Racist Ryanism

2016 came down to a math problem. Trump's rhetoric was, to a certain segment of the population, refreshingly free of conservative free-market nonsense. It was time to reorient policy to serve common people, not the moneyed interests so keen on paying speaking fees to Hillary Clinton. The economy had been very good for people like Trump, now it was time for prosperity to make its way down the rungs. Entitlements should be protected and expanded. Health insurance should be cheaper and everyone should be covered, conservative principles be damned. The opioid epidemic should be taken seriously. This resonated with white working-class people who might ordinarily vote Democratic or not vote at all.

On the other hand, Trump freely engaged in race-baiting and misogyny, and his policy proposals were generally devoid of content or actively stupid. I don't want to imply that this was some kind of novel thing for the Republican Party, but we hadn't seen a presidential candidate this crudely and openly bigoted in a long time. This tended to alienate certain affluent, well-educated people who would ordinarily vote Republican because of their desire for low taxes and, in some cases, their desire to slash spending on things like Social Security and Medicare. (I don't mean to imply that there aren't any affluent white people who thrill to the sound of racist demagoguery. But broadly speaking, the way to pick up affluent white votes is to sound like a generic tax-cutting Republican, not a welfare-expanding bigot.)

So which effect would dominate? Well, obviously Clinton won the popular vote, but in general affluent white people pulled the lever for Trump and so did poor white people. You might say there was an implicit social compact formed: The rich would look the other way while Trump attacked blacks, Hispanics, women, the disabled, Jews, and Muslims, in exchange for tax cuts. The poor would look away while Trump attacked social services for the poor, in exchange for attacks on blacks, Hispanics, women, the disabled, Jews, and Muslims. This bargain has been respected to a degree that is somewhat remarkable in American politics.

But of course that's a very jaundiced view of poor white voters. It seems likely that many of them thought Trump was a genuinely new kind of Republican, one whose obvious concern for the less-well-off would lead to sensible, worker-friendly public policy. Instead Trump has governed as a hard-right plutocrat, elevating the most extreme right-wing elements throughout government. To anyone who wasn't in on the bargain described above, Trump's decision to unleash full Paul Ryanism on the population must feel like a betrayal.

So 2018 and 2020 will be tests of whether Trump's 2016 coalition was a fluke that relied on misleading substantial numbers of non-bigoted white voters or a durable arrangement that will prove mutually satisfactory to his two bases. All indications are that "racist Ryanism" is not actually popular in the United States, so my bet is on the former. But there is one troubling aspect of all of this—it took a special kind of naivete, an almost culpable degree of gullibility, to think that Trump would govern in the way he promised. It is not easy to understand why anyone who turned a blind eye to Trump's manifest dishonesty then would wake up now. Even if the Republicans lose badly in 2018, this may simply be because they will rarely put an openly racist asshole like Trump on the ballot. The real test of racist Ryanism will be in 2020, when Trump will presumably enjoy the full-throated support of the far left that pushed him over the top in 2016. So unfortunately we won't be able to rest easy for quite some time.