It’s the elite solidarity thesis
A theory of Trump as “status traitor," the lesser of two elites
Hating on elites is as American as apple pie. There’s a case to be made that populism, not liberalism, built the foundations of the republic. After all, the Constitution begins with a declaration of populist legitimacy: “We the people.”
If we can conceive of the Boston Tea Party as a revolt against out-of-touch elite governance by the British Crown, then I think it’s also fair to think of the political discontinuities of the last fifteen years — “change” elections took place in 2008, 2016, 2020, and now 2024 — as similar populist rejections of the ruling class.1 As I laid out in my last post, wealth inequality has worsened over the past 35 years of economic management across six different administrations of the same two political parties.
Voters, then, have pretty good reason to hate those making the decisions at the top. The thing is, elections often come down to a choice between the lesser of two elites.
Eisenhower over the “egghead” Stevenson in 1952. Clinton over the tony Bush I in 1992. “Guy you’d like to have a beer with” Bush II over Gore in 2000. Obama over the consulting firm incarnate Romney in 2012. And of course Trump over the hubristic Clinton in 2016.
But why was Trump, literal ex-president and Ivy League billionaire, once again able to take on the mantle of the outsider and common man, while Harris, who took pains to highlight her middle-class upbringing as the child of immigrants, was not?
Racism, sexism, and xenophobia are surely a major part of the answer. Many of the most successful populists are strongmen who appeal to nativism and nostalgia to claim a narrow band of the populace as the legitimate voice of “the people.”2
But I think there’s something else going on, too. Many people, hurting from years of inflated prices, wanted change. Just a couple months before Election Day, two in three registered voters reported that the nation was not on the right track. Trump offered another shock to the system. Harris offered more of the same.
The cardinal sin of the Harris campaign, in my mind, is her response to what she’d do differently from Biden: “not a thing comes to mind.” The Republicans couldn’t believe their luck. They cut an ad with the line, and JD Vance suggested it should be her campaign slogan. It made Harris look out of touch, much like Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment in 2016.
I think this unwillingness to break with Biden, even after dumping him from the ticket, says a lot about the culture of elites and the state of the Democratic Party. To elites, appearance is everything. Don’t worry, we got this. Wielding power is embarrassing. Can’t you just see we know what’s best? Rocking the boat endangers your future job prospects. We don’t do things that way.
This is a culture of deference to perceived authority, of valuing credentialed expertise, of smiling and nodding because you never know who your next boss is going to be. It is, in many ways, a culture of conformity that masks the power struggle going on beneath the surface. To those on the outside of these cultural norms, it codes as inauthentic, self-interest posing as sanctimony. In a word, phony.
Trump calls this the swamp. I’m going to call it elite solidarity.
Trump broke with elite consensus — sometimes rhetorically and sometimes substantively — and with elite etiquette often enough to signal that he was not one of them, the elites, the ruling class. For her part, Harris could never effectively escape elite solidarity, in part because she is serving as the incumbent vice president and in part because etiquette is the currency of elite liberals. Saying that Biden (her boss!) had not done enough to support working people would have been, well, gauche.
My working hypothesis is that elites are defined by non-elites as hoarders of power, wealth, and influence. They will do anything to advance their position, including lie and cheat. They will make it harder for others to get ahead by putting up roadblocks, bureaucratic or cultural, that work to improve their own position. Then, they will claim moral superiority, looking down on everyone else for not knowing how to play the game.
The best example of elite solidarity in recent memory is the disastrous decision of Bidenworld to deny the president’s obvious decline. The emperor had no clothes; the president only had his marbles between 10am and 4pm. When, back in February, a special counsel suggested that Biden was too old and his memory too poor to withstand a trial about mishandling classified documents, Bidenworld closed ranks around the president. The accusations were “gratuitous,” “highly prejudicial,” a form of “investigative excess.”3
This was elite solidarity in action. Bidenworld could have used this moment to nudge the president off the stage. Instead, they battened down the hatches. Even the media’s coverage of Biden’s age constitutes some form of elite solidarity. Reporters need to maintain relationships with sources; editors need to keep eyeballs on their stories.
It was Ezra Klein who bucked elite solidarity in February and cracked open the door in Democratic circles to Biden stepping aside. I remember this moment because I thought a) it was quite brave to go up against the elite consensus and b) it might amount to something because Democrats love Ezra Klein! I suspect he ended up getting a lot of shit for not toeing the party line, however, because a month later, he walked back the suggestion that Biden was too old for the job.4
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it was Nancy Pelosi, one of the few Democrats who really seems to understand how to wield power in Washington, who signaled to the press and the public that Biden should step aside. It was a game of cloaks and daggers. What she actually said was, “We're all encouraging him to make that decision [to step aside or not] because time is running short,” which of course was a flat refusal to acknowledge that Biden already had publicly stated he was determined to stay in. Pelosi outmaneuvered the president by insisting that he take a bit more time to think about it. Because of her own position and power, Pelosi gave other Democrats permission to add to the pressure. Biden soon acquiesced.
But notice how Pelosi had to wield the knife and the smile. Elite solidarity really is Omertà. Biden was allowed to save face while Gavin Newsom jockeyed for position in 2028 by saying “you don’t turn your back on the president.” These power plays, the non-statements, the backstabbing is a culture that elite insiders have to navigate. To outsiders, it simply looks like lying and hypocrisy.
If the campaign to remove Biden became cutthroat behind the scenes while maintaining a veneer of politesse, Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party was nothing but hostile. The entire premise of his 2016 primary campaign was taking a sledgehammer to the elite solidarity crafted by the highest tiers of the party apparatus. The Iraq War? “A big fat mistake.” John McCain? “Loser.” The Bush administration? “They lied.” I still remember where I was watching the first Republican primary debate in 2016, because it was equal parts exhilarating and discomfiting to witness an elite political establishment get humiliated on live television. The spectacle rewrote the rules of elite conservative consensus in real time. “Liddle Marco” is now the Secretary of State-in-waiting.5
It’s ironic to talk about trust in relation to Donald Trump, a man who parted ways with the reality based community a long time ago. But breaking elite solidarity is exactly why his voters trust him, despite…everything. When Harris distanced herself from positions she took only a few years ago and hugged the president whose staff had been actively deceiving the American people, she acted like a member of the elite — a self-interested, hypocritical politician.
Because Trump is eager to throw (at least a portion of) the elite under the bus, he proves he’s not one of them. He’s a traitor to his status. He might be a liar, but at least he’s no phony.
And there’s reason to believe we shouldn’t actually conceive of the Tea Party as a populist revolt in the name of freedom but as the action of a cartel looking to maintain its pricing power. I encountered this argument for the first time in Chris Hayes’ 2017 book A Colony in a Nation, where he makes the case that the “Destruction of the Tea” was not a protest against higher taxes in the vein of “no taxation without representation,” but a protest against a lower tariff set by the Crown that undercut the price of smuggled tea. The Sons of Liberty were the smugglers!
You heard echoes of this sentiment in post-mortems of the 2016 election. Back then, the rural, white working class took on a mythic status as the “real” America that liberals had lost touch with, as if immigrants, city dwellers, or the black working class did not also have a claim to America.
These lawyerly quotes deny, not the content of the special counsel’s claim, but its relevance for the report. A non-denial denial?
To be fair, Biden’s State of the Union speech was not a disaster, which quieted his critics until the debate against Trump in June.
Elite solidarity among the Republicans now functions in Trump’s favor. I love this video of Rubio from 2016 in which he says it’s “getting harder everyday” to commit to voting for the Republican nominee. You can see his exhaustion as he struggles to adjust to the new reality of fealty to Trump, forever. Obviously, he made the adjustment.