Trump and Sanders both recognized what had changed. Both wanted a return to a more mobile and just society. They had the same socialist goals but wanted to reach them in different ways. Sanders offered us socialist ends through socialist means, while Trump proposed socialist ends through capitalist means. Because I saw American politics as class warfare, and predicted how this would become the story of the 2016 election, I was a Marxist. And because I saw the way back as a return to free-market principles I was a right-wing Marxist.
“Socialist goals through capitalist means” upset some conservatives, who didn’t want socially just goals no matter how we got there. I think that phrase had originally been suggested by Milton Friedman, though I couldn’t find the reference. But what did it matter? It’s what I thought American voters wanted and needed.
It’s also what the Trump campaign wanted. I say this as one who, with my wife and my friend Bob Tyrrell, provided first drafts of many of Trump’s campaign speeches in the spring and summer of 2016, and who subsequently advised on transition matters. The speech of Donald Trump Jr. at the Republican Convention, which I had a hand in writing, summarized what I had written in The Way Back. The Democrats had complained of American immobility, but it was they who had caused the problem. Trump himself praised my book, which to my mind proved either that he was a splendid fellow or that he had not read it. In any event, I knew that his domestic policies were the same as the ones I had recommended.
We Trump supporters had taken sides in a bitter Republican civil war. The other side, the NeverTrumpers, was composed of a small group of ideological purists who had assembled a checklist of received right-wing ideas. And what were these? They might have been derived from a deep study of John Locke and Robert Nozick, with perhaps a bit of Ayn Rand thrown in for light reading. An advanced degree in Austrian economics would also help. That might take years, but in the end you’d know just what to believe. All good stuff, but if we’re talking about the NeverTrumpers you could mostly just ask what are the most heartless policies around. That would save a lot of time.
The perfect ideological idiot had forgotten to connect his ideas with people. He had forgotten that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. A smarter person might have learned this, but instead the ideologue reviled Trump for appealing to the ordinary American voter. Trump and his supporters were called populists. That was meant as a term of opprobrium. We were kin to Father Coughlin, to David Duke, to all that was nasty in American politics. That was simply an effort to smear us, and when the editor of National Review, Richard Lowry, called us populists in a debate, I turned to him and said, “I do not think I am ill-bred, compared to you; I do not think I am ill-educated, compared to you.”
Sneers at populists were to be expected, however, for in 2016 almost no one had shown much interest in the ordinary voter, except for Trump. And that’s because no one was much interested in the idea of equality. Without much discussion, we had come to accept that we live in a class society and that we are permitted to avert our gaze from great differences in wealth and status. In the past, such indifference would have been condemned by Marxists and by egalitarian liberals, for they regarded equality as a moral imperative that demanded something from us. Now, none of them seemed up to the job.
The classical Marxist dream of universal brotherhood had died in the moral and political bankruptcy of communism. On the progressive left it had been abandoned for identity politics that explicitly deny a common humanity by granting priority to favored groups—minorities, gays, women. There was a telling moment in a 2015 Democratic presidential debate when the candidates were asked to choose between “Black Lives Matter” and “All Lives Matter.” One might have thought that only a moral imbecile or a racist would judge people by the color of their skin and not by the content of their character. But among the candidates only Jim Webb said that all lives matter, and he left the Democratic Party not long afterward.
As for egalitarian liberalism, it was never the firmest reed in America. At the founding it coexisted with slavery, and it’s always been tainted by religious bigotry. In academic milieus it got a boost from the work of John Rawls, but a theory so rational, so esoteric, wasn’t going to leave a firm imprint on very many people. Moreover, Rawls’ “difference principle” encouraged readers to ignore social and economic inequalities unless they affected the least advantaged members of society. In short, the Rawlsian liberal wouldn’t much care about the typical Trump voters.
Concerns about inequality scarcely bothered the meritocratic New Class, which embraced the idea that its members were the chosen people of a new, global information economy, and that those who failed to attend Yale Law School, take out a subscription to The Atlantic or attend workshops at the Brookings Institution had only themselves to blame. The conceit that the answer to the country’s social ills lay in turning the working class into proper little left-wing intellectuals was wonderfully ridiculed by Thomas Frank in Listen, Liberal, but somehow the New Class missed the satire.
Where egalitarianism has any purchase, it’s among religious believers, especially Evangelicals and Catholics, who massively supported Trump. If we believe we’re all made in God’s image, that we all have souls, it’s impossible to deny our common humanity. And without religious belief, the belief in equality is a tough sell. Walter Berns, a conservative thinker, once quoted the opening words of the Declaration of Independence to me. “All men are created equal.” He asked me: Do you think that’s an empirical proposition?
When we look at others what we see are differences, between the long and the short and the tall. In the left’s identity politics, it’s differences between races, ethnic groups, genders. On the right, it might be the nasty IQ debate introduced by people such as Charles Murray, which has permitted the members of the New Class to feel superior to the little brains beneath them. Without religious belief, what else is there?
Among the wiser socialists, that’s led to a new respect for religion as a foundation for their dearest beliefs. Without abandoning his atheism, German philosopher Jürgen Habermas was willing to debate Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) and announce his openness to the egalitarian content of religious traditions. G. A. Cohen, a Canadian-American philosopher, came to the same realization in If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? Similarly, in Culture and the Death of God, Terry Eagleton noted that “it was the fate of the Enlightenment to usher in a civilization in which its pragmatism, materialism and utilitarianism tended to discredit some of the very exalted ideas which presided over its birth.” That’s why today’s clever Marxist is as likely to study the Epistle to the Romans as he is to read Das Kapital. But the New Class paid no attention to any of this. It wasn’t that they were believers, or even that they were atheists. Rather, they had simply stopped caring about equality.
The Republican Workers Party
The NeverTrumpers were right about one thing. On domestic policies Trump was not a doctrinaire libertarian. Early in the 2016 presidential campaign, a higher-up at the Charles Koch Foundation told me his problem with Trump. The developer from Queens didn’t have an entitlement policy. He didn’t plan to roll back Medicare or curb Social Security. But that’s not what most Americans want either. We have a generous welfare policy, as I noted, and all Trump planned to do was make it work better. He proposed to repeal and replace Obamacare, not just repeal it; and he wanted a system that wouldn’t leave people uninsured.
In appealing to ordinary voters, and rejecting rigid Republican right-wing doctrines, Trump had rescued what is living from what is dead in conservatism. What is living is a Republican Party that doesn’t think those left behind deserve their fate. Trump is a nationalist, and what many of his opponents missed is the logic of nationalism: that the needs of Americans take priority over the interests of non-Americans, that what is denied non-Americans must be paid for by what is given to Americans. That’s a lesson as old as the distinction between strangers and brothers in Deuteronomy, but it’s one that right-wing ideologues, with their desire for