The Birth of Aspirational Populism
How political scientists misunderstood Trump and missed his appeal.
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After Donald Trump was first elected, the same political scientists who had adamantly insisted that he could never win a presidential election quickly coalesced on the same interpretation of his success. He was an authoritarian populist who cleaved the electorate into “real” Americans and everybody else, promising to put the former in charge while banishing the latter to the margins (or, according to the more extreme alarmists, putting them in camps). On this interpretation, two things were intrinsically linked: Trump’s demagogic talent for mobilizing popular opinion against the norms and values of a deeply mistrusted establishment; and his apparent alliance with a predominantly white and elderly electorate that had experienced a decline in their social status, feared the future, and was ready to resist change by any means necessary.
It turns out that this was a grave analytical error, which made it impossible to understand what has been brewing in the United States for the past ten years. For despite all the predictions that Trump couldn’t possibly win, he didn’t just squeak through in 2016; he also won a more convincing victory, taking the popular vote, in 2024.
Trump did this by doing what academics are supposed to be expert in: recognizing that the popular understanding of some concept—in this case, populism—is actually constituted by two elements which are logically separable. In his more recent incarnation, Trump has held on to his disdain for longstanding norms and his populist belief in the unfettered prerogative of the majority. But he has also made more explicit than in the past that his political vision is open to supporters from every ethnic and religious group—and has been very shrewd in courting them with an aspirational vision of America.
The norm-breaking side of Trump was in full evidence during the first day of his second presidency. He insulted his predecessor with unorthodox indelicacy during his inaugural address and with habitual brutality during subsequent remarks. He went into far greater detail about his planned actions and executive orders than recent presidents. He foreshadowed a constitutional crisis by announcing that he would deploy the military on the southern border. And he gave a giant middle finger to international law by suggesting that he might occupy the Panama Canal.
Though the term is much-overused and often misapplied, the concept of populism remains the most accurate frame for understanding his actions: He believes that, as the rightful voice of the people, he should not suffer any artificial restrictions on his actions—whether by unwritten norms or by explicit limits on the powers of a president.
But the second, widely overlooked, part of Trump was also in full evidence. He took evident pleasure in the fact that he owes his victory in large part to his growing popularity among Hispanics, Asian-Americans and African-Americans. He explicitly thanked those demographic groups for their support. He even invoked Martin Luther King Jr., promising to turn his dream into a reality. If David Duke has, in the past—and in part for strategic reasons of his own—come out in support of Trump, I can’t imagine that he found many things to like about this inaugural address.
For the most part, the executive orders Trump announced in his Second Inaugural are tailor-made to support this vision. His promise to restore order to American cities will resonate among the poorer and more diverse segments of his electorate who are the prime victims of urban crime. His promise to restore free speech is broadly popular among voters without fancy degrees who feel that elites are using their arbitrary moral codes and linguistic conventions as cudgels to wield against them at will. Even his promise to “drill, baby, drill” is broadly popular among voters who are more focused on realizing their American Dream in the next few years than on containing the threat to the climate over the coming decades.
Indeed, what is most striking about Trump’s vision is that, for all of its exaggerated laments about the dilapidated state of America, it is profoundly aspirational. His paean to colorblindness and meritocracy resonates among many Hispanic and Asian-American voters who feel much more secure in their membership in the American mainstream than Democratic invocations of the distorting category of “people of color” would suggest. And his promise to plant the American flag on Mars recalls the collective ambition and grandeur of the 1960s space race.
The received wisdom for the last decade has been that Trump has made his political home among the “losers of globalization.” In the memorable image of Arlie Hochschild, who has articulated the most sophisticated version of this narrative, his voters supposedly felt that they were stuck in a long line that did not budge, with the wrong kinds of people—notably women and ethnic minorities—cutting in line.1
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That was and likely remains Trump’s appeal for one part of his electorate. But another part of his base—just as important—has a very different view of America. Hailing from groups that had once been banished to the fringes of American society or have immigrated more recently, they don’t want to return to a supposedly golden past. On the contrary, they are optimistic about the future and embrace entrepreneurial values precisely because they feel that their hard work is starting to pay off. They don’t picture themselves as standing in a long, static line to enter a destination they covet; rightly or wrongly, they believe that the doors to it would be wide open if gatekeepers—from journalists to Democrats to elites self-servingly insisting on outdated norms—hadn’t cruelly decided to bar their way.
There are good reasons to remain concerned about this version of populism. Democracies do in fact need rules and norms. When the separation of powers goes out of the window, bad policies and perilous constitutional crises usually follow suit. And, being capable of attracting genuine support among a much broader cross-section of the population than most observers recognized until recently, Trump’s brand of populism is more likely to succeed in transforming the country’s political culture this time around.
But the first step in understanding any political movement lies in taking seriously the sources of its popularity. Trump has forged a brand of populism that has wide appeal and makes big promises about the future. If you want to use a suitably academic term, you might call it aspirational, multiethnic populism. Therein lies the power, the promise and the peril posed by Trump’s second presidency.
The “deep story” Hochschild describes in Strangers In Their Own Land is one of the most fair-minded and incisive versions of this narrative. If I mention her here, it is not because she is particularly guilty of the failings which characterize the work of virtually all social scientists who have written about populism, but rather because we recently had a productive and thought-provoking conversation about these issues for the podcast. The episode is not yet out, but I hope to share it with you soon.
I have used this analogy for the failing of the progressive movement to gain political traction and I think it fits your analysis as well.
Imagine two groups, the blues and the reds, who are sorting shapes each with red and blue dots on them. The blue group will only accept a shape that has absolutely no red dots. At first they exclude shapes with large or multiple red dots that are easy to see. However, after excluding those, they notice that some of the shapes they accepted have small red dots or just a couple of red dots. So those shapes gets excluded too. Eventually, the blues put shapes under a microscope to make sure that even those with red dots that are invisible to the naked eye get excluded.
The red group will accept any shape with a red dot, even if it has blue dots. At first most of the shapes they accept will have few blue dots. Over time, the shapes with both blue and red dots, having been excluded from the blue group will wander over to the red group and find themselves accepted.
Clearly the number of shapes in the red group is going to outnumber the shapes in the blue group. This is the result of the identity politics on the left with its insistence on ideological purity. It's great for self-righteousness but not great for winning an election.
I also think many intellectual elites misunderstood Trump because they spent more time psychoanalyzing him and his supporters than actually doing the difficult work of listening to them and taking their concerns seriously without judgment. In other words, the approach was too academic, too fixated on understanding “the other,” and too lacking in empathy.