But that emergence worked primarily from the top down. Progressive belief isn’t purely an elite phenomenon, but the Great Awokening has largely wielded influence through what Nate Silver calls the “indigo blob,” a center-left network of schools and foundations and media enterprises and human resources departments. It has not really sought power through elections — in part, I would argue, because its project is fundamentally therapeutic and educational, placing soulcraft before statecraft. But also because when it’s been tested at the ballot box, it’s been a loser. That’s why President Biden, not Elizabeth Warren, is the leader of the Democratic Party right now, even if some of Warren’s ideas have prevailed behind the scenes, through the staffing of the White House.
On the right-wing populist side, you have a rather different phenomenon, a political revolution — the earthquake of Trumpism, the similar shocks in Europe — that far outruns any theory of what it’s about or what it’s doing and leaves the intelligentsia rushing to catch up.
Yes, of course you can find writers who anticipated right-wing populism to some degree, figures as diverse as Sam Francis and Michael Lind, Pat Buchanan and Christopher Lasch. To some extent, I was one of them, co-writing a protopopulist book on how Republicans could win the working class back in 2008 and associating with so-called reform conservatism in the Obama era.
But the paleo, Buchananite school of conservatism wasn’t at all ascendant in the Republican Party of the early 2010s, and there was no obvious connection between Donald Trump and any version of the reform-conservative movement. We saw the opening he filled, but he didn’t need to listen to us in order to fill it.
Instead, what you had was a celebrity figure with his own set of ideas, forged in the 1980s and barely altered since, who managed a successful mind meld with a swath of beleaguered voters from both parties. Trumpism certainly has aspects of a cult of personality, but the cult has plenty of doctrines — protectionism, immigration restriction, industrial policy — even if the Great Leader is flexible about their application. And rather than embrace or vindicate any existing ideological or intellectual movement, Trump often appeared to bypass the idea factories entirely.