Disruptive. That’s a good word to describe Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, and to describe the sometimes ramshackle Republican National Convention his campaign more or less superintended in Cleveland this past week.
Apple disrupted the music industry, Uber disrupted the taxi cartels, Amazon disrupted the megabookstores. Global competition has been disrupting American manufacturing for decades. The inundation of low-skill immigrants unintentionally produced by the 1965 immigration act has disrupted many communities and big metro areas.
Over history America has mostly been built by disruption. Certainly the Loyalists in the American Revolution thought so. So did the farmers who cheered for William Jennings Bryan’s free silver as industrialization was disrupting the farm economy.
The New Deal was disruptive. So was World War II. As Yuval Levin points out in his book The Fractured Republic, both the political Left and political Right see the two post-WW2 decades as normal, with high family formation, low crime, strong faith in institutions, relatively smooth economic growth.
But that period was the exception, not the rule. Postwar America was massively disrupted by the Kennedy and King assassinations, high crime, urban riots and antiwar protests.
That’s the point in time when Donald Trump began using his father’s political connections to move his Brooklyn/Queens real estate business to Manhattan and beyond. And to stamp his last name on casinos, hotels, a reality TV show.
When Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower 13 months ago and announced his candidacy, almost no commentator took his chances seriously except the Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams.
The other 16 Republicans largely represented a perhaps stale party consensus: Conservative on cultural issues, for tax cuts, backing military interventions and free trade. Trump was different: perfunctory on cultural issues, against the Iraq war, corrosively critical of trade agreements and illegal immigration.
Trump’s victory in the Republican race owes much to $2 billion or so of free media coverage and to his 16 rivals’ unwillingness to risk attacks that might recoil against them. His dystopian picture of America and the world spinning out of control gained credibility after terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and Paris, Orlando and Nice, and even more so after recent mass murders of police officers. This was the centerpiece of his acceptance speech in Cleveland.
Trump’s message and persona appealed especially to non-college-graduates and older voters. There’s also an ethnic angle. Groups with high degrees of social connectedness and respect for order — Mormons, Dutch- and German-Americans — were largely immune from his appeal. He connects far better with people who lack such ties — “people who work hard but no longer have a voice,” he called them Thursday night, so “the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves.”
Ethnic groups who respond positively to raucous disruptive appeals rallied to Trump — Scots-Irish along the Appalachian spine from western Pennsylvania to northern Alabama, and Italian-Americans, half of whom live within 100 miles of New York City. If you draw a map of counties where Trump topped 50 percent by May 4, the great bulk of them are along that diagonal and within that circle.
For 20 years, American elections have looked like battles between two roughly equal-sized armies in a culture war, with close results every election year. It’s easy to predict how 40 states will vote, much harder to predict who will win.
Donald Trump may well disrupt these patterns too. Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes seem within his range, as well as Ohio’s 16 and Florida’s 29 — which together would have made Mitt Romney president. He seems less competitive in states with younger, more educated populations like Colorado (9), Virginia (13). Heavily German-American Wisconsin (10) seems hostile; low-social-connectedness Nevada (6) rather friendly.
In Cleveland, Trump’s managers have disrupted the rules in place for the last 30 years: Only supporters speak, sessions end promptly at 11 p.m., don’t visibly crush dissent, vet speeches carefully. Monday saw a rules rebellion squashed. Tuesday featured a media kerfuffle over a bit of anodyne plagiarism. Wednesday saw Ted Cruz’s ringing non-endorsement speech booed off the stage.
All that looked ragged. But there’s another way of looking at a campaign which has not gone conventional wisdom’s way. Disorder and disarray work against the party in power. Terrorist attacks and police shootings are not what Americans expected in the Obama years. Neither are examples of government incompetence from VA hospitals to Benghazi.
Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, speaking minutes before Trump, described the “staggering decline” of governmental research and software. Maybe some disruption from a candidate who says he has “no tolerance for government incompetence” is in order.
