Review of Rogue Elephant: How Republicans Went from the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos by Paul Heideman (Verso Books, 2025)
The rise, fall, and second coming of Donald Trump represent one of the most puzzling and heavily scrutinized political developments of the last decade. Yet much commentary has barely scratched the surface.
The main focus is on Trump’s reactionary rhetoric and personalist politics. The more farsighted analysts identify broader processes like deindustrialization or the corporate capture of the Democratic Party as root causes of his popular appeal among the US working class. But they stop there.
The prevailing reading of Trumpism sees it as “a revolt from below” of disenfranchised social groups left behind by (neo)liberal globalization. There is more than a grain of truth to this (even though Trump’s share of working-class voters is often overstated). But is this the full picture?
Voter-centric narratives tend to obscure the fact that political parties are vehicles of cross-class alliances based upon — but not limited to and not even led by — their voter base. That is particularly the case in US politics, where the power of wealthy donors is notoriously second to none.
If, like me, you’ve been left wanting by the endless string of accounts about how Trump won over the Rust Belt or made inroads into traditionally Democrat-voting ethnic minorities, then Paul Heideman’s Rogue Elephant: How Republicans Went from the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos comes like a breath of fresh air. The book spotlights how the relationship between class and party plays out beyond the ballot box.
Rogue Elephant neatly sets out its core argument from the very start. Trump has seized the Republican Party, seemingly against all odds, for two main structural reasons. First, due to a range of historical and institutional factors — most prominently the loose regulations around political donations — the two big parties are not as…
Auteur: Vladimir Bortun
