This essay does a good job of capturing the ideological core of Right Wing Populism, to the extent that phrase isn’t an oxymoron, is simply an extension of the ideological core of Reaganism. What Trump and others add to the mix is an open embrace and celebration of autocracy, which is a significant step beyond what movement conservatism was forty or even twenty years ago.
At worst, Trump would do nothing. He’d sit around eating cheeseburgers and making calls to Fox News, while the serious people got on with serious things.
All of this was to grossly underestimate Trump. He may have done plenty of the cheeseburgers and Fox News stuff. But he also kept his eye on the great strategic prize: the creation in the US of a vast and impassioned base for anti-democratic politics. . .
It is not just that Trump really was not interested in governing. It is that he was deeply interested in misgovernment.
He left important leadership positions in government departments unfilled on a permanent basis, or filled them with scandalously unqualified cronies. He appointed people to head agencies to which they had been publicly hostile.
Beneath the psychodrama of Trump’s hourly outbursts, there was a duller but often more meaningful agenda: taking a blowtorch to regulation, especially, but by no means exclusively, in relation to the environment.
This right-wing anarchism extended, of course, to global governance: the trashing of international agreements, withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, sucking up to the leaders of mafia states, and open contempt for female leaders like Angela Merkel and Theresa May.
With this discrediting of democratic governance, it is not just that we cannot disentangle the personal motives from the political ones. It is that the replacement of political institutions by personal rule was precisely the point.
But the hatred of government, presented as the embrace of “freedom” — that’s just movement conservatism in its purest form.
There’s a certain sort of American who thinks of “freedom” in the way a poorly socialized dull-normal 15-year-old boy does: Freedom means I have the freedom to choose not to wear a mask during a global pandemic, but it most certainly does not mean that a private business can choose to refuse me entrance if I won’t wear a mask. Because that would interfere with my freedom, which is what Right Wing populism is all about.
They will sell out any M4A or UBI in a second for the attention of their authoritarian daddies.
Trump’s wild swings of position were all about this delight in the command performance of utter obedience.
To take just the most outlandish example, Kim Jong-un could be transformed from the Little Rocket Man on whom Trump would unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen” to “Chairman Kim” with whom, in his own words, he “fell in love”.
His followers, like old Stalinists desperately tacking to the shifting winds of the Moscow line, agreed that Trump’s opposites were equally brilliant.
The price of this form of power is the undermining of any form of democratic deliberation. Democracy is not just about voting – it is a system for the rational articulation of ideas about the public good. Trump set out to lay waste to that whole system, from the bottom up, poisoning the groundwaters of respect for evidence, argument and rationality that keeps it alive.