Left and Right are dead. Now it’s the Establishment vs the People
Trump, Ramaswamy and RFK Jr show us that America is never going back to normal
MICHAEL LIND
30 August 2023 • 1:56pm
Welcome to the age of the Outsider CREDIT: Win McNamee/Getty
Was Donald Trump a fluke – or is he the first in a series of outsider candidates in the US? Many mainstream Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have hoped that the removal of Trump from the American political scene would mean a return to the pre-2016 norm, with conventional career politicians of both parties running against each other while sharing a broad consensus about public policy. But the surprising popularity of Vivek
Ramaswamy and RFK Jr. suggests that there is an enduring constituency among American voters for mavericks, campaigning against the political and economic system while deliberately violating the accepted norms of political speech and behavior.
America’s first-past-the-post electoral system discourages third-party and independent candidacies. In a race with three or more contenders, the candidate with a mere plurality may prevail, even though most voters wanted someone else. And in close races a third-party contender may act as a spoiler, throwing the election to the major-party candidate whom the independent candidate’s voters like the least. As a result, the US has a relatively stable system in which the two major parties amass distinct factions within themselves.
In spite of these obstacles, third-party candidates have often sought the Presidency. In 1980, independent Republican John Anderson challenged both Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. In 1992 and again in 1996, Texan billionaire H. Ross Perot ran for President as the head of his candidate-centered Reform Party.
By siphoning off more votes from one major party than from another, a third-party bid may change the outcome of an election. This is even more likely given America’s electoral college system, in which the President is elected on the basis of electoral college totals, which give some American states more political power than others, rather than on the popular vote alone. It may be no coincidence that in two of the last three elections in which Republican Presidents were elected the winner
– George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016
– lost the popular vote but won an electoral vote majority.
While most third-party candidates can be placed on a familiar left-right spectrum, populist candidates tend to scramble these distinctions. Often they combine right-wing views on social or civil rights issues with center-left views on the welfare state and trade and foreign military intervention.
George Wallace, candidate of the American Party in 1968, stirred up racist opposition to desegregation while favouring relatively left-wing economic policies. Ross Perot united Republican pro-military attitudes with protections of American industry against offshoring, which was a cause backed by mostly-Democratic private sector labour unions. In 2016 Trump, who briefly considered a Presidential run as the nominee of Perot’s Reform Party in 2000, promised to build a “wall” along the US-Mexican border to thwart illegal immigration, while breaking with Republican economic orthodoxy by vowing to protect Social Security and Medicare entitlements and denouncing the Iraq War.
As the 2024 election approaches, Trump has been joined by two other outsiders. Foremost amongst them is Vivek Ramaswamy, a wealthy finance and biotech entrepreneur who has never held public office. He has risen in polls of Republican primary voters, while Florida Governor Ron
DeSantis, a conventional career politician, has seen popularity slide. RFK Jr, the son of martyred 1968 presidential candidate Robert Kennedy and nephew of President John Kennedy, Jr., is in no danger of displacing Biden as the Democratic party’s 2024 nominee – but has still received widespread support amongst the party base, spurred on by his embrace of unconventional positions.
Part of the appeal of outsider populist candidates is their rude flouting of the etiquette of conventional politicians. For example, populist candidates supported by their personal wealth and celebrity are more free than conventional politicians to break with the positions preferred by their party’s campaign donors. In the first Republican Presidential debate, Ramaswamy, with a personal fortune of around a billion dollars, mocked his rivals as “bought and paid for,” just as Trump had denounced “donors and special interests” in 2016.
Outsider candidates, including those running in conventional party primaries, also benefit from the inability of the old gatekeepers of broadcast television and metropolitan newspapers to police national political discourse. In the old days the opposition party would permanently damage a Presidential candidate with a single gaffe, taken out of context and endlessly repeated. But the mainstream media has witnessed their power slip away: Ramaswamy’s statements about allowing only 18-to-24 year olds who pass a civics test to vote, and Kennedy’s discussion of allegations of ethnically-targeted bioweapons, have failed to derail their campaigns.
The transgressive and flamboyant styles of today’s outsider populist candidates does not mean that their appeal can be reduced to cults of personality. The same themes of immigration restriction and trade protectionism and re-industrialisation recur among populists of right, left, and center in the US and Europe, because these policies reflect the interests and values of the alienated working-class voters who provide much of the support for populist outsiders, as opposed to conventional libertarian or centrist independents.
RFK Jr’s call for a crackdown on illegal immigration, along with his skepticism about vaccines and vaccine mandates, puts him at odds with Democratic party orthodoxy. He’s an outsider candidate with an eclectic mix of views like Trump or Perot, rather than a traditional protest candidate of the left, like
Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein or Cornel West. And contrary to the conventional wisdom of media pundits that Trump’s followers worship him and do not care about specific policies, it’s certain that if Donald Trump began promoting free trade and higher immigration, many if not most of his supporters would desert him.
The outsider is best understood as a man who runs against the existing political system as a whole. Hard to place on the legacy left-right axis, these figures are marked along a different insider-outsider axis. Outsider candidates will continue to dominate as long as substantial numbers of voters feel they are not adequately represented by any mainstream party faction today.
