The right populist propaganda that typifies Trump's toolset has a curious hybrid quality to it. In form it resembles a leftist critique, so as to capture the reality of national and global political and economic pathologies. There is talk of out of touch elites, bad trade policy, impotent foreign policy, de-industrialization, and all the like.
However in content, it twists into a right wing critique. The critique quickly becomes racist, misogynistic, and generally xenophobic and domineering, which allows Trump to come into possession of the levers of power that rely on these mechanisms .
This cobbled-together argument achieves the pressure levels required to give it thrust on a national field. The leftist form allows for an attack on the establishment that Trump resents because he is not respected by it, and the right wing content can mobilize sufficient sectors of the voting population, a voting population that is not too thoroughly hampered by poverty, voter discrimination, gerrymandering, or a number of other injustices. Or of course, general despair.
Much of the politically efficacious population - that is, the part of the population that still votes, is able to vote, and believes in voting in the first place - is closer to the right than the left. This is the population that serves as a lever at least; you still have the blue states, but you still have to win states in the electoral college. And even then, as a sign of the thorough domination of capital, an individualist and neoliberal ideology generally has to be adhered to in order to get anywhere in establishment politics, so that even the left is stuck playing the nicer capitalist in order to win seats. If money is driving an election, and money is concentrating, then you have to take on the qualities that will flatter whatever concentrated pocket of money you are seeking to power your campaign, though this paradigm is rapidly unraveling.
Much of the political messaging that penetrates deep enough into the populace tends to be backed by money and organized corporate power, and it has been the right that has had the most effective political and economic organization over the last couple of decades, and it is able to effectively capture these resources. Plus the right holds the ideological reserve currency so to speak. With the concentration of power in the capital class, it was also inevitable that the economic left would be snuffed out by the very actions of consolidating capital, which forced the restructuring of the political left as a consequence.
So Trump used the same old right wing propaganda that has been peddled for the last 30 years to advance money power, and which was also used to maintain the control of resources by a generally white-coded grouping of families and entrepreneurs. However this propaganda had to be modulated with a leftist critique so that the establishment right could be supplanted by the insurgent right. The Trump right bit the far left to gain a foothold in unclaimed political space. It is this slight modulation, the subtle wrinkle in the Mobius strip, that indicates the swinging of the pendulum in the other direction, or at least a dramatic transformation of the political arena.
It might be worth recalling that the National Socialists followed a similar shapeshifting path to power. We don't necessarily have to repeat that sequence of events, but neither is it certain that we can avoid producing a similar rhyme.
