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trump.html

GUEST ESSAY

I Study Guys Like Trump. There’s a Reason

They Keep Winning.
Nov. 8, 2024

By Ben Rhodes
Mr. Rhodes was deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama.

In December 2019, I traveled to Hong Kong, where a heavy unease hung in the air.
For months, young people had taken to the streets to protest the encroachment of
the Chinese Communist Party on what was supposed to be a self-governing,
democratic system. On walls they’d scrawled: “Save Hong Kong! If we burn you
burn with us!” All the protesters I spoke to knew their movement would fail; it was
a last assertion of democratic identity before it was extinguished by a new order
which saw democracy as the enemy within.

I met with a government official preparing to resign and told him I was writing a
book about the rise of authoritarian nationalism. “The nationalism in the U.S. and
Europe is somewhat different,” he told me. “Yours started with the financial crisis
in 2008. That’s when liberalism started to lose its appeal, when people saw this
wasn’t working. The narrative of liberalism and democracy collapsed. This spilled
over into China, too. This is when China started to think — should we really follow a
Western model?” We were sitting in a hotel lounge, the invisible forces he
described surrounding us: capitalism, but not democracy; cultural elites cloistered
away from the working class. “The nationalist movements in East and West were
both a response to the collapse of the Western model,” he added.
Everything I’d experienced told me he was right. Eight years serving in the Obama
White House after the financial crisis felt like swimming upstream, against the
currents of global politics. A radicalized Republican Party rejected liberal
democracy at home, mirroring far-right leaders like Prime Minister Viktor Orban
of Hungary who spoke about installing “illiberal democracy” (a polite term for
“blood and soil” nationalism) across Europe. In Russia, Vladimir Putin set out to
undermine — if not dismantle — the liberal order helmed by the United States. In
China, Xi Jinping began to shift Beijing’s strategy from rising within that order to
building a separate one, drained of democratic values. Barack Obama’s political
skills and cultural appeal allowed him to navigate those currents, but they didn’t
always transfer to other Democrats.

Donald Trump’s first victory challenged my liberal assumptions about the

inevitability of a certain kind of progress: “The arc of the moral universe is long,
but it bends toward justice.” For eight years outside of government, I have talked to
opposition figures around the world and heard versions of the same story
everywhere. After the Cold War, globalization chipped away at people’s sense of
security and identity.

In the West, neoliberalism — that blend of free trade, deregulation and deference to
financial markets — hollowed-out communities while enriching a global oligarchy.
Meanwhile, a homogenized and often crass popular culture eroded traditional
national and religious identities. After 9/11, the war on terror was embraced by
autocrats such as Mr. Putin, who used it as a frame to justify power grabs while
forever wars fueled mass migration. The financial crisis came through like a
hurricane, wrecking the lives of people already struggling to get by while the rich
profited on the back end. Then social media’s explosion offered a vehicle to spread
grievance and conspiracy theories, allowing populist leaders to radicalize their
followers with the precision of an algorithm.

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The playbook for transforming a democracy into a soft autocracy was clear: Win
power with a populist message against elites. Redraw parliamentary districts.
Change voting laws. Harass civil society. Pack courts with judges willing to support
power grabs. Enrich cronies through corruption. Buy up newspapers and television
stations and turn them into right-wing propaganda. Use social media to energize
supporters. Wrap it up in an Us versus Them message: Us, the “real” Russians or
Hungarians or Americans, against a rotating cast of Them: the migrants, the
Muslims, the liberals, the gays, George Soros and on and on.

The persistent anti-incumbent mood was so strong that it even (narrowly) swept
Mr. Trump out of office in 2020, aided by his bungling of a pandemic. But even after
the shock of Jan. 6, heavy unease hung over American politics: There was no
return to pre-Trump normalcy.

As president, Joe Biden embraced protectionism, organized labor and industrial

policy, and his administration made investments in hollowed out communities
through executive orders and legislation. Democrats relentlessly communicated
the threat Mr. Trump posed to democracy, with the removal of abortion rights as
proof. When they fought a mediocre collection of Republican candidates to a draw
in the 2022 midterm elections, many in the party — including Mr. Biden — drew the
lesson that this approach was working.

Yet now Mr. Trump has decisively won back the presidency. I would never claim to
have all the answers about what went wrong, but I do worry that Democrats
walked into the trap of defending the very institutions — the “establishment” —
that most Americans distrust. As a party interested in competent technocracy, we
lost touch with the anger people feel at government. As a party that prizes data, we
seized on indicators of growth and job creation as proof that the economy was
booming, even though people felt crushed by rising costs. As a party motivated by
social justice, we let revulsion at white Christian nationalism bait us into identity
politics on their terms — whether it was debates about transgender athletes, the
busing of migrants to cities, or shaming racist MAGA personalities who can’t be
shamed. As a party committed to American leadership of a “rules-based
international order,” we defended a national security enterprise that has failed
repeatedly in the 21st century, and made ourselves hypocrites through
unconditional military support for Israel’s bombardment of civilians in Gaza.

Democrats told true stories about Mr. Trump’s unfitness, about the legislative
achievements of the Biden-Harris administration, about bodily autonomy for
women. But when talking about middle-class economics, it was often in the familiar
poll-tested language of the consultant class.

As a former speechwriter, I am sympathetic to the challenge of weaving these

threads together. But for all his many strengths, over the last four years, Mr. Biden
— in part because of his age, in part because of social media — could not fill that
intangible presidential role of narrating what was happening in our nation and
world. Democratic leaders in Congress tended to be old hands who’d spent decades
in Washington, making them imperfect messengers for an electorate demanding
change. It is no coincidence that two outsiders as different as Mr. Obama and Mr.
Trump have dominated politics for 20 years.

Kamala Harris brought new energy and remarkable discipline to the campaign’s
final months, revitalizing the collaborative joy essential to Democratic politics. But
her ties to an unpopular incumbent — and a global post-pandemic backlash against
any incumbent — held her back. Democrats understandably have a hard time
fathoming why Americans would put our democracy at risk, but we miss the reality
that our democracy is part of what angers them. Many voters have come to
associate democracy with globalization, corruption, financial capitalism, migration,
forever wars and elites (like me) who talk about it as an end in itself rather than a
means to redressing inequality, reining in capitalist systems that are rigged,
responding to global conflict and fostering a sense of shared national identity.

Yes, this is unfair: Republican policies from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush did
far more than Democrats to create this mess. But Mr. Trump’s crusade against the
past elites of his own party — from the Bush family to Mitch McConnell —
credentialed him with a public hungry for accountability, while the Harris
campaign’s embrace of Dick Cheney conveyed the opposite message.
Donald Trump has won the presidency, but I don’t believe he will deliver on his
promises. Like other self-interested autocrats, his remedies are designed to exploit
problems instead of solving them, and he’s surrounded by oligarchs who want to
loot the system instead of reforming it. Mass deportation and tariffs are recipes for
inflation. Tax cuts and deregulation will exacerbate inequality. America First
impulses will fuel global conflict, technological disruption and climate
conflagration. Mr. Trump is the new establishment in this country and globally, and
we should emphasize that instead of painting him as an outlier or interloper.

Out of the wreckage of this election, Democrats must reject the impulse to simply
be a resistance that condemns whatever outrageous thing Mr. Trump says. While
confronting Mr. Trump when we must, we must also focus on ourselves — what we
stand for, and how we tell our story. That means acknowledging — as my Hong
Kong interlocutor said — that “the narrative of liberalism and democracy
collapsed.” Instead of defending a system that has been rejected, we need to
articulate an alternative vision for what kind of democracy comes next.

We should merge our commitment to the moral, social and demographic necessity
of an inclusive America with a populist critique of the system that Mr. Trump now
runs; a focus more on reform than just redistribution. We must reform the
corruption endemic to American capitalism, corporate malfeasance, profiteering in
politics, unregulated technologies transforming our lives, an immigration system
broken by Washington, the cabal of autocrats pushing the world to the brink of war
and climate catastrophe.

After he lost an election in 2002, Mr. Orban spent years holding “civic circles”
around Hungary — grass-roots meetings, often around churches, which built an
agenda and sense of belonging that propelled him back into power. In their own
way, the next generation of Democratic leaders should fan out across the country.
Learn from mayors innovating at the local level. Listen to communities that feel
alienated. Find places where multiracial democracy is working better than it is in
the rest of the country. Tell those stories when pitching policies. Foster a sense of
belonging to something bigger, so democracy doesn’t feel like the pablum of a
ruling elite, but rather the remedy for fixing what is broken in Washington and our
body politic.

We are not living in Hong Kong, where a democratic movement could be

extinguished. A midterm election looms. Mr. Trump is term-limited. The next four
years will be trying and dangerous — especially for the more vulnerable among us.
But if we understand the global trends that got us here, we can swing the political
pendulum back in our direction and seize that moment with a new vision of
liberalism and democracy.

Ben Rhodes was deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama and author of “After the Fall:
The Rise of Authoritarianism in the World We Made.”

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