Under the influence of Donald Trump, the Republican Party has become more of a working-class party, similar to what the pre-woke Democratic Party used to be. How should we regard this fact? 

In other words, should we see the party of Donald Trump and even more, that of his likely successor, J.D. Vance, as the fulfilment of the social democratic vision of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his successors? Aren’t the promises of the populist Trump/Vance ticket—to protect the jobs and pensions of American workers—a continuation of what the Democrats of the 1930s began with the New Deal and more incipiently during the Progressive Era 20 or 30 years earlier? Perhaps Trump and his followers are following the path blazed by the Democrats before they became the party of woke corporate capitalists, angry feminists, black nationalists, and those pursuing what were once (properly) regarded as alternative lifestyles.

There is food for thought here. Although public sector employees are overwhelmingly Democrats, such privileged bureaucrats are not what FDR or Truman understood to be the working class. By that term, they clearly meant unionized factory workers and others laboring in the private sector. Those people (or at least their white and now Hispanic representatives) are the ones we see rallying to Trump today. The head of the Teamsters spoke at the Republican National Convention, and Trump has repeatedly promised to ensure the health of popular entitlement programs for his fellow Americans. 

For his part, J. D. Vance has spoken out against the enactment in some states of right-to-work laws, which allow nonunion workers to be employed in unionized factories and workplaces. As a lifelong defender of such laws, which were pioneered by one of my all-time political heroes, Senator Robert A. Taft, I was upset to learn that Vance had taken that stand, which would give unions, in my view, excessive control over the money and the political activities of their fellow workers. But this indicates how thoroughly populist Republicans, particularly Vance, are identifying with a class that has become their favorite constituency.  Further, the Republicans are now committed to protecting a lot more entitlements than ever existed under FDR’s New Deal. Having abandoned its Wall Street plutocratic incarnation, this new GOP may be coming to look like the party of the New Deal on steroids.

Maybe, but not so fast! Different ages present different problems requiring different solutions. Whether or not the New Deal was a good thing (and I would argue that most of what it left behind was not), and despite the hysterical leftist demagoguery about the return of fascism, we are not living in the 1930s. Today’s nationalist populism, which seems to be spreading across the Western world but perhaps nowhere as thoroughly as in the United States, takes the present historical moment as a given. 

We’re not going to return to an older political order (as much as some of us would be delighted to do so). A large welfare state is here to stay. Although it is many times greater than the one FDR, Truman, and LBJ bequeathed to us, that dispensation is not going away. The questions then become who will be allowed to benefit from it and how it will be run. 

Here the populists have necessarily introduced a nationalist and cultural element. Those who receive government benefits must be American citizens and not illegals, who have been allowed to populate our cities as future Democratic voters.

Up until about 30 years ago, this requirement would not have seemed unreasonable, let alone Nazi-like. Times change. Now the populist right seems to have shocked the establishment by calling for the expulsion of illegals. And they favor taking the necessary measures to keep additional illegals from entering the country. 

As already indicated, none of these demands would have struck the pre-woke left as excessive. In all likelihood they would have received enthusiastic backing from such strange protectors of national workforces as post-World War II Western European Communist parties, labor advocates like Caesar Chavez and Rep. Barbara Jordan, and various socialist theorists. This last group would have insisted, like French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, that the functioning of an extensive welfare state and the operation of massive entitlement programs depend on the existence of national solidarity. Therefore, closing one’s borders is understandably a precondition for the success of a social democratic administration. 

The Trump-Vance position on illegals is clearly a reaction to the woke left and its Democratic Party leaders. But it would not have been intrinsically anti-leftist in our country even 20 years ago, when Bernie Sanders and Ralph Nader were inveighing against the importation of low-skill immigrants as a job killer for American workers. Certainly, there was nothing “far right” about opposing further immigration back then. On the contrary, it was corporate capitalists often lodged in the Bush wing of the GOP and writing for The Wall Street Journal who were delighted at the prospect of fattening balance sheets by importing loads of cheap labor. Our corporate capitalists have now turned woke while clinging to their old habits of trying to profit from “diversity,” as I gather from reading Charles Gasparino’s book Go Woke, Go Broke.

What differentiates this new right-wing populism from earlier opposition to flooding the labor market with cheap foreign labor is its obvious pushback on the moral and social front. The populist right belongs to the right insofar as it emphatically defends the God-fearing, communally rooted American worker, who is sickened by woke leftist indoctrination. This pushback is quintessentially rightist, whether or not we choose to call it “conservative.” This reaction may not always sound well-reasoned. In fact, it often comes couched in garbled and emotionally charged phrases. American populists like to think that what they want is a “God-given right,” which “the people” demand. (Presumably this “people” does not include the wokeified other half of our population.) 

What makes this reaction legitimately rightist, however, is its indignant response to a culturally subversive left and a long overdue call to fight back. One has to look past the phrases of the often-incoherent militants to grasp their recognition of an existential threat to their entire way of life and to human normality itself. This sense of crisis and hope to see their way of life preserved against an identified adversary should be the focal point for analyzing populist politics.

The emergence of a leader figure, as opposed to a faceless bureaucracy, is another feature of the right, particularly when that presence is linked to distinctly male traits. The masculine Trump is necessarily a figure of the right, just as America’s effeminate and not very black “first black president” Barack Obama, the super-feminist former Prime Minister of Britain Tony Blair, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Canadian Premier Justin Trudeau, and Germany’s epicene Chancellor Olaf Scholz are necessarily figures of the present left. This is clearly a reason, if not a sufficient one, that feminists and gays view Trump as another Hitler. Their charge, repeated ad nauseam, makes perfectly good sense, given the the contemporary left’s identification of fascism with “toxic masculinity.”

Although the left could at one time produce virile leaders, this is no longer the case. It now goes in for desexed heads of state who make war on fixed gender identities. Distinctly masculine “sexist” leaders have become an exclusively rightist characteristic in the onetime West, even if this association has not yet spread to more “sexist” Latin or Third World Marxist governments. The counterpart to these girly-man heads of state who presume to lead our “democracies” are masculinized females who obsess over abortion rights. I noticed at the Republican National Convention that the female members of Trump’s family and inner circle look quite different from these defeminized luminaries. 

A striking difference between what FDR set out to do (or what he appears to have wanted) and the present American populism concerns their differing attitudes toward public administration. Under no other president did government administration expand so rapidly and irreversibly as it did under Roosevelt. Between 1933 and 1945, public administration in this country grew from half a million employees to three-and-a-half million; even after World War II, the number only decreased by about half a million. 

Most of that growth took place in the 1930s and was not attributable to war conditions. Moreover, the building of what eventually became our permanent unelected “deep state” was not intended merely to help the country overcome the ravages of the Depression. It was meant to mold the thinking and habits of the citizenry over whom FDR and his Braintrust ruled. 

Reading through the accounts of Rexford Tugwell, Raymond Moley, and other Roosevelt advisors, including the president’s wife, one certainly finds evidence of the social engineering plans that had characterized the thinking of earlier Progressives. The idea that the proposed “reforms” were just about pump-priming may have applied to Herbert Hoover’s public works programs but not to what influential government planners intended on FDR’s watch. Of course, given that government’s dependence on very conservative voting blocks, like Northern ethnic Catholics and Southern white Protestants, and the still prevalent mores at the time, the New Deal’s potential for social transformation went mostly unrealized in the 1930s.

For the Trump/Vance populist movement, public administration is an unpleasant means toward a worthy end, that end being the securing of decent living conditions for the working class and other gainfully employed citizens. Any attempt by public employees to impose woke leftist values on these citizens will be energetically resisted by right-wing populists. With wind at their backs, they would not hesitate to call for the removal of offending activists from government service.

What clearly distinguishes this populist revolt from the New Deal-Great Society promoters is the low regard in which the populists hold government bureaucrats. For them, these administrators may be no more than the polluted instrument through which the populists are forced to operate. There’s also no hiding the fact that the two sides view each other with mutual loathing. 

The columnist George Will, in his neoconservative classic, Statecraft as Soulcraft, complained that the American right didn’t appreciate the benevolent results arising out of what they called “big government.” It was that attitude, according to Will, that made his fellow conservatives unnecessarily wary of administrative power and therefore unable to serve the people in a democratic age. Although the Trump/Vance right-wing populists have pledged themselves to the working class, they have done so without embracing Will’s enthusiasm for the administrative class. In fact, their appeal to the working class is paired with a promise to “drain the swamp,” the inhabitants of which should be obvious. 

In the end, the populist right may find itself on the horns of a dilemma, about which the earlier small government right once warned us. This problem goes back to the confrontation between the late Chronicles columnist Sam Francis and his paleolibertarian critics (Hans-Hermann Hoppe and others) about whether the right should take a statist turn. Francis argued, with justification, that in the present age there may be no historic choice. What he called the “Middle American Radicals,” from whom the reaction against the managerial left would come, expect their leaders to use the power of the state to protect them. They are not trying to return to a pre-New Deal America but seeking liberation from managerial oppression and cultural degradation.

The question then becomes how one can achieve that end while reining in the “denizens of the swamp.” The closest I can come to squaring that circle is pointing to the German philosopher Carl Schmitt’s concept of the modern state apparatus as a neutral machine. Schmitt applied that description to the direction of the post-medieval European state. That political entity was no longer concerned with lofty spiritual ends but operated as an unadorned tool for preserving internal order and protecting the sovereign’s subjects. Schmitt found this idea as being implicit in Thomas Hobbes’ concept of the “sovereign state,” which pursues limited, secular ends and stays away from messy theological or moral questions. Its end is tranquility and the peace of the realm. 

Without carrying the comparison too far, we might view the administration that the populists have in mind as something more functional than controlling. If state functionaries are forced to operate in a technically correct manner to carry out certain assigned duties, then it may be possible to have a populist welfare state without the swamp. What this assumes is replacing an already weaponized administration with a new one. And herein lies the rub. It may be hard to get public administrators who have been involved up to their eyeballs in partisan battles and who hold strong ideological positions to lay down their arms. Quite inconveniently, the populist agenda may require that this problem be addressed.

Having myself worked for the Reagan administration as an advisor to the very swamp-like Department of Education, which the “Reagan Revolution” never abolished, I suspect that a populist regime will have a Herculean task getting the administrative class to play nice. As we know, the Obama administration took a government service class that already leaned left and made them even more subservient to his side. Obama filled the surveillance state, IRS, and Department of Justice with his fervent partisans. 

The leaders of the new populist right should prepare for a battle royale if they wish to take effective power. Although Trump, Vance, and their successors may justifiably loathe the swamp, they may need a defanged one to serve their constituency. Just make sure its poison has been drawn.