Wolff: The rise of rebel politicians
What is even more upset than politics itself is our idea of what a politician is. Donald Trump not only lacks political coherence but, too, a political organization, and yet, ever dismissed by political professionals, he rises again — once again competitive in the polls. In the United Kingdom, defying all professional political expectations, Brexit passed because Boris Johnson, for many years among the most popular political figures in Britain, supported it. Yet Johnson, never taken seriously by other politicians, was almost immediately pushed out of the race for prime minister by the professional political class.
Other than the vague designation of “populist,” there is really no historical equivalent in a stable democracy for the level of success achieved by such outré characters. Indeed, their main platform and animating idea is to run against the very idea of what we think a politician is. Alarmingly, this has intersected with strains of racism and nationalism and a wide sense of political exclusion that the political class has been in denial about or which it thought it could manage — outsiders aligning with outsiders.
The belief among the politically knowledgeable is that the final and most imposing bulwark against a Trump vote is that he so defies the civics-class version of a politician that, as the polls qualify it, he just isn’t judged “prepared” to be president. How could he be? Similarly, Johnson’s colleagues regularly rate him a “joke” and a “buffoon.” This view of professional ineligibility persists even though both have upended their nation’s political assumptions and come within reach of the ultimate political job.
Their detractors try to square the ad hominem case against them as a case too about their policy positions. That is, other than theatrical and symbolic gestures, they have no actual policy positions. Trump isn’t a real Republican, and Johnson is accused of secretly hoping Brexit wouldn’t win. They are both, in the new conventional wisdom, “post-truth” politician — meaning not that other politicians are truthful, but that theirs is something less, in British journalist Toby Young’s description, than “grown-up debate.” But outside of media and political class circles, this has mostly been an unsuccessful critique, because it merely describes what they obviously are. That’s their appeal, talking in a language that’s foreign to, contemptuous of and ever ridiculing traditional political discourse. They are running against the usual political language, the deadest kind of language there is.
The Trump campaign, in the professional view, has been in disarray as it tries to transition Trump from primary fighter to presidential figure, with Trump persisting, even as his still-thin campaign apparatus tries to restrain him, in making his trademark garrulous and obnoxious statements. And yet, a man who by sophisticated political logic could theoretically lose all 50 states is now even in the polls with that most professional of candidates, Hillary Clinton.
Johnson, who is perhaps most famous for his gaffes, his helpless and injudicious asides, his comical if not slapstick gestures, and his long, public trail of sexual embarrassments, nevertheless helped inspire a famously quiescent British electorate to do what no one — least of all the sitting prime minister, who, last week, lost his job because of it — thought it would.
It is, obviously, the professionals who keep getting it wrong. Their mistake, on its most basic level, is just to reject people who are not professionals — that is, people not like them — and to assume that everyone else at some logical point will reject these rouges, too.
The professional political class — from President Obama to suddenly voluble Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to leading members of his own party to every respectable pundit — is intent on doing its best to keep Trump from being president. And chances are, it probably will. And likely will learn nothing from, indeed are unable to even comprehend, the evident desire on the part of something close to a majority to have someone to vote for who does not look like, talk like, think like, act like them.
In the U.K., after the successful Brexit vote and the announcement by Prime Minister David Cameron that he would resign, Johnson, the former London mayor, leader of the Brexit campaign and darling of the conservative rank and file, was the presumptive leader of his party — a patent absurdity to the British professional political class. Within hours after the vote, following backroom shenanigans and many rumors of many versions of many threats issued to him, Johnson mysteriously bowed out.
The alternative in both the U.S. and U.K. to the two least professional politicians ever to achieve such high standing, is two of the most professional politicians. Theresa May, the former Home secretary who became Britain’s prime minister last week, is a diligent party animal and classic waiting-in-the-wings default candidate. Hillary Clinton has for the last generation been the face of dogged political ambition, Machiavellian tactics and discipline, careful policy proscriptions and lack of genuine expression.
The professional political class obviously protects itself. But perhaps even more basic than that, it can’t imagine anything outside itself. What they are, they believe, is what politics is. We look alike, we talk alike, we walk alike. The ultimate measure of the angry dissatisfaction with those constraints and that dullness is that it has produced a figure as polar opposite and as unlikely as Donald Trump.
In the U.K., where in the past few weeks political assumptions and careers have been discarded on an hourly basis, Boris Johnson, having risen and fallen, rose again the other day as foreign secretary, where as the once and future hope of a politician beyond the usual, he will now likely stupefy the global political class.