I normally don’t watch CNN. But a recent online essay by senior political analyst, Ron Brownstein, caught my attention.
In his piece Brownstein makes some of points that I have been making over the past few years (since the Trump election in 2016), and that have much to do with the tectonic shift in the nature of the Republican (or better said, conservative) base of voters, the fact that the GOP has become largely a “blue collar” workingman’s party. Certainly, university educated professionals still fill a goodly proportion of leadership positions, but that proportion has been decreasing.
In my view, the growing MAGA portion of the GOP is analogous, impressionistically, to other broadly-based populist counter-revolutionary movements which have existed since the late 18th century violent convulsions of the French Revolution and of other revolutionary movements occurring since then. Rightwing populism and populist counter-revolutionary movements did not begin with MAGA.
Let me mention an historical lineage or genealogy for what I am talking about.
Let’s begin with “conservative,” or more accurately, counter-revolutionary opposition to the French Revolution (1791-1794 and beyond). We are talking here about the vast Catholic rural areas of Western France, the peasantry of the Vendee, the Chouans of Brittany and Normandy, who opposed by force of arms the totalitarian actions of the revolutionary French Directory, its anti-clericalism and anti-traditionalism, its oppression of small farmers and suppression of regional liberties. These “pitchfork” brigades were not composed of “egalitarians”; no, actually, they defended the old ways and traditions, the importance of the Church in public life, and they were led by the real and natural local aristocracy (e.g. the Comte de la Rochejaquelein, Baron de Charette, Cathlineau, etc.) who lived and worked side-by-side with their retainers and the local farmers and merchants, who went to Mass with them and shared their essential beliefs and values. Not with the many-times effete worldly aristocrats in Paris, often swept up by the fashionable currents of the “Illuminees” and the anti-clerical Enlightenment.
The very same occurred with the ancestors of my Carlist friends in Spain, first in their popular or populist rebellion against the Napoleon and the French (and their imposed “enlightenment” policies), then against the Spanish version of liberalism in three bloody civil wars. That popular Carlist/Traditionalist movement which began early in the 19th century was both favorable to a strong, legitimate and traditional monarchy, but with traditional rights and local liberties (“fueros”) enshrined and guaranteed, sanctified by recognized law and immemorial custom. In the traditional concept of a “balanced monarchy”–summed up by St. Thomas Aquinas in his De Regimine Principum–the essential principle of subsidiarity was the guiding light, and in a certain sense that principle inspired other theories of a “balanced” political system. That reality was brutally assaulted by the Revolution in France and elsewhere. And it was many times the peasantry, the small landholders, the small merchants, the Church, and the local nobles, who formed a steadfast opposition, even waging open war, against liberalism. That opposition continued in the 19th and into the early 20th centuries.
My late friend, Baron Ignacio de Orbe y Tuero, grandson of the great Carlist military leader in the Third Carlist War in Spain [1873-1877], Juan de Orbe, Marquis of Valdespina, is an excellent example of this, and his example can be replicated hundreds of times in popular “pre-MAGA” counter-revolutionary movements not just in Spain, but in Portugal (with the Miguelistas in the 19th century), in Italy (with the popular Army of the Holy Faith–the “Sanfedisti,” thousands of peasants with pitchforks who, under the leadership of Prince-Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo de Calabria, defeated Napoleon’s finest in 1799 and restored their rightful king, Ferdinando I “el Deseado” of Naples).
I have written previously about my Spanish Carlist friend, Teofilo Andueza, who as a young teenager in July 1936, with his father and his grandfather (an actual veteran of the Third Carlist War), volunteered to fight against the revolutionary “red” Republican and Communist-dominated regime Madrid, with the guiding motto, “Viva Cristo Rey!”—Long Live Christ the King! Teofilo was a small farmer who had worked in a potash mine, but like hundreds of thousands of other simple traditional Catholics, joined with local nobles, like Ignacio de Orbe, to combat Socialist elites in his country.
I would also cite the “popular” anti-revolutionary movement in the Tirol, led by the great Austrian patriot and royalist, Andreas Hofer; the movement in Argentina led by General Juan de Rosas; the Catholic counter-revolutionary Cristero movement in Mexico in the 1920s against Mexico’s socialist and anti-clericalist dictatorship; and perhaps even the popular extermination of hundreds of thousands of Communists by Islamic peasants and middle class folk in Indonesia in the 1960s, a kind of non-Christian populism, but again in defense of tradition, custom, and religion.
Even the battle of the Confederate states against Federal usurpation and control, 1861-1865, can be fitted into this template, as it was seen by many European traditionalists who not only favored the Southern cause, but in some cases provided soldiers for it (e.g., Neapolitan and Carlist volunteers to the Confederate forces). At least 5,000 known European volunteers made it to Southern regiments, and there were most likely more.
What I am highlighting, then, is a process which in some ways has a genealogy and historical precedence, where insulated, unelected elites basically assault the essential traditions and beliefs of a broader populace, where dominant segments of the population not only control the polity, but also attempt to root out deeply-moored heritage, traditions, and mores of the “great unwashed” (a misnomer, of course) in the name of, let’s see, “social justice,” “democracy,” and in our time, diversity, equity and inclusion, and sexual liberation.
Thus, we had in 1991-1992 Pat Buchanan’s “pitchfork brigades,” a kind of precursor to the MAGA movement…recognizing, if only instinctively back then, that our country was becoming radically and irreconcilably divided, with an essentially unseen, largely Managerial Class (to use James Burnham’s terminology) which fundamentally determined how we were to live (and die), a kind of “hidden hand” of unseen and faceless bureaucrats with huge salaries, in cahoots with global corporations and more ominously, with Big Tech and the media.
Over the past few years the essentially traditional non-elite population has begun to recognize, intuitively, that things are going very badly. Education is increasingly and ideologically perverted, inimical to the family values that children are raised with; entertainment is rotten to the core; millions now live from paycheck-to-paycheck; and our politics has ceased to be a responsible contest between differing views, but rather its representatives form a giant Uniparty…a kind of Mitch McConnell/Chuck Schumer interchangeability, with slight, condescending bows to supposed differences over such things as taxes. But an inability, or rather an unwillingness to translate the real concerns of average Americans into meaningful action, much less results.
Donald Trump’s election in 2016, for all his personal faults and verbal foibles and silliness, his occasional outrageous antics, represented an actual opportunity to at least begin some sort of reversal, some sort of counter-revolution. Trump was an unlikely champion of the cause, and his resemblance to earlier counter-revolutionaries is thin. I’m not even sure if the Donald really understood what he was unleashing; indeed, at times he seemed to attempt the impossible task of placating the GOP old guard, by his appointments, and by his occasional willingness to listen to real enemies of his announced MAGA agenda.
Yet, with his election the proverbial “cat was let out of the bag,” the populist counter-revolution was, at least to some degree, unleashed. The veil concealing the real aims and goals of the administrative Deep State has largely dissolved as its supercilious denizens have reacted with virulent, palpable fury against Trump’s actions, real and perceived, and against the MAGA base.
Just as the AfD in Germany, Fidesz in Hungary, the National Front in France, the Fratelli d’Italia in Italy, and other groups have grown in opposition to the managerial global elites in those countries, our MAGA movement could be seen as part of a global populism, which in many ways opposes what I would call “authoritarian modernism”—opposed to the triumph of administrative and globalist state hegemony.
With all that, I pass on to you the following essay. As I say, I do not agree with everything Brownstein writes, but I think he wanders over into the truth more times than not.
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From CNN
Trump’s hidden advantage in the GOP primary
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/11/politics/donald-trump-reshape-gop-fault-lines/index.html