You, the People

CrowdSource 10.28.2024

Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: Trump and populism.

Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.

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Is Trump Still a Populist?

Populism isn’t going anywhere — even if Trump loses the election. But is “populist” still the right label for Trump?

• “Populism.” A handy definition from political theorists Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau:

Populism … is a strategy of constructing a political frontier that divides society into two camps, ‘us’ and ‘them’, and calling for the mobilization of the ‘underdog’ against the ‘powerful’. … There is no simple opposition between a righteous ‘people’ and a corrupt layer of ‘elites’, conceived as pre-existing empirical entities. Rather, this binary can be constructed in a variety of ways

• Conservative or Radical? Two months ago,

  Sohrab Ahmari
  foresaw an identity crisis in Trump’s coalition:

… is Trumpism still an uprising against elites and the American status quo in the opening decades of the 21st century? Or is the movement settling into familiar conservative patterns, battling “communist” phantoms, allying with powerful segments of American capital and abandoning a post-neoliberal trend first heralded by Trump himself in 2016?

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Who is Trump’s “People”?

Whether or not Trump is still a populist, who is the “us” that he represents?

• Weirdos. As defined by Dave Weigel: “voters — mostly white, mostly male — at the political margins. … people who might vote third party, or not at all …” Or

  Max Read
  : Young men “who like ‘edgy,’ trollish, hedonistic, attention-seeking personalities [like RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, et al.].” Or Jeet Heer (of
  The Time of Monsters
  ): “mostly” alienated young men.

• White Suburbanites. According to

  Matthew Walther
  , “there are good reasons to conclude that his campaign is no longer targeted at the sorts of voters — white, rural, working-class — who are most commonly associated with him. … Trump now aspires to be the candidate of moderate middle-class white suburbanites, the most civically engaged and outrage-prone constituency in America.”

• Normies + Populists. Says Michael Brendan Dougherty: “A natural normie who believes that misgovernance is incompetent. And a populist who knows that such incompetence is indistinguishable from active malice. … Trump’s bifurcated campaign has welcomed them both in with open arms.”

• Against Foreigners.

  Anne Applebaum
  argues that Trump’s dehumanizing language about immigrants creates a “them”: “Trump blurs the distinction between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants.” Everyone who does not fit into that camp of unwanted aliens is “us.”

Maybe Trump is simply a tribune for the group of people Joan Didion calls “the public”: “ ‘the critics’ distrust great wealth but ‘the public’ does not. … [there is] a palpable contract between the very rich and the people who distrust them least.”

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From the Crowd

• Gemma Mason
  chimes in on the “Is culture stuck?” debate. Against
  Matthew Gasda
  ’s pessimistic assessment of the situation, Gemma cites examples of real-existing Internet culture that is also good:

… the distinctly new-media realm of horror podcasts. Conveniently, these developments are recent enough to be relevant to a discussion of modern culture, while also being old enough to perceive trajectories of artistic influence.

• M.L.D.
  writes a fascinating and erudite post about the binding of Isaac, the history of child sacrifice in the ancient world, human rights, and the end of history — a response to
  Damir Marusic
  and
  Santiago Ramos
  ’ musings in last week’s podcast episode. Here’s a taste:

The kind of people smug enough to dismiss the Akedah as ancient barbarism, overcome long ago, are the same kind of people who simplify the world by dividing it into oppressed and oppressors — two groups that we can tell apart by weighing the suffering on each side — as though nothing in this world was worth suffering for.

• Matt of

  Lost Tempo
  , responding to
  Shadi Hamid
  ’s Provocations:

I think there are profound disagreements [in Shadi’s article] about what “the good life” is — or indeed, if it is a singular thing. One of the annoying things about both the post-liberal right and some progressives is that they assume everyone has (or should have) the same desires as them. That’s not how desire works.

See you next week!

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