Donald Trump’s remarkable rise in the Republican Primary has been attributed to everything from racism to reality television. The billionaire’s “silent majority” however could be reflecting trends from the U.K. where United Kingdom Independence Party leader Nigel Farage is leading a similar revolt with the “people’s army.”
Farage became leader of UKIP in 2010 campaigning on reduce legal immigration, stay out of foreign wars like Iraq, and leaving the European Union.
The mainstream media quickly laughed off Farage as unserious, radical, and even a racist. Nonetheless the people disagreed and UKIP won the 2014 European Parliament Election for the first time in the party’s history, capturing 28 percent of the nation’s vote.
Campaigning as a nationalist allowed Farage to win over a broad coalition of Conservatives, Labor, and Liberal Democrats.
That has been true among nationalist parties in most of Europe: the Front National in France, Party for Freedom in The Netherlands, The Freedom Party of Austria, Danish People’s Party in Denmark, Finns Party in Finland, Law and Justice Party in Poland, Sweden Democrats in Sweden, and the Swiss People’s Party in Switzerland.
All these are fusion parties of left and right interests, protecting the welfare state while promoting lower taxes, national borders, lower immigration levels, and taking on the threat of Islamists.
Enter Trump, a candidate who campaigns on similar platforms of promoting America first, nationalist, protectionist, and patriotic.
The billionaire defends Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback,” Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” and “Reaganomics.”
Trump understood that the Republican Party’s fusion of Evangelical moralism, Neoconservative foreign policy, and libertarian economics was a fragile and breakable coalition.
Farage like Trump has almost an uncanny ability to work the media, channeling anger and following it with a joke and an insult to the establishment.
In the 2015 UK general election, UKIP got trounced by the mainstream Conservative Party 37 to 13 percent. Nonetheless, it was the highest results of right wing parties since 1959.
Trump may be able to copy similar success, able to appeal to groups that don’t traditionally vote Republican. As writer Bret Easton Ellis said on Twitter, he was at a dinner in the gay neighborhood of West Hollywood, and a majority of the table was supporting the billionaire.
The billionaire would put an end to Reagan’s “three-legged stool” and create a new coalition that demands we put Americans over ideology.
