Last month The New York Times’ Bret Stephens wrote a piece that triggered an avalanche of unjustified, vitriolic criticism. As part of a Times series where columnists confess things they got wrong in their writing and commentary, Stephens says he was “wrong about Trump voters.” He regrets his past “broad swipe” at them and the way he “caricatured” their motivations.
Here’s how he described Trump voters now:
Trump’s appeal, according to [The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy] Noonan, was largely to people she called “the unprotected.” Their neighborhoods weren’t so safe and pleasant. Their schools weren’t so excellent. Their livelihoods weren’t so secure. Their experience of America was often one of cultural and economic decline, sometimes felt in the most personal of ways.
It was an experience compounded by the insult of being treated as losers and racists —clinging, in Obama’s notorious 2008 phrase, to “guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”
No wonder they were angry.
Noonan and Stephens are onto something … about 2016. I live in a deep-red part of America, and I heard a version of this argument countless times during the 2016 primary and the 2016 presidential election.
I know this account doesn’t describe every Trump voter (some took a much darker view of politics at that time), but it does connect with a very real sentiment—especially when describing big portions of Trump’s rural, working-class base.
While Trump was not the normal politician, the reasons I heard for supporting him were (mostly) conventional, and unsurprising. There’s a long history of different American constituencies feeling disregarded and disrespected. There’s a long history of populist movements in American politics.
I’m bringing up Stephens, however, because it’s important to understand that this explanation is outdated. The case for Trump is changing, right along with the attitudes of the MAGA base. While MAGA Republicanism remains populist, it’s radicalizing. The case for Trump now is different from the case for Trump then, and the change is profoundly harmful for American politics.
In 2020 I released a book called Divided We Fall, which argued that America’s partisan enmity was growing so profound that it threatened the long-term unity of the country, and central to my argument was the existence of competing left/right narratives about American politics and about each other. The darker those narratives get, the more imperiled our union.
Make no mistake, our mutual narratives are getting dark indeed. A Pew Research Center survey found that Republicans and Democrats are more likely to view their political opponents as close-minded, immoral, unintelligent, dishonest, and lazy than they were four years ago.
But hidden behind these dry statistics are the stories we tell, and I don’t think many members of the media truly understand precisely how radical the core MAGA narrative has become and how challenging that narrative is to any effort to pull the GOP away from Trump and Trumpism.
Here’s the new narrative—and I have no doubt that a number of readers have heard all or much of it from their MAGA friends and family members—goes something like this:
The Trump presidency exposed the true evil of the left. They persecuted Trump more than any other president in history. First, there was the Russia hoax, then the impeachment hoax, then they shut down the economy and schools to destroy Trump; they shut down churches to destroy the Church. They burned cities. They hollowed out our police forces. They were tyrants. They forced us to wear masks that didn't work and to take an experimental vaccine that has killed tens of thousands of vulnerable Americans.
They hated Trump because Trump was God’s anointed leader to save the nation, and it’s no surprise that the forces of hell came against him.
Even then, they knew they couldn’t beat him. So they changed election rules. Dead people voted. Thousands of “mules” stuffed the ballot boxes, and then they tried to stop Trump from investigating fraud. And if anyone’s to blame for January 6, it’s Nancy Pelosi for leaving the Capitol unguarded. They just let people walk in, and now they’re holding political prisoners in solitary confinement. Second impeachment was a joke, another hoax. But still they can’t keep Trump down. Joe Biden is senile. He can barely walk or talk. Trump is coming back, and they know it, so they’re attacking him again.
Why do I stand with Trump? Because God has appointed him for this moment. And the hatred of the Democrats is proof.
Once you’re aware of this narrative, the evidence of it is everywhere. Just this week, my own social-media feeds featured a false Naomi Wolf assertion that 44 percent of pregnant women in the Pfizer COVID-vaccine trial miscarried; a Steve Bannon Gettr post questioning whether a Pennsylvania Senate candidate was “satanic” and claiming he hangs with “Satanic groomers”; and a new book by a popular right-wing radio host arguing that the COVID lockdowns and other public-health measures were “the worst evil in our history” and the “worst oppression in global history since the Third Reich.”
When you understand that people really, truly believe the state of political and spiritual emergency outlined above, then a lot of other cultural phenomena start to make sense. For example, it’s fashionable to make fun of MAGA supporters who say, “He fights” as a prime justification for Trump. But if you believe the MAGA narrative, you would want a politician who fights, hard, against (alleged) pure evil.
Why would Republicans immediately rally around Trump after the FBI search? Because their entire story of the past six years teaches them that Trump is persecuted, he’s God’s instrument, and the Democrats (and “deep state”) are thwarting God’s divine plan.
When you understand the narrative, you understand why Mike Pence’s approval rating with Republicans plummeted after January 6, and not Donald Trump’s.
You can also start to understand how this narrative impacts what it means for politicians to “take care of the base.” On the one hand, there are tens of millions of Republicans who don’t hold the views identified above (or don’t hold them as intensely), but those who do hold these views intensely are disproportionately concentrated in the ranks of Republican primary voters.
This changes what it can mean to tack right in the primary and then move to the center for the general. The story above is so dire and so radical that tacking right often precludes moving left. Where do you go after you’ve declared the election stolen or after you’ve declared that your opponents are pure evil?
While there’s evidence that Republican radicalism might hurt the party in November, especially in the Senate, no one should presume that radicalism will doom the GOP. If a voter is dissatisfied with the status quo, they may well vote for the opposition even if the opposition is radicalized. They may see that vote as their only concrete way to register their discontent.
That’s why a nation needs two healthy political parties. Neither side can win forever, and when parties radicalize, you can count on at least some radicals seizing power. In this case, one of those radicals might be Donald Trump (again), and the case for his second term will rest on a narrative that’s more destabilizing even than the stories that brought him to the Oval Office six short years ago.