The American Enterprise Institute is an unlikely place to be reminded of why Donald Trump was necessary 10 years ago and is no less needed now. But a comment by Yuval Levin on a recent AEI panel succinctly brought out the difference Trump has made. Criticizing today’s populist, Trump-led Republican Party, Levin said, “The right has to ground its approach to the public in a more conservative message, in a sense that this country is awesome. It is not a festering, burning garbage pile — that is a strange way to talk to the next generation, and it’s not true, even a little bit.”
Trump has never used the words “festering, burning garbage pile,” but he’s used similarly strong language to describe America’s condition in this century under administrations other than his own. Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” implies that America hasn’t been great lately, although he and his voters can change that. Whenever Trump alludes to what Levin calls “a festering, burning garbage pile,” he’s referring to the poor leadership our country has suffered from in the not-too-distant past and the results of its misgovernance.
Trump’s task is clear: Restore the people’s power over the elite. Only then will the elite feel compelled to reform.
But that’s not what Levin or other AEI types hear. To them, Trump’s criticisms of the ruling class sound like criticisms of the country.
He upended the system
It would be unfair to guess that Levin simply believes the nation’s elite and the institutions they run are what count as the country itself, but there are precedents for such a view. In traditional monarchies and aristocracies, the rulers are the embodiment of the realm. Our Declaration of Independence was quite radical in breaking away from that understanding, asserting that the people are the realm and that all its institutions are answerable to them, not the other way around.
Levin and other intelligent non-populist conservatives know this, and they’re well aware of the failings of the pre-Trump Republican Party and the country’s political establishment as a whole. But knowing and feeling are different things.
Much of what survives of the pre-Trump conservative movement even now feels that the virtues rather than the vices of the old elite (and the institutions with which they are almost synonymous) ought to be emphasized.
For reasons that are easy to understand, many temperamental conservatives have an abiding fear of demagogues and an irreverent public. However corrupt or incompetent Ivy League-educated leaders may be, they should not be criticized too harshly — likened to flaming rubbish, for example — lest Ivy League education itself be stripped of its mystique. That mystique is part of the decent drapery of republican life, instilling a proper attitude of deference among the public toward those who have the education and lifestyle preparation to lead them.
From the moment he came down the escalator a decade ago, Trump upended this system. He pays no heed to the norms that distinguish America’s leadership class from the rabble the way noble bloodlines distinguished leadership in traditional hierarchical societies.
Elite confusion
Trump draws strength from the weakness of America’s elites and the widening public awareness of their vices. This is why, again and again, he has been rewarded for violating the very norms the elites consider sacrosanct, even to the point of winning the Republican nomination and then the White House last year despite a slew of criminal convictions and many more pending charges.
In three consecutive elections, Trump has not offered voters only a choice of leaders but a choice between systems of government. The capaciousness of our republican Constitution is such that within its framework, more than one kind of regime is possible. The “informal regime” can be considered the regime of society as well as government, or a regime that in operation reflects the real dispensation of authority within the country.
Most Americans have sadly little familiarity with even the letter of the written Constitution, and even most educated Americans have never entertained the thought of an informal regime. Much of the country’s elite (think about the typical writer for the Atlantic, for example) suffers paroxysms of panic over Trump’s words and actions because its members conceive of the informal regime under which they’ve lived their whole lives — and under which people like themselves flourish — as being the only natural outcome of the written Constitution.
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To violate the “norms” of this regime is to violate the Constitution itself, as far as their understanding can conceive.
It’s rare that voters get to make a choice not just between candidates but between regimes. The greater and lesser George Bush, the male and female Clinton, Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris all represented the same regime and norms. Trump differs from them all not only in policy but in the relationships he represents between the people, elected power, and institutional elites (both inside and outside government).
They delegitimized themselves
Trump at last gave the American people a choice of regimes, with one regime — represented by his enemies, not just in the general election but in the Republican Party, too — operating on aristocratic presumptions and the other being a reassertion of popular self-government, including its characteristic parrhesiaand even vulgarity.
Crude materialists who understand power only in terms of wealth struggle to interpret Trump, because he and many of his associates obviously belong to the same affluent class as his enemies. Yet just as Christ said the poor will always be with us, so too does every regime, formal or informal, have its rich men. The regime is not defined by the existence of a wealthy group; it’s rather about relationships and authority, and that is what Trump has changed.
This change was necessary because the old regime had already destroyed its own legitimacy. It performed poorly for millions of ordinary Americans, but beyond that, it had also grown arrogant. Its norms were not a limitation on its power or abuses but rather a gag stifling criticism from within or below.
The new regime that’s in the making will have its own defects and will need various corrections, but the test of a regime lies precisely in its ability to correct itself. The old elite had lost that ability and would hardly have had the will to exercise the capability even if it had still been there.
Trump is not a revolutionary who has overthrown a healthy order. Rather, he, like the American revolutionaries of 250 years ago, has given the people a chance to be healthy again by ridding themselves of a debilitating regime. Americans had been tricked into living under an aristocracy within the form of a democracy.
Against the phony aristocracy
Thomas Jefferson hoped that voters would freely choose natural aristocrats — leaders of wisdom, virtue, and ability. But in recent decades, the country fell under the rule of an aristocracy against nature: a self-perpetuating elite that governed through institutions immune to the ballot box. Universities, nonprofits, media outlets, the permanent bureaucracy, judges, and political operatives in both parties — each aligned ideologically, broadly liberal — formed a web of power that shut down any real challenge.
Until Trump.
He offered the people a radical choice, and they took it. They rejected the aristocracy.
If America’s ruling class had actually resembled the natural aristocrats Jefferson envisioned, the people might not have turned to Trump. But the elite they faced was an aristocracy of privilege: smug mediocrities, not public-spirited heroes or genuine geniuses. Swapping one set of insiders for another would have changed nothing. Trump gave them a worthwhile alternative.
Even conservatives like Yuval Levin — who value the role of a well-formed elite in a healthy republic — should recognize this moment. America can only return to true aristocracy, the kind America’s founders hoped for, by becoming more democratic and more populist. The people must want an elite — and they will only want one that serves them faithfully, competently, and without arrogance.
Trump’s task is clear: Restore the people’s power over the elite. Only then will the elite feel compelled to reform.
That path won’t destroy American institutions. It will save them.
Editor’s note: A version of this article was published originally at the American Mind.
