slate | To understand the rise of Donald Trump, you’d do well not to fixate
on the fact that he’s running under the Republican banner. During
Thursday night’s Fox News debate, Trump made it clear that failing to
secure the GOP nomination wouldn’t stop him from exploring an
independent candidacy. And honestly, he’d be crazy not to. Trump is very
far from a Republican regular. He represents an entirely different
phenomenon, one that bears little resemblance to garden-variety American
conservatism. That’s why Republicans shouldn’t fool themselves into
believing that one lackluster debate performance will send him packing.
Go to almost any European democracy and you will find that the
parties of the center-right and center-left that have dominated the
political scene since the Second World War are losing ground to new
political movements. What these movements have in common is that they
manage to blend populism and nationalism into a potent
anti-establishment brew. One of the first political figures to perfect
this brand of politics was the very Trumpian Silvio Berlusconi, the
Italian media tycoon who rose to power as part of a coalition of
right-of-center parties in the mid-1990s, and who has been in and out of
power ever since, dodging corruption charges and worse all the while.
More recently, the miserable state of Europe’s economies has fueled the
rise of dozens of other parties. Britain’s Labour Party has been
devastated by the rise not only of the leftist Scottish National Party,
but also by UKIP, a movement of the right that has been growing at
Labour’s expense by campaigning against mass immigration, and by largely
abandoning what had been its more libertarian line on the welfare
state. UKIP’s leader, Nigel Farage, has a penchant for bombast that
endears him his working-class base, which might sound familiar to you.
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