The Return of the Middle American Radical
John B. Judis, National Journal, October 2, 2015
In 1976, Donald Warren–a sociologist from Oakland University in Michigan who would die two decades later without ever attaining the rank of full professor–published a book called The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation. Few people have read or heard of it–I learned of it about 30 years ago from the late, very eccentric paleoconservative Samuel Francis–but it is, in my opinion, one of the three or four books that best explain American politics over the past half-century.
While conducting extensive surveys of white voters in 1971 and again in 1975, Warren identified a group who defied the usual partisan and ideological divisions. These voters were not college educated; their income fell somewhere in the middle or lower-middle range; and they primarily held skilled and semi-skilled blue-collar jobs or sales and clerical white-collar jobs. At the time, they made up about a quarter of the electorate. What distinguished them was their ideology: It was neither conventionally liberal nor conventionally conservative, but instead revolved around an intense conviction that the middle class was under siege from above and below.
Warren called these voters Middle American Radicals, or MARS. “MARS are distinct in the depth of their feeling that the middle class has been seriously neglected,” Warren wrote. They saw “government as favoring both the rich and the poor simultaneously.” Like many on the left, MARS were deeply suspicious of big business: Compared with the other groups he surveyed–lower-income whites, middle-income whites who went to college, and what Warren called “affluents”–MARS were the most likely to believe that corporations had “too much power,” “don’t pay attention,” and were “too big.” MARS also backed many liberal programs: By a large percentage, they favored government guaranteeing jobs to everyone; and they supported price controls, Medicare, some kind of national health insurance, federal aid to education, and Social Security.
On the other hand, they held very conservative positions on poverty and race. They were the least likely to agree that whites had any responsibility “to make up for wrongs done to blacks in the past,” they were the most critical of welfare agencies, they rejected racial busing, and they wanted to grant police a “heavier hand” to “control crime.” They were also the group most distrustful of the national government. And in a stand that wasn’t really liberal or conservative (and that appeared, at least on the surface, to be in tension with their dislike of the national government), MARS were more likely than any other group to favor strong leadership in Washington–to advocate for a situation “when one person is in charge.”
If these voters are beginning to sound familiar, they should: Warren’s MARS of the 1970s are the Donald Trump supporters of today. Since at least the late 1960s, these voters have periodically coalesced to become a force in presidential politics, just as they did this past summer. In 1968 and 1972, they were at the heart of George Wallace’s presidential campaigns; in 1992 and 1996, many of them backed H. Ross Perot or Pat Buchanan. Over the years, some of their issues have changed–illegal immigration has replaced explicitly racist appeals–and many of these voters now have junior-college degrees and are as likely to hold white-collar as blue-collar jobs. But the basic MARS worldview that Warren outlined has remained surprisingly intact from the 1970s through the present.
{snip}
Trump is squarely within the Wallace-Buchanan tradition. Speaking on behalf of the “silent majority,” he blames undocumented immigrants for urban violence (“A lot of the gangs that you see in Baltimore and in St. Louis and in Ferguson and Chicago, you know they’re illegal immigrants”) and for driving down wages and raising welfare costs. But he has also accused hedge-fund speculators of “getting away with murder” on their tax bills, while the middle class is being “decimated” by taxes; and he has chided insurance companies for getting rich off of the Affordable Care Act.
It isn’t just populism that undergirds the MARS worldview, however; another key component is nationalism. Wallace saw himself as defending America against its enemies at the United Nations. He opposed most foreign aid. He presented himself as “a man who would lead America to new greatness” and would “stand up for America.” Perot and Buchanan, who ran for office after America’s trade surplus had turned into a growing deficit, advocated nationalist economic positions that distinguished them from most Republican politicians and from “new Democrats” like Bill Clinton. {snip}
Trump has gone even further on trade. He has promised to renegotiate or junk NAFTA and to slap a punitive tax on Chinese imports. In his announcement speech, he pledged to “bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico, from Japan, from so many places. I’ll bring back our jobs, and I’ll bring back our money. Right now, think of this: We owe China $1.3 trillion. We owe Japan more than that. So they come in, they take our jobs, they take our money, and then they loan us back the money, and we pay them in interest, and then the dollar goes up so their deal’s even better.”
He also argued, in his 2011 book, for getting “tough on those who outsource jobs overseas and reward companies who stay loyal to America. If an American company outsources its work, they get hit with a 20 percent tax.” And he has promised to end corporate tax “inversions,” whereby a company moves its official headquarters to a tax haven in order to avoid U.S. taxes. Recently, I asked Buchanan whether he thought Trump’s populism and economic nationalism were in line with what he and Perot had advocated. “Trump is a billionaire, but he gets it,” Buchanan told me. “It’s a very populist appeal and it works.”
{snip}
But can he succeed where Wallace, Perot, and Buchanan fell short? Can a MARS candidate actually win the White House? One hesitates at this point to offer any predictions, but my suspicion is that Trump will fail like the others. There is, of course, his volatile persona, which seems likely to cause self-inflicted wounds (just as Perot’s did in 1992). But the bigger limiting factor for Trump is that there are only a certain number of MARS in the country: They constitute maybe 20 percent of the overall electorate and 30 to 35 percent of Republicans. That was enough to allow Trump to lead a crowded GOP field. But as the field narrows, he will have difficulty maintaining his lead unless he can expand his appeal beyond the MARS. And it will be hard to do that without threatening his base of support.
It therefore seems unlikely that we will end up with a MARS president in 2016 or beyond–especially since their percentage of the electorate is continuing to shrink. Still, that doesn’t mean MARS will necessarily fail to have a political impact. After all, tea-party activists–a group Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol estimated at 250,000 during Obama’s first term–have had a decisive influence on the balance of power in the House of Representatives since 2010.
{snip}