The Culture Warrior

Why This Campaign is Different

The 2024 presidential campaign is all about Donald Trump – not Joe Biden, the incumbent president, or even Kamala Harris, the incumbent vice president and Democratic nominee.  It’s basically a referendum on Trump, who has been out of office for four years.

Trump is the most controversial public figure in the U.S.  He has never won majority support.  Not when he got elected in 2016 by the electoral college with 46 percent of the national vote (two percentage points less than Hillary Clinton) or in 2020 when he lost the election to Joe Biden with 47 percent of the vote (Biden got 51 percent). 

Trump is a culture warrior.  He is leading the backlash to the culture war that has come to define U.S. politics since the 1960s.  An educated liberal elite has gained cultural power in major U.S. institutions:  academia, the media, Hollywood, the Democratic Party, religion, business.  The tastes and values of this elite (often characterized as ``diversity, equity and inclusion’’) have become ascendant in American life.

Those values are not enthusiastically embraced by most working class Americans, especially those with traditional cultural and religious values (the stereotype is the fictional character ``Archie Bunker’’).  Donald Trump has positioned himself as a resistance leader.

The result is a country intensely divided by the culture war.  In the latest New York Times poll, only 39 percent of white voters with a college degree said they have a favorable impression of Trump, compared with 64 percent of non-college whites.

The impression that Democrats have contempt for Trump supporters was re-enforced by the debate over President Biden’s remark on Wednesday when he appeared to call Trump supporters ``garbage,’’ although Democrats claim it is not clear what the president was trying to say.  The latest incident is being taken by the Trump campaign as another example of the cultural contempt expressed by Hillary Clinton in 2016 when she called Trump supporters ``a basket of deplorables.’’

Trump is a resistance leader, but the movement he is leading is not driven by economic resistance.  Most Americans, including most working class Americans, have seen their incomes rise in line with rising prices.  What’s driving the Trump movement is cultural backlash, particularly backlash to immigration, specifically the flood of illegal immigrants that has entered the U.S. during the Biden presidency.  Trump is making their removal his number one priority if he takes office.

Sixty-five years ago, the eminent political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset shocked liberal academics by writing about ``working class authoritarianism.’’  Lipset uncovered ``a variety of evidence from many countries that low status and low education predispose individuals to favor extremist and  intolerant’’ political behavior.  The finding was controversial because the liberal academic community had long depicted people with ``low status and low education’’ – lionized by leftists as ``the working class’’-- as noble and sympathetic.

Beginning in the 1960s, however, the racist backlash to the civil rights movement among working class whites suggested a far less ennobling reality.  The Republican Party, which has always represented the conservative interests of the business class plutocratic community, is being taken over by Trump’s far more populist and radical ``MAGA party.’’  The MAGA movement embodies the values and resentments of rural whites and the white working class.  Trump channels those resentments very skillfully even though he himself is not working class or rural or poorly educated or even religious.

Trump shares the resentments of working class authoritarians.  He is now leading a campaign of culture war conservatives aimed at purging the influence of liberal elites.  Trump is suspected of authoritarianism – fascism, even – because he acts without inhibitions.  He can do that because what he has created, MAGA, is a more than a political movement.  It’s a cult.  No one else can lead a cult.  (Ask Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.)

Democracy normally needs leaders who respect their inhibitions.  A cult leader can govern without inhibitions and demand retribution against his enemies.   That kind of behavior invites extremism.  And extremism means doom for democracy.