Political headlines these days are constantly plastered with news, updates and opinions about who will secure the Republican presidential nomination. No matter how it’s printed, the upcoming fight is clear: The establishment and the anti-establishment are facing off, and the results won’t be pretty.
On one side, you have Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, on the other, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Much like a boxing match, the candidates square up, then take and deliver punches. However, unlike in most boxing matches, one side is clearly losing right out of the gate and through the first round, given Trump and Cruz’s triumph in Iowa. What has become clear, once and for all, is that conservative populism is here, and it’s ready to burn establishment politics to the ground.
Populism is a relatively loose term, for all intents and purposes. It can describe a variety of movements and opinions, ranging from jingoism and manifest destiny, to xenophobia and isolationism. It can be a wholly democratic movement or a fully authoritarian one.
However, the central point of populism is political representation of a population’s fears, hopes and needs, rather than those of special interests or the establishment. I believe that it would be safe to say that, in a way, the anti-establishment conservatives embody many aspects of this philosophy.
Let’s start with where the support for the anti-establishment candidates originates. In today’s politics, the best way to trace support is to follow the money. Unfortunately, this is harder than it sounds, as much of the money donated in election cycles is contributed by super PACs, who can spend money in support of the candidate, but not directly coordinate with the campaign.
However, one thing is clear from the data: Many members of the anti-establishment on the federal level are backed by individual donors dumping millions of dollars into super PACs.
In the current presidential election cycle, for example, the anti-establishment candidates — Cruz, Trump, Fiorina and Carson for the purposes of this article — have received upwards of 65 million dollars of outside support. Much of it comes from ultraconservative individuals with ties to Wall Street and the oil industry. For being supposedly populist, the anti-establishment seems to enjoy the same sort of money games as the establishment does.
Notably, Donald Trump has refused any outside financial support for his campaign; however, his rise is no less a product of outside support than any of the other anti-establishment candidates.
Money isn’t the only outside support a candidate can receive. For a populist candidate to be successful, the political mood of the population must be aligned to support them.
One of the biggest driving factors in this is the media. For the anti-establishment candidates, conservative-leaning media has been a godsend. Conservative sites like Breitbart and The Blaze, along with an assortment of conservative talk radio shows, push an anti-Obama, anti-liberal, anti-democrat agenda. This sort of behavior by conservative media has been going on for years and may be a contributing factor in the political polarization of the American public. Not only that, but Republican voter antipathy to Democrats has also increased to all-time highs, likely for the same reason.
More recently, however, they seem to have a new foe: the establishment republicans. While not necessarily directly attacking them in many cases, there is a tangible animosity which highlights the growing divide between the two sides. If conservative media can influence political polarization, it’s not too much of a stretch to believe that it can also influence Republican voter hostility towards the establishment.
With money and media backing anti-establishment politicians, it’s finally time to start taking their message seriously. Many of them believe that America has fallen to new lows, and they blame a variety of things for it, among them Democrats, liberals, Obama, regulations and even those who rely on government safety nets (Medicaid, food stamps, etc). Carson believes that Obamacare is “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery” and that a flat tax will solve all of our tax problems (in fact it increases the deficit). Fiorina still believes Planned Parenthood is selling baby parts and that a three-page tax plan is feasible.
Trump believes that all illegal immigrants, roughly 11 million people, should be removed from the labor force and deported. Not only that, but he is somehow going to get Mexico to pay for a wall separating our two countries.
Cruz believes that the IRS, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Commerce and Department of Housing and Urban Development should all be eliminated. He also believes that the Federal Reserve should be audited, essentially allowing its policy to be debated and politicized by Congress, and we all know how educated they are on economic matters.
In short, the Republican anti-establishment candidates do only two things: Tell their supporters exactly what they want to hear (fearmongering and nationalism), and threaten to change major aspects of how our government works and operates, all while disregarding the potential consequences of those actions.
The anti-establishment offers a pseudo-populist message, backed by money and media, with an intent akin to arson of significant parts of our government. They want to deregulate and handicap the government’s ability to protect its citizens and to intertwine Christian values with the way government operates, despite the constitutional separation of church and state.
Change is necessary for the continuance of a successful government, but the question we should be asking is whether this faction's plans are a step forward or a step backward.