Is Donald Trump Pat Buchanan redux? Sure, Buchanan is outwardly pious, while Trump is . . . well, Trump. (Nobody ever doubted Buchanan’s anti-abortion bona fides, for example.) And while Buchanan, whatever you make of his politics, is undeniably a serious intellectual, Trump . . . well, at the very least, he did go to an Ivy League school!
That said, Trump’s current campaign and Buchanan’s in 1992 and 1996 have some deep similarities. Both are motivated by economic nationalism and hostility to immigration, illegal and otherwise.
So what accounts for Trump’s doing better than Buchanan ever did? The New York construction magnate is polling around 40 percent nationally, after all, whereas Buchanan won about 20 percent, nationally, in his two 1990s runs.
Sure, Trump is an unusually charismatic. And he has a built-in fan base from The Apprentice that Buchanan’s regular appearances on Crossfire hardly match.
But there’s another factor at play, I think: Over the quarter century that has passed since Buchanan’s first presidential run, the United States has become much more deeply saturated by immigrants. For that reason, opposition to immigration has much more salience, nationwide, than it did in Buchanan’s day.
I’m just not talking about places like Los Angeles, New York, or south Texas, which have traditionally had large immigrant populations. Consider just a few states. In 1990, 1.6 percent of Iowa residents were foreign-born. By 2013, the last year for which data are available, that percentage had trebled, to nearly 4.8 percent. Over the same period, North Carolina’s foreign-born population went from 1.7 percent to 7.6 percent. For Georgia, 2.7 percent to 9.7 percent. And Colorado, from 4.3 to 9.5 percent. (All stats are from the Migration Policy Institute.)
It seems that, the more immigrants move to the United States, the more hostility to their presence plays at the ballot box. That partially explains Trump’s rise. And, more profoundly, it raises questions about how to maintain peace and stability in an increasingly pluralistic society.
