As Democrats continue to deconstruct the root causes of their recent defeat and attempt to regroup for next year’s midterm elections, they might want to consider a new factor in American politics: the seductive power of a movement compared to a boring old party.
On the surface, the 60th American presidential election was the usual two-way contest between the Democratic and Republican parties. But, as Democrats tried their best to run as normal and competent as they could despite Biden’s ill-timed withdrawal, Trump had re-branded and re-organized the Republican Party as a vessel of his MAGA movement.
A movement is dynamic. Its number-one goal is building excitement and a sense of belonging.
A party strives for constancy. It represents a set of principles through thick and thin.
All things being equal, a movement beats a party.
“The difference between parties and movements is simple,” the progressive pundit David Sirota wrote back in 2009. “Parties are loyal to their own power regardless of policy agenda. Movements are loyal to their own policy agenda regardless of which party champions it.” Democrats who were skeptical of military interventionism under Bush embraced it under Biden yet remained Democrats; the abortion-rights movement would vote Republican if the GOP were to come out as firmly pro-choice.
Donald Trump has scrambled Sirota’s formulation.
Trump has built a highly-personalized movement detached from any discrete policy prescription. Rather than remain independent of party politics, his MAGA movement seized control of the Republican Party. Despite having achieved a sweeping victory, MAGA continues to act like an outsider insurgent movement.
Personality is everything. The dauphin J.D. Vance notwithstanding, it is impossible to imagine the MAGA movement without Trump. While I don’t give much credence to arguments that the president is a Nazi-in-waiting, there is an echo of the Führer Principle that gave the force of law to anything Adolf Hitler said. MAGA Trumpism is anything that Trump says at any given time.
At first glance at the man on the golden escalator in 2015, this highly individuated politics seems ill-fated. Trumpism is riddled with internal contradictions and existential hypocrisies. Trump’s habit of reversing himself, as he did recently by threatening Russia only to turn around and embrace it after a call to Putin seems destined, by traditional political standards, to turn off supporters who care about those issues. So does the conflict between his personal and political lives; surely evangelicals will turn against a crude serial adulterer who screws porn stars and doesn’t appear to have ever darkened the door of a church in session.
People who evaluate Trump by traditional metrics fail to understand that everything has changed. For a party, Trump’s inconsistences and flipflopping changing his mind 180° would be weaknesses to overcome or explain away. Not so for a movement. First and foremost, a movement moves. Where and how it moves is beside the point.
A movement is entertaining. Think about Trump and his wild and crazy rants, not as appalling or racist but as unpredictable—and thus interesting. Think about Trump supporters and their giant flags, their sense of community.
Trump kept holding rallies throughout his first term—a party doesn’t do that. A movement does. A party doesn’t stick with an individual politician through thick and thin, as Trump supporters did through his legal troubles. A movement does. It has to, because it’s all about one man.
If there is a 20th century authoritarian parallel to Trump, I have argued before, it is not the totalitarianism of Hitler but the culturally-centered rule of Mussolini. As the Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco, who grew up under Italian fascism, noted, “Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy.” Mussolini, who started out as a socialist journalist, came to believe that people were drawn to action—any action—for its own sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection,” Eco wrote in an influential essay about fascism in 1995. “Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
Writing at Salon, Chauncey DeVega complains: “President Trump and his MAGA Republicans and their forces are smashing American democracy, the Constitution, the rule of law, the institutions and norms. Trump has enacted over 50 executive orders since Jan. 20, the most in a president’s first 100 days in more than 40 years. Some of the most egregious ones are blatantly unconstitutional and violate current law.” DeVega blames the media for normalizing Trump and Democrats for not taking him seriously enough to convince voters.
What such mainstream analyses dismiss is is how soul-deadening the technocrats who run the West have been. Not only have they been unresponsive to people’s complaints about internationalism and declining living standards, they have been boring.
Democrats (and many Republicans) have repeatedly run on not promising anything. The only surprise is that they got away with it for so long.
Whether Trump is influenced by Mussolinian tactics or his acute political instincts rediscovered the potency of a “cult of action,” the United States was primed for the politician Trump became by the time he ran a third time in 2024—energetic, focused, retributive, imaginative—and stormed out of his inaugural ceremony with a blizzard of pardons, sweeping executive orders and bold diplomatic initiatives.
Asked if she would have done anything differently than Joe Biden during his presidency, Kamala Harris said: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”
And, four years earlier, Biden told a group of wealthy campaign donors that, were he to be elected, “Nothing would fundamentally change.” Turns out, he was truthful. Nearly a third of those who voted for him in 2020 didn’t turn out for Harris in 2024.
Liberal Democrats I talk to are depressed and disengaged in this, the first month of the second term of Trump. They’re also jealous. Why, they ask, won’t the Democrats run a candidate who campaigns and governs as aggressively as Trump is doing now?
As for those Democrats, the party faces a choice as it prepares to challenge MAGAism. It can reconstitute itself into something that looks and feels more like a movement, far less careful and far more energetic. Or it can keep going as a party that promises that nothing will ever fundamentally change.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
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Ted,
There’s a lot to unpack here. So much so that I think someone ought to try to come up with an equivalent of Euclid’s “Elements.” A clear, dispassionate enunciation of the axioms surrounding Trump’s political schema.
1. Don’t use words like “schema.” As with feminism, much of the power of an -ology or an -ism is weakened by the brittle, frigid need to cling to outmoded terminology “to look smart with the book larnin’ and such.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is a great example of this. She is making very important observations but she does it in a register so high in its density and technical jargon that it’s almost hateful in how inaccessible it is to the audience. Like how welfare offices insist that applicants permit themselves to be degraded, humiliated, and spoken down to, Spivak’s fundamental point — Western intellectuals tend to speak “for” the socially, politically, and economically minimized groups rather than give them a “room of their own” — is non-ironically, couched in such dense verbiage that none of the billions of people she’s mentioning as marginalized could ever hope to understand it. Trump uses — is there something below “simple”? — simplified language. He repeats himself frequently, he rambles, he jumps from point to point. He makes up facts and simply ignores any challenges.
2. The entire conceptual basis of the discussion has to be reinvented. Trump didn’t emerge out of the void. He didn’t spring fully formed from Zeus’ head. Trump is the natural end result of the system that has given us two parties — yes, TWO — that simply ignore incovenient truths. What’s that? The democrats are the good guys? Ask the dnc about that laptop that everyone said was fake, until they had to admit it wasn’t, but still pretend it’s not germane. We now have the system that results from 40 years of ignoring the middle class, elevating religion mania, and glomming on to whatever the dish-of-the-day irrelevant “social issue” is advanced by a mass media that is composed for the most part by preening idiots from both sides.
I’ve already gone too long. But you get the idea, I hope. Movements versus parties? We don’t really have either anymore. We haven’t the attention span. Go on, give me a movement that’s lasted more than about two months. We no longer have the ability, politically, because too many people have smartphones and 48-inch televisions and double Whoppers with cheese. If you try to start some sort of movement? The real rulers go to the hoary old playbook that John Steinbeck knew of when he wrote “The Grapes of Wrath” back in the 1930s. The playbook none of the “social warriors” know about because, um, like, reading is so, uh, um, oppressive.