The elites are nervous. America has not had a populist and a nationalist this close to the presidency in at least a century. <\/p>\n
Arthur Chu writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n If I were still in a mood to make jokes about the Trump campaign I\u2019d say the makers of \u201c<\/span>Allegiance<\/span><\/a>\u201d and \u201c<\/span>The Man in the High Castle<\/span><\/a>\u201d both owe Donald Trump money for free publicity. <\/span><\/p>\n The Philadelphia Daily News hailed <\/span>Trump\u2019s plan to ban all Muslim immigration<\/span><\/a>–which would bring us back to the era of the openly racist <\/span>Chinese Exclusion Act<\/span><\/a>–with the barely-even-a-pun headline \u201c<\/span>The New Furor<\/a>.<\/span>\u201d The New York Daily News, not to be outdone, showed Trump <\/span>beheading the Statue of Liberty<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n Prominent Republicans have been<\/span> coming out of the woodwork<\/span><\/a> to bash Trump for escalating Republican discourse about immigration from veiled bigotry to open bigotry. The First Amendment-defying concept of applying a religious test to immigration is apparently a bridge too far even for the Dick Cheneys and Lindsey Grahams of the world. <\/span><\/p>\n Twitter, of course, has been <\/span>a-twittering nonstop<\/span><\/a>. Jeff Bezos <\/span>threatened to shoot him into space<\/span><\/a>. J.K. Rowling weighed in, calling him<\/span> a worse villain than Lord Voldemort<\/span><\/a>. (A stretch, considering Donald Trump has not yet assassinated anyone nor created an army of mind-controlled slaves nor fused his soul to that of a giant man-eating serpent, though I guess we\u2019ll see in 2016.)<\/span><\/p>\n All of this naturally leads to the question: If everyone hates him so much, why are we so worried about him? Ross Douthat <\/span>points out <\/span><\/a>we haven\u2019t even held our first primaries yet; Trump has yet to win a single actual election. Nate Silver, our nation\u2019s election oracle, recently implored the media to \u201c<\/span>stop freaking out<\/span><\/a>\u201d about Trump\u2019s position in opinion polls as the \u201cRepublican frontrunner.\u201d Trump gets a lot of attention, but not that much support–his overwhelmingly \u201chigh unfavorables\u201d basically mean the nation is split between a minority that backs Trump and a majority that hates him but hasn\u2019t decided whom they\u2019d prefer as president instead.<\/span><\/p>\n As Silver says, \u201cNobody remotely like Trump has won a major-party nomination in the modern era\u201d; for Trump to succeed, he\u2019d have to beat the entire Republican Party apparatus lined up against him and thus prove that the party itself is ineffectual against a determined enough wealthy individual. People who\u2019d like to think that the two parties are obsolete lick their chops at Trump\u2019s headline-grabbing status for this reason, but for better or for worse that\u2019s probably wishful thinking.<\/span><\/p>\n To put it bluntly, <\/span>Trump isn\u2019t Hitler<\/span><\/a>, not because Trump\u2019s views aren\u2019t as personally odious as Hitler\u2019s were but because Trump doesn\u2019t live in Hitler\u2019s Germany and, to be blunt about it, he doesn\u2019t have Hitler\u2019s balls. The Adolf Hitler who took power in 1933 was a man who\u2019d previously taken politics seriously enough to lead an armed revolution against the state and be imprisoned for it. His party already had a paramilitary wing (<\/span>the SA<\/span><\/a>) of organized, uniformed thugs who seriously thought of themselves as a rival to the existing military. He rose to power in a country that saw itself as a desperate underdog, having lost a major war and been <\/span>forced to make massive reparation payments<\/span><\/a> that crippled the economy.<\/span><\/p>\n None of this describes Donald Trump. It\u2019s impossible to imagine the effete reality-show billionaire at the head of a <\/span>Beer Hall Putsch<\/span><\/a> or going to prison as a martyr for his cause. His supporters are <\/span>violent, frightening, boorish mobs <\/span><\/a>but they\u2019re nothing at all like an army, not even the ersatz army the SA were. And despite how ugly things have gotten in the United States during the War on Terror we are still comfortably the world\u2019s wealthiest superpower; Weimar Germany would be lucky to have our problems. <\/span><\/p>\n No, as disgusted as I am that a leading candidate for president can mouth fascist slogans and trumpet fascist ideals in 2015, I don\u2019t seriously believe the America is Germany in 1933 or Trump is Adolf Hitler.<\/span><\/p>\n That doesn\u2019t mean I\u2019m not scared.<\/span><\/p>\n Because there is an example of a country a lot like America in 2015 that had a candidate in mind much like Trump–an ultra-rich dilettante who seemed to treat politics like a show and shoot his mouth off without any concern for actually winning, who did indeed \u201cfreak out\u201d the chattering classes by skyrocketing in popularity against all common sense.<\/span><\/p>\n That country is America in 1924, and that would-be candidate was <\/span>Henry Ford<\/span><\/a>. <\/span><\/p>\n Like Trump, Ford vacillated about <\/span>which party he even belonged to<\/span><\/a> but seemed none the worse for wear for his shifting allegiances–his personal brand outshining the brand of whatever party he belonged to. Like Trump, Ford\u2019s popularity was blamed on mass media–in 1924 that was the \u201cmovie mind\u201d overstimulated by Hollywood features; in 2015 it\u2019s apparently the fault of the \u201csocial media mind\u201d of self-sustaining Internet outrage.<\/span><\/p>\n Like Trump, Ford surged to national attention in 1924 because of the country\u2019s deep disenchantment with the \u201cserious\u201d candidates, a sense that party politics was just a corrupt elite trading favors with each other–Trump, like Ford, somehow managed to be an \u201coutsider\u201d and to represent the \u201ccommon man\u201d despite being incredibly wealthy.<\/span><\/p>\n And, like Trump, Ford was beloved by his fans because he was perceived as a straight-talker, a truth-teller, someone insulated enough by his wealth he didn\u2019t have to recite polite fictions. Among serious pundits of the chattering classes, an eccentric billionaire who goes on rants about the<\/span> Protocols of the Elders of Zion<\/span><\/a> or <\/span>Barack Obama\u2019s forged birth certificate<\/span><\/a> has disqualified himself from being taken seriously for office. Among voters who hate and resent the serious pundits of the chattering classes, those \u201cfringe\u201d views only underscore the billionaire\u2019s \u201coutsider\u201d credentials.<\/span><\/p>\n It may well be the case that Ford, had he not bowed out of running for the Republican nomination in 1924, would never have won a general election once enough people blasted the contents of his raving anti-Semitic newspaper <\/span>the Dearborn Independent <\/span><\/a>to a national stage–indeed, the Anti-Defamation League <\/span>successfully shut down that newspaper<\/span><\/a> with a boycott in 1927. It may be that <\/span>historians are correct<\/span><\/a> that Ford would never have made it that far into the election because, like most people who storm into presidential elections with no past political experience, he simply didn\u2019t have the taste for politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The elites are nervous. America has not had a populist and a nationalist this close to the presidency in at least a century. Arthur Chu writes: If I were still in a mood to make jokes about the Trump campaign … Continue reading