Avik S. A. Roy ,FORBES STAFF
Commentary on politics & policy from Forbes’ Opinion Editor.
Donald Trump is now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Last night, by winning the Indiana primary and forcing Ted Cruz to drop out, Donald Trump effectively clinched the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. This has led some Republican hands to reconcile themselves to Trump as their best hope to defeat Hillary Clinton. But a party that willingly places Donald Trump at the top of the ticket has relinquished its claim to the allegiance of principled conservatives.
Nationalism vs. conservatism
One of the mistakes Trump’s detractors make is to describe his worldview as haphazard and spontaneous–a collection of “irritable mental gestures,” in Lionel Trilling’s famous formulation. Trump’s political philosophy, in fact, is surprisingly coherent, with a heritage that goes back more than a century.
That philosophy is nationalism: an approach to politics that places nativist solidarity above all other priorities. It involves nativist economics (opposing foreign trade), nativist culture (opposing immigration, whether legal or illegal) and nativist foreign policy (“America first” isolationism).
While nationalist parties are common in European democracies, we haven’t had them in the United States, because the nationalist movement has been split. The Democratic Party, with its labor union base, has been the home of nativist economics here, while the GOP has become the home of cultural nativists. Neither party has exhibited a formally isolationist foreign policy, though President Barack Obama’s disengagement from the world comes close.
Postwar American conservatism, as formulated by William F. Buckley Jr. and others at National Review, was explicitly distinct from nationalism. American conservatism embraced classical liberal economics, expressing the confidence that free markets and free minds could generate prosperity for all. Buckley and his compatriots saw communism for the tyrannical scourge it was, and resolved to combat it around the world. Buckleian conservatism opposed illegal immigration, but expressed that America is exceptional because it has attracted people from all over the world who embraced the American creed.
The rise of the nationalist GOP
The accession of Donald Trump to the GOP throne means that whether we like it or not, the plurality of Republicans who vote are nationalists, not conservatives. This is not something that happened by accident; rather it is the end result of a long process advanced by nationalists within the conservative movement.
It wasn’t that long ago that Ronald Reagan won 49 states on his way to victory over Walter Mondale. That was back in the day when conservatives strove to appeal to everyone. Then at the 1992 Republican National Convention, Donald Trump’s forerunner–Patrick Buchanan–declared that the GOP would wage a “block by block” war to “take back our culture, and take back our country.”
Buchanan’s appeal was an explicitly nationalist one: opposed to immigration, free trade and Reagan-Bush foreign policy. While Buchanan didn’t win the GOP nomination, his nativist appeals found a fertile home in the burgeoning conservative media-entertainment complex, which identified with rural, Christian, white America in opposition to diverse, metropolitan America.
Conservatives won a lot of elections appealing to the “real Americans” in the heartland, exemplified by Ted Cruz’s jibe against Donald Trump’s “New York values.” Gerrymandering has made the problem worse, by creating safe GOP districts dominated by rural white voters.
The Asian-American case study
One insightful way to think about the nationalist vs. conservative divide is to ponder the case of Asian-Americans. If conservative values are the values of family and hard work, then Asians are the most conservative demographic group in America. They have the highest median incomes ($66,000 vs. U.S. median of $49,800), the highest percentage of college graduates (49% vs. U.S. median of 28%), and the lowest rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births (17% vs. U.S. median of 41%).
And yet, in 2012, Asian-Americans voted for Obama over Mitt Romney by a margin of 49 points. Hispanics, by contrast, “only” voted for Obama by a margin of 44 points.
This is the deficiency—and in many cases, the hypocrisy—of nationalists who appeal to “values voters.” They claim to be celebrating hard work and family, but they make no effort to appeal to immigrants—and non-Christians—who embrace those values in greater proportion than do those whose grandparents were born here. The appeal to “values voters,” in effect, has become a coded appeal to identity politics for white people.
Conservatives must not accept this outcome
It’s amazing now to recall that the Republican Party was founded in order to abolish the enslavement of blacks. The transformation of the GOP into a white nationalist party took time. It started when Barry Goldwater campaigned for president on opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, drawing segregationists out of the Democratic Party and into the GOP. Republicans like Nixon accepted this shift, because it helped them win elections. But they did so at great cost to the GOP’s moral authority as a party of racial equality.
The conservative movement has not come to grips with this problem. Most conservatives have failed to appreciate the GOP’s lurch toward white nationalism, because most conservative elites are white, have mostly white friends, and have no real understanding of why their party hasn’t successfully appealed to non-whites.
Younger conservatives—the Gen Xers and Millennials who flocked to Marco Rubio—are much better on this stuff, because they grew up in a more diverse environment. It will be up to them to articulate a conservatism that can appeal to Americans of all races and creeds.
It won’t happen this year. But if American conservatism is to survive the 21st century, it’ll have to happen soon.
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