Who Is To Blame For Donald Trump?

Let's play the blame game!!!

(Credit: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images)

(Credit: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images)

This video may autoplay on your system so hit mute quick if you don’t want to hear a moderator welcoming an audience.

It’s a testament to a flagging campaign when thought leaders from your own party gather to hold a debate on who they should blame for your very existence. Donald Trump may be closing some of the gap in this horse race, but he’s still a long shot, and the conservative intelligentsia think it’s high time to start pointing fingers. Who are we to doubt them?

Like Saturn, the Reagan Revolution is eating its children, and it’s a spectacle to behold.

That’s what transpired last night when Intelligence Squared U.S. hosted its latest debate. T.P. Carney and Ben Domenech argued that Donald Trump is the natural result of a Republican party elite that perennially promises working-class whites the world and is shocked when those people stop trusting the party elites. On the other side, Jennifer Rubin and Bret Stephens argued that the Trump voters themselves are to blame.

Even though my colleague Elie Mystal may share the “blame ourselves” sympathies of those against the motion, the elite blamers won the day with a dominant evisceration of the opposition.

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Bret Stephens addresses the audience.

Bret Stephens addresses the audience.

Things go off the rails for Rubin and Stephens from the jump. Recasting the “elites” as, bizarrely, not the people in charge of Washington and the media, but rather the audience of New York professionals, they attempted to rest their whole case on the sentiment “do you blame yourselves?”

It would be a silly definitional quibble if winning that claim wasn’t a prerequisite underlying every single argument they would make. They blamed demagogues (“with names like ‘Sean’ or ‘Rush'”) for stirring up the alt right. Aren’t those multimillionaire commentators the media elite? No, not if we change the definition of elite! They blamed the voters themselves for being racist and sexist birthers. Didn’t Republican party elites successfully harness — and fail to denounce — these forces through coy asides for decades? No, not if we change the definition of elite!

Carney and Domenech were having none of it. Without saying it outright — the inevitable blinders of putting conservatives on all sides of this question — they argued that the Republican Party built its recent successes upon fanning the insecurities of the working-class whites that would become the Reagan Democrats and then failing to deliver on the wild promises it made. Rubin and Stephens thought, for some reason, that their best argument — they explicitly flagged it as such — was that Trump’s failure to reach working-class minorities proved his rise couldn’t be related to class, which did nothing to the precise argument that the Republican elite built this phenomenon by sticking specifically white working-class people in the eye.

It’s too bad they put so much faith on that flimsy claim, because in reality, their best argument was recent polling showing that Trump supporters were not economically struggling workers rising up, but middle-class voters making roughly $72K/year. And yet, Domenech stifled this argument with another statistical finding: it’s not the economic security of the supporter, but their proximity to economic anxiety. In other words, it’s the person who knows someone who lost their job, has kids on opioids, or is struggling to get decent care at the VA. Indeed, taken to its logical conclusion — which the proponents didn’t pursue — this flipped the opposition’s effort to recast elites as random New Yorkers on its head. Even if one were to accept that definition of the term, the bubble those people live in, avoiding contact with the economically insecure, is feeding institutional distrust among those out there in, to hijack a term misapplied by the right, “real America.” After this exchange, the best potential indictment of the affirmative’s narrative never came up again.

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And so it was that the audience awarded Carney and Domenech a deserved victory.

Carney and Domenech may have performed ably throughout the evening, but it was Jennifer Rubin’s final speech that inadvertently encapsulated everything broken about the right-wing worldview that has made the rise of Donald Trump an inevitability. Staring a rhetorical beatdown in the face, Rubin argued not that her opponents misstated key facts, but that they sounded like “Bernie Sanders or Noam Chomsky.” Substance be damned when there’s a chance to call your opponent a commie! Or low energy. Or little. That’s the whole playbook in a nutshell, folks.

And these media elites wonder why the people on the other end of their megaphone might get simple, reductionist ideas…

Earlier: We Officially Have A One Party System In America, And Have Only Ourselves To Blame


Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.