… as a discussion
The election of the 45th United States President in 2016 – Donald J. Trump and his best-known motto “Make America Great Again”, along with outright stricter standards on immigration policies during his candidacy in 2015. This is an inciting political tension, which sweeps the values of hundred years building the nation since the Founding Fathers. Leading scholars in American politics named his phenomenon as Trumpism, which is a subtype of modern populism.
However, the logic of electing a President in a country having a superpower over the world like the United States cannot be smooth-spoken rather than its form of leadership in setting the “popular sovereignty and defending democracy” (Moffitt, 2016, p. 1). Henceforth, to some commentators, the political style of Trumpism is, on the one hand, a unique political phenomenon; and on the other hand, in fact, a continuation and culmination of 60 years of Republican Party development, which has transformed it from the Party of slave emancipation to the Party of Trump.
A newcomer to politics
The 2016 United States Presidential Election result had surprised most of us [America and the world] by electing Donald J. Trump. The elder Trump was of German heritage and he is the son of Fred Trump, who was a phenomenally successful real estate developer (White House History, 2020). Donald Trump has been famous since the 1980s and was a billionaire in real-estate development and businessman who owned, managed, or licensed his name to several hotels, casinos, golf courses, resorts, and residential properties in the New York City area and around the world. In 2004, he also launched the Apprentice (later The Celebrity Apprentice), a popular television series that aired until 2015. In another word, he was a newcomer to politics when he started his Presidency in 2017.
From the Party of Abraham Lincoln to Trump’s reign
a. A radical division since the Founding Fathers
The modern Republican party (GOP) is one of two major political parties in the United States. It was founded out of the remnants of the Whig Party by its former members in 1854 as a coalition opposing the extension of slavery into Western territories. The Republican Party fought to protect the rights of African Americans after the Civil War, which they saw as a tyranny of President Andrew Jackson’s slavery crisis. After years of simmering tensions between southern and northern states over slavery, states’ rights and westward expansion, the election of Lincoln in 1860 caused the secession by 11 southern states and precipitated a Civil War.
The strategic move by Lincoln and other Republicans urged to issue the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, which was a call for people loyal to the Union. The Union ultimately prevailed over the Southern Confederacy, because of its superior industrial and military might. But at a terrible price, including a permanent structural fissure in US politics. This started to set a bent on the destruction of the “peculiar institution” between both parties. It is sustained until today’s GOP. The party is generally socially conservative and favours smaller government, less regulation, lower taxes, and less federal intervention in the economy and cultural life (between South and North) (History, 2020).
b. The more party’s business, the more de-democratization
The party of big business so does Trump. His motto shows us that. The political ideology of the Republican is not growing, it is rather a call back the spirit. It is seemingly easy to put bluntly that this is a matter of America, which the American has the rights to deal with. Then it is so polarised to face the fact that the Presidential Election is solely a fight between the Republican and the Democrats. It is not representing the whole common good that the world entrusts in a global power structure if we do not mention the term “The New World Order”. So a political figure like Trump, who lacks experience (as analytically noted from his profile) in politics and his character is much of a businessman who masters the “Art of the Deal” as the name of his own book, is an anarchist in politics. This is due to the fallen humanity’s will to unify and not to divide, to solidify and not to polarise.
Therefore, it could not be disagreeable in line with the statement that “in 2016 the Republican presidential contest party insiders failed to anoint a standard-bearer…to coalesce behind one candidate opened the door for Trump.” (MacWilliams, 2016, p. 716) The failure of modern American politics is due partly to the failure of building trust amongst its political elites regarding both Republican and Democrat Party. Therefore, much of the political strategy rests on foundations of imperial pride and colonial nostalgia, which have roots since the establishment of political parties. And Sykes (2017, p. 13) – author of “How The Right Lost Its Mind” regretfully commented towards this phenomenon that “it is about the culture and mindset of a Republican party and a conservative movement that enabled him, capitulated to him, and embraced him, probably much to his own surprise.”
A brief from transformation to democracy
Is this good or bad for democracy? Reflectively, Trump’s motto and his policies entrenched the anarchic perception and downward the Democrats rather than a heal from the past. In other words, it unleashed a less cohesive potential of unbridled capitalism without articulating visions and risk measurements. This is a huge transformation from the Party of Lincoln to the Party of Trump. However, both are in the same party, but their ideologies are unmatched. As this time, Trump wanted to build a wall with Mexico, and be an anti-immigration whom the Republican elites together make American history at its crossroad.
The second wave of this transformation was though the centrist Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was president from 1953 to 1961, actively supported equal rights for women and African Americans, a conservative resurgence led to Barry Goldwater’s nomination as president in 1964, continued with Richard Nixon’s ill-fated presidency and reached its culmination with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
In terms of the national interest, John R. Vile, Dean of Political Science at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, says the solidarity of America cannot solely depend on the Army or the Navy but indeed “the notion that we are bound together by certain great principles and that our similarities are more binding than our differences are.” (McKeever, 2020, para. 21)
Lately, a side-effect but a future impact
In terms of political perspective, Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2017, p. 81) argue that populism has tension with liberal democracy, not democracy. Notwithstanding, Trumpism is not only a product of populism but also barricades other political values where the majority and the merit should never be plunged into tyranny, which means from democratization it transforms into de-democratization as an ambivalent process. In another word, it culminates in the decay within the look of both Republican and Democratic parties. Subsequently, the election of Trump is a just side effect, which publicly attacked the centre ideology between two parties. “The roots for the populist/nationalist putsch run too deep” in this country. (Sykes, 2017, p. 15)
References:
Alan, W. (2016). Donald Trump’s Hijacking of the Republican Party in Historical Perspective. The Political Quarterly. Vol. 87: 3. pp. 406-414.
History. (2020). History of the Republican. Retrieved from: https://www.history.com/topics/us-politics/republican-party
MacWilliams, M. C. (2016). Who Decides When the Party Doesn’t? Authoritarian Voters and the Rise of Trump. Political Science and Politics. Vol 49:4. pp. 716-721.
McKeever, A. (2020). No modern presidential candidate has refused to concede – Here’s why that matters. National Geographic. Retrieved from: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/11/no-modern-presidential-candidate-refused-to-concede-heres-why-that-matters/#close
Moffitt, B. (2016) The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style & Representation. Stanford University Press. P. 1.
Mudde, C., & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2017). Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. P. 81.
Roberts, K. M., & Ostiguy, P. (2016). Putting Trump in Comparative Perspective: Populism and the Politicization of the Sociocultural Low. Brown Journal of World Affairs. 23(1), 25-50.
Sykes, C. J. (2017). How the Right Lost Its Mind. London: Biteback Publishing. pp. 3-18.
The White House Historical Association. (2020). President Donald J. Trump. Retrieved from: https://www.whitehousehistory.org/bios/donald-j-trump
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