Connecting the problem of rightwing polarization to democratic solutions
I’m generally of the opinion that to understand how authoritarian movements achieve popular support and not just support from economic oligarchs, we have to look at both major economic factors and practical social-psychological ones. Which is certainly no novel insight.
But sometimes it’s hard to understanding the combinations of factors driving political behavior. In the 2024 US elections, economic statistics in the months leading up to November showed solid economic growth, employment rates above the official US definition of full employment (i.e., 96% of the active work force employed), and low inflation. By conventional assumptions, that should have worked massively to the advantage of the Presidential party. Instead, the Democrats lost the White House and the Republicans won majorities in both Houses of Congress.
And that despite the fact that the Orange Anomaly was and is obviously a narcissistic, cruel, and often incoherent character.
Political parties and campaign organizations do matter in politics. But those can’t be measured in economic statistics, and public opinion poll numbers produce more ambiguous data than basic economic statistics. In the formation of political opinions and choices, the media environment and the quality matter tremendously. Democratic societies can also experience concentration of media ownership in the hands of oligarchs, which facilitates the strengthening of conservative and authoritarian policies. That is why in countries like Hungary and Russia, the governments want to see media controlled by oligarchs who can be placated as well as coerced by the Orbáns and Putins of the world.
There are also mass-psychological dynamics which have been and are studied in terms of “authoritarian personality” characteristics and the social processes which tend to produce and strengthen them. Encouraging callousness toward those who are seen as weak or inferior activates authoritarian tendencies. Right now, we see that process at work in the theatrical celebration the Trump 2.0 government has made of snatching Latino residents off the streets, branding them (mostly without any evidence) as being violent gang members and terrorists, and shipping them in defiance of a specific court order to what is basically a concentration camp in El Salvador. The individual case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia has attracted particular attention, since the arbitrariness, criminality, and just plain meanness of the government’s treatment of him has been so blatant.1
Andrew Weissmann comments on the illegal act which targeted Garcia and others2:
The effectively unlimited flood of private money into political campaigns, massively facilitated by the infamous 2010 Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court, has created a qualitatively different political situation than that of even 15 years ago.
TechBro billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel don’t support democracy, they hate it. For the Democrats to protect the liberal democratic system of government, they have to combine the use of the many issues like Social Security where their stands on issues are very popular with the strengthening of state and local party structures and the kind of branding that strongly identifies the Democratic Party as a political brand that actively fights for their own popular positions.
Paul Heideman recently took a new look at how Trump and Trumpism captured the Republican Party.3 There are certainly long and deep roots of what we currently know as Trumpism, from Southern segregation to know-nothing anti-science religious fundamentalism, to xenophobic nationalism, to McCarthyist witch-hunts, to militarism, to anti-feminism and homophobia.
Heideman leads with a weak start, the first sentence being, “For most of the twentieth century, the Republican Party was the preferred party of the American capitalist class.” Which is more-or-less true as far as it goes. That’s the posture that Franklin Roosevelt struck in 1936 when he denounced “economic royalists” and declared:
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace - business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. “They are united in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred.”4
And that was basically true in that moment. But both FDR and his cousin and predecessor as President Teddy Roosevelt were part of a wealth patrician family. And bankers, industrialists, and big landowners have always split their support between the Democratic and Republican parties. While the Democrats have always prided themselves on the Jeffersonian-Jackson legacy of being the party of the “common man,” as they said in the old days, they are still paranoid of embracing unapologetic social-democratic positions like Medicare for All – partially out of ideology but especially out of concern for discouraging wealthy donors.
Clumsy opening class analysis aside, Heideman’s observation that “most business owners supported the GOP most of the time” has been true for a long time. Sinclair Lewis’ novels like Main Street, Babbitt, and The Man Who Knew Coolidge give a good feel for that tendency in its early 20th-century version.
The story Heideman tells in his piece is mainly about how in recent decades a Republican Party clearly devoted to fulfilling the desires of American billionaires and oligarchs managed to attract enough voters who are neither wealthy nor oligarchs to vote for an authoritarian, Trumpified Republican Party devoted to catering to the desires of the Elon Musks of the world. Notable aspects of this in his view include:
Willingness by conservatives to make primary challenges to Republican incumbents.
Increasing influence of super-PACs that were controlled by wealthy donors and lobby groups rather than by the party organizations. The Supreme Court’s gutting of campaign-financing laws was crucial here.
Sharpening of radical-right ideology within the Republican Party and the increase of what the sociologist Wilhem Heitmeyer calls “respectable callousness.” The ultra-conservative Koch network, which had been the guiding force behind the Libertarian Party, was a key element in this process.
To illustrate what we might think of as the FOX News/Murdoch/Rush Limbaugh effect, Heideman uses a telling quote from an unnamed Republican libertarian type:
All this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching, I realized when they voted for Rand [Paul] and Ron [Paul] and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas — they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class.
Heideman does slip into the temptation to interpret this as a tilt by Trump and at least some of the Republicans as some kind of pro-working-class or antiwar/anti-militarist tilt, which some podcasters also like to claim. Yet he also argues that Trump’s very personalist style of governance as President has coincided with the fact that “after eight years of Trump’s dominance over the party, the ideological divisions within it have only deepened,” and therefore “the span of positions within the party, and hence the potential for future conflict, has grown considerably.” (How much of that is substantive differences and how much is scatterbrained variations on a basic ideological direction is another question.)
As Heideman mentions, Trump has campaigned on supporting Social Security and Medicare. But the Social Security Administration was one of the first targets of Elon Musk and his band of incel programmers this year. Trump is with the Congressional Republicans on cutting Medicaid and immediately made major cutbacks in the Veterans Administration and its medical services.
Trump’s deviation from the Republican Party’s previous neoliberal embrace of “free trade,” aka, corporate-dominated economic globalization, has been very notable. But it is also stunningly incompetent. As Paul Krugman recently noted, “the Chinese, unlike the Trump administration, understand what trade and trade wars are about. And the Trumpers, in addition to not knowing what they’re doing, don’t even know what they want.”5
Heideman also suggests that Trump deepened the divisions in the Republican Party on foreign policy:
Trump’s position on NATO, and on foreign policy in Europe more generally, has been the place where his policies have introduced the largest fissures in the GOP. While criticizing NATO members for not spending enough on defense had been pro forma for Republican politicians, the party was staunchly “Natopolitan.” Trump took this line of criticism further by suggesting that the United States would not fulfill its Article 5 obligations of mutual defense to countries that it judged delinquent in their military expenditures.
This supposed difference with traditional Republicans conservatives is mainly a combination of rhetoric and incompetence. Trump 2.0 has proposed a big increase in US military spending, which is the main thing the military-industrial complex and its lobbyists care about. And after three months of Trump 2.0, it would be hard to convince most NATO leaders that Trump is a fan of the alliance. Particularly not those of Canada and Denmark! Trump’s “America First” foreign policy has always been a combination of militarism, extreme nationalism, bluster, and the occasional rhetorical gesture of claiming that combination makes him a Peace President.
The Dick Cheney/George W. Bush brand of foreign policy thinking was not actually that different, although they were never dumb enough to just blow off the NATO allies, because they knew NATO served as a major magnifier of US power and influence in the world. Trump hasn’t yet initiated any long wars himself. But with Israel pushing him to go to war against Iran and his own threats against Canada, Denmark, and Panama, that could change any day.
It’s true that Trump’s rhetorical variations may have introduced some Republican political frictions, for example on the party’s attitude toward Big Pharma, with Trump’s embrace of quack medicine ideas and the authority he has given the conspiracist RFK, Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services. That’s one area where big money does run up against barriers that medical crackpots try to put up, and that will likely be a sources of continuing tension within the Republican Party.
My reservations about Heideman’s include his seeming lack of recognition of the party branding that the Republicans have embraced over the last three decades. The combination of the party’s stone conservatism, and it’s increasing embrace of Rush Limbaugh/Anne Coulter-style in-your-face meanness toward everyone and everything that isn’t mean-spirited, sexually-binary, white-racist, conspiracist thinking from nasty clowns like Glenn Beck, all amplified recklessly by FOX News and the rest of the conservative media environment, have given the Republican Party an “owning-the-libs” brand identity that is largely independent of mundane worries about grandma getting her Social Security checks or whether you can afford to take your kids to the doctor if they get sick.
Embracing crackpot medicine is also a way of appealing to people who are not billionaires but are tripping on some alternative-medicine faith and are looking for a savior on that front.
As Heideman himself observes, “In 2020, the party did not even put forward a platform, refusing to define itself as anything except Trump’s party.” But that’s more a reflection of the general authoritarian tendency of the party rather than any sign that the party has given up on bad policy positions in either domestic or foreign policy.
Democrats have certainly been able to define the Orange Anomaly as a disgusting character. But that’s also how Trump worked hard to identify himself, and the Republican base supports him because of it, not in spite of it.
Democrats have many popular issues, including the somewhat abstract-sounding one of supporting democracy and the rule of law. But to offset the Republicans’ deep pockets from ultra-rich freaks like Elon Musk, they have to find a way to organize the party’s voting and activist base as the brand of people who actually take things like protecting Social Security and public schools seriously and politically fight for them. Democratic consultants are extremely fond of the idea of having their candidates look brand and non-threatening. And of using laundry-lists of popular issues.
But unless Democrats can go into elections with a combination of popular issues (which they mostly have), a grassroots funding base (which they also have but needs to be much improved), active party organizations in all 50 states (which they really need to work on building up), and candidates who look and sound like they will fight for their own side on all that - effectively winning against billionaire-funded Republicans with a big media network and candidates practiced at the own-the-libs Rush Limbaugh schtick will be a big lift to achieve.
Heideman is right in pointing out some of the downsides of Trump’s dominance of the party, like his extreme reliance on personal cronyism. (Hello, Special Envoy to Everywhere Steve Witkoff!) As he observes, “The figures most loyal to Trump are seldom the figures best equipped to lead state organizations.” And he notes that Trump’s ability to raise funds from small-dollar donors has declined: “In October 2024, the Associated Press reported that Trump’s small-dollar fundraising was 40 percent lower in 2024 than in 2020.”
And that’s before his tariffs and trade war chaos send prices through the roof and knock the economy into a recession!
He also points out that, despite the thrust of some of his other arguments about Trump’s mass appeal, “For all the hype about Republicans being the party of the working class now, their actual funding has never been more dependent on a small core of hyper-ideological billionaires.“ (my emphasis)
This doesn’t seem like a comfortable fit with his argument earlier in the essay. Including his opening point that the Republican Party used to be “the preferred party of the American capitalist class” but is not so much anymore.
Stern, Mark Joseph (2025): A Federal Judge Is on the Brink of Criminally Prosecuting Trump Officials for Contempt. Slate 04/16/2025. <https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/04/rubio-criminal-contempt-trump-officials-cecot.html> (Accessed: 205-17-04).
BREAKING: Understanding Judge Boasberg's Contempt Ruling Today. 04/17/2025. Andrew Eissmann YouTube channel 04/17/2025. (Accessed: 2025-17-04).
Heideman, Paul (2025): Trump’s Takeover of the Republicans. Catalyst 8:4, 52-82.
Roosevelt, Franklin D. (1936): Address at Madison Square Garden, New York City. The American Presidency Project. <https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-madison-square-garden-new-york-city-1> (Accessed: 205-17-04).
Krugman, Paul (2025): Why Trump Will Lose His Trade War. Paul Krugman Substack 04/16/2025. (Accessed: 205-17-04).