WOULD TRUMPISM HAVE HAPPENED EVEN WITHOUT TRUMP?

I know you all groan whenever I take Ross Douthat seriously, but I think he's asking an interesting question today about American politics since 2015:

Was there a more normal, conventional, stable-seeming timeline for 21st century American politics that Trump, with his unique blend of tabloid celebrity, reality-TV charisma, personal shamelessness and demagogic intuition, somehow wrenched us off?

Or is Trump just an American expression of the trends that have revived nationalism all over the world ... ? In which case, are attempts to find some elite removal mechanism likely to just heighten the contradictions that yielded Trumpism in the first place, widening the gyre and bringing the rough beast slouching in much faster?

I'm not sure about nationalism specifically, but I think America was already trending toward right-wing populist extremism, largely thanks to Fox News, and we might have elected a populist extremist even if Trump hadn't run.

We all know who won the 2016 Republican primaries, but do you remember who finished second? It was Ted Cruz. He won 11 states, got nearly 8 million total votes (Trump's total was just over 14 million), and won 551 delegates (Trump won 1441). If Trump had decided not to run, I think Cruz would have won the nomination, rather than one of the early favorites (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio). It's possible that Jeb (the polling leader until Trump entered the race) would have survived because Trump wouldn't have been around to attack and humiliate him, but it's also possible that polling starting in the fall of 2015 reflected the real mood of the Republican base -- angry, radical, and looking for someone who seemed to hate the Establishment.

And don't forget who was the only candidate able to challenge Trump for the lead in the polls, if only briefly (in November 2015): Ben Carson. He'd built his reputation on the right with a rude speech at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast that attacked "political correctness," Obamacare, and progressive taxation; he later went on to call Obamacare "the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery," and he called then-President Obama a "psychopath."

So, yes, I believe that Republican voters in 2016 wanted for a candidate who stirred up anger the way their beloved Fox News does, and would have gone with Cruz if Trump hadn't been an option. And given the media's hatred of Hillary Clinton, and the fact that Americans rarely elect the same party to three consecutive White House terms, I think even Ted Cruz could have won the general election.

As for the future: I see Nikki Haley rising in the polls now, but despite all the obituaries for Ron DeSantis's candidacy, he's still beating Haley in Iowa and is tied with her in national polls; it seems likely that if the Supreme Court somehow allows Trump to be removed from primary ballots, DeSantis, Trump's fellow authoritarian, will pick up more votes than Haley. (According to FiveThirtyEight, DeSantis's favorability among Republicans is 61.1%; Haley's is only 46.8%.)

If we have a presidential election in 2028 (and Trump doesn't declare himself eligible to run again), I think elite pundits will tell us Haley and Glenn Youngkin are the early favorites, but the winner will probably be Donald Trump Jr., Mike Flynn, Mike Lindell, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kari Lake, or Tucker Carlson. I don't see any reason to believe that "the fever" will "break" between now and then.

I think I know why right-wing populism is thriving. It's fairly simple: Moneyed interests worldwide don't want to cede any more of their ill-gotten gains than they do now, and they have power -- especially in America -- to prevent any additional wealth transfers to the have-nots. That means liberalism always disappoints voters, whose material circumstances are never allowed to improve. Right-wing politicians don't even bother trying to improve the lives of ordinary people, but right-wing populists at least know how to create liberal and left-wing scapegoats for the public to hate. For many voters, watching a right-wing populist treat, say, immigrant asylum seekers or LGBTQ people cruelly feels like at least some kind of victory. It's more than liberals can offer as long as the plutocracy always has the final say.

We'll be in this right-wing populist moment until the left realizes that it has to confront the superwealthy directly. I'm afraid that battle might have to be violent, like the labor movement a century ago, in order to be effective, but I hope that's not the case. In any event, right-wing populism will thrive until there's a mass left/liberal movement that takes the battle directly to greedy billionaires.