Refilling Our Hallowed Halls without Any Hollow Men

Daniel McCarthy, "Trump Gave Americans a Choice, Not an Echo"

His critique is not against America as a whole—but against its leadership class.

The American Enterprise Institute is an unlikely place to be reminded of why Donald Trump was necessary ten years ago, and is no less needed now. But a comment by Yuval Levin on a recent AEI panel succinctly brought out the difference Trump has made. Criticizing today’s populist, Trump-led Republican Party, Levin said, “The Right has to ground its approach to the public in a more conservative message, in a sense that this country is awesome. It is not a festering burning garbage pile—that is a strange way to talk to the next generation, and it’s not true, even a little bit.”

Trump has never used the words “festering burning garbage pile,” but he’s used similarly strong language to describe America’s condition in this century under administrations other than his own. Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” implies that America hasn’t been great lately, although he and his voters can change that. Whenever Trump alludes to what Levin calls “a festering burning garbage pile,” he’s referring to the poor leadership our country has suffered from in the not-too-distant past and the results of its misgovernance.

But that’s not what Levin or other AEI types hear. To them, Trump’s criticisms of the ruling class sound like criticisms of the country. It would be unfair to guess that Levin simply believes the nation’s elite and the institutions they run are what counts as the country itself, but there are precedents for such a view. In traditional monarchies and aristocracies, the rulers are the embodiment of the realm. Our Declaration of Independence was quite radical in breaking away from that understanding, asserting that the people are the realm, and all its institutions are answerable to them, not the other way around.

Levin and other intelligent non-populist conservatives know this, and they’re well aware of the failings of the pre-Trump Republican Party, and the country’s political establishment as a whole. But knowing and feeling are different things. Much of what survives of the pre-Trump conservative movement even now feels that the virtues rather than the vices of the old elite (and the institutions with which they are almost synonymous) ought to be emphasized.

For reasons that are easy to understand, many temperamental conservatives have an abiding fear of demagogues and an irreverent public. However corrupt or incompetent Ivy League-educated leaders may be, they should not be criticized too harshly—likened to flaming rubbish, for example—lest Ivy League education itself be stripped of its mystique. That mystique is part of the decent drapery of republican life, instilling a proper attitude of deference among the public toward those who have the education and lifestyle preparation to lead them.

From the moment he came down the escalator a decade ago, Trump upended this system. He pays no heed to the norms that distinguish America’s leadership class from the rabble the way noble bloodlines distinguished leadership in traditional hierarchical societies. Trump draws strength from the weakness of America’s elites and the widening public awareness of their vices. This is why he is again and again rewarded for violating the very norms the elite considers sacrosanct, even to the point of winning the Republican nomination and then the White House last year despite a slew of criminal convictions and many more pending charges.

In three consecutive elections, Trump has not merely offered voters a choice of leaders but a choice between systems of government. The capaciousness of our republican Constitution is such that within its framework more than one kind of regime is possible. The “informal regime” can be considered the regime of society as well as government, or a regime that in operation reflects the real dispensation of authority within the country.

Most Americans have sadly little familiarity with even the letter of the written Constitution, and even most educated Americans have never entertained the thought of an informal regime. Indeed, much of the country’s elite (think about the typical Atlantic writer, for example) suffers paroxysms of panic over Trump’s words and actions because its members conceive of the informal regime under which they’ve lived their whole lives—and under which people like themselves flourish—as being the only natural outcome of the written Constitution. To violate the “norms” of this regime is to violate the Constitution itself, as far as their understanding can conceive.

It’s rare that voters get to make a choice not just between candidates but between regimes. The greater and lesser George Bush, the male and female Clinton, Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris all represented the same regime and norms. Trump differs from them all not only in policy but in the relationships he represents between the people, elected power, and institutional elites (both inside and outside of government).

Trump at last gave the American people a choice of regimes, with one regime—represented by his enemies, not just in the general election but in the Republican Party, too—operating on aristocratic presumptions and the other being a reassertion of popular self-government, including its characteristic parrhesia and even vulgarity. Crude materialists who understand power only in terms of wealth struggle to interpret Trump, because he and many of his associates obviously belong to the same affluent class as his enemies. Yet just as Christ said the poor will always be with us, so too does every regime, formal or informal, have its rich men. The regime is not defined by the existence of a wealthy group; it’s rather about relationships and authority, and that is what Trump has changed.

This change was necessary because the old regime had already destroyed its own legitimacy. It performed poorly for millions of ordinary Americans, but beyond that it had also grown arrogant. Its norms were not a limitation on its power or abuses but rather a gag stifling criticism from within or below. The new regime that’s in the making will have its own defects and will be in need of various corrections, but the test of a regime lies precisely in its ability to correct itself. The old elite had lost that ability and would hardly have had the will to exercise the capability even if it had still been there.

Trump is not a revolutionary who has overthrown a healthy order. Rather he, like the American revolutionaries of 250 years ago, has given the people a chance to be healthy again by ridding themselves of a debilitating regime. Americans had been tricked into living under an aristocracy within the form of a democracy.

Thomas Jefferson had hoped that voters would freely and democratically choose natural aristocrats as their leaders. Instead what happened in recent decades was that an aristocracy against nature established itself as an authority that could rule through a multiplicity of institutions regardless of voters’ choices at the ballot box. Universities, nonprofits, the media, the permanent federal bureaucracy, judges, political professionals within both parties, and other interlocking, ideologically aligned (broadly “liberal”) components could forestall any challenge—until Trump came along. He gave the people a radical choice, and they sided with him against the aristocracy.

If the elite really had consisted of the natural aristocrats in whom Jefferson placed his faith, the people might not have felt the need for a Trump. The aristocracy that confronted them, however, was an aristocracy of privilege, one consisting of haughty mediocrities, not natural geniuses or public-spirited heroes. Replacing one of these aristocrats with another, or one of their cabals with a different cabal, would have made no difference. What the people needed was an alternative to the entire system—and Donald Trump gave them that alternative.

Guardians of institutional prestige such as Yuval Levin—men of conservative temperament who see the need for a well-formed elite within a popular regime—shouldn’t abjure Trump, however. Only by making America more democratic again, more populist, can it be made more aristocratic in the sense the Founders intended. The people have to want an aristocracy, and they will only want one that serves them faithfully, selflessly, and competently.

Trump has to restore the people’s power over the elite before the elite will feel the need to reform. That will save America’s institutions, not destroy them.