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As a marketing strategy, I’ve always been impressed by how the German political party, “The Alternative for Germany,” brands itself as the alternative to all other parties in that multi-party parliamentary system. Similarly, in our two-party system, Donald Trump succeeded in defining himself and Make America Great Again (MAGA)—whatever that collection of ideas is—as The Alternative to others within both the Democratic and Republican parties, whatever that mixture means.
Those who claim the mantle of The Alternative rely heavily on negative campaigning [ [link removed] ]. They define themselves by whom they oppose, rather than what they aim to achieve. This mindset depends on a simple binary view of politics and even reality. When it becomes centered on a continuous cult of personality, it can be especially dangerous. How can anyone always agree with Donald Trump, Joe Biden, or anyone else? None of us treats even our own family members as infallible. “Show me two people who always think alike,” goes the saying, “and I’ll show you one person who is not thinking.”
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Of course, we all seek new options, and every new leader presents some alternative to the current situation. My bubbly mother-in-law, now gone, constantly repeated her mantra, “Throw the bums out.” She wasn’t searching for The Alternative to believe in, but rather a continuous series of alternatives that would successively reduce the corruption left by those who previously held power.
My friend, Michael Stevens, a longtime foreign service officer, tells me that those who follow cult-like personalities in politics remind him “of Russians in the old days who endured the evils of their ruling class with the thought, ‘alas, if only the Czar (or Comrade Stalin) knew!’ The peasants believed that the head guy in the corrupt system was on their side, simply unaware of the harm his minions were doing to them. If and when the leader at the top discovered all this, he would surely put things right.”
While defining oneself as The Alternative can be an effective political strategy for a time, it is quite unstable. Political parties mix self-interested individuals and businesses, altruistic citizens, and ideological radicals. These combinations change constantly. For example, the business class has long been associated with the Republican Party, but has never reached majority status alone. As a result, it partners with different groups over time—unionists in the mid-19th century and states’ rights advocates today. However, even this can be misleading, since each of these groups is far from homogeneous.
Consider how the political terms “left” and “right” [ [link removed] ] began with the seating in the French National Assembly in 1789, when supporters of republicanism sat on the Speaker’s left and supporters of the monarchy sat on the right. However, this seating arrangement changed quickly. In 1791, the Legislative Assembly placed what would have been leftist supporters of the new constitution on the right, “innovators” on the left, and “moderates” in the center. As revolutionary enthusiasm varied over the following years, by 1793, no one sat on the right, and by 1794, members of the far left were excluded, leading to the dissolution of the Assembly.
Though group labels always fail to describe their members completely, the terms “right” and “left,” “liberal” and “conservative,” have lost much of their meaning when applied to the Republican and Democratic parties. Today, libertarians long associated with the Republican Party resist efforts [ [link removed] ] to create a strong president with limited checks on executive power. At the same time, Democrats now fall over themselves to lead in supporting deregulation [ [link removed] ], an effort once led by Jimmy Carter but often ascribed more to Ronald Reagan. Donald Trump may claim to be “conservative,” and President Maduro of Venezuela may claim to be “socialist,” but their actions contradict any genuine adherence to conservative or socialist principles.
Populism further distorts these group classifications. Several “illiberal democracies”—here again, the term has significant definitional problems—have adopted the “conservative” label as a crude way to try to gain support from those who feel threatened by cultural change—especially the inevitable movement of immigrants to richer and freer countries in pursuit of their own well-being—and those who have been left behind in various ways. Populist autocrats like Victor Orban in Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey have both greatly expanded government power while transferring substantial resources to the lower- and middle-classes, particularly during periods of recovery. Are either of those actions “conservative?”
Having gained power mainly through verbal assaults on others, today’s populist leaders now expand these attacks by leveraging the resources and authority of government. In a sense, they continue to employ the skills they know best. They also claim adherence to a vague form of religious nationalism that allows them to portray political opponents as unpatriotic. Sustaining conflicts—sometimes even through war—helps them define the world in binary terms: us versus them.
In the U.S., President Trump declares he must send troops to cities to eliminate “the enemy within.” [ [link removed] ]“I hate my opponents [ [link removed] ],” he claims as a virtue. He demeans immigrants as drug dealers, criminals, and rapists [ [link removed] ]. As Howard Gleckma [ [link removed] ]n explains, he threatens the tax-exempt status [ [link removed] ] of charities and other tax-exempt organizations that “engage in hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality,” with the Treasury Secretary in charge of defining what is “hostility,” “traditional American views,” and “morality.” The President and his appointees view as enemies and threats the FBI, military leaders, female soldiers, and almost any other source of information or expertise, including civil servants, scientists, universities, immigration judges, the “mainstream press” (defined as any part of the press that disagrees), and anyone who provides data that might be unsympathetic to any story they want to tell.
My main point is simple. We should avoid defining ourselves by labels that constantly change in meaning. We must teach our children how to recognize when political marketing attempts to manipulate them. We should avoid viewing the political landscape through a binary lens. We need to hold all our leaders, including those for whom we have voted, accountable for each of their actions. Otherwise, like the Russian peasants in Michael Steven’s recounting, we, not just some “others” for whom we do not care, will bear the cost.
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