J.D. Tuccille: Elitist Democrats excel at turning people into Republicans

However the U.S. presidential race shakes out, the endorsement of Donald Trump by insurgent former Democrats Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., while establishment Republicans including former Vice President Dick Cheney back Kamala Harris, frames the contest in populist vs. elitist terms. That’s no surprise to anybody who follows politics, but now the battle lines are drawn more starkly than ever. 

Last month, Tulsi Gabbard, a former member of Congress who often battled her party, and a contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, endorsed Republican Donald Trump for president. 

“We have a government that is retaliating against its political opponents and undermining our civil liberties, weaponizing our very institutions against those they deem as a threat,” she said. She added, “President Trump has been their first and foremost target” and endorsed him to thwart what she saw as government wielded as a bludgeon by dangerous people. 

Gabbard’s statement evoked a fierier speech she gave in June when she denounced her old party as “led by an elitist cabal of woke warmongers” who “are driven by an insatiable greed for power.” 

Likewise, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a black sheep of the famed Democratic dynasty, suspended his campaign in August to endorse Trump. He denounced “shadowy” Democratic operatives who “waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and (himself).” 

Not long thereafter, Dick Cheney, who was vice president in the Republican presidential administration of George W. Bush, endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in a move he described as necessary “to defend our Constitution.” He cautioned, “there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.” 

That’s a good illustration of the battle lines between insurgents and the elite.  

“The ongoing development of the Democratic Party as a party not of labor but of socioeconomic elites, and the ongoing development of the Republican Party as a party not of business but of working class social conservatives, represents a major, perhaps the major, American political development of the twenty-first century,” wrote Tufts University’s Eitan Hersh and Sarang Shah of the University of California at Berkeley in a 2023 paper. 

It’s a struggle and realignment familiar to anybody who has watched world politics in recent years. 

Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst, wrote about this struggle in The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, which he self-published in 2014 before the book became a phenomenon and was commercially re-released. He believes the rise of the internet erodes gatekeepers’ control over information. That eases public access to alternative sources – many of which aren’t flattering to elites. People can also contradict their rulers more loudly than in the past and win a large audience. Think, for example, of debates about the source of COVID-19 and responses to the pandemic which set official government accounts against those of independent voices. Neither side had a lock on truth, which made arguments that much nastier. 

“Democratized information poses a dilemma for modern society,” Gurri wrote in his book. “If the public loses patience and respect for government, the result will be disintegration. If elites dig in, they are likely to resort to repression.” 

A decade later, Trump, Gabbard, and Kennedy all complain of being targeted and muzzled by weaponized government agencies which seek to suppress dissenting ideas and criticism of their policies. Their fears are supported by the Twitter and Facebook files, and by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to Congress admitting “the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content” as well as reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

That’s repression at work, revealed in ways that further erode patience and respect for government. Kamala Harris, of course, is the number two person in the censorious Biden administration. 

Gurri, it should be noted, is cautiously sympathetic to the revolt of the public without necessarily enthusing over its participants. Trump, for example, he calls “a performer in search of an audience” and as much a vehicle for the aspirations of his followers as he is a bogeyman for his opponents. 

That bears emphasis. The struggle between populists and elites isn’t inherently one of good vs. evil. The establishment may be arrogant and presumptuous, but the public rising against it can be destructive and authoritarian. The devil is in the details, and it matters whether the result is an uprising against an authoritarian regime or a demagogue leading mobs against convenient targets. Which features in the battle between populist Republicans and elitist Democrats is in the eye of the beholder. Most likely, it’s a mix with no pure heroes and villains. Voters must decide who is less bad than the competition.  

In the U.S., as elsewhere, the struggle between populists and elitists gets nastier as the establishment seeks to regain status by trying to reassert control over information. Jacob Mchangama, founder of the Danish think tank Justitia and executive director of The Future of Free Speech, warns of “a free speech recession” in which “liberal democracies, rather than constituting a counterweight to the authoritarian onslaught, are themselves contributing to the free-speech recession.” 

That puts the elites on the wrong side. But the public too often yearns for a strongman who “takes action on the country’s important policy issues without waiting for Congress or the courts” in the words of an April AP-NORC poll. Fifty-seven per cent of Trump supporters favored that outcome, as well as 39 per cent of those who favored then-Democratic candidate Joe Biden. That’s also wrong. 

And while Harris is part of an administration that tried to censor social media, Trump wants to strip the broadcast license from ABC News for allegedly putting its thumbs on the scale in his debate with Harris. 

Again, while democratized information is good, and the public has legitimate grievances to fuel its revolt, who to support in a specific battle depends on the character and intentions of the players. In the U.S., that means an unhappy choice between Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, and their respective parties. May the less-bad populist or elitist win. 

National Post