The Donald and Decadence

I tried to avoid the coals-to-Newcastle phenomenon that is Trump coverage this weekend by writing my Sunday column on immigration politics in Europe instead, with a particular focus on how the widening population differential on either side of the Mediterranean, already roiling European politics, is likely to create a kind of sweeping “Eurafrican” interaction over the next fifty years, with truly unknowable results. It’s a big topic, a lot bigger even than the yugeness of Trump … but there are, yes, links between the two phenomena, which my old friend Reihan Salam teased out a bit for Slate last week:

… Trump is very far from a Republican regular. He represents an entirely different phenomenon, one that bears little resemblance to garden-variety American conservatism.

Go to almost any European democracy and you will find that the parties of the center-right and center-left that have dominated the political scene since the Second World War are losing ground to new political movements. What these movements have in common is that they manage to blend populism and nationalism into a potent anti-establishment brew. One of the first political figures to perfect this brand of politics was the very Trumpian Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian media tycoon who rose to power as part of a coalition of right-of-center parties in the mid-1990s, and who has been in and out of power ever since, dodging corruption charges and worse all the while. More recently, the miserable state of Europe’s economies has fueled the rise of dozens of other parties. Britain’s Labour Party has been devastated by the rise not only of the leftist Scottish National Party, but also by UKIP, a movement of the right that has been growing at Labour’s expense by campaigning against mass immigration, and by largely abandoning what had been its more libertarian line on the welfare state. UKIP’s leader, Nigel Farage, has a penchant for bombast that endears him his working-class base, which might sound familiar to you.

Read the rest, with which I concur but to which I would add one important further point: To the extent that the seeds for a populist-nationalist movement exist in the United States, and to the extent that Trump is watering them with his own personal elixir, I think our own anxieties differ somewhat from the essential fears of Europe, in that in the U.S. there’s slightly less anxiety about the loss of national identity and a little more anxiety about the loss of greatness and exceptionalism and economic supremacy and (though most people wouldn’t phrase it this way) empire.

Which is not to say that the immigration issue isn’t inextricably linked to populism generally — even to Bernie Sander’s sort, a little bit — and to Trump’s particular (if complicated) appeal. (Don’t hurt me, Mickey!) But if you look at his rhetorical posture overall, including the way he led things off at last week’s debate, the Trump Narrative (TM) is less about threats to American national identity per se, in the style of Marine Le Pen or Farage with La Belle France or Little England, than it is about the collapse of American competence, effectiveness, and success. Thus Trump is less likely to say that we’re getting overrun by the Mexicans than he is to say that we’re getting beaten by the Mexicans (and their government), in the same way that (he argues) we’re getting beaten by everybody: ISIS, the Chinese, the Iranians, you name it. If you want to cast him as just a nativist, his slogan “Make America Great Again,” can be read as a dog-whistle to some whiter and more Anglo-Saxon past, but I think it makes more sense to just take it literally – as a complaint about everything from the failed Iraq adventure (another frequent Trumpian theme) to the general stagnation of of our economy and the sclerosis of our government, and an implicit plaint for the days (which most of his supporters remember) when America won the Cold War and by-God Put a Man on the Moon. (And even built a single-payer health care system for old people … but that, folks, was “a different age.”)

The theme of ebbing greatness isn’t absent in European populist politics, of course, particularly in France. But it’s not always the major theme, because European societies have had to come to terms with their lost power, their vanished empires, across years and generations. Whereas the challenges posed to Europe’s nations by immigration and assimilation are fresher (especially on a continent where peace was finally gained after World War II in part by a bloody rationalization of national borders along ethnic lines) and potentially sharper (because of the role of Islam and Islamist terrorism), and more likely (given population trends) to grow apace with every passing year.

Again, it’s not that the immigration issue doesn’t matter in America; as a moderate-restrictionist, comprehensive-reform skeptic obviously I think it does. But America has experience with assimilation that Europe lacks, we have the advantage of a federal system that partially limits balkanized responses to migration, we share borders with peoples who mostly share versions of our (ancestral) religion and increasingly inhabit functional democracies, and the population balance between North and South America is just much more, well, balanced than the differential between Europe and the regions to its south.

Of course Latin America isn’t the only source of U.S. immigration, and Africa’s demographic surge will probably have repercussions for American in-migration and domestic politics as well. But still I’m doubtful that the issue would play quite the same role in a real populist-nationalist upsurge that it has in Europe; it would have to be subsumed into broader fears about American economic and geopolitical decline – the (defensible and bipartisan) sense that while our very existence may not be at stake, our public institutions are in decay, our military can’t win wars, our leaders are corrupt, and in every other way we simply aren’t the America (!) that we have traditionally imagined ourselves to be.

That this argument would be expressed and championed, at present, by a magnificent specimen of decadence like the Donald – a coarse much-married Richie Rich-cum-crony capitalist who boasts about bribing politicians and exploiting bankruptcy laws to enrich himself – is perhaps an irony, or perhaps simply the way that these things inevitably go (as the Berlusconi example suggests). The best way to think of Trump, it seems to me, is as a parody of a send-up of how Americans like to imagine themselves. But perhaps a decaying imperium simply conjures up the critics it deserves.