Backlash: Are Americans Finally Turning Against Trumpism?
When will we reach the "tipping point" at which our democracy is saved?
With the legal charges against Donald Trump now reaching avalanche proportions, are Americans finally getting the message that the 45th president of the United States committed a scale of criminality that puts Al Capone to shame? Surely, the tide is about to turn.
Sorry to disappoint.
According to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, 71 percent of GOP primary voters think Republicans should remain firmly behind Trump in face of the investigations and indictments, compared with 22 percent who think otherwise.
An equal 71 percent of Republicans assert that Trump has not committed serious crimes, versus 17 percent who say he has.
And 75 percent of GOP primary voters believe Trump was merely exercising his right to challenge the results of the 2020 election, in contrast to 19 percent who believe he endangered democracy.
Why is it that at least a third of Americans cannot see the equivalent of the nose on their face? Are they willfully blind? In denial? Or just downright mentally challenged?
Oceans of ink and pixels have been spilt over this question — angry left-behinds who live in flyover country, income inequality, racism, right-wing rant media, etc. These are all valid, but none offers a complete explanation. I think it’s useful to first step back and examine the broader socio-political tableau that underlies the problems we see on the surface.
Harvard political scientist and author of the book, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism, Pippa Norris, writes that the turn to right-wing populism that has been sweeping industrialized Western countries stems from a profound demographic and cultural “tipping point”: “Populist authoritarianism can best be explained as a cultural backlash in Western societies against long-term, ongoing social change” that has been playing out over the past 20 years, she asserts.
Traditionalists feel increasingly insecure in a fast-changing society in which, in the case of the United States, Whites will fairly soon constitute a mere plurality of the population and social and cultural changes threaten what they regard as traditional values. In the U.S., the roughly 40 percent who back Trump — older, whiter, less educated — also tend to vote in greater numbers. Feeling under threat demographically, “an authoritarianism reflex kicks in,” Norris writes. “They want a strong leader who can push back. A transgressive leader, who doesn’t care if it’s politically correct,” who can restore traditional values. It is at this stage, the tipping point, that the politics of resentment manifests itself. It “is the maximum point of conflict, when people become aware of the differences, become aware of the loss.”
Is Norris confident that the rightward backlash will die out? “In the long term, yes,” she says vaguely. Right-wing populism, she is confident, will not overcome the more powerful forces of social liberalization.
Die out? Okay then. How? Because at this stage of the “tipping point,” few are waging large bets that Trump won’t return to the White House to usher in a vengeance-driven The Man in the High Castle era of fascism.
But some are predicting a coming counterrevolution.
Veteran pollster Larry Sabato told the Daily Beast that overreach will be the far-right’s undoing:
They’re going to cause a rebellion because people are not going to put up with it. There’s a limited tolerance at first. They think it’s just political rhetoric. But when it turns into policy as it did with abortion, then people respond politically. They’re going back to the ’50s, but is it the 1950s or the 1850s?
A recent NPR/Ipsos poll found that most Americans oppose book bans and almost two-thirds, including a majority of GOP respondents, are against restrictions on school curriculums.
This is beginning to show itself at the grassroots level around the nation. POLITICO, for example, reports a series of demonstrations and lawsuits against right-wing culture war groups in California seeking to impose their will on school boards.
Citing a recent pro-democracy protest by half a million Poles in Warsaw, ongoing mass demonstrations by Israelis against Benjamin Netanyahu’s ploy to gut the judiciary, as well as success by Americans to set up a memorial to Emmett Till in face of determined opposition by White racists, Rachel Maddow sees a trend:
Looking at our domestic challenges right now, looking at images from our own history and from Israel this weekend, it’s days like this when it’s good to remember that it’s not just the authoritarian right that is ascendant as a global trend. It is also resistance to authoritarianism. That is a global trend. The fight back is ascendant too. Resilience matters. Resistance to this stuff trends too. It is also contagious. And emboldening.
While such events are encouraging, more action is required before we can make the call that there is a broad-ranging and ongoing popular trend to defeat toxic right-wing populism. Perhaps the growing avalanche of legal indictments with their airing of Trump’s rampant criminality will be the catalyst and more people will follow the example of those who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 — those, as Special Counsel Jack Smith reminded us, who “put their lives on the line to defend who we are as a country and as a people. They defended the very institutions and principles that define the United States.”
That will be the “tipping point” at which our democracy is saved.