The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Future of Trumpism

Episode Date: October 23, 2020

Nicholas Lemann’s “The Republican Identity Crisis After Trump” explores what will happen to the movement Donald Trump created among Republicans. In his 2016 campaign, he ran as a populist insurgent against Wall Street, “élites,” and the Republican Party itself—mobilizing voters against their traditional leadership. But, in office, he has governed largely according to the Party’s priorities. If Trump loses next month’s election, what will become of the movement he created? Lemann spoke with David Remnick about three possible scenarios for Republicans. Plus, the New Yorker music critic Carrie Battan describes how the sound of Korean pop is becoming part of the American mainstream. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Nicholas Lemon has been reporting on and studying American politics for a long time as a staff writer for The New Yorker. And now as this strange and very unnerving election season draws to a close, with the polls forecasting real trouble for Donald Trump, Nick has been considering a question that could be crucial to the American future. Will Trumpism outlast Donald Trump? Nick, let's begin with a very basic question. What is Trumpism?

Well, it's a little hard to answer because President Trump is such an erratic person, but it would have been easier to answer during the Republican primary season in 2016. So then you had the spectacle of Trump, in addition to being a social. flamboyant and flamboyantly offensive, a former reality TV star, it wasn't clear that he even was a Republican, and he was running for president. And he quickly carved out a sort of zone for himself, not just a personality zone, but a set of political stances that were really different from what you expected in a Republican. You know, pro-labor, pro-social security. no anti-government. I'm getting government out of your life. I'm limiting government. None of that kind of rhetoric.

Nativist, nationalist, racist, and somewhat anti-business. A lot of anti-elite, but a lot of Wall Street bashing. So he was, you know, pitching himself to a certain kind of voter that wasn't in the Republican playbook. You say that Carl Rove told you, the Republican strategist who was so closely associated with George W. Bush, he said by the time you got to 2016, people just wanted to throw a brick through a plate glass window. What does that mean? Well, I think it means, and, you know, I want to say this is a Democratic and Republican phenomenon, and it's a global phenomenon. It's not just about Trump. It's not just about the Republicans.

It's not just about the U.S. People, well, let's go back. The turn of the millennium, there was this thing called the Washington Consensus, which you can find in, say, Tom Friedman's book, he has this phrase, the golden straitjacket, and he says, everybody in the world just has to accept certain things, free trade, et cetera, and outsourcing of blue-collar jobs. A lot of people accepted that and thought, okay, fine,

that's it, both parties essentially, agree on this. It became clear, especially after the 2008 financial crisis, that that view was just wrong. In terms of blue-collar workers, it was, you know, my job just went to China or wherever, or Mexico, so I feel abandoned and lied to. Then, I think you and I both know a few people who were younger than ourselves. For them, the attitude is this whole, narrative about the American dream, that was just never true for a generation or two, hasn't been true. And that's not just why Trump happened, it's why Bernie happened, who seemed through two presidential election cycles just as unlikely as a political star as Trump. Now, you say that Trump

came along and exposed the inner hollowness of the Republican Party, quoting from the conservative Charles Kessler. What does that mean? So the U.S. has had the same two dominant parties since 1860. And that's weird. It's a long run. Many times the run of either or both parties has been predicted to end, but they haven't ended. So each party has to be, if we have only two in a big, diverse country like this, a sort of bizarre coalition of people who don't have that much in common. The Republican coalition in recent years has been to oversimplify rich people and even evangelical Christians. And, you know, the hollowness is they don't have anything in common. It sounds facile to say it, but it's true. The rich donor class in the Republican Party

is not filled with people who think abortion is murder and things like that and who go to church several times a week. And the evangelicals don't believe in, quote, neoliberalism. You know, Trump exploited that lack of commonality between the two sides of the Republican Party. Yes, and in the campaign recognized that evangelicals account for, in terms of people who identify as evangelical Christians, something like 80 million people. Yeah, it's the huge majority of the Republican Party. It's the Republican base. But he campaigned appealing to them. He campaigned as a populist. But as president, it turns out that he governed more conventionally as a conservative. Tax cuts for corporations, conservative judges, law and order,

and all the rest. Why did that happen? Okay, so first you have to separate sort of the Trump show and what Trump actually did in the policy sense while Trump was president and you're not allowed to talk about tweets and things like that. A massive tax cut, massive rollback of government regulations. And, you know, it's sort of of a Reaganite policy, but way more than Reagan even dared to ask for, especially in terms of

corporate tax cuts and rolling back environmental regulations, financial regulations. In the aggregate, these weren't to benefit the people who brought him into the Republican nomination and then into office. These weren't policies that helped all those displaced factory workers in the Upper Midwest, who really tipped the balance in the election. So then, back to your question, so why did he do this? And to do this piece, I talk to a lot of Republicans, and for them at least, you know, one might hear the answer, well, that's just because these rich Republicans control the party. I want to give a little more subtle answer than that. I don't think they control the party still electorally. But I do think they control the party in the sense that they have this huge

apparatus that built up over the years that has produced all of these people who are just waiting for a Republican to take office so they can serve in it. And Trumpism didn't have that. So he, a combination of his personal lack of interest in the details of government and policy and the fact that this the establishment that he spurned was able to say will supply all your appointees and all your policies that he just went with that so now we come to the crux of the matter we're looking at polls we're and we're not going to predict anything because that's a fool's game and we've been through that before nevertheless the polls indicate that Donald Trump is in serious trouble, that his odds of winning are, let's just say, less than half.

So you say that there are essentially three scenarios of post-Trump, that there is a remnant scenario for the Republican Party, a restoration scenario, and a reversal scenario. What do you mean? Okay. So these are my categories, names I have given what I'm hearing from talking to a whole bunch of Republicans and conservatives. Remnant is the idea of Trumpists are a surrounded and shrinking and older minority, but by God, they're going to keep fighting and they're just going to stay as much like Trump as possible and not try to be inclusive in any way. You know, if you want to look at Twitter

and not look at Donald Trump's Twitter, look at Donald Trump Jr's Twitter or Senator Josh Holly's Twitter. So that's remnant. Restoration would be the Republican Party wakes up as if after a bad dream and the party can go back

to its traditional role as the party of business, which it's been for at least 100 years. You know, tax cuts, free enterprise, strong military. The base, basic Reagan mix. And the embodiment of this is somebody like Nikki Haley. Yeah, I mean, you could

envision somebody who would be sort of in line like Pence or Pompeo, or Nikki Haley is thought to be running, but positioning herself as, you know, the bearer of the Reagan tradition, the pro-business optimist Republican. And it would be as if Trump never happened. The reversal is a kind of flipping of the historic roles of the two parties so that the Republican Party becomes more the sort of lower middle class labor, at least non-public employee labor union party. It begins to attract a lot of Latinos. And it's kind of the party of the people. And the Democrats become the party of business, particularly, you know, high tech and financial. businesses. And the embodiment of this is Marco Rubio somehow who talks to you at length.

Yeah. So let me say, I want to stress how if this happened, first, how close it is to happening and how weird it would be. It's not just in the U.S., but globally in the 20th century, politics kind of came down to in democracies that were developed. There would be a party of labor and a party of business, basically. You find this all over the world. So for those roles to switch would be a big deal. The 10 richest congressional districts in the U.S., all 10 are represented by Democrats. 44 of the 50 richest are represented by Democrats. The biggest business sector in the country, tech, is clearly affiliated with the Democrats and is getting bashed by Republicans all the time. Wall Street is not as uniformly Republican as it always was, and in some campaigns has been

majority Democratic. And the Democrats dominate among college-educated voters, which is not the historical situation. So somebody like Rubio thinks, I can build a Republican Party that has a more sort of open, inclusive, less negative rhetoric. It's very focused on the middle part of the country, this new kind of Republican would reach out to the less populated areas and say, you know, if you are just a regular churchgoing person who lives a local life, wants a job, and wants a party that cares about you, we're your party. And what is the likeliest outcome of these three scenarios for the Republican Party? What do you see is the likeliest outcome and why?

If I had to bet, I would bet that the Republicans will go with the restoration scenario, which probably isn't the smartest one for them. But that's just because the whole officeholder and leadership part of the party is so trained in that and steeped in that for decades. And I think it's very easy to go back to the mistakes of 2016. But what happens to the vaunted base? This is tens of millions of people, not just people who come out to Trump rallies, but people who have stayed with him despite everything, despite Twitter,

despite things that they find offensive or rude or misogynist or racist. Obviously, there are many who find that attractive. If the Republicans go with restoration, I think the Democrats, if they're smart, will go after some of the Trump voters, remembering that many of them voted for Obama. You know, when Dr. King made his great speech in 1965, he said, essentially, the reason that

poor whites in the South are racist is they've been distracted away from their true economic interests. And that was said in a spirit of optimism that they could be brought back to attend to their true economic interests. So I think the Democratic Party, if they attend to the economic interests, which they haven't done so well for the last 20 years, could lure back a lot of people who voted for Trump. And it's not useful to say those people are just racist, forget about it. I think people have good and bad in them. Nick, in Closick, I can't help but ask, we've been discussing, is there Trumpism after Trump? What is for Trump after this? What is the afterlife of Donald Trump, if in fact, he loses

this election? Wow. Well, every morning and every night I walk my dog and I talk to my neighbors. Not one believes that Trump will voluntarily leave office. So that's one scenario

is he will declare martial law and just remain our president for the rest of his natural life. Would you see as a reasonable scenario? Do you think it's possible? No. I hope it's not possible and I don't think it's...

When I argue with these people, I say, you know, the folks who have brought that off, they have, like, for instance, the uniformed military on their side, like Cece in Egypt. And he doesn't seem to have that. So I guess what he would do is he seems not to be a shy retiring type and isn't going to, you know, go home and paint oil paintings of his feet like George W. Bush has. and he'll find a way to remain in the spotlight, maybe dream of a restoration of Trumpism. I can't imagine we've seen the last of him. Nicholas Lemon, thank you so much.

Thank you. Nicholas Lemon is a professor of journalism at Columbia and a staff writer for many years at The New Yorker. And you can find his essay about the Republican Party after Trump at New Yorker.com. This is The New Yorker Radio. video hour, more to come. Terry.

Hello, how are you? I was trying to think last night if there's a subject on earth that I know less about than K-pop. Oh. You know, what's the, what's the band that's huge, huge, huge, huge. Okay, I've watched them, then I watched them sing some Beatles song to Paul McCle. K-pop is the pop music of Korea. And Carrie Batten, a music critic for the New Yorker, has been following its development.

And recently, K-pop has found a very solid place in the American mainstream. which is still unusual for bands from non-English-speaking countries. But it takes someone who's been listening to the music intently to tell us what's what. And Carrie Batten always knows what's what. Carrie, how did this all start? Has this been going on for decades and we just never noticed and then it exploded in the United States? So not exactly.

K-pop is one of the few genres where you can actually pinpoint its origin date, which is 1992. and it emerged after a kind of loosening of censorship laws in South Korea. But it wasn't until just a few years ago that K-pop really broke through in the West. I think most people for a long time, their primary association with K-pop was Sy's Gangnam Style. Do you remember that song? I do. I do. Yes, of course. How could you forget it?

That was the earworm of the moment. That was the earworm of the moment. And I think it has something like 500 billion views or something. And so for several years, and that was kind of like a fluke. It was more of a gimmicky, gimmicky song. And I mean, since then it's evolved quite a bit. You fast forward a few years. And today you can't really talk about K-pop in the United States without talking about

BTS, which is, you know, one of the biggest groups in the world, full stop. And they are a seven-man boy band in, in some. Korea. And if you look at the last couple of years in BTS's career, all you see are all of these milestones that they've achieved in America. You know, they reach the top of the Billboard 100s numerous times. They were at the top of the Billboard 200 album chart. One of the first Korean acts to win an American music award, one of the first Korean acts to appear at the Grammys, all sorts of things. How did they take off here? Why did they take off here? So I think they took off here because I think a lot of it is algorithmic.

Like I think, you know, once something starts to take off on YouTube, then it's going to get served to more and more people who might be interested in it. And a lot of people think that they have. They're kind of an overnight success. But for a long time, they struggled to make inroads in the American market. And it wasn't, they have this manager and their labelhead whose nickname is Hitman Bang. And he owns one of the biggest record labels in South Korea. and what he did was he really studied the American market

and he kind of took a lot of steps to tailor their music to American pop audiences. And BTS was one of the groups that really embraced social media early on. So, you know, publishing YouTube vlogs, going on Instagram, going on Twitter, this kind of thing that a lot of groups in Korea weren't doing at the time. I have to admit maybe the first time I saw BTS and it's quite possibly the most recent and last, was when they appeared on Saturday Night Live.

Ladies and gentlemen, BTS. Yeah, so this happened last year, and it was the first time that a Korean Pop Act appeared on SNL where they did their hit single called Boy With Love. Their stage presentation is pretty amazing. I mean, if it reminds me of anything, it's not Michael Jackson, but of the Jackson Five in some way. Yeah, you can certainly see that,

especially with how intensely choreographed they are. and how rehearsed they are. And they've also kind of carved out personas for each one of them, sort of in the same way that the Jackson Five might have. One thing that is also interesting about K-pop boy bands is they're sort of interest in presenting as androgynous. Male K-pop stars wear makeup and they dye their hair

and they're sort of flamboyant in their own way. And that's something that definitely distinguishes K-pop from a lot of other genres of them. music. So there's a documentary on Netflix about a band called Black Pink. What's that all about? Tell us. Yeah. So another big South Korean group right now is called Black Pink, and they are a girl group. They just put out their sort of biggest major album to date, and it's called The Album. And right now, the big lead single off of that record is called Ice Cream, and it's a collaboration with Selena Gomez. You know, it's very polished, very theatrical, very highly produced. Everybody's kind of

having fun in the summer, wearing ridiculous outfits and being very girlish and eating ice cream. Carrie, who are the big American acts who have kind of collaborated with K-pop acts in order to expand their bass and to experiment musically? So in addition to Selena Gomez, there's also a feature with Cardi B on a song called Betjuana on the album. And the fact that you have Selena Gomez and Cardi B on this record sort of speaks to how big Black Pink is and also how willing these days American pop stars are to collaborate with South Korean artists. You're seeing collaborations all over the place now. You see Housie with BTS, French Montana with Monsta X. You saw Lil Nas X and Old Town Road doing a remix with BTS. It kind of runs the gamut. Who else you're listening to in the

K-pop realm? So one group I'm really interested in is another South Korean a K-pop all-girl group called Itsy. And there are five of them. And one of their hit songs right now is called Wannaby. And what I really like about W wannabe is that it's very emblematic of K-pop styles. Because I think I read a statistic saying that in the average K-pop song, there are eight to ten melody changes, which is absolutely crazy. Usually it's only three or four in an American pop song.

And part of what makes K-pop so fun is that, you know, there are often several songs. in one song. It goes from EDM to rap rock to hip hop to slow balladry all in the span of a couple of minutes. And this song really symbolizes that. It's really interesting this summer around the time of the protests following the killing of George Floyd. I remember reading about how K-pop fans were mobilizing on Twitter in support of the protests. Can you explain that phenomenon? Right. Yeah, you're seeing K-pop fans popping up in unexpected places this summer. They've kind of taken an activist. spent to their online presence. And when all of the, you know, the George Floyd protests were

happening in early June, what K-pop fans did was they flooded specific hashtags like the White Lives Matter hashtag. And if you clicked on one of these hashtags like hashtag White Lives Matter, what you would see was a kind of endless sea of K-pop dance videos, which was obviously very disorienting to anybody, anybody engaging in that content in a kind of political way. Another thing you've probably heard a lot about this summer was the K-pop fans kind of banding together and signing up for tickets to a Trump rally that happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And basically what they did was they flooded the ticket signups so that the number of attendees would be kind of grossly overstated.

And what you're seeing here is the way. that K-pop fans have kind of learned to gamify their online fandom. They know that they have strength in numbers. They know that they have this intensity and what they kind of do is rally together and sort of see how they can channel

their power online towards a variety of different causes or outcomes. Do you think it's a phenomenon with legs, particularly in this country? I do want to say that I think that this idea of K-pop being

huge in the U.S. is a bit overstated. One thing about K-pop in the U.S. is it doesn't get any radio play on terrestrial radio. It's all streaming. So it doesn't have the kind of household resonance that a lot of... How much does terrestrial radio matter any longer for the music business? I think it still matters. Maybe it doesn't matter technically. I think it is still a bellwether. And I think that you're seeing a lot of the labels in Korea kind of struggle to make it further. And it does kind of go back to COVID because arena shows is one of the biggest outlets for K-pop acts to infiltrate the U.S. market. You see them in stadiums all over the place. And so without that option, that could be a little bit difficult to keep making inroads. But I

certainly think that the algorithms online have, K-pop has warmed its way into all of them. And so it's not going, you're going to be seeing it online for quite a lot of. long time to come. Well, I've got my YouTube work cut out for me. Carrie, thanks so much. Thank you. Carrie Batten is a staff writer, and she covers music and much more. I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. Hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron.

Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Liannon Corby, Calli Leah, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Monfay Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.