One of the themes of my forthcoming book Too Dumb to Fail is that cultural and technological trends are conspiring to create the chaos we’re disproportionately seeing in today’s Republican Party. Many of these same forces — the death of expertise, the phenomenon of viewing political experience as a negative, and the celebritization of politics (and its cousin, the blending of political reporting and entertainment news) — contributed to the rise of Donald Trump.
And here’s the latest one to manifest: the decline of trust in institutions.
It has long been observed that reverence for almost every institution — the church, the media, marriage, you name it — has declined since Watergate.
Add the modern political party to the list.
Just as people were once loyal to their job (work there for forty years and get a gold watch) and their marriage (whether it was a good one, or not), people were once loyal to their political party — in sickness and in health (which explains why there were so many conservative Democratic voters lingering for so long).
Granted, over the years, political parties have lost much of their statutory power. We no longer have conventions or back room deals deciding on presidential nominees, and the banning of earmarks and the rise of outside groups have helped expedite the death of party loyalty. That explains why the politicians no longer toe the line. But regular Americans weren’t just loyal to their political parties out of fear or obligation, or because they controlled the means of production. No, a lot of Americans were once fiercely loyal to their political party. And it was based on things like respect, affinity, cultural identity, and principle.
One gets the sense that those days are gone. And again, Donald Trump is proving the point. I’m speaking, of course, of Trump’s criticism of George W. Bush for not preventing the 9-11 attacks.
Rather than getting involved in the merits of Trump’s argument (which are dubious), the truly interesting thing here is that you have the front runner for the Republican nomination lodging a rather scurrilous attack on the last two-term Republican president — and not only is the party establishment impotent to stop him — but Republican voters might not even care. (The usual caveat: Eventually one of these “gaffes” might actually hurt Trump.) Make no mistake: this was a big deal. As political strategist Stuart Stevens observed, “A Republican attacking President Bush on 9/11 is like a Dem trying to win the 1948 nomination by attacking FDR on Pearl Harbor…”
The reason that political commentators are having a hard time predicting what will happen with candidates like Trump is that the world is changing, and not necessarily for the better. Radicals on both sides of the political spectrum might applaud rapid change that casts aside the establishment and their stogy protocol, but Burkean conservatives are, by definition, less enamored of it.
To be sure, some of the changes we are witnessing may well prove to be positive, but Americans are becoming unmoored from many of the cultural institutions that defined “the rules” for decades, and anomie is the result. It is perhaps ironic that the Republican presidential primary is, for now, ground zero of this cultural revolution. In a different era where America was more communitarian and where mainstream consensus on virtues like humility still mattered, Donald Trump wouldn’t stand a chance. The fact that he’s winning says more about us than it does about him.