The fake populist.

The following article was written by my friend, Chauncey DeVega, for Salon Magazine.  

 "Donald Trump is not a real populist. That fact will not change despite how many times politicians and the news media say that he is. Reporters and journalists can also visit an infinite number of diners, bowling alleys, flea markets, gun shows, and other such places in Trumplandia in a quest to decipher the supposedly mysterious beliefs of the (white) working class in so-called real America and “the heartland” but that won’t change the fact that Trump is not a real populist. Real populism is radically democratic and inclusive.

By comparison, Trump’s fake populism is exclusionary and narrow as it channels widespread anger at “the elites” into something fascist and authoritarian with demagogues and other hatemongers like him in charge.

The enduring power of old-fashioned biological racism in American society is made even more terrifying given how Trump is now openly channeling Hitler

Moreover, Trumpism as a form of white rage-white identity politics, channels what has been described as “frustrated white entitlement” about an increasingly diverse and inclusive society where Whiteness and white privilege (and claims on it) are increasingly by themselves no guarantee of upward mobility and life success in America and around the world.

Black and brown people, as a community, were not seduced/deluded by such fictions as the American Dream or the Horatio Alger myth or American exceptionalism. As James Baldwin so incisively observed, “The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which White Americans cling.”

In a 2021 conversation with me here at Salon, leading sociologist Arlie Hochschild offered this explanation for Trump’s “populist” appeal and its connections to whiteness, white entitlement, white racism and white resentment:

'''The people who voted for Donald Trump did so for a variety of reasons. There were those who voted for him because of taxes or social issues, guns or being "pro-life." Others because they liked Trump's bravado. Some because they feel a generalized sense of decline. Some Trump people supported him because of racism. I think that the dominant group of Trump voters are people I would call "the elite of the left behind." These are not the abject poor. However, they are not rich either.

They're rural or small-town and white. They sense themselves as being part of a declining part of society. I believe such feelings are also global with right-wing populism, as seen in response to such issues as race and immigration. Fear and anger is displaced onto scapegoated groups.

But the group that's doing such things here in the United States specifically are the "elite of the left behind." Going back to 1970, there are winners and losers to globalization and the winners are generally coastal and more cosmopolitan and better educated. They can have jobs that are not as vulnerable to being automated or off-shored.

These losers from globalization consist of different kinds of people. But the people who are mobilized are the elites of that group. I remember going to a Trump rally in a bus. This was in New Orleans, with a member of the Tea Party who I had gotten to know and who I was following around for my research. On the bus, people were saying, "Oh! Look how many of us there are! We're all for Trump!" Trump has mobilized them. He's pulled them together. He's gotten them to see each other.

And here is how I believe race is operative. The white Trump supporters I met actually see themselves as some type of minority group: "We're being put down. We are being prejudiced against. They call us rednecks and hillbillies."'

Ultimately, at its core Trumpism is a form of crude and toxic populism that is racist, white supremacist, nativist, misogynist, ableist, and based on a general type of hostility to the Other – usually racially defined. The role of racism and white supremacy in overdetermining support for Donald Trump and the MAGA movement and American neofascism – and today’s Republican Party and “conservative” movement more broadly – has been repeatedly demonstrated by political scientists, sociologists, social psychologists, and other researchers and experts." {Article}

Every now and then I post on X (Elon Musk's billions dollar website, he bought to allow people to be openly racist in a public forum.), just to test the hypothesis laid out by Chauncey Devega in the above article, and it never fails. The level of vitriol and racist responses to my posts are invariably over the top, and far more than the initial post called for. Musk doesn't realize that by allowing racist to be themselves, he was doing the rest of us a favor, and confirming what many of us have suspected all along about the racists who live among us.   

The racism is usually cloaked in political discourse, and MAGA world will never disappoint in letting you know that their entire movement is built on racism and hatred, not populism, as some in the mainstream media would have you believe.  Which begs the question,  why did so many other people not see it? Why would seemingly normal Americans whose main concern was to take care of their families and live in a free and democratic society, risk it all by voting for a madman, whose movement is built on a foundation of division and destruction? I ask this question because the article above was written in 2023, and here we are in 2026, living in the middle of Trump's despotic nightmare. 

I have my own theories on why that is the case, but that will be another post for another time. 

The fall is here field hands, it's my favorite time of year. Get outside and enjoy it.