The ‘pulsating sense of grievance’ driving Donald Trump’s supporters

Peter Wehner worked for three traditional Republican presidents and says the party today under the full Trump takeover is pretty much the opposite of its former self: “Name the issue, it’s almost antithetical to the party that I was part of.”

But he ruefully concedes that he didn’t grasp the full depth of the popular hatred that Donald Trump’s Republican Party fosters and feeds on. Until a conversation with a friend, a pro-Trump Christian.

Wehner is a Christian himself, a member of the non-profit Trinity Forum dedicated to renewing society according to Christian values, but not part of the politically aggressive “Christian nationalism” movement that has emerged as a foundation of Trump’s support base.

Wehner wanted to understand “the sheer hatred” that Trump-following Christians feel for America’s political left. So he took it to an extreme to see if his friend would “push back”.

“So I said, ‘does the left, in terms of what they want to do to Christians, want to slit your throats and watch you bleed and watch you die?’

“I thought he’d say, ‘Oh, no!’ But he was like ‘yeah, that’s it’. So that’s how they view it,” he tells me.

So it’s not only the “Mexican rapists” of Trumpian trope that such voters have to fear. They fear their Democrat neighbours, and the fear isn’t only political.

Wehner concluded that some, at least, fear actual bodily harm.

This group is not a small element in the Republican voter base. A survey last year found 54 per cent of Republican voters identified themselves as Christian nationalists or as sympathising with Christian nationalist beliefs.

The survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution gave respondents five statements of such beliefs and asked their degree of support for each.

First: “The US government should declare America a Christian nation.”

And fifth: “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.”

Wehner says it’s not clear whether his friend would call himself a Christian nationalist, but he’s certainly a Trump-supporting right-wing evangelical.

But where did the Trump followers’ intense fear and loathing of the political left come from?

Wehner, who worked in the White House for Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, says objective conditions in the US form a rational basis for grievance, but that cultural resentments supply the rage.

Among the objective problems he cites are too many illegal immigrants for too long, the Iraq war, the financial crisis of 2008-09, and inequality.

The cultural grudges developed over the “massive cultural changes” of same-sex marriage, transgenderism, the erosion of the white majority and the denigration of Christianity.

These have come together to create “this pulsating sense of grievance and resentment”, especially among working-class Americans.

The US sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of the 2016 book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, put her finger on the animating emotion – a working class that feels “dishonoured and disrespected”.

Wehner picks up the phrase: “When you feel dishonoured and disrespected, that generates enormously strong emotional and psychological responses.”

People see Trump as the warrior who will destroy those who have been dishonouring and disrespecting them, the contemptuous “elites” of the cultural, political and economic systems.

“They believe Trump will bring a pistol to a cultural knife fight,” explains Wehner, author most recently of The Death of Politics and also a contributor to The Atlantic and The New York Times.

And that’s exactly what Trump offered in a speech last year: “In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice’. Today, I add, ‘I am your warrior. I am your justice’. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

How many Americans really want radical change? Asked their view of how much change was needed to the US political and economic systems, 2 per cent of Americans in a Times/Sienna poll of swing states chose no change.

By contrast, 14 per cent said that “the system needs to be torn down entirely”. Another 55 per cent supported “major change”. That’s seven out of ten respondents who want major or total change.

In fomenting disgruntlement and simultaneously appealing to it, the Republican Party of today is no longer conservative in any way.

Bill Kristol, a longtime leading intellectual in the Republican Party as the publisher of the Weekly Standard, tells me that it’s more accurately “counter-revolutionary or reactionary”.

Kristol, who now describes himself as a “moderate Democrat”, says that many Republicans or former Republicans had hoped that Trump would be a passing phase, that a return to some sort of “normalcy” was in prospect.

But Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance as his vice presidential candidate is a major and underappreciated development, says Kristol. If Trump wins, his vice president will be 40 years old and not only Trumpian but “ahead of Trump on the agenda” of nativist, isolationist, protectionist populism.

In other words, if Trump wins it’ll no longer be possible to assume that his style of politics is just a passing phase.

One marker is that The Weekly Standard is now defunct, though Kristol has started a new journal, The Bulwark.

Worse, says Kristol, if Trump wins, the Republicans might refuse to honour democratic norms like the rule of law and term limits: “It’s like all these things, once unleashed, these things can’t be put back entirely. Norms become norms because they’re not questioned.”

Trump defied the last election result, cheered on a mob to overturn the election certification, and “got away with it, not in the sense that he overturned the result but he didn’t pay a big price. So the norms are damaged”.

He fears the effects could spill over internationally: “It’s not just a theoretical issue – it’s very clear that there are people, and people out of power in certain countries, who were emboldened by Trump in the prospect that this is going to be the future in the West.”

He cites Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro as an example.

“Australia has a very robust tradition,” he adds, “so maybe the English-speaking peoples will be different. But I’ll leave it at that.”

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