Citizens United v. Our Democracy

In 2016, Secretary Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate, was thought to wield specific political advantages over her Republican opponent Donald Trump. Secretary Clinton had the experience, she was more knowledgeable than Mr. Trump was in regards to the issues being discussed, some said she was more articulate, and Secretary Clinton raised a lot more money. Typically, a candidate’s advantage in campaign fundraising was always an indicator that they had more support from more people, they had more exposure, and had more power to sway the undecided and independent voters.  In the 2016 election, we learned that this is not always the case. Super PACs do not have complete sway power over the voters, but they do greatly influence the politicians in office.

In this day and age, campaign donations do not directly go to the campaign and candidate themselves. Since Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, the floodgates opened and soft money barreled into our elections. Super PACs, through independent expenditures, send money towards media buys in hopes of advancing their candidate of choice or encouraging the public not to vote for another candidate. Since the Citizens United decision was held, we saw dramatic increases in independent expenditure spending and independent expenditure spending posited as a significant and unfair game changer in elections, but Super PACs are not having the affect many people thought they would have. We are now entering an era where independent expenditures by Super PACs only have a large impact over politicians and are not reflective of the people.

Secretary Clinton raised over $563 million dollars and independent expenditures spent over $231 million in support of her. Mr. Trump raised a little over $333 million, most of which ($66 million) was his own money, and he received $75.2 million from independent expenditures. The significant amount of money flowing into Secretary Clinton's campaign coffers led political experts to come to the conclusion that she would win. However, Donald Trump beat Secretary Clinton - even taking states that historically supported democratic presidential candidates.

Super PACs funnel an exorbitant amount of money into political campaigns in order to sponsor and advocate for and against specific candidates. While ads and media buys by independent expenditures may have some sway on the undecided and in swing states, Super PACs and their outreach in campaigns are not the ultimate decider in elections. President Trump and his campaign proves this. He won the election, yet independent expenditure spending for Secretary Clinton spent was $155,849,637 more than it was for President Trump. However, just because Super PACs aren’t the ultimate decider in elections doesn’t mean they do not have a great impact on our government. What we are seeing is Super PACs becoming the deciders in how the politician they are supporting will view particular issues.

When a politician receives most of their support from Super PACS, either directly or indirectly, they are going to be likely to view issues in the eyes of the Super PACs regardless of their constituents’ views. The issue of gun control exemplifies how Super PACs shape politicians' views on issues. According to a Gallup Poll taken in October 2017, 60% of people want stricter gun control laws. This poll also revealed that 96% of people asked support background checks - with 86% saying they support a universal system, 75% support a 30 day waiting period when purchasing a weapon, and 70% of people polled would support privately-owned guns to be registered with the police. With all this information and other information from other polling organizations that reflect similar  results, politicians would be jumping at the chance to put their name on a gun control bill or that the President would pass an executive order reflecting what the people want - but that is not what we are seeing.

Let’s look at everyone’s favorite lobbying group, the National Rifle Association. The NRA goes above and beyond, shelling out an exorbitant amount of money to defend the right to bear arms. The NRA's influence is felt not only through campaign contributions, but also through millions of dollars in off-the-books spending on issue ads. Lobbying expenditures for the National Rifle Association regularly exceed $1.5 million and increased from $3.2 million in 2016 to more than $5.1 million in 2017 and 2018. The organization's lobbyists frequently try to exert their influence over government agencies including members of Congress and they are consistently successful in doing so. In just 2018, the NRA lobbied for and against 283 bills concerning gun laws. Politicians, particularly Republicans in regards to this issue, are doing everything in their power to avoid the issue or appease public opinion by agreeing to small things because the money they receive through ad buys and media wants them to keep an anti-gun control stance.

The same can be said with Democrats as well, who receive a lot of support from Super PACs, like Priorities USA. In the 2016 election, Priorities USA acted as if they were Secretary Clinton’s actual campaigning team and they did more campaigning in states, like Pennsylvania, than Secretary Clinton did herself. Priorities USA actually broke fundraising records, raising over $175 million dollars in the 2016 election cycle. Priorities USA targeted swing states and battleground states, drafting specific pro-Clinton messages that would appeal to each state’s populations and needs. In a way this Super PAC did a better job than the Democratic Party did, yet it still didn’t work. States that Priorities USA targeted with big media buys didn’t swing in Clinton’s favor, contributing to her overall loss. A majority of people in states like Michigan, Florida, and Ohio - where a lot of those ads aired - voted for President Trump, clearly indicating that Super PACs’ ads did not do much to sway the voters. People in these states for the most part wanted to hear from the politician who was running for office. While voters wanted to hear from Secretary Clinton that she would meet their needs, it is possible that they didn’t respond well to hearing about it from an ad paid for by a Super PAC that wasn’t directly connected to Secretary Clinton herself.

The Center for Responsive Politics predicted that over $5.2 billion would be spent on the 2018 midterm elections, making it the most expensive midterm election ever by a wide margin. More than $4.7 billion was already spent by candidates, political parties and other groups such as PACs, super PACs and nonprofits a week before this year’s midterm elections. Prior to this election cycle, no midterm election had surpassed more than $4.2 billion in spending when adjusted for inflation. Sheila Krumholz, the executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, postulates that “the significance of this election is clear. But whether it’s a blue wave or a red wave, one thing is certain: A wave of money is surging toward Election Day, much of it coming from the wealthiest donors targeting this year’s most competitive races.” Now that the midterms are over, the Center for Responsive Politics estimated that at least $5.1 billion was spent on this year’s midterm.

Established politicians align their views to those of Super PACs in order to receive their money and get away with it because they carry the incumbency advantage over opponents who barely have any visibility due to a lack of support from financially powerful Super PACs. It is too soon to see what kind of long term effect the 2016 election will have on the way politics is run in the country and how elections will function in the months and years to come. One thing, however, is clear. Super PACs do not have the sway many people believe they do. They are not representative of the population. Candidates’ ability to receive the benefit of ‘free media’ worth millions of dollars from independent expenditures does not mean they have the public support necessary to win an election. Voters have the power to control the election and it is politicians who have become hypnotized by Super PACs and what they believe those PACs can give them.

How Popular Is The Trump Doctrine?

The Trump Administration’s foreign agenda for the next four years is easily summed up in two words: America First. What’s already being described as the “Trump Doctrine” represents a stark departure from decades of American foreign policy orthodoxy, putting aside traditional internationalist and moral principles in favor of an agenda that seeks to maximize American interests and power abroad. Several defining planks have already emerged from the President’s rhetoric outlining his radical policy agenda, including a new economic isolationism that involves pulling out of the TPP and renegotiating NAFTA; a crackdown on immigration from Mexico and Muslim countries; a realignment of the United States towards Vladimir Putin’s Russia while easing American obligations to NATO; an all-out war on what Trump insistently calls “radical Islamic terrorism” with distinctly anti-neoconservative pledges to target civilians, reinstate torture, and seize Iraqi oil.

Trying to gauge how the American public feels about “Trump Doctrine” at this point in his presidency is no easy task, however. Given the choice between President Hillary Clinton, who likely would have represented a continuation of the Obama Doctrine, and President Donald J. Trump, 62,985,106 Americans opted for the latter – a number which represents a substantial portion of American voters, yet at the same time a minority of the popular vote. Furthermore, at barely over two months into his term President Trump has had little time to demonstrate the effects of his policies, nor has he been presented with a real test of his leadership capabilities in an international crisis situation. It also remains possible that moderates in the State and Defense Departments could nudge the White House towards a more conventionally conservative policy agenda, should the Trump Doctrine run into major obstacles once it’s enacted in proper.

What we know now, however, points to complex and often contradictory feelings among the American public regarding President Trump’s foreign policy agenda. According to HuffPost Pollster, public approval for Trump’s foreign policy currently stands at around 47% disapproval to 40% approval – hardly outstanding numbers, but an improvement over his dismal 54% job disapproval rating. On specific policies and principles espoused by Donald Trump, polls have shown a mixture of support and opposition from the American public, narrowly divided on many topics and heavily tilted towards or against Trump in others. The President does not carry a mandate from the public on foreign policy, nor does he face overwhelming indictment.

In terms of principles, it’s clear that the American public has not embraced “Trumpism” on one of the defining elements of his foreign policy: isolationism. Gallup has reported all-time highs of Americans who view foreign trade as more an opportunity than a threat to the nation, at 72%, far beyond even the late Clinton years in the heyday of NAFTA. The CNN/ORC poll has also found a growing majority of Americans in favor of a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants in the United States, up to 60% in mid-March, a repudiation of the President’s pro-deportation stances. Contrary to popular talk of a new era of economic isolationism, Americans seem to be growing even warmer to open trade policies for the US since Donald Trump’s election.

Opinions become less clear when Americans are asked about specific policies promoted by the Trump Administration. Though recent polls show consistent majorities opposed to the President’s proposed Mexican border wall, 80% of Americans also support deporting illegal immigrants arrested for other crimes, a policy strongly advocated by Donald Trump. Meanwhile, several polls have indicated both narrow support and opposition to the executive order restricting travel to and from several majority-Muslim countries originally imposed in February. As Harry Enten discusses at FiveThirtyEight, respondents to online polls have demonstrated greater support for the travel ban than in live polls, indicating a sizable portion of Americans who support the ban but hide it out of concern for “political correctness.” Americans are similarly cooler on free trade in practice than in theory: voters are evenly split on whether NAFTA is good or bad for the United States, and when asked if the US pulling out of trade dealssuch as the TPP and NAFTA is a good idea, 43% said they “don’t know enough to say” while support and opposition to the proposal received just 28% each.

Americans are similarly conflicted on the issue of the United States’ involvement around the world. A 2016 Pew Research Center study found broad skepticism about the US’s role abroad, with 57% of Americans saying the nation should let other countries deal with their own issues and a 41% plurality believing that the US does too much in solving international problems. Another poll from NBC News found two-thirds of Americans worried about the country becoming involved in a new war during Trump’s term as President. At the same time, the Pew poll also shows a majority of Americans fearing that the US won’t go far enough to defeat Islamist militants, broad concerns that the United States is less respected internationally now than in the past, and growing support for increases in military spending. And while American support for remaining in NATO is overwhelming, opinions on the UN are more mixed, with the organization enjoying favorable approval ratings but also broad agreement that it has done a “poor job” in solving the problems it’s faced. The contradictory opinions felt by many Americans on the nation’s activities overseas could dovetail nicely with President Trump’s own rhetoric, as the President has vowed to stop wasting US resources abroad while at the same time promising to defeat ISIS and restore America’s status on the international stage.

The Trump Administration’s relationship with Russia is another area where polls show Americans holding mixed feelings about the President. A Quinnipiac University poll showed an overwhelming 72% of voters supporting an investigation into connections between Donald Trump’s campaign advisors and Russian officials, and disapproval ratings for Russia and President Vladimir Putin are at historic highs according to Gallup. However, recent polls have also shown little confidence among the public when it comes to indicting President Trump himself: a recent NBC News/WSJ poll, for example, showed a third of Americans having no opinion on whether or not Donald Trump is “too friendly” with Vladimir Putin. Less than 1% of Americans consider Russia the top issue facing the nation today, and only 20% believe that President Trump has done anything criminal in his relations with Russia. Americans may generally disapprove of Russia and Trump’s friendliness towards the country, but it appears that few are ready to press the issue against the President without further evidence of wrongdoing.

Another major development in the Trump Doctrine era of foreign policy is the striking partisan divide over several key foreign policy issues. While Putin’s approval ratings remain abysmal in the US overall, they’ve seen a marked increase among Republicans compared to four years ago, when Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney described Russia as the nation’s “number one geopolitical foe.” Similarly, ninety percent of Democrats consider Russian interference in the 2016 election to be somewhat or very important, while forty percent of Republicans consider Russian interference to be not important at all. Free trade, once a calling card of the Republican Party, has also emerged as far more popular among Democratic voters than among Republicans, with a growing rift between the parties since Donald Trump’s election. President Trump may enjoy a built-in policy insulator in Congress, where Republicans up for reelection in 2018 will likely hesitate to waver from a President so disproportionately supported by their constituents. At the same time, Trump will have an even harder time reaching out to congressional Democrats, whose voters oppose the President’s policies almost instinctively, which could pose a major policy obstacle should either house of Congress flip to Democratic control after the midterm elections.

Conclusions

While Donald Trump is struggling with public opinion to a degree unseen by most newly-elected presidents, there is no guarantee that it will cripple the President’s radical foreign policy agenda. Americans disagree with Trump in principle on many issues including immigration, free trade, and Russian relations, but they also seem to agree with the President’s instincts on American involvement abroad. When it comes to specific policy issues, many Americans also seem to be more convinced by the Trump Administration’s arguments, or at least less willing to hold their ideological disagreements against the President. And in light of the complex and contradictory foreign policy opinions felt by many Americans, Trump’s unorthodox and often self-contradictory rhetoric may prove to be a unique asset in advancing his foreign agenda.

It appears likely that approval for the Trump Doctrine will hinge on how effective the President is at enacting his policies. If Donald Trump can easily roll out his foreign policy agenda and show returns for Americans at home, he may enjoy public support in the foreign policy realm even as his job approval ratings continue to fall. In addition, without a single “smoking gun” that blows his credibility wide open, Trump is unlikely to face real indictment from Congressional Republicans over the slow drip of stories involving his administration’s connections with Russian oligarchs. If Trump’s policies are unsuccessful or unactionable, on the other hand, then he may face substantial backlash from the public; a majority of Americans already believe that Trump should stop trying to pursue the travel ban and move on to bigger issues, including a fair number of voters who initially supported the ban. The Trump Doctrine could face a collapse in support from Americans who agree with it in theory, but who would become disillusioned with President Trump’s leadership if he can’t get what he wants with his signature deal-making and bravado.

“A New Nationalism”: 1992 and the Birth of President Trump

“I understand good times and I understand bad times. I mean, why is a politician going to do a better job than I am?” – Donald J. Trump on NBC’s Meet The Press, October 1999

You could be forgiven for thinking that 2016 was the first time Donald Trump ran for President of the United States. Much was made about the Republican nominee’s lack of political experience, and his campaign certainly looked the part. The candidate regularly ignored the consensus and orders of Republican leadership, staffers were kicked out seemingly at random, and the campaign’s ground game consisted of little more than eye-catching rallies. Of course, Trump’s unorthodox campaign was ultimately enough to win him the presidency in violation of all political wisdom. But his campaign wasn’t quite as unprecedented as it’s made out to be, either.

During this election, surprisingly little attention was given to the first presidential campaign of Donald Trump–no, not this year’s, but his campaign for the Reform Party nomination in 2000. Granted, Trump’s first run for President wasn’t much to write home about, as his campaign lasted just four months and the Reform Party was little more than a footnote in the election. The eventual Reform Party nominee, Pat Buchanan, captured less than 1% of the national popular vote on Election Day. In the mythos built up around the 2000 presidential election, pundits and historians have been much more interested in debates over the Electoral College, Bush v. Gore, and Ralph Nader than the meager implications of the Reform Party.

But Pat Buchanan’s Reform campaign in 2000 was a remnant of a powerful wave of populism that swept the nation eight years earlier. Populist movements already had a proud tradition in American history, periodically resurging in national politics every couple of decades. The mid-nineteenth century witnessed the rise of the nativist Know-Nothing Party; the turn of the century saw the radical anti-bank campaigns of William Jennings Bryan; and in the 1960s, Alabama Governor George Wallace militantly defended Southern “states’ rights” and segregation. In the 1992 presidential election, another populist wave motivated by economic nationalism, cultural conservatism, and rabid anti-elitism propelled two fringe candidates to the front of the race and threatened to upend American political orthodoxy. Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, though far more successful than the movements which came before it, simply picked up where the last wave of populism left off a quarter-century before.

1992: Pat Buchanan Takes On Washington

President George H. W. Bush was in poor shape entering the 1992 presidential election. Just a year earlier, President Bush had become a national hero due to his decisive leadership in the Operation Desert Storm campaign to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. But the President had seen his approval ratings plummet since their high of 89% in early 1991. Bush infamously recanted on his 1988 campaign promise–“Read my lips: no new taxes”–by signing on tax increases to address the climbing federal deficit, costing him dearly among voters who once admired his integrity and commitment to the middle-class. The nation was struggling to recover from a recession, leaving many in doubt of the President’s ability to lead the country through economic crisis. Bush was also developing a reputation as an out-of-touch elitist, egged on by incidents including a clip that appeared to show the President marveling at a mundane supermarket scanner. Incumbent presidents rarely face serious challenges for their party’s nomination, but in 1992 one candidate saw an opportunity to take on George Bush: Pat Buchanan, a right-wing commentator and former advisor and speechwriter to Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Pat Buchanan’s campaign against President Bush rings awfully familiar to modern ears. Buchanan described his campaign as “America first,” claiming a need for “a new nationalism” that would defend the American worker first and foremost heading into the 21st century. Buchanan attacked free trade deals that the United States signed with other nations and decried manufacturing jobs being outsourced to Japan. He called for a shutdown of immigration to the United States to prevent American jobs from being stolen by foreign labor. He rejected George Bush’s conception of an American-lead “New World Order” after the fall of the Soviet Union, asserting that the United States should stay out of unnecessary foreign conflicts and focus on domestic issues. Buchanan also railed against Washington elites, admonishing President Bush’s lack of energy and “vision.” He called for a “law and order” response to the crime wave seizing the nation, drawing criticism for racially suggestive comments he’d made in the past. And he undertook what he later coined as the “culture war,” attacking multiculturalism and liberal sensibilities–an obvious precursor to Trump’s assault on political correctness, albeit based more in conservative Christianity than deliberate vulgarity.

Buchanan’s message hit home in New Hampshire, a state roiling from the recession and the first stop in the Republican primaries. Voters in the state, fraught with economic worries, were drawn to Pat Buchanan’s promise to restore American jobs and economic power. New Hampshire was also flooded with ads attacking President Bush’s dishonesty for caving on his “no new taxes” pledge, sinking his reputation in the state. Buchanan won 37% of the vote in the New Hampshire primaries, including over half of independents and most of the 30% of voters who said they wanted to “send a message to the White House.” Buchanan’s showing in New Hampshire was also his best; after giving President Bush a severe rattling in the first primary, Pat Buchanan’s campaign began to lose steam for the rest of the race. Buchanan won 22% of the total Republican primary vote to Bush’s 72.5%. The President emerged victorious in the Republican primary, but not without some serious fatigue. Later on at the Republican National Convention, Buchanan gave a concession speech touching on several familiar refrains. He assailed the “radical feminism” of future First Lady Hillary Clinton, criticized the Democratic Party for elitist pro-free trade policies, and called for Americans to “take back our country” in the wake of the Los Angeles riots, describing the city like a war zone.

Pat Buchanan was not the only challenger to the political establishment in 1992. Though many in the nation were looking for a change from President Bush, the Democratic nominee wasn’t proving to be a very appealing alternative. Emerging from a hard-fought and bitter primary, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton was already battling an unsavory reputation due to his involvement in the Whitewater housing scheme and accusations of sexual impropriety from multiple women. Many Americans, dissatisfied with both major parties, found themselves supporting Ross Perot, an eccentric Texas billionaire and independent candidate who announced he would run for President on CNN’s Larry King Live in February. Much like Buchanan before him, Perot campaigned on a protectionist economic plan to restore American jobs and a strong response to the crime wave, all the while railing against Washington elites and government corruption.

Ross Perot began his national campaign with a huge wave of support, leading in several polls taken in early summer of 1992. But just as his lead was surging in July, Perot unexpectedly suspended his campaign due to a bizarre alleged blackmail plot involving his daughter’s upcoming wedding, only re-entering the race a few weeks before the general election. Despite his months-long absence from the race, Perot still won 19% of the popular vote, the best of any third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose run in 1912. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton was elected President with 43% of the popular vote, the smallest share by a winning president since Woodrow Wilson.

The Aftermath of 1992

Pat Buchanan wasn’t ready to rest after his 1992 defeat. He ran in the Republican primaries again in 1996, this time facing off against Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole. Though Buchanan had a better-organized campaign in his second run, he still couldn’t keep up with Senator Dole, capturing just 21% of the total primary vote in a distant second to Dole’s 59%. However, Buchanan’s second campaign found a stronger audience in the industrial Midwest, where he pulled 34% of the primary vote in both Michigan and Wisconsin. Blue-collar voters, concerned about their economic future, were drawn again to Buchanan’s rhetoric about an “America first” economy that would protect the working-class and sympathized with his distrust of immigration and multiculturalism. Though Buchanan was defeated for a second time, his campaign laid a blueprint for a populist candidate to court working-class voters in regions like the Rust Belt by appealing to economic nationalism and anti-elitism.

Ross Perot also ran again in 1996, this time on the Reform Party ticket after establishing the party himself a year earlier. But the less conservative and more reform-minded crowd that Perot captured four years ago had largely come around to President Clinton, who was by then quite popular nation-wide and easily leading the race. Perot was able to win 8% of the popular vote–not a bad performance for a third-party candidate in the greater scheme of history, but a marked drop from his much more successful 1992 campaign.

The populist wave began to seriously wane after 1996. President Bill Clinton’s popularity was only continuing to increase, and a period of immense economic growth left a satisfied country less skeptical of globalism and multiculturalism. The Reform Party would face a serious crisis of character in 2000; without Ross Perot’s magnetism to unify it, many feared the primary could become a free-for-all of fringe candidates in search of a party. Pat Buchanan eventually won the Reform Party nomination, but not without enduring a bizarre and dramatic primary which at points involved Donald Trump calling Buchanan a “Hitler lover”and a counter-convention organized by John Hagelin supporters following his primary loss. Buchanan attracted just a fraction of the voters he won over in the Republican primaries, ultimately winning 0.43% of the popular vote.

The radical populist movement appeared to die off after the Reform Party’s dismal performance in 2000. After Pat Buchanan’s challenges to the Republican Party in 1992 and 1996, following primaries would be largely dominated by mainstream conservatives like George W. Bush and John McCain. Ron Paul was probably the closest successor to Pat Buchanan, a staunch libertarian with a devoted cult following who entered the Republican primaries in 2008 and 2012, but he never posed much more than a headache to party leaders. The Tea Party movement, a hard-right grassroots movement motivated by economic conservatism and anti-establishment rhetoric, briefly threatened to challenge Republican orthodoxy during Barack Obama’s presidency. However, so-called “tea-party whisperers” like Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio were effective at bridging the gap between Republican leadership and the newest popular conservative movement, helping to preserve party order.

At least, until this year. After lying dormant for nearly a quarter-century, the radical populist movement once led by Pat Buchanan returned with a vengeance to elect Donald Trump President of the United States. Trump’s presidential campaign focused on many of the same issues that Buchanan did in 1992: economic protectionism, backlash against multiculturalism or “political correctness,” resentment of the Washington establishment. But what was different about Donald Trump in 2016 that allowed him to win the presidency where Buchanan failed twenty-four years before?

Why Trump Struck Lightning

Part of the answer can probably be chalked up to pure party structure. In 1992 and 1996, Pat Buchanan was facing off against the most powerful Republicans in the country, leaving him little path to challenge party leadership and win the nomination. In contrast, Trump entered a Republican primary where attention was split between over a dozen candidates, none of which held the blessing of party leaders. Trump could take advantage of sheer personality to bulldoze past his competitors, gaining enough momentum to be unstoppable once the primary field was worn down to something more manageable. And unlike Ross Perot, once Trump won the primary he had the force of the Republican Party behind him; he didn’t have to worry about winning over conservative partisans or convincing pragmatically minded voters to throw their vote to him.

But there’s more to Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton than just being in the right place at the right time. Public opinion has shifted dramatically against globalization and the economic elite in the twenty years since the heyday of NAFTA and free trade. Many Americans believe that the economy now caters to elite interests and has ceased serving the working-class, increasing the appeal of economic populists like Trump. This sense of economic alienation only grew after the 2008 financial crisis, where to many it appeared that the federal government went out of its way to protect Wall Street and wealthy corporations while ignoring the workers those institutions left behind. For all of her progressive rhetoric, Hillary Clinton couldn’t shake her reputation as a Washington insider unsympathetic to American workers. Donald Trump, in contrast, fed into the feelings of abandonment and resentment held by many working-class voters, especially in the industrial Midwest.

Immigration is also a more salient issue now than it was in the 1990s–the number of illegal immigrants in the United States now numbers at about 11 million, compared to just 4 million in 1992. Declining faith in government and backlash against Congress also make anti-elitism and promises to “drain the swamp,” in Trump’s words, much more appealing to the public. In a 1992 interview with Face the Nation’s Bob Scheiffer, Pat Buchanan claimed Americans wanted a decisive leader who would take on Washington in response to Scheiffer’s description of the 102nd Congress as “the most partisan session that [he] could remember.” Buchanan was right, but a few decades too early.

Pat Buchanan has not been silent on the similarities between his past campaigns and the modern-day campaign of Donald Trump. In a pre-election interview with New York Magazine, Buchanan said he was “delighted we were proven right,” celebrating the similarities between Trump’s message and his own vision from 1992. In another interview with the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, Buchanan claimed the Republican Party will eventually realign around the values of nationalism and protectionism which Trump brought to the forefront, regardless of the will of the party establishment. He also correctly predicted Trump’s winning strategy for the presidential race, calling for Trump to “go for victory in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin … campaigning against the Clinton trade policies that de-industrialized Middle America.” Now that Trump is president-elect, Buchanan has expressed hopes that his ideological successor will engage in battle with Congress and refuse to back down on his radical campaign promises.

We don’t know yet if Buchanan’s prediction that Donald Trump will transform the Republican Party are true. The president-elect’s lack of political experience could make him vulnerable to manipulation from seasoned politicos, crippling his attempts to reshape the political culture of Washington. Attempts to predict Trump’s path during the election have a mixed record at best, however, casting doubt on any predictions of what a Trump Administration might look like. At any rate, the movement that propelled Donald Trump into the White House is far from new, building heavily on Pat Buchanan’s campaign from a quarter-century ago. The main difference between Trump and populists of the past is that the former was able to win a presidential election, overcoming efforts by political leaders from both sides to stem the tide of populism. Trump’s economic nationalism, backlash against political correctness, and militantly anti-elite rhetoric fed into feelings which had been fomenting among a significant portion of Americans for decades at the least. The political establishment will have to formulate a response to the Trump movement if they want to quash the populist uprising that seized the nation in 2016, or else pray that this bout of populism is just overstaying its welcome.

Trump, National Myths, and the Rise of Populism

It happened.

What was to me incredibly obvious a few months ago, that Donald Trump would be elected the 45th President of the United States, was a complete shock to most of the country and the world. Polls got it wrong. Experts got it wrong. GOP insiders got it wrong. American University’s Allan Lichtman got it right, but he seems to be about the only one.

Why were we so sure that Trump would lose?

How, in the wake of so many populist movements across the world, so many uprisings from the disenfranchised, so many new and growing platforms for the people who have felt their identities slipping away — whose pain and anger with the systems in place swelled until it was the only newsworthy story — could we dare to pretend for one moment that the United States would be immune to the power of a populist revolt? Our “exceptionalism” is not invulnerable to those who put truth to power, even when their truth is one we think we can cast aside as uninformed or irrational.

Frustration with the economy and leadership in a post-economic crisis world has manifested itself in various ways across the world. The so-called Arab Spring, which engulfed the Middle East and North Africa in 2010, resulted in revolutions of various types. Populist parties have won elections in Hungary, France, Greece, the Czech Republic, and Poland, among others. Jeremy Corbyn, a fringe radical in the UK Labour Party, rode a wave of voter discontent to take his party’s leadership. In Russia, Vladimir Putin’s government has turned to a nationalist foreign policy to distract a restive Russian middle class that has seen its quality of life decline. Britain voted to leave the European Union, arguing that the EU was restricting fair trade policies, strangling the UK’s choices on immigration, and threatening the British way of life.

The international uprisings founded on discontent, the increasingly momentous populist movements, and the newly-empowered, vocal, and active American right-wing community should have made us stop and seriously question the polls that told us we were safe from a Trump Presidency.

The ascent of Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election, anticipated by no one just a year earlier, is driven by a deep dissatisfaction with the “Washington establishment.” All of the recent developments across the world have a common thread—their supporters seek to revise the status quo at the expense of established political, economic, and cultural institutions. Trump’s appeal is no exception.

What makes a Trump supporter?

First, we must ask what makes an anti-establishment voter, since before people support Trump’s specific policies (or lack thereof, frankly) on immigration, healthcare, etc., they support the idea of Trump. The ideology driving an anti-establishment, populist voter is that a new leader who represents the people can dismantle the systems and institutions currently in place, which the voter believes have made their quality of life worse. Those who support anti-establishmentarianism want an honest candidate, unchained from the corrupt circle of elites.

Trump’s populism is a form of voter backlash against long-term social changes that threaten to dismantle the country, culture, and society that they know. In other words, many Trump supporters live in fear that the America that they know is slipping through their fingers, and that the cultural values that they define as “American” are shifting, causing them to feel apprehensive of the future and overwhelmed with uncertainty of their place and role in the country. The fear of being marginalized and left behind causes what Jennifer Mitzen calls ontological insecurity. This refers to a person’s sense of “being” in the world; an ontologically insecure person does not have a stable sense of self and place. This threat against one’s identity creates a difficulty to act and maintain a steady self-conception. In contrast, the ontologically secure person has an unquestioned sense of self and is confident of his or her place in the world in relation to other people.

While all anti-establishment movements are based on grievances and all seek to revise traditional political and social institutions, they disagree on what those grievances and institutions are, causing a split in anti-establishment movements. Bernie Sanders was an anti-establishment candidate, but could not be more unlike Trump in his political beliefs. Sanders supporters absolutely fit the mold of disenfranchised, angry voter that I just outlined in regard to Trump supporters: they wanted to dismantle the institutions (i.e. Wall Street, NAFTA) and systems (i.e. structural racism, sexism, patriarchy) in place that make the quality of life worse, and wanted an honest candidate who was “above” the politics of the political world. We can see, then, that Sanders and Trump supporters initially agree ideologically, yet they place blame on extremely different institutions and systems. Why would people who, fundamentally, share so many of the same complaints about the status quo back leaders with two very different versions of a better future?

I contend that the answer lies in one’s national Origin Story.

If we accept Role Theory, which states that people’s perceptions of their place in society shape their actions and their expectations for the actions of others, then we can start to move toward an understanding of the Sanders/Trump split in modern American populist movements. The national role is one subset of Role Theory. Individuals use their interpretations of national role to set expectations for their in-group and out-groups. In other words, people rely on their answer to the questions “who are we?” and “what is our mission?” to develop preferences over political outcomes. In this sense, national role can co-constitute a set of very specific policy preferences for a voter.

If one’s view of the national role shapes one’s policy preferences, we should be able to see distinct correlations between certain policy preferences and certain perceptions of the national role. It’s easy to put an empirical measure on policy preferences; support for a particular political party or candidate is perhaps the most obvious. But the idea of national identity is very nebulous, so measuring a person’s perceptions of the national role is difficult. Besides just asking, “what do we do?” there are alternate ways to observe an individual’s view of national role. This is where the national origin story comes in.

The origin story of America essentially answers when and why America became the America it is today. The story will change from person to person, and is dependent on a person’s view of the country, of himself, and how he constructs his own identity. Thus, the origin story fits the national role. Where you come from defines who you are and what you do. So, if people have different ideas about what we do, it should trace back to different Origin Stories. I posit that the national origin story is a salient marker of identity that can be used to distinguish between varying conceptions of nation and national role.

Divergent interpretations of the national role (measured through one’s origin story of America) are responsible for the split between anti-establishment movements based on pocketbook grievances and those focused on nationalistic and xenophobic grievances. If I have constructed my identity based on a nation that begins to undergo radical social change, my identity will be shaken. If I believe America to be a white, Christian, English-speaking, conservative country, an influx of immigrants, the enactment of liberal social policies, or the advancement of women, LGBTQ, or non-Christian peoples will shake my perception of my country. For people who base their own sense of self on their interpretation of the country, changes like these can cause ontological insecurity.

In August, I put these theories to the test. After running statistical (regression and comparative) analyses on 500 survey responses, with 240 of these coming from Trump and Sanders supporters, I have come to the conclusion that origin story is a better predictor of political tendencies than previously understood. This means that how a person views America’s origin (when did America become America?) can shed light on whom he or she will vote for. Thus, the origin story can be seen as a predictor of voter behavior.

The survey collected respondents’ demographics, their first choice for President in 2016, xenophobic indicator questions, and gave three origin stories and asked them to rate how warmly they felt toward the stories on a scale from 0-100. The stories, as they appeared on the survey, are written below.

“America came into its true character after defeating the Germans and the Japanese in the second Great War. During this time, each U.S. state and territory unified to contribute to the war effort, leading to American agricultural and industrial supremacy. Our victory after WWII established international respect and honor for American citizens, our government, and our military, proved our unity as a nation, and showcased the power and importance of the United States of America.”

“America came into its true character during the Civil Rights Movement. In 1965, African-Americans and their allies worked through multiple channels to compel the American government to recognize that all Americans, regardless of the color of their skin, deserve equal protection under the law.”

“America came into its true character when the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. The pilgrims and other early American settlers were people who were fleeing the horrors of the old world, where individuals could not be free. In the New World, these young Americans created a nation based on liberty and freedom.”

Each of the three stories presented a distinct character of American identity and told a brief story of when America came into its “true character.” The story themes are based on David Bell Mislan’s previous work on identity formation, which recognized them as significant categories. The first story reflected an American origin based on power, unity, military might, international prestige, and importance. I call this story the Exceptional Story. The second story, the Legal Story, emphasized equality, opportunity, hard work, and equal protection under the law. The third story, the Enlightened Story, underscored an America that was founded on liberty, freedom, and progress away from the European “old world.”

While I originally thought that Trump supporters would overwhelmingly choose the Exceptional Story, the table below reveals the results that, upon reflection, make a lot of sense.

Trump supporters did not have a clear winner when asked to choose from three American Origin Stories; all three were almost equally chosen, and twice as many Trump supporters ranked a combination of stories equally as compared to Sanders supporters, as can be seen in the graph below.

This tells us that there is not one conception of American origin that Trump supporters follow. There is no guiding story that enlightens the average Trump supporter about who we are, what we do, and what our mission is, as Americans. This tells us a few things about Trump’s win: first, that his vague and vacillating policies were probably more of a strong suit than we thought. By refusing to take firm stances and stick with them, and instead opting to allude to ideas or simply promise to “Make America Great Again,” Trump took advantage of the ontologically insecure voter and allowed him to employ whatever conception of the national role he liked.

Sanders, in contrast, very clearly symbolized one particular national role ideology, causing him to gain a cult-like following from those who shared his same view of the country’s national role. The second take-away from this data is that Trump’s supporters possess a wide-range of origin stories and are often unsure of their own opinion of the national role. This means that for a Trump supporter, one conception of national identity might be more or less salient depending national or global current events, or how he or she is feeling about their own personal life during any given time. Sanders supporters proved confident in their Legal Origin Story of America, while Trump supporters did not all align in their beliefs and often chose more than one origin story. This could mean that Trump supporters are more easily convinced of new national roles or are more easily manipulated through messaging or false news, since they do not have a sturdy and steadfast perception of identity through which to view the world.

Trump tapped into the wave of international unrest of the establishment and of the “other,” a combination that fed perfectly into a disenfranchised, ontologically insecure voter. There is a correlation between one’s conceptions of the national role and the ability to be swayed by xenophobic ideologies. If a voter possesses ontological security, he is less likely to be convinced that groups, individuals, or ways of life outside of his own social network are an existential threat to his own safety, wellbeing, or way of life. Sanders supporters are nestled in this camp, since the Legal Story of American Origin emphasizes equality and community under the law. They feel that America did not really become America until all of its citizens were equal under the law. Thus, a Trumpian view of immigration does not fit their national narrative, because immigrants are fundamental to the understanding of America under the Legal Story framework. If a voter does not posses ontological security, he is more easily convinced that others are to blame for his own discontent.

So, it happened. In January, Donald Trump will be inaugurated. Shock, fear, anger – many Americans have felt it all since November 8th. What we need to remember, though, is that Trump supporters should not be cast aside as idiotic, uneducated, or almost anything else that prominent media outlets have called them. Yes, their political preferences might be racist, xenophobic, sexist, etc., and this should not be dismissed. But these preferences are based on deep seeded conceptions of national and personal identity, national role, and American origin. This, unfortunately, means that until we can teach “who we are” and “what we do” in a way that allows all Americans to feel ontologically secure in a globalizing world, we’re likely to see Trump-like nationalism live on well into the future.

This article presents a new angle from a full research paper completed September 2016 on xenophobia and anti-establishmentarianism, which was co-authored by Emily Dalgo and Dr. David Bell Mislan and funded by the AU Summer Scholars Research Fellowship.