Rogue Elephant: The Republicans from the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos

In this piercing, ingenious account, American studies scholar Heideman (Class Struggle and the Color Line) unpacks why the Republican Party and the business elites that dominated it failed to rein in Donald Trump. Heideman draws a comparison between Trump and Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who, like Trump, “polarized much of the party against himself” and “practiced a demagogic mode of politics.” McCarthy was eventually neutralized by a censure in the Senate that was supported by the nation’s business elite. Heideman attributes the difference in outcome between Trump and McCarthy to new gaps both between candidates and their party, and between the party and big business. The former he fascinatingly traces back to 1950s campaign finance reform, which “virtually requires candidates to set up a finance committee separate from the national party,” with the party’s role reduced to providing “campaign services”; this effectively created a system wherein candidates with a personal brand and fund-raising prowess could do and say whatever they wanted without worrying about whether it aligned with the party’s agenda. The latter he attributes to the decline of organized labor, which ironically also weakened big business as a political force, since it lacks a serious foe to oppose. Meticulous and robustly argued, this is a vital new perspective on recent political history. (Nov.)