The Liberalism of the MAGA Voters Explains Trump's Election. But Trump's Illiberal Presidency Could Become Fascist.

Leading up to the presidential election, commentators like Robert Kagan and Steven Hahn argued that if Donald Trump were elected, this would show the triumph of the illiberal tradition of American politics in defeating the American liberal tradition.  

I agree with Kagan and Hahn that the political history of America has been a continuing battle between liberalism and illiberalism.  But I see that the liberal tradition of American political thought--as expressed in the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence--has ultimately prevailed over the illiberal tradition.  And I see that even in the MAGA movement.  I agree that much of Trump's rhetoric has illiberal, and even fascist, overtones.  But most of the MAGA voters accept the liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence.  (I have written previously about the prominence of the Declaration of Independence in the rhetoric of the 2020 Republican National Convention.)

Here I use the term "liberalism" in the broad Lockean sense that includes both those who we call "liberals" in America and those we call "conservatives"--as opposed to the illiberal Left (such as the socialists), on the one extreme, and the illiberal Right (such as the fascists), on the other extreme. 

We can see the triumph of the American liberal tradition in Trump's election.  The American illiberal tradition defends the national cultural homogeneity of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America against subversion by both internal and external enemies.  (Consider the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, for example.)  But Trump's electoral victory depended on a pluralistic coalition of voters who were racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse.  As opposed to a WASPish illiberal America, it was a culturally heterogeneous liberal America that voted for Trump.  If Trump's presidency gives into his illiberal propensities, he will alienate these MAGA voters.

Steven Hahn doesn't understand this because in his book Illiberal America, he describes the MAGA voters this way:

". . . When supporters of Donald Trump channel his slogan 'Make America Great Again,' they are looking back to a world before a Black man could be elected president, before people of color demanded equal rights, before feminists battled against gender exclusions and inequalities, before sexual identities began to be redefined, before American Protestants had to confront growing spiritual diversity, before immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America began to threaten the majority status of white people, and before the federal government served as an enabler of all these developments.  The tradition they value is anything but liberal.  It emphasizes state rights, community control, patriarchal families, rugged individualism, Christian nationalism, and some form of white supremacy" (35).

White supremacy?  Hahn offers no evidence for this. Perhaps he could point to people like Luke Meyer and Richard Spencer--white supremacists who have supported Trump.  But these people have been ostracized by the MAGA movement.  For example, Meyer was a 24-year-old regional field director for the Trump campaign in Western Pennsylvania.  But when a reporter for Politico exposed him as the person who goes by the online name Alberto Barbarossa, who co-hosts a white supremacist podcast with Richard Spencer, who was the organizer of the 2017 white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Meyer was immediately fired.  The Republican Party of Pennsylvania issued a statement: "The employee in question was background-checked and vetted, but unbeknownst to us was operating separately under a pseudonym.  If we'd had any inkling about his hidden and despicable activity, he would never have been hired, and the instant we learned of it, he was fired.  We have no place in our Party or nation for people with such shameful, hateful views."  Similarly, Spencer has been condemned by Republican leaders.  After being spurned by the Republicans, Spencer endorsed Biden in 2020 and Harris in 2024!

So while there have been a few white supremacists who have voted for Trump, they know that as soon as they are openly identified as white supremacists, they will be expelled from the MAGA movement.  Moreover, if Trump appealed only to illiberal voters like the white racists, he would never win any election.  Given the racial and ethnic diversity of the American electorate, Trump can win only with the support of what Patrick Ruffini has called the "multiracial populist coalition" that includes most of the white working-class voters with large portions of the Hispanic, Asian, and Black voters.  The evidence for that became clear in the 2020 election, as compared with the 2016 election, in which Trump's vote share in each of these groups trended in his favor.  That trend continued in the 2024 election.  

The crucial factor here is that many Hispanic, Asian, and Black voters are politically and culturally conservative in their values; and therefore, as the Democratic Party shifts to the Left, these conservative voters are open to being persuaded by the more conservative Republican Party.  In the 2020 election, the Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters who described themselves as conservatives moved 35 to 40 points toward Trump as compared with the 2016 election.

Democrats have assumed that Trump's threat to deport all the illegal immigrants would alienate all of the Hispanic immigrant voters.  But Ruffini's studies of Hispanic voters in Miami Dade County in Florida and along the Rio Grande in Texas found that many Hispanics who are legal immigrants resent those Hispanics who have entered the U.S. illegally, and they think they should be deported.  Amazingly, almost all of the counties along the Rio Grande, which has the largest concentration of Hispanics in the U.S., went to Trump in 2024.

The "AP VoteCast" survey for the 2024 election shows this multiracial and multiethnic shift towards Trump.   White voters split 56% for Trump and 43% for Harris. While Harris won the Black vote (83%), Trump's share (16%) was an increase over 2020.  Among Black men, Trump won 25%.  Latina women went 59% for Harris, 39% for Trump.  Latino men split evenly--49% for Harris and 48% for Trump.  Since Hispanics are the fastest growing ethnic group in America, it's hard to win a presidential election without them.  Although Harris is of South Asian ancestry, Asian Americans split 54% for Harris and 39% for Trump.  In all categories, Trump's share of the nonwhite vote increased from 2016 and 2020; and that's why he won the popular election for the first time this year.  

So, how can Hahn see this as a vote for white supremacy?  

It would be better to say that this was a vote for the working class, because in all of the racial and ethnic categories, Trump got most of the votes from those people who have no college degree, while Harris got most of the votes from those with a college degree.  This gives Trump a big advantage because seven in ten American adults have never graduated from college.  Trump appeals to the natural working-class majority in American politics, while people like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris appeal to the professional elites with advanced educational degrees who work with their heads rather than their hands.

Furthermore, it's ridiculous for Hahn to claim that the MAGA voters are "looking back to a world before a Black man could be elected president," because many of the white working-class voters who have voted for Trump voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.  Indeed, Obama would have lost those elections if he had not won large portions of the white vote.  In 2012, he got 46 percent of the white vote in Pennsylvania and 47 percent in Michigan.  In 2008, 51% of the eligible voters belonged to the white working class (that is, white people without a college degree).  So, Obama could not have won without a big share of their vote, and he made explicit appeals to them in his campaign rhetoric.

And what about women?  Hahn asserts that Trump's supporters are looking back to a world "before feminists battled against gender exclusions and inequalities."  What world is that?  The world in which under the common law doctrine of coverture, married women had no legal identity separate from their husbands?  The world in which women had no right to vote?  If so, where's the evidence that Trump's supporters want to return women to that patriarchal world?  In this year's election, women between the ages of 18 and 44 split their vote between Harris (55%) and Trump (44%).  Women over 45 voted 51% for Harris and 48% for Trump.  Isn't it hard to believe Hahn's suggestion that close to half of the women voters want to repeal the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, so that they will never again have the right to vote?

But what about Hahn's claim that the MAGA voters want to go back to a world "before sexual identities began to be redefined"?  It is true that one of the themes of the Trump campaign was that allowing biological men to compete in women's athletics was unfair to women.  Another theme was that taxpayers should not be forced to pay for transgender treatments for prisoners.  But what makes such arguments illiberal?  (I have argued that liberal principles and the biology of sex differences justify sex-segregated sports and perhaps a new category of intersex sports.)

Finally, is it true that MAGA voters want to go back to a world "before American Protestants had to confront growing spiritual diversity"?  I assume that Hahn is pointing in particular to the time when Catholics were persecuted, and Protestant Christianity was considered an essential part of American national identity.  Well, again, I can't see any evidence that the MAGA movement is devoted to persecuting Catholics.  If that were so, it would be hard to explain why so many Catholics have voted for Trump--50% of them in 2020, 54% in 2024.  Since Catholics represent 22% of the electorate, Trump's winning the Catholic vote was crucial for his winning the election.

And, of course, J. D. Vance is a serious Catholic.  Moreover, one of the criticisms of Harris brought up by the Trump people was that she was anti-Catholic.  As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Harris suggested that a Trump judicial nominee should be disqualified because he was a member of the Knights of Columbus!

On all of these points, I see no evidence to sustain Hahn's claim that the MAGA voters want to go back to an illiberal America.  On the contrary, they seem to belong to a liberal coalition of voters who belong to a multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious, and working-class majority in American politics.

Let's also keep in mind, as I have argued previously, that the one issue that decisively favored Trump's election was high inflation--in the summer of 2022, the highest inflation in 40 years--and no one suffers more from high inflation than working-class voters.  But there's nothing illiberal about hating high inflation.

Nevertheless, as I have argued on this blog, I also see an illiberal propensity in Trump's rhetoric towards fascism that must be restrained if he is to keep the support of his liberal coalition.

And as we see Trump appointing loyalists throughout the government who will carry out his orders, even if they are unconstitutional, his move to fascist rule appears ever clearer.   It appears that most of Trump's voters made a mistake in thinking that he was not serious about his fascist rhetoric, and that will prove to be a tragic mistake for America.

If Hahn is right about how MAGA voters understand the slogan "Make America Great Again," then we can predict that shortly after his inauguration, Trump will proclaim that his voters have given him a mandate to make America into a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant theocracy and patriarchal society in which Catholics and non-Christians are persecuted, women have no voting rights, married women have no independent legal identity because they are under the authority of their husbands, all nonwhite people are treated as inferior, and only white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are permitted to immigrate to America.  

I predict that that will not happen because most Americans do not want to live in that kind of illiberal America.  They want to live in a Lockean liberal social order that is better than any illiberal order in satisfying the natural human desires of our evolved human nature.

REFERENCES

Hahn, Steven.  2024a. Illiberal America: A History.  New York: Norton.

Hahn, Steven.  2024b.  "The Deep, Tangled Roots of American Illiberalism."  The New York Times. May 4.

Klein, Ezra.  2024.  "The Book That Predicted the 2024 Election."  The New York Times.  November 9.

Moore, Amanda.  2024.  "A Trump Field Director Was Fired for Being a White Nationalist."  Politico.  November 4.

Ruffin, Patrick.  2023.  Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP.  New York: Simon and Schuster.