Depicted by masters of American literature from Herman Melville to Mark Twain to Donald Westlake, cropping up in real life in each epoch of our great hustling and bustling and grasping commercial republic, the confidence man is a primordial American type. Many accounts treat him with some affection, as an understandable (if deformed and ultimately deplorable) product of the boredom and excesses of complacent bourgeois life, a figure who livens up our often dreary and earnest landscape. Vulgarian and climber, braggart and charlatan, he tends to be portrayed as pretty harmless in the big scheme of things, someone who does limited damage to the republic as a whole—though of course he can impoverish individuals and damage communities that get in his way. Matt Labash’s 1999 portrayal of Donald Trump in this magazine (with the apt headline “A Chump on the Stump”) fits into this genre of portraits that combine disdain and affection for their colorful subjects.
But when the time for comedy or irony or even philosophy is over, when things that matter hang in the balance, the con man is supposed to fail. Even if he doesn’t fail in the narrow sense—even if he makes a lot of money, pulls off scams and stays a step ahead of the law, and watches his children become respectable pillars of the community—he isn’t supposed to succeed in upending our politics or endangering our future. To quote Winston Churchill, who had a rich appreciation for comedy and irony and even philosophy: “Politics is not a game. It is an earnest business.”
The good news is the confidence man hasn’t generally succeeded here. The Founders’ institutions, the Tocquevillean mores, the religious traditions, and the common sense of the people have on the whole preserved and protected our political health. We have usually succeeded in distinguishing reality from reality show. We have most often understood that governing isn’t branding. Our presidents have been a mixed lot, but no true tin-pot Caesar has yet occupied the Oval Office.
So we have had no periods of Latin American-style banana republic to besmirch our republic’s annals. We have on the whole managed not to permit European-style waves of populism wholly to overwhelm our constitutional forms. We have not allowed the cheap nationalism of lesser countries to supplant our robust patriotism. All in all, the United States of America has been an exceptional nation.
Until now? Is Rush Limbaugh right, that “Nationalism and populism have overtaken conservatism in terms of appeal”? And is he right that American conservatives have nothing to do in response but step aside and usher in their European and Latin American-style successors? Are the politics of Latin America and Europe to be our new normal? Are today’s conservatives supposed to appease and make their peace with such politics? Is the task of today’s American conservatism to normalize Trump and Trumpism?
Surely not.
