Like it or not, Trumpism is the future of the Right across the declining West
When the news broke that Donald Trump had been shot, I happened to be watching Heaven’s Gate – the monumental 1980 Hollywood flop that marked the final demise of the American Western. As the film drifted across the frontier like a soul trapped in purgatory, wallowing in the cruelty of anti-immigrant cattle ranchers, I scrolled social media posts marvelling at the “mafia” defiance of The Donald.
They say life imitates art. It is uncanny how in politics – as in Hollywood – the “gangster” has usurped the “cowboy” as the hero of the American epic. The phrase that people remember from the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan was the radioed message from the secret service agent who inspected him for injuries: “Rawhide is ok”.
The press was torn between despairing at endemic violence and revelling in the President’s stoic humour in adversity. Much was made of the fact that he had been quoting Thomas Paine to his team and admiring his collection of miniature western saddles before the attack. It helped set up his “cowboy presidency”, dedicated to rolling back the state’s frontiers and waging at times lonely battles against the Soviet Union.
Commentary around the assassination attempt on Trump has, on the other hand, oscillated between a compulsion to forensically pick over the security failures and sheer awe at Trump’s vitality in the face of possible death. The world got a glimpse of the true nature of the man: his impulse to meet his own vulnerability with pure defiance, his split-second intuition to “fight”.
This has not been lost even on Trump-sceptics on social media, who are celebrating him as an “unbelievably gangster” man who “got that dog in him”. African-American rappers have appropriated him as one of their own – with AI compilations of Trump set to gangster rap soundtracks going viral.
But could this be evidence of more than a simple difference in the characters of the two presidents? It would seem that there has also been a paradigm shift in what many voters want from their leaders, particularly on the Right. It is no longer a confidently rugged idea of freedom that frames the Western worldview, but rather a desperate yearning for strength.
This is in part because the way that countries like America feel about themselves has fundamentally changed. The West is like the character in the movie, surrounded by enemies, struggling to get a grip on his gut-wrenching melancholy and hold onto traditional values in the face of modernity – family, friendship, honour, self-respect.
America, in particular, no longer believes that it is a great nation with a bright future. Instead, its optimism is putrefying into apocalypticism. It is tortured by its past, despairing at its bureaucratic obesity, bewildered by its failure to offer anything of substance to civilisation over the last half a century, save for the personal computer.
At suburban dinner parties, the truism that “the American Dream has become the American Nightmare” has replaced the folk wisdom that “government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem.” Historians have started to point out that, in the new global power games, it is the West not the East that resembles the Soviet Union, with its brittle state machinery and eccentric elites.
It’s also worth reflecting that Americans’ view of the role of violence in their society has subtly changed. Traditionally, Americans viewed it as freedom’s collateral damage. When it comes to gun control, debate has centred on the question of whether liberty is worth the inevitable price in blood. Now, amid endless drug warfare and uncontrolled immigration, many conservatives have concluded that the whole liberal system is founded on depravity. That in a society lacking in tough laws or moral strictures, violence has become an end in itself. White and black alike see in Trump a strongman capable of holding things together.
As America – and the wider West – finds itself in a new era, Trump is, like it or not, the lodestar guiding the way. He is no cowboy libertarian in the Reagan mould. Nor is he interested in many traditionally conservative concerns. On the contrary, he is a fiscally irresponsible corporatist cut from mid-century cloth.
All the same, Trump looks set to prove a pivotal figure. His unimpeded energy, and wars against the legal-industrial complex offer a glimpse of a style of leadership that is willing to take on the biases and inefficiencies of the system. His much-referenced “resilience” is a quality that the West will need in spades as it contends with stagnation at home and the end of its geopolitical supremacy abroad.
But perhaps Trump’s most striking “gangster” characteristic – and the one that has won him so many fans – is his bloody-minded focus. The reason we are mesmerised by the Hollywood gangster character – why we both fear him and deep down want to be him – is that he knows what he wants, and he goes out and gets it, not giving a damn about whatever or whoever stands in his way.
Though easily dismissed as a coarse simpleton, this movie archetype is talented at formulating plans to attain his objective – whether it is to dominate the Miami cocaine trade or buy enough Rolex Daytonas to fill a crystal bathtub. And in the end, he gets his way. That is not lost on Americans who think that their country needs a fierce and ruthless plan to make itself great again.
British Conservatives look at Trump with a mixture of wonderment and horror. Many believe that Trumpism is an anomaly best ignored and that “broad church” British conservatism will bounce back. Yet a new kind populist-conservative politics that aggressively pursues prosperity and order may well be the inevitable future of Right-wing politics in the declining West.
And Britain shares much in common with America. If anything, our economic decline is even more urgent because we are unable to spend well beyond our means to bankroll public services and defence. Frustration at the technocratic elite’s complacent attitude to chaos – from its inability to police the border to its “regretful” early release of drug dealers, burglars and muggers – is also growing.
Like it or not, we are entering the era of “gangster conservatism”, defined by charismatic “change” leaders that are unapologetic about upsetting elites and breaking the rules. Sceptics can try to refine, guide and soften the impact, but they should not delude themselves. The world has changed. Trumpism may prove an unstoppable force.