocracy (e.g. the Comte de la
Rochejaquelein, Baron de Charette, Cathlineau, etc.) who lived and worked
side-by-side with their retainers and the local farmers and merchants, who went
to Mass with them and shared their essential beliefs and values. Not with the
many-times effete worldly aristocrats in Paris, often swept up by the
fashionable currents of the "Illuminees" and the anti-clerical
Enlightenment.
The very same occurred with the ancestors of my
Carlist friends in Spain, first in their popular or populist rebellion against
the Napoleon and the French (and their imposed "enlightenment"
policies), then against the Spanish version of liberalism in three bloody civil
wars. That popular Carlist/Traditionalist movement which began early in the
19th century was both favorable to a strong, legitimate and traditional
monarchy, but with traditional rights and local liberties ("fueros") enshrined
and guaranteed, sanctified by recognized law and immemorial custom. In the
traditional concept of a "balanced monarchy"--summed up by St. Thomas
Aquinas in his De Regimine Principum--the essential principle of
subsidiarity was the guiding light, and in a certain sense that principle
inspired other theories of a "balanced" political system. That reality
was brutally assaulted by the Revolution in France and elsewhere. And it was
many times the peasantry, the small landholders, the small merchants, the
Church, and the local nobles, who formed a steadfast opposition, even waging
open war, against liberalism. That opposition continued in the 19th and into
the early 20th centuries.
My late friend, Baron Ignacio de Orbe y Tuero,
grandson of the great Carlist military leader in the Third Carlist War in Spain
[1873-1877], Juan de Orbe, Marquis of Valdespina, is an excellent example of
this, and his example can be replicated hundreds of times in popular
"pre-MAGA" counter-revolutionary movements not just in Spain,
but in Portugal (with the Miguelistas in the 19th century), in Italy (with the
popular Army of the Holy Faith--the "Sanfedisti," thousands of peasants with pitchforks who,
under the leadership of Prince-Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo de Calabria, defeated
Napoleon's finest in 1799 and restored their rightful king, Ferdinando I “el
Deseado” of Naples).
I have written previously about my Spanish Carlist
friend, Teofilo Andueza, who as a young teenager in July 1936, with his father
and his grandfather (an actual veteran of the Third Carlist War), volunteered
to fight against the revolutionary “red” Republican and Communist-dominated
regime in Madrid, with the guiding motto, “Viva Cristo Rey!”—Long Live Christ the
King! Teofilo was a small farmer who had worked in a potash mine, but like
hundreds of thousands of other simple traditional Catholics, joined with local
nobles, like Ignacio de Orbe, to combat Socialist elites in his country.
I would also cite the "popular"
anti-revolutionary movement in the Tirol, led by the great Austrian patriot and
royalist, Andreas Hofer; the movement in Argentina led by General Juan de
Rosas; the Catholic counter-revolutionary Cristero movement in Mexico in the
1920s against Mexico's socialist and anti-clericalist dictatorship; and perhaps
even the popular extermination of hundreds of thousands of Communists by
Islamic peasants and middle class folk in Indonesia in the 1960s, a kind of
non-Christian populism, but again in defense of tradition, custom, and
religion.
Even the battle of the Confederate states against
Federal usurpation and control, 1861-1865, can be fitted into this template, as
it was seen by many European traditionalists who not only favored the Southern
cause, but in some cases provided soldiers for it (e.g., Neapolitan and Carlist
volunteers to the Confederate forces). At least 5,000 known European volunteers
made it to Southern regiments, and there were most likely more.
What I am highlighting, then, is a process which
in some ways has a genealogy and historical precedence, where insulated, unelected
elites basically assault the essential traditions and beliefs of a broader
populace, where dominant segments of the population not only control the polity,
but also attempt to root out deeply-moored heritage, traditions, and mores of
the "great unwashed" (a misnomer, of course) in the name of, let’s
see, “social justice,” “democracy,” and in our time, diversity, equity and
inclusion, and sexual liberation.
Thus, we had in 1991-1992 Pat Buchanan's
"pitchfork brigades," a kind of precursor to the MAGA movement...recognizing,
if only instinctively back then, that our country was becoming radically and
irreconcilably divided, with an essentially unseen, largely Managerial Class
(to use James Burnham's terminology) which fundamentally determined how
we were to live (and die), a kind of "hidden hand" of unseen and
faceless bureaucrats with huge salaries, in cahoots with global corporations
and more ominously, with Big Tech and the media.
Over the past few years the essentially
traditional non-elite population has begun to recognize, intuitively, that
things are going very badly. Education is increasingly and ideologically perverted,
inimical to the family values that children are raised with; entertainment is
rotten to the core; millions now live from paycheck-to-paycheck; and our
politics has ceased to be a responsible contest between differing views, but
rather its representatives form a giant Uniparty...a kind of Mitch McConnell/Chuck
Schumer interchangeability, with slight, condescending bows to supposed differences
over such things as taxes. But an inability, or rather an unwillingness
to translate the real concerns of average Americans into meaningful action,
much less results.
Donald Trump’s election in 2016, for all his
personal faults and verbal foibles and silliness, his occasional outrageous
antics, represented an actual opportunity to at least begin some sort of
reversal, some sort of counter-revolution. Trump was an unlikely champion of
the cause, and his resemblance to earlier counter-revolutionaries is thin. I'm
not even sure if the Donald really understood what he was unleashing; indeed, at
times he seemed to attempt the impossible task of placating the GOP old guard,
by his appointments, and by his occasional willingness to listen to real
enemies of his announced MAGA agenda.
Yet, with his election the proverbial “cat was let
out of the bag," the populist counter-revolution was, at least to some
degree, unleashed. The veil concealing the real aims and goals of the administrative
Deep State has largely dissolved as its supercilious denizens have reacted with
virulent, palpable fury against Trump’s actions, real and perceived, and
against the MAGA base.
Just as the AfD in Germany, Fidesz in Hungary, the
National Front in France, the Fratelli d'Italia in Italy, and other groups have
grown in opposition to the managerial global elites in those countries, our
MAGA movement could be seen as part of a global populism, which in many ways
opposes what I would call "authoritarian modernism”—opposed to the triumph
of administrative and globalist state hegemony.
With all that, I pass on to you the following
essay. As I say, I do not agree with everything Brownstein writes, but I think
he wanders over into the truth more times than not.
------------------------------------------------------------
From CNN
Trump’s hidden advantage in the GOP
primary
Even amid all his legal challenges, Donald
Trump has
a secret weapon in his drive to win the Republican presidential nomination next
year: polling strongly suggests he has transformed the GOP primary electorate
in a way that will make him harder to beat.
Since Trump’s
emergence as the GOP’s dominant figure in 2016, the college-educated voters
generally most skeptical of him have declined as a share of all GOP primary
voters, while the voters without a college degree generally most sympathetic to
him have increased, an array of public and private polls indicate.
Those changes
suggest Trump has set in motion what could prove a self-fulfilling prophecy:
compared to when he first captured the nomination in 2016, he’s encouraged more
participation in the Republican primaries by the blue-collar voters most
inclined to support him and less by the white-collar voters likely to become
the centerpiece of any coalition against him.
“There’s no
question about it,” says long-time GOP pollster Whit Ayres. “He has drawn
people into the Republican Party who are more likely to support him and people
like him and he has driven out of the Republican Party people who were more
likely to support candidates George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney.”
This transformation of the Republican electorate is critical because
attitudes in the GOP about Trump vary enormously along educational lines – what political
analysts have often termed the divide between well-educated “wine track” and
non-college educated “beer track” voters. In the latest
CNN national poll conducted by SRSS, for instance, almost three-fifths of
Republicans without a four-year college degree said nominating Trump again
would give the party its best chance of winning in 2024; in stark contrast,
two-thirds of Republicans with a college degree said the party would have a
better chance if it chose someone else.
The conundrum for Republicans
is that while the influence of college-educated adults is diminishing inside
the GOP primary, those voters have become a growing obstacle for the party in
general elections. The rejection of Trump, and Trump-style candidates, in
well-educated suburbs across the country has been a central
factor in the mostly disappointing election results for the GOP in
2018, 2020 and 2022. The Democratic landslide in last week’s state Supreme
Court election in Wisconsin, a state the GOP likely must win back to recapture the White
House next year, underlined the party’s continuing erosion in such places,
especially amid the sharpening debate over abortion rights.
The changing nature of the
GOP coalition compounds the party’s problems of winning back those suburban
voters. The shift toward a more blue-collar primary electorate advantages the
candidates like Trump emphasizing precisely the slashing culture war messages
that are alienating those general election voters.
Probably the best long-term
data set capturing the shifting dimensions of the Republican electoral
coalition is polling by the GOP firm Public Opinion Strategies. Each year, it
cumulates the results of all the polls it conducts for media clients including
the Wall Street Journal, NBC and CNBC to produce a large-sample picture of the
two parties’ supporters.
This annual merged data shows
some significant changes over the past decade among the voters who identify
with the GOP, according to a detailed breakdown the firm provided to me. In the
POS data, the party is getting somewhat grayer: in 2012 it found that 43% of
all Republicans were aged 55 or older. That figure rose to 50% in 2022, the
latest annual compilation. Over that same period, the party moved modestly to
the right, with the share of GOP voters who identify as very conservative
edging up from 34% in 2012 to 38% in 2022.
On other key dimensions, the
party didn’t change much: in 2022, as in 2012, men constituted a slight
majority of all GOP partisans (a stark contrast from the electorate overall,
where women are the majority), and voters of color represented about
one-in-eight party members, virtually unchanged from 10 years ago.
But one change in the GOP
electorate was more dramatic than any other, says GOP pollster Bill McInturff,
one of the firm’s partners: “the growth of non-college Whites as a percentage
of self-identified Republicans.” In 2012, the firm found, those Whites without
a college degree constituted 48% of all Republicans, only slightly more than
Whites with a college degree, who represented 40%. By 2016, when Trump was
first nominated, the gap between the two groups had widened, with the
non-college Whites rising to 56% of all Republicans, and the college-educated
Whites falling to 33%. In the 2022 results, the Whites without a college degree
soared to 62% of all GOP partisans, while the college-educated Whites sagged to
25%. (Looking at all GOP supporters, including the relatively small number who
are racial minorities, the group without a college degree rose from 56% in 2012
to 70% in 2022, POS found.)
What makes this shift even
more striking is that over that same period, Whites without a college degree
have generally declined as a share of the total electorate by about two
percentage points every four years, according to figures from the Census Bureau
and other data sources such as the projections by the Democratic
targeting firm Catalist. That means the non-college Whites have been increasing
their presence inside the GOP while they were shrinking overall, as American
society grows both more racially diverse and better educated.
Not every data source shows
as dramatic a change as POS. Large-sample polls provided to CNN by the Public
Religion Research Institute found virtually no change in the educational
composition of GOP partisans from 2016 to 2022. Similarly, long-time GOP
pollster Chris Wilson said in an email that while he believes the GOP
electorate has tilted more toward voters without a college degree over the past
decade, most of that change occurred by 2016, with little additional movement
since. “One way to look at the data overall is that the effect Trump had in the
primary was already baked into 2016,” he said.
But other sources point
toward continuing change. In addition to the Public Opinion Strategies data,
the Pew
Research Institute also found that over the decade of the 2010s,
college-educated Whites shrank as a share of GOP voters, widening the gap with
Whites who lack a degree (who remained constant at just under three-fifths of
the party). Using a new polling methodology for its latest figures, Pew found
that voters of all races without a college degree now comprise fully 68% of
Republicans, almost exactly the same result as POS.
Whatever their exact share in
the total pool of GOP supporters, college-educated voters will likely represent
a somewhat larger portion of actual voters in next year’s primaries. That’s
because eligible voters with a college degree consistently turn out at higher
rates than those without one.
Cumulative analyses by Gary
Langer of ABC of all the exit polls conducted in the Republican presidential
primaries of 2008, 2012 and 2016 found that each time the total GOP primary
electorate split almost exactly in half between voters with and without a
college degree.
But subsequent changes in the
methodology of the exit polls suggest those numbers likely somewhat inflated
the share of college-educated GOP voters. Many recent media and GOP polls have
found that Republicans without a degree now comprise a clear majority of
Republicans likely to vote in next year’s primary.
The latest CNN polls, for
instance, project that voters with a college degree will comprise about
one-third of the likely 2024 GOP voters, while those without a degree will
constitute two-thirds. The most recent
Monmouth University poll found an even greater imbalance, projecting that fully 72%
of GOP primary voters next year will lack a college degree.
Three Republican pollsters I
spoke with – Ayres, McInturff and CNN contributor Kristen Soltis Anderson – all
said that their analysis projects college-educated voters will represent about
40% of the GOP electorate next year. That leaves the non-college voters who
provide the bedrock of Trump’s support as the clear majority at around 60%.
State-level polls also
document how the GOP electorate has shifted toward those without degrees. In
New Hampshire, for instance, adults with a four-year college or graduate degree
constituted a 54% majority of likely voters in a January 2016 poll just before
the primary there by the University of New Hampshire, according to results
provided to CNN. In a January 2023 UNH poll, college-educated voters had fallen
in half, to just 27% of likely GOP primary voters, while those without degrees
had soared to 73%.
Likewise, in New York, Siena
College polling has found that the share of likely GOP primary voters with a
college degree in that state has fallen in half, from around 50% in 2016 to
just 25% now. Polling over the same period by the Public Policy Institute of
California shows a more modest shift in the same direction there.
These shifts enormously
complicate the task of assembling a coalition that can beat the former
president in the primaries.
Trump has gained ground in
recent weeks among college- and non-college voters alike, particularly as the
party has rallied around him in the face of his indictment by Manhattan District
Attorney Alvin Bragg. But there’s no question that college-educated Republicans
are much cooler toward Trump than their counterparts without a degree. In 2016,
only about one-third of college-educated Republicans supported Trump in the
primaries, according to Langer’s cumulative analysis of the exit polls. And
while 63% of non-college Republicans said in the latest
CNN poll that
the party should nominate Trump in 2024, only 33% of those with degrees agreed
(suggesting his underlying support among them has not increased from its meager
level in 2016).
Anderson says that in polling
over the past few months by her firm Echelon Insights, nearly half of all
Republicans who express unfavorable views about Trump hold a college degree.
That’s true, she says, both for Republicans who identify as conservatives and
those who do not. “The portions of the right that are not very favorable to
Donald Trump are the most highly educated,” she says.
After eight years of Trump’s
seismic impact on the party, though, those highly educated Republicans have
less leverage over the nomination process than they did in 2016. With the
non-college Republicans now a growing majority of the primary electorate, it’s
unlikely that anybody can overtake Trump without significantly cutting into his
lead among those blue-collar voters who gave him nearly half their total votes
in 2016 and again are supporting him at least at that level in most 2024 polls.
Long-time GOP consultant
David Kochel is one of many party strategists who believes that “If you are
going to have an anti-Trump coalition in the primary,” college-educated
Republicans are “where it has to start.” But since those voters likely won’t be
enough to beat Trump on their own, Trump’s rivals will also need to loosen his
hold on non-college Republicans. Yet doing that may require taking hardline
positions on cultural issues that makes it more difficult to unite the college
Republicans. Those two groups, Kochel says, “have very different values, they
see things differently, they live in very different media universes.”
Ron DeSantis’ recent polling
decline among college-educated Republicans may reflect that challenge. While he
often led Trump among them earlier this year, the Florida governor has
consistently slipped somewhat as he’s leaned even harder into his culture
warrior credentials, signing a bill allowing permit
less carry of concealed weapons and backing a six-week abortion ban
in Florida. (DeSantis also stumbled
on Ukraine by initially echoing, and then somewhat distancing from,
Trump’s skepticism of sustained US support.)
Wilson says it’s possible
college graduates could comprise a somewhat larger share of the GOP electorate
in 2024 than 2016 if President Joe Biden does not face a competitive Democratic
race and more white-collar independents choose to participate in Republican
primaries as a result. But most other Republicans I spoke with believe the
other candidates will face the challenge of beating Trump in an electorate
tilted even more than in 2016 toward the voters most sympathetic to him. “He
has created favorable conditions for himself,” says Kochel.
Kochel doesn’t believe that
dynamic guarantees a Trump victory, though. While Republicans of all camps, he
says, mostly rally around Trump when he’s criticized by Democrats or the news
media, the former president could be more vulnerable to “a sustained effort to
define him negatively from the right” on issues such as his support of steps to
lock down the country in the very first days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Taking down Trump with those
arguments won’t be easy because the GOP voters theoretically most receptive to
that case are largely the same non-college Republicans who display the
strongest emotional connection to the former president as a “warrior” who
fights for them. Yet most GOP strategists agree Trump’s 2024 rivals must find
some way to reduce his commanding lead with the blue-collar Republicans. “If he
stays that high,” among those non-college primary voters, says Ayres, “it is
going to be very difficult to dislodge him.”
Unless one of Trump’s
opponents can disrupt these dynamics, the former president in 2024 may have
even more reason to declare, as he so memorably did in 2016, that “I love
the poorly educated.”
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