American Political Issues by Tech Resist (@TecSiGuy), 2016 Dem! - was independent – used to lean “right”
These memes are a compilation of major points from the following 6 articles or perspective or analysis. We have in place an authoritarian leadership that fits with Gop beliefs and needs, but is counter to our democratic principles.
Following the memes are cited, research articles, where I got perspective - besides from
Digital Demagogue - Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Trump and Twitter by Christian Fuchs.
The Contract with
Authoritarianism
Protesters both for and against President Trump in Washington.Credit Shawn Thew/European Press photo Agency
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly
column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality. April 5, 2018
In 1994, Newt Gingrich, brandishing
his Contract
with America, led a Republican
revolution that swept
aside Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate, initiating an epoch of
conservative ascendancy that lingers on. Don Sipple, a Republican campaign
consultant, declared
at the time that the 1994
midterms pitted a Republican Party calling for “discipline” against a
Democratic Party focused on “therapy.”
Two years later, George Lakoff, a professor
of linguistics at Berkeley, published “Moral Politics: How Liberals
and Conservatives Think,”
which argued that deeply embedded in conservative and liberal politics are two
different models of the family. Conservatism is based on a Strict Father model, while liberalism is centered on a
Nurturant Parent model. These two models of the family give rise to different moral systems.
Several approaches to contemporary
politics echo the insights of Sipple and Lakoff. The crucial word now, however,
is authoritarianism.
The election of Donald Trump — built as
it was on several long-term trends that converged in 2016 — has created an
authoritarian moment. This somewhat surprising development is the subject of
“Remaking Partisan Politics through Authoritarian Sorting,” a forthcoming book
by the political scientists Christopher Federico, Stanley Feldman and Christopher Weber, who argue that Three trends — polarization,
media change, and the rise of what many people see as threats to the traditional
social order — have contributed to a growing divide within American
politics. It is a divide between those who place heavy value on social order and cohesion relative
to those who value personal
autonomy and independence.
The three authors use a
long-established authoritarian
scale — based
on four
survey questions about
which childhood
traits parents would
like to see in their offspring — that asks voters to choose between independence or respect
for their elders; curiosity
or good manners; self-reliance
or obedience; and being
considerate or well-behaved. Those respondents who choose respect for elders, good
manners, obedience and being well-behaved are rated more authoritarian.
The authors found that in 1992, 62 percent of white voters
who ranked highest on the authoritarian scale supported George H.W. Bush.
In 2016, 86 percent of
the most authoritarian white voters backed Trump, an increase of 24
percentage points. Federico, Feldman and Weber conclude that Authoritarianism
is now more deeply bound up with partisan identities. It has become part and
parcel of Republican identity among non-Hispanic white Americans.
In an email, Johnston summarized some
of their findings:
Over the last few decades, party
allegiances have become increasingly tied to a core dimension of personality we
call “openness.” Citizens high
in openness value independence, self-direction, and novelty, while those
low in openness value
social cohesion, certainty, and security. Individual differences in
openness seem to underpin many social and cultural disputes, including debates
over the value of racial,
ethnic, and cultural diversity, law and order, and traditional values and social norms.
Johnston notes that personality traits
like closed mindedness,
along with aversion to change and discomfort with diversity, are linked to authoritarianism:
As these social and cultural conflicts
have become a bigger part of our political debates, citizens have sorted into
different parties based on personality, with citizens high in openness much more likely to be liberals
and Democrats than those low in openness. This psychological sorting
process does not line up perfectly with older partisan differences based on
class, because those higher in
income and education also tend to be higher in openness.
Johnston addresses class differences in
voting patterns and also differences stemming from the level of a voter’s
interest in politics:
An important caveat is that individuals
who take a stronger interest in politics and know more about it are more likely
to be sorted on the basis of openness. So, it’s really among those most
“politically engaged” Democrats and Republicans where we see members of
different parties diverge in openness. Moreover, sorting into different parties on the basis of
openness appears to be much stronger among non-Hispanic whites than
other racial and ethnic groups.
In their book, Johnston, Lavine and
Federico reinforce this point:
With the rise of cultural and lifestyle
politics, Democrats and Republicans are now sharply distinguished by a set of psychological dispositions
related to experiential openness — a general dimension of personality tapping tolerance for
threat and uncertainty in one’s environment.
The revived interest in authoritarianism in politics began
well before anyone seriously considered the possibility of a Trump candidacy
— except, apparently, Trump himself.
In it, Hetherington and Weiler argue
that preferences about many of the new issues on the American political agenda,
such as gay rights, the
war in Iraq, the proper
response to terrorism, and immigration are likely structured by authoritarianism.
There are “colliding conceptions of right and wrong,”
they write, between those on
the high and low ends of the authoritarian scale. That, in turn, makes
it difficult “for one side of the political debate to understand (perhaps, in
the extreme, even respect) how the other side thinks and feels.”
In an email to me, Hetherington said
that in their book he and Weiler will describe “people on opposite sides of the
divide as having a fixed or fluid
worldview:”
Those with a fixed worldview tend to see “American Carnage,”
while those with fluid
worldviews see the world as a big, beautiful place that is safe to explore. The fixed
tend to be wary of what they perceive as constant threats to their
physical
security specifically and of social change in general.
The fluid are much more open to change and, indeed, see it as a strength.
For them, anger lies in
holding on to old ideas and rejecting diversity.
Hetherington and Weiler argue that the
answers to questions about the four childhood traits reveal “how worldview guides
a person in navigating the world,” as Hetherington put it in his email:
Not only do the answers to these
questions explain preferences about race, immigration, sexual
orientation, gender attitudes, the projection of military force, gun
control, and just about every “culture war” issue, people’s
worldviews also undergird people’s life choices. Because ‘the fixed’ are wary about the dangers around them, they prefer the country over the
city. ‘The fluid’ prefer the reverse.
Political analysts have become more and
more aware of how voters’ sense of themselves as liberals or conservatives,
Democrats or Republicans, has taken on heightened importance. Affirming one’s
political tribe or community has in many respects become more important in
deciding whom to vote for than the stands candidates take on issues.
The power behind the labels “liberal”
and “conservative” to predict strong preferences for the ideological in-group
is based largely in the social
identification with those groups, not in the organization of attitudes
associated with the labels. That is, even when we are discussing ideology — a
presumably issue-based concept — we are not entirely discussing issues.
Mason continued:
Identity-based ideology can drive affective ideological
polarization even when individuals are naïve about policy. The passion and prejudice
with which we approach politics is
driven not only by what we think, but
also powerfully by who we think we are.
Matt Grossmann and Daniel Thaler of
Michigan State University further expand on the role of psychological traits in
voter decision-making in their forthcoming paper, “Mass-Elite Divides in Aversion
to Social Change and Support for Donald Trump.” They found that aversion to change “is strongly
predictive of support for Trump” among regular voters, but much less so among
Republican political elites.
They measure aversion to change by the
answers to two
polling questions: “Our
country is changing too fast, undermining traditional American values”
and “By accepting diverse
cultures and lifestyles, our country is steadily improving.”
The accompanying graphic shows how
those who think that the country is changing too fast and who disagree with the
notion that diverse cultures and lifestyles improve the United States voted
decisively for Trump.
Leonie Huddy, a political scientist at
Stony Brook, sent me her analysis of how
political conflict has shifted from economic to psychological factors.
The groups that have come to define partisanship in recent years, she
wrote,
are far more grounded in
social and moral values, geographic choice, and identity politics
than the influential groups of yesteryear (especially unions) that maintained a
focus on group economic interests. African-Americans may be an exception, but
there is even a
trend among young blacks to move away from the Democratic Party because they see the
party as
insufficiently focused on police brutality and other issues.
The result, in her words, is a
political environment in which
the new affinities that shape
partisanship are more a matter of choice than something one is born into or
passed on by parents. That gives partisanship
a more fluid nature than in the past
and opens it to the formation of affinities grounded in personality, values, religion, and lifestyle
choices.
In her 2005 book, “The
Authoritarian Dynamic,” Karen Stenner — a former member of the political science
departments at Princeton and Duke and now a behavioral economist in Australia —
described politics as a clash of conflicting personal beliefs or
moral value systems.
Stenner demonstrated, first, that levels of authoritarianism rise and fall in
proportion to the experience of “normative threat,” and second that over the past generation
authoritarianism has been predictive of Republican voting.
Stenner developed a universal theory
about what causes intolerance
of difference in general, which includes racism, political intolerance (e.g. restriction of free speech), moral intolerance (e.g. homophobia, supporting censorship, opposing
abortion) and punitiveness. It
demonstrates that all these seemingly disparate attitudes are principally caused
by just two factors: individuals’
innate psychological predispositions to intolerance (“authoritarianism”)
interacting with changing
conditions of societal threat.
Looked at this way, recent developments
experienced by many voters as alarming — including the financial collapse of
2008, the surge of third-world immigration in the United States and Europe and
continuing fears among traditionalists that the social order is under assault — have fueled authoritarianism:
The threatening
conditions, resonant particularly in the present political climate,
that exacerbate
authoritarian attitudes include at least the perception of civil
dissent and unrest, loss of
confidence in social institutions, unpopularity of
leaders on both sides of politics, divisive presidential
campaigns, internal or external crises that undermine national pride or confidence, national economic
downturn and rapidly rising crime rates.
In an email, Stenner provided figures from a recent Euro Pulse survey showing that authoritarianism is stronger in the United States
than it is in the European Union: In the E.U., 33 percent of the
electorate can be described as authoritarian, while in the United States, it’s 45 percent.
The animosity between authoritarians
and non-authoritarians has helped establish what Johnston, Lavine and Federico
describe as the “expressive dimension”
of policy choices:
In this view, the influence of
personality on economic opinion arises not because the expected outcomes of a
policy match an individual’s traits, but because those traits resonate with the
social meaning a policy has acquired.
They explain further:
Citizens care less about the
outcomes a policy produces and more about the groups and
symbols with which a policy is associated.
Mason enlarged on this argument in her
2015 paper, “‘I Disrespectfully Agree’: The Differential Effects of Partisan
Sorting on Behavioral and Issue Polarization.” Her argument is a direct
challenge to those who take, as she puts it, an instrumental view of politics,
in which people choose a party and decide how strongly to support it based
solely on each party’s stated positions and whether the party shares interests
with them.
Instead, she writes, Contrary to an issue-focused view of
political decision making and behavior, the results presented here suggest that
political thought, behavior, and emotion
are powerfully driven by political identities.
The strength of a
person’s identification with his or her party affects how biased, active, and angry that
person is, even if that person’s issue positions are moderate.
While much of this research uses the
“preferred traits in child-rearing” questions to measure authoritarianism, two
sociologists at the University of Kansas, David Norman Smith and Eric Hanley,
observe in “The Anger Games: Who Voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 Election,
and Why?” that those questions do not capture the full scope of
authoritarianism, especially the more aggressive authoritarianism that they
believe drives voters to Trump.
Smith and Hanley used what they call a
“domineering leader scale” to measure the wish for a strong leader
who will force others to submit.
The premise is that
evil is afoot; that
money, the media and
government authority — and even “politically correct” moral authority — have been usurped by undeserving interlopers.
The desire for a domineering leader is the desire to see this evil crushed.
The domineering leader scale is based on responses to two statements: “Our country will be great if we
honor the ways of our forefathers, do what the authorities tell us to do, and get rid of the ‘rotten apples’
who are ruining everything” and “What our country really needs is a
strong, determined leader who will crush evil and take us back to our true path.”
If an aggressive, domineering authoritarianism is a prime motivator for
many Trump supporters, as Smith and Hanley contend, the clash between
Republicans and Democrats is likely to become more hostile and
warlike.
Federico, Feldman and Weber note that since the early 2000s, many especially acrimonious
political debates have focused on threats to social stability and order
— debates surrounding abortion, transgender rights, immigration, and the role of the federal government in protecting
the rights of marginalized social groups.
The rising “salience of these debates,” they write, “has contributed to a growing
‘authoritarian divide’ within the United States, at least among White Americans.”
Trump
has purposefully
exacerbated
the “many especially
acrimonious political debates” now dominating public discourse, deepening not only the
authoritarian divide, but the divide between open
and closed mindedness,
between acceptance and racial resentment,
and between toleration of and aversion to change.
He evidently believes that this is the best political strategy for presiding in
the White House and winning re-election, but it is an extraordinarily destructive
strategy for governing the country and for safeguarding America’s
interests in the world.
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Right Way to Resist Trump, By Luigi Zingales, Nov. 18, 2016
Five years ago, I warned about the risk of a Donald J. Trump presidency. Most people
laughed. They thought it inconceivable.
I was not
particularly prescient; I come from Italy, and I had already seen this movie,
starring Silvio Berlusconi, who led the Italian government as prime minister for
a total of nine years between 1994 and 2011. I knew how it could unfold.
Now that Mr. Trump
has been elected president, the Berlusconi parallel could offer an important
lesson in how to avoid transforming a razor-thin victory into a two-decade
affair. If you think presidential term limits and Mr. Trump’s age could save
the country from that fate, think again. His tenure could easily turn into a
Trump dynasty.
Mr. Berlusconi was able to govern Italy for
as long as he did mostly thanks to the incompetence
of his opposition. It was so rabidly obsessed with his personality that any substantive
political debate disappeared; it focused
only on personal attacks, the effect of which was to increase Mr. Berlusconi’s popularity. His
secret was an ability to
set off a Pavlovian
reaction among his leftist opponents, which engendered instantaneous sympathy in most moderate
voters. Mr. Trump is no different.
We saw this dynamic
during the presidential campaign. Hillary
Clinton was so focused on explaining how bad Mr. Trump was that she too often didn’t promote her own ideas, to make the positive case for voting for her.
The news media was
so intent on ridiculing
Mr. Trump’s behavior
that it ended up providing
him with free advertising.
Unfortunately, the dynamic has not ended with the election.
Shortly after Mr. Trump gave his acceptance speech, protests sprang up all over America. What are
these people protesting against? Whether we like it or not, Mr. Trump won legitimately. Denying that
only feeds the perception that there are “legitimate”
candidates and “illegitimate” ones, and a small elite decides which is which. If that’s true, elections are
just a beauty contest among candidates blessed by the Guardian Council of
clerics, just like in Iran.
Silvio
Berlusconi in Milan last year. CreditFlavio Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto
Agency
These protests are also
counterproductive. There will be plenty of reasons to complain during
the Trump presidency, when really awful decisions are made. Why complain now,
when no decision has been made? It delegitimizes the future protests and exposes the bias of the
opposition.
Even the petition
calling for members of the Electoral College to violate their mandate and not
vote for Mr. Trump could play into the president-elect’s hands. This idea is
misguided. What ground would we then have to stand on when Mr. Trump tricks the
system to obtain what he wants?
The Italian
experience provides a blueprint for how to defeat Mr. Trump. Only two men in Italy have won an
electoral competition against Mr. Berlusconi: Romano Prodi and the
current prime minister, Matteo Renzi (albeit only in a 2014 European election).
Both of them treated Mr. Berlusconi as an ordinary opponent. They focused on the issues, not on his character. In different ways, both of them are seen as outsiders, not as
members of what in Italy is defined as the political caste.
The Democratic Party should learn this
lesson. It should not do as the Republicans did after President Obama
was elected. Their preconceived opposition to any of his initiatives poisoned
the Washington well, fueling the anti-establishment reaction (even if it was a
successful electoral strategy for the party). There are plenty of Trump
proposals that Democrats can agree with, like new infrastructure investments.
Most Democrats, including politicians like Mrs. Clinton and Bernie Sanders and
economists like Lawrence Summers and Paul Krugman, have pushed the idea of
infrastructure as a way to increase demand and to expand employment among
non-college-educated workers. Some details might be different from a Republican
plan, but it will add credibility to the Democratic opposition if it tries to
find the points in common, not just differences.
And an opposition
focused on personality would crown Mr. Trump as the people’s leader of the
fight against the Washington caste. It would also weaken the opposition voice
on the issues, where it is important to conduct a battle of principles.
Democrats should also
offer Mr. Trump help against the Republican establishment, an offer that would
reveal whether his populism is empty language or a real position. For example,
with Mr. Trump’s encouragement, the Republican platform called for reinstating the
Glass-Steagall Act, which would separate investment and commercial banking. The Democrats
should declare their support of this separation, a policy that many Republicans
oppose. The last thing they should want is for Mr. Trump to use the Republican
establishment as a fig leaf for his own failure, dumping on it the
responsibility for blocking the popular reforms that he promised during the
campaign and probably never intended to pass. That will only enlarge his image
as a hero of the people shackled by the elites.
Finally, the
Democratic Party should also find a credible candidate among young leaders, one
outside the party’s Brahmins. The news that Chelsea Clinton is considering running for office is the worst
possible. If the Democratic Party is turning into a monarchy, how can it fight
the autocratic tendencies in Mr. Trump?
Luigi Zingales, a
professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the Booth School of Business at
the University of Chicago, is the author of “A Capitalism for the People:
Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity.”
Dodging the Trump Bullet, Americans—and Republicans—are
lucky that the Donald has bowed out. Luigi Zingales, May 19, 2011
Donald Trump’s announcement that he will not run
in the Republican presidential primaries after all is great news for the
Republican Party and for the country. The only thing more frightening than
Trump’s running for president would be Trump’s getting elected president. From
a party perspective, while losing an election is bad, winning one with the
wrong candidate for the party and for the country is worse. I know something
about this: I come from Italy, a country that has elected as prime minister the
Trump-like Silvio Berlusconi.
Trump and Berlusconi are remarkably alike. They
are both billionaire businessmen who
claim that the government should be run like a business. They are both gifted salesmen, able to appeal to the emotions of their fellow citizens. They are
both obsessed with their looks, with their hair (or what remains of
it), and with sexy women. Their gross manners make them popular,
perhaps because people think that if these guys could become billionaires, anyone
could. Most important is that both Trump and Berlusconi made their initial fortunes in real estate, an
industry where connections and
corruption often matter as much as, or more than, talent and hard work. Indeed, while both pretend to stand for free markets, what they really believe in is what most of us would label crony capitalism.
Berlusconi’s policies
have been devastating to Italy. He has been prime minister for eight of the
last ten years, during which time the Italian per-capita GDP has dropped 4
percent, the debt-to-GDP ratio has increased from 109 percent to 120 percent,
and taxes have increased from 41.2 percent to 43.4 percent. Italy’s score in the Heritage Foundation’s Index of
Economic Freedom has dropped from 63 to 60.3, and in the World Economic Forum
Index of Competitiveness from 4.9 to 4.37. Berlusconi’s tenure has also been devastating for free-market
ideas, which now
are identified with corruption.
How can such a pro-business prime minister wreak
havoc on the economy and on the idea of free markets? Because “pro-business” doesn’t necessarily mean “pro-market.” While the two agendas
sometimes coincide—as in the case of protecting property rights—they’re often at odds. Market
competition threatens established firms, which often use their political muscle
to restrict new entries into their industry, strengthening their positions but
putting customers at a disadvantage. A pro-market strategy, by contrast, aims
to encourage the best business conditions for everyone. That’s in fact the
opposite of what a real-estate tycoon wants: to keep competitors out and
enhance the value of his own properties. By capturing (or more precisely,
purchasing) the free-market flag in the same way one might acquire a business
brand, Berlusconi likely has destroyed the appeal of the free-market ideal in
Italy for a generation.
How, then, did Berlusconi get elected and
reelected? He created an unlikely coalition between the business elite, which
supports him for fear of the alternative, and the poor, who identify with him because
he appeals to their aspirations. In a country where corruption and lack of
meritocracy has all but killed the hope of intra-generational mobility,
citizens chose to escape from reality and find consolation in dreams.
Berlusconi adeptly fosters the illusion that he can turn everyone else into
billionaires. His political career is something like Trump’s Apprentice program, only on a national scale.
Unfortunately, some of the same factors that
sparked Berlusconi’s success in Italy have begun to show up in the United
States. Social mobility has dropped. Income for 95 percent of the population
has stagnated. The financial crisis has uncovered a dangerous connection
between government and the financial establishment. Losing hope that they can
rise from rags to riches the old-fashioned way, Americans are taking refuge in
fantasy, from American Idol to The
Apprentice. In such a climate,
Donald Trump, whose own career has
exemplified crony capitalism—from government subsidies for
his developments to abuse of eminent domain—could have potentially won not just the GOP
nomination, but even the presidency. That would have been a catastrophe for the
Republican Party, for free-market capitalism, and for America.
The
Failures of Anti-Trumpism
President
Trump has defied never-Trumpers’ best efforts. CreditDoug Mills/The New York
Times
WACO, Tex. — Over the past year, those
of us in the anti-Trump camp have churned out billions of words critiquing the president.
The point of this work is to expose the harm President Trump is doing, weaken
his support and prevent him from doing worse. And by that standard, the
anti-Trump movement is a failure.
We have persuaded no one. Trump’s
approval rating is around 40 percent, which is basically unchanged from where
it’s been all along.
We have not hindered him. Trump has more power than he did
a year ago, not less. With more mainstream figures like H. R. McMaster,
Rex Tillerson and Gary Cohn gone, the administration is growing more nationalist, not less.
We have not dislodged him. For all the
hype, the Mueller investigation looks less and less likely to fundamentally
alter the course of the administration.
On trade, immigration, entitlement
reform, spending, foreign policy, race relations and personal morality, this is
Trump’s party, not Reagan’s or anyone else’s.
A lot of us never-Trumpers assumed momentum
would be on our side as his scandals and incompetences mounted. It hasn’t
turned out that way. I almost never meet a Trump supporter who has become
disillusioned. I often meet Republicans who were once ambivalent but who have
now joined the Trump train.
National Review was once staunchly
anti-Trump, and many of its writers remain so, but, tellingly, N.R. editor Rich
Lowry just had a column
in Politico called “The Never Trump Delusion” arguing that Trump is not that big a departure from
the Republican mainstream.
The surest evidence of Trump’s
dominance is on the campaign trail. As
The Times’s Jonathan Martin reported,
many Republicans, including Ted Cruz, are making the argument that if Democrats take over Congress,
they will impeach the president. In other words, far from ignoring
Trump, these Republicans are making defending him the center of their
campaigns.
In red states, as Josh
Kraushaar of the National Journal noted, Republicans compete to see who is the most Trumpish. In
Indiana, the men vying for the Republican Senate nomination underline their
support for the trade war. One candidate has a slogan, “Defeat the elite,”
while another promises to “Make America Great.”
Even in blue states, Republicans refuse
to criticize the man. In districts across Southern California, 11 Republican
House candidates were asked about their positions on various issues. Seven of
them refused to answer any question concerning Trump, and the four who did were
strongly supportive.
Democratic anti-Trumpers had better
hope they win in 2020, because their attacks have only served to entrench Trumpism on the right.
Meanwhile, if Republican never-Trumpers were an army, they’d be freezing their
buns off in Valley Forge tweeting over and over again that these are the times
that try men’s souls.
Why has Trump dominated? Part of it is
tribalism. In any tribal
war people tend to bury individual concerns and rally to their leader and the
party line. As late as 2015, Republican voters overwhelmingly supported
free trade. Now they overwhelmingly oppose it. The shift didn’t happen because
of some mass reappraisal of the evidence; it’s just that tribal orthodoxy
shifted and everyone followed.
Trump opponents, the academics say, are
open-minded and value independence and novelty. Trump supporters, they continue, are closed-minded, change-averse
and desperate for security.
This analysis strikes me as
psychologically wrong (every human being requires both a secure base and an
open field — we can’t be divided into opposing camps), journalistically wrong
(Trump supporters voted for the man precisely because they wanted
transformational change) and an epic attempt to offend 40 percent of our fellow
citizens by reducing them to psychological inferiors.
The main reason Trump won the
presidency is that tens of millions of Americans rightly feel that their local
economies are under attack, their communities are dissolving and their
religious liberties are under threat. Trump understood the problems of large
parts of America better than anyone else. He has been able to strengthen his
grip on power over the past year because he has governed as he campaigned.
Until somebody comes up with a better
defense strategy, Trump and Trumpism will dominate. Voters are willing to put
up with a lot of nonsense for a president they think is basically on their side.
Just after the election, Luigi
Zingales wrote a Times op-ed on
how not to fight Trump, based on the Italian experience fighting Silvio
Berlusconi. Don’t focus on
personality or the man, Zingales advised. That will just make Trump the
people’s hero against the Washington caste. Focus instead on the social problems that gave rise to Trumpism.
That is the advice we anti-Trumpers
still need to learn.
The
Never Trump Delusion, By RICH LOWRY, March 28, 2018
Donald
Trump is a dominant presence in our public life, although one that his
adversaries have trouble accepting and processing.
The
Left is still looking for scapegoats for his 2016 election victory, and the
coterie of his critics among writers and activists on the Right—loosely
referred to as Never Trump—often sound like they are in denial.
I’m
friends with many of these Never Trumpers, admire most of them, and have often
been numbered among them.
It’s
true—obviously—that Trump has significant downsides. It’d be nice in a he
said/she said between a porn star and the president to be able to believe the
president. It’d be good if the president weren’t repellent to suburban women
and millennials, perhaps doing long-term damage to the GOP. It’d be much better
if the president didn’t run his administration like a reality TV show run by a
mercurial and cruel executive producer. A cult of personality is especially
problematic when the personality is that of Donald J. Trump.
Indeed,
most of the fears of how Trump would conduct himself in office have been
realized (everyone would have thought Jeb Bush was crazy if he had predicted a
President Trump would fire a high-level Cabinet official via Twitter, and not
even using direct message). Yet it doesn’t follow that we should buy into the
fantasy either that Trump is going to disappear into thin air, or that Trumpism
can be blithely dismissed so the party can return to what some Never Trumpers
believe constituted the status quo ante.
A
serious primary challenge is not in the offing, if anything like the current
situation obtains. Trump has an 80 percent approval among Republicans and an
ironclad hold on the base. For that to change, it would probably take a smoking gun revelation in the
Mueller probe or some other jaw-dropping scandal, plus a significant
political betrayal (say, nominating a moderate Supreme Court justice).
And
if Trump crashes and burns, it is doubtful the 2020 nomination would be worth
having. If he somehow left office before January 2021, it would have meant
there was some disaster that fractured and dispirited the party. If he were
beaten in a primary, the GOP would likely be in a similar state and festooned
with a deeply wounded incumbent president. Neither would bode well.
NEW YORK—“Ma’am,”
said the soldier in suit slacks and a collar-popped pea coat, “my name is Max
Rose, and I’m running for Congress as a Democrat.”
The woman behind the
glass front door in the semi-suburban neighborhood on Staten Island in this
state’s Republican-leaning 11th Congressional District looked him over. She
asked what he was “all about.”
“Sure, sure—here’s a
little information,” he said, showing her his “walk card.” On one side was a
picture of Rose smiling while sitting at a table wearing a tie. “A Healthcare Expert with Solutions,”
it said. “An Economic Champion.”
On the other, though, was an image of him in his military fatigues, a long,
black M4 carbine assault rifle hanging off his shoulder. This side had
different language: “Combat
Infantry Captain in the U.S. Army,” “the courage to lead.” This was the side Rose
presented to her first.
The door opened a
little.
“I’m the first
post-9/11 combat veteran to run for office in New York City history,” Rose
said.
The door opened a
little more.
“I’m
a Staten Islander,” he continued. “I deployed to Afghanistan about five years
ago. I was an infantry platoon leader.” He said he was a Purple Heart
recipient. Bronze Star, too. “And now we’re fighting this fight,” Rose said.
The door opened all
the way.
Rose, a 5-foot-6 power pack with an upbeat,
shoulders-back gait, is near the forefront of a surge of a certain sort of
candidate in the 2018 election cycle. Veterans who are Democrats are vying for
Congress in numbers not seen in decades. With
Honor, a “cross-partisan” organization
that aims to “help elect principled next-generation veterans in order to solve
our biggest problems and fix a Congress that is dysfunctional,” counts
approximately 300 veterans who have run for Congress during this cycle—roughly
half of whom chose to serve after, and in many cases because of, September 11,
2001. Although specific numbers are hard to come by, the spike is stark—“a
substantial increase,” With Honor co-founder and CEO Rye Barcott told me, “from
any prior cycle” in modern memory. While the perception might exist that most
veterans lean Republican, some 51 percent of the veterans who are or have been
2018 candidates, based on With Honor’s tally, are actually Democrats. And some
are proving to be competitive in places once considered safe GOP districts.
Witness Conor Lamb’s win in western Pennsylvania earlier
this month. Polling suggests former Army Ranger Jason Crow
could do the same in Colorado’s 6th District in the suburbs of Denver. Backed
by members of Congress like Representative Seth
Moulton (D-Mass.) and
organizations like VoteVets and New
Politics, this roster of
aspirants is a key to Democrats reclaiming control of the House of
Representatives in November’s midterms, party strategists believe.
It
is not a coincidence that this wave of veterans is hitting at a moment when
a five-time
draft-deferring president
occupies the White House and toxic partisanship has ground Capitol Hill to a
virtual halt. The candidates are presenting themselves both as a moral rebuke
to what they see as Donald Trump’s self-promoting divisiveness and also as a
practical solution to the failure of the nation’s highest legislative body to
get anything done. In short, the reputation of the national institution with by
far the highest approval rating, the military, is being offered as an antidote
to the woes of a schismatic president and a Congress whose approval ratings
have never been worse.
“They’re all people
who served the country without worrying about who’s a Democrat and who’s a
Republican—let’s just get the damn thing done,” longtime national
Democratic strategist Joe Trippi said in an interview. “In this Washington, in
this divisive, chaotic cycle, you have these people who’ve proven they can rise
above party and actually accomplish a mission.”
And out on the
campaign trail, many of them have versions of Max Rose’s experience with
opening doors, I heard in conversations with a dozen of these kinds of
candidates.
Mikie
Sherrill, a former Navy pilot
and federal prosecutor running in New Jersey’s Republican-leaning but
open 11th District,
sees it when she stops in at diners. It usually happens with older men. “I’ll
go up and say, ‘Hi, my name’s Mikie Sherrill and I’m running for Congress,‘”
she told me, and she’ll gauge mostly disinterest. “And I’ll say, ‘Yeah, you
know, I was a Navy helicopter
pilot and a federal prosecutor,’ and then I kind of start to walk
away—and they go, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute …’”
In California’s
50th District, made up mostly of
San Diego suburbs and held by embattled GOP Representative Duncan Hunter, Josh Butner gets it when he introduces
himself as a former Navy
SEAL—who’s a Democrat. “That usually gets the conversation started,” he
said. “They say something to the effect of, ‘Yeah, we need more Democrats
like you.’ We need more people willing to put the country ahead of
political parties. We need more folks willing to work with the other side.’”
Here in New
York’s 11th, Rose is running in
the most concentrated pocket of Trump Country in a very blue city. All of
Staten Island and a slice of southern Brooklyn, it’s the only congressional
district in the president’s hometown that voted for him. On Staten Island,
voting rolls show five Democrats for every three Republicans, but its elected
officials (state and local) are split in favor of the GOP. Whiter and more
socially conservative than the rest of the city, Staten Island is home to
firefighters, police officers, teachers and people who take the ferry to
Manhattan. Five miles from the heart of the city, the people here have a
chip-on-the-shoulder attitude, according to Kevin Elkins, a lifelong Staten
Islander and Rose’s campaign manager, boiling down to: “Screw the system,
because they screwed us.” In that way, it resembles the country as a whole—and
explains why 56.9
percent of Staten
Island voters picked Trump.
“Thank
you for your service,” this woman said.
“We gotta change politics!”
Rose told her. “It’s a mess in D.C.”
And
now, finally, it was warm, in a house for an evening fundraiser. “Tired yet?” I
asked him. He gave me a look, New York for c’mon. On tables
were finger sandwiches and mixed nuts and shrimp, Heinekens and Perrier and
pinot noir. On the wall was a picture of the hosts with Bill Clinton. On the
shelves were books by James Carville (Had Enough?) and Ta-Nehisi Coates
(We Were Eight Years in Power). A woman rang a little bell. It was time
for Rose to talk. He still had on his combat boots.
“I’ve
been a politician for 176 days,” Rose said.
People
laughed.
“But I’ve been a soldier for eight
years,” he continued. And the mood was serious again. “I led a combat outpost
in Afghanistan. And when I tell people that, they imagine Fort Knox or
something. It was just some sandbags, 30 U.S. soldiers, about 60 Afghan
National Army soldiers, and a mission. And those soldiers came from
everywhere—all across the country, gay, straight, Hispanic, African-American,
white. Dreamers. Citizens. None of that mattered, though, because we had a
mission to accomplish. And when my vehicle hit an IED in Afghanistan, they got
to work. They called the nine-line
medevac. They pulled
360-degree security. They got me out of there. I’ll owe them for the rest of my
life. You know, a fascinating thing happened to me when I was medevacced to
Kandahar Air Force Base. A two-star general comes up to my hospital bed, he
looks down at me, and he says, ‘Son, five years ago, you’d be dead.’ And then
he walks away.”
More
laughter.
“You
can laugh at that,” Rose said with a smile. “I was pretty shocked—that’s how
generals comfort you. But you know what? He was right. For too long, Strykers
had been called Kevlar coffins. … And after far too many soldiers died,
Congress finally got their act together. They put the right people in a room,
they gave them resources, they put partisanship aside, and they said, ‘Solve the damn problem!’ That used
to be the story of this country. I am only alive today because that’s what
Congress is actually capable of.”
He
let that thought sit for a bit.
“So,”
Rose said, “I think that we need to go back to that.”
How to Primary
Trump in 2020: Elected Republican officials keep asking me if it’s
possible. It won’t be easy. We should try anyway. By MIKE MURPHY, March 28,
2018
“Could
Donald Trump be, um, primaried?” That’s the whispered question I hear more
often than you might think from plenty of exhausted Republican elected
officials, particularly after a long week of dodging reporters looking for
comment on the president’s latest antics. “I mean, he’s just killing us!” they
say, before hustling away to safety.
Could
the president be beaten in a primary? The short and easy CW is, lots of luck!
Only two incumbent presidents have faced serious primary opposition in the past
50 years: Ronald Reagan challenged Gerald Ford in 1976, and Ted Kennedy took on
Jimmy Carter in 1980. Both lost after spirited contests. Two others faced less
serious opposition; George H.W. Bush dispatched Pat Buchanan in 1992, and
Richard Nixon crushed the two Republican congressmen — one from the left and
the other from the right — who challenged him in 1972. The sole president in
memory knocked out of office by the primary process was Lyndon Johnson, who
abandoned his reelection campaign after Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy
stunned observers by finishing a close second — 7 points behind LBJ — in the
New Hampshire primary.
Could
such an early state stumble happen again? (I suspect Ohio Governor John Kasich
is particularly curious, having run second to Trump in 2016’s contest in New Hampshire).
Doubtful. While such a sign of political weakness might once have driven an
honor-bound president to resign, shame is a nonfactor to Trump. To defeat him,
you would have to actually win early and often in the primary states and
assemble a majority of convention delegates. That’s the simplest way and the
hardest.
So
how would a Trump opponent plot out such an audacious caper? Polling today
looks grim. Despite Trump’s toxic numbers — the worst of any president at day
433 in the history of polling — his strength among rank-and-file Republicans is
formidable. Recent Marist data show a Trump favorable rating among Republicans
of 78 percent and a job approval rating of 87 percent. If any GOP primary
contests were held today, Trump would slaughter any opponent.
So
it’s hopeless, correct?
Maybe
not. Any Trump primary isn’t
about polling data today, it’s about polling data in late 2019. What
could make those 2019 numbers far different than today’s? A Republican wipeout
in the 2018 midterms. Such a disaster,
which is certainly now possible, would destroy Trump’s brand as a “winner”
and smash the GOP’s D.C. apparat. We conservatives would lose control over the
House appropriations process and watch the Democrats gleefully torment both the
White House and our political allies with endless investigations and subpoenas.
Even if we hold the Senate in November, a very nervous group of Republican
senators would eye their own loss of majority when they face 2020’s dire Senate
map, chock-full as it is of Democratic leaning states. None of this is a recipe
for Republicans to stagger home from what could be a very long election night
this November and immediately snuggle up to the president. Instead, Trump will
slide across on GOP balance sheets from very imperfect asset to huge scary
liability.
Trump
will sense all this and boil with resentment. He might even compound his
troubles by bringing back his old 2016 campaign message and snarl that House
and Senate Republicans caused their own demise and are just another big swampy
part of the D.C. problem. I can even imagine him musing aloud about running for
reelection as a third-party candidate, damning both parties.
Also
threatening to upend 2018 and beyond is the grim parade of Rumsfeldian “known unknowns” that loom
over the president’s future. Will
the Mueller investigation drive Trump out of office or into real legal jeopardy?
Could there be a hurricane of future Stormys, or an “et tu Trumpus” moment from
the long-suffering Melania? Will the stock market cave, ruining the
Republicans’ economic success message? Will a trade war break out, with China
acting on its threats to crush American exports—from GOP farm states—of pork
and soybeans? Will there be a military crisis with North Korea or Iran, and
will it hurt or help Commander in Chief Trump?
We
simply don’t know, but if
major political defeat, legal
scandal, internal party warfare and growing economic distress does
erupt, the 2019 primary soil could become far more fertile. How might a Trump
challenger best take advantage of it?
Three key elements must come together. First, the field must quickly narrow
to one major Trump opponent after the winnowing of Iowa and New
Hampshire. As we’ve seen before, a large flock of candidates only helps Trump.
This is easier said than done, since the weaker Trump looks, the more opponents
he is likely to attract.
Second,
it sure helps to be famous. Trump was what Hollywood calls a “pre-aware title.”
He was well-known from “The Apprentice” as a can-do outsider — amazing what
firing Gilbert Gottfried in a fake boardroom on a product-placement TV show can
do for you—and he put that image to work. Challenging Trump is no job for an unknown ham-and-egger.
Finally, message
is everything. Political organization has always been
overrated by the news media. But in this era of smartphones and social media, a
resonant message by a prominent political (or nonpolitical) “brand” can spread
quickly, powerfully and cheaply. Organizations can be built upon that
excitement and energy. The best political tactics to beat Trump are his own.
If
2020’s Republican voters are worn out by drama, defeat and despair, the message
that wins 50 percent of them will be clear: It’s time to change the channel on
the Trump show to his opposite. It is a reliable truism that voters weighing
candidates often look for what they perceive they didn’t get the last time. If
Trump in year three stands for wild Keystone Kops disorder and endless legal,
ethical and porn-star drama while Republicans lose election after election, any
alternative candidate should be all about competence, winning and nice, boring
conservative normalcy.
Who
could run? It’s far too early to name names, but for a tested, highly competent
potential contender with immaculate conservative credentials, I’d keep an eye
on political developments in Utah. Another potential archetype would be a
candidate promising a return to conservative ideological purity after three
big-spending years of braying populism. There is no shortage of potential “real
conservatives”—many promising generational change as well—itching to run for
president.
My
bet? I’m far from sure the president will even run again, but if he does I
think he’ll be in bad enough shape to catch a primary, just like Carter and
Ford did. As a Day One Never Trumper, I might be underestimating his long-term
hold on the Republican base, but after 30 years in politics I’ve seen how fast
support can crumble when a party sees its very survival at stake. While
defeating an incumbent president in a primary is the longest of political long
shots, if 2018 goes badly it is a shot worth taking.
Rose,
31, has a handful of opponents in the Democratic primary in June, but he’s
the well-funded favorite. Come November, he would
face Dan Donovan, the current Republican representative, or GOP challenger
Michael Grimm, the former representative who is coming off seven
months in prison for tax evasion but
who retains local support—if
not Washington’s blessing.
With endorsements from the Working Families Party, the Women’s Equality Party
and NARAL Pro-Choice America, plus Moulton, retired Air Force colonel and
California Representative Ted Lieu and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, Rose is
on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “Red to Blue” list of Democrats considered to have
a chance at flipping a red district. Even so, Roll Call still labels the 11th as “likely Republican.”
So does University of Virginia political
scientist Larry Sabato. And the Cook Political Report calls it a Republican “lean.”
Rose was born and
raised in Brooklyn, the
son of a medical laboratory executive and a professor of social work. He went
to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where he wrestled briefly and was a history major
with a favorite
professor who specialized
in the psychology of political leaders. After Wesleyan, he went to the London
School of Economics, where he earned a master’s degree in philosophy and public
policy. And after LSE … he enlisted in the Army. Why? I asked
him this over a late steak dinner at a Staten Island tavern called Jody’s Club
Forest. We were drinking Bud Light poured out of a plastic pitcher into
half-pint juice glasses. He answered my question by asking another. “If not
me,” he said, “who?” In April 2013, the Stryker he was riding in got blown up
by an IED. The first words he says in his first campaign video: “I don’t remember the bomb going off
…”
There used to be far
more Max Roses in Congress. In the 1970s, according to Jeremy Teigen, a political scientist at Ramapo
College in New Jersey and the author of Why Veterans Run, approximately three-quarters of the
members of Congress were veterans—led by the “Greatest Generation” of World War
II. But the number of veterans in Congress has been going down basically ever
since. The percentage of veterans in Congress is now 19—near a historic low. This downward
trend has been evident as well in other prominent political arenas. The 2012
presidential election, for instance, was the first since World War II in which
neither major party nominee was a veteran. The 2016 presidential election was
the second.
Whether it’s
causation or correlation, many of the candidates I talked to for this story
pointed to the reality that the extent of the partisanship in Washington has
gotten worse as veterans on the Hill have disappeared.
Available data
suggest that being a
veteran in fact doesn’t help win elections. “If you
think about it,” Teigen told me, “if that were true, we’d have 535 veterans on
Capitol Hill. Parties would nominate no one else.” A comprehensive study of
congressional races from 2000 to 2014 showed a military background has no “systematic, measurable effect,”
Teigen notes in his book. Furthermore, he writes, “Democratic veterans actually
do a little worse than comparable nonveteran Democrats”—a function, perhaps, of
Democratic veterans seeming to run more in longer-shot districts.
But this year’s
candidates say this time’s different, because so much else is so different,
too.
Trump is the
president, and this new generation of service members has emerged from the
battlefield with deep reservations about the direction the country is heading.
They might be frustrated by the (ongoing) outcomes of the conflicts of Iraq and
Afghanistan, but they are not embarrassed by their service. On the contrary,
they believe, it’s what distinguishes them, and what has prepared them for this
moment. From the victories of Tammy
Duckworth and Tulsi Gabbard in 2012 to Seth Moulton’s
surprising triumph on the North Shore of
Massachusetts in 2014 to his handpicked current class of endorsees—“Seth Moulton’s kind
of a North Star for a lot of these guys,” said Anson Kaye, a prominent media strategist
who’s working
for Rose—these young veterans
are hammering home their message of service above self, country above party,
concluding their résumés and experiences hold special appeal for voters who have grown
exasperated with scorched-earth, hyperpartisan politicking. Rose isn’t
the only candidate who’s used his or her time in the service as a campaign
pillar and as a cornerstone in a video pitch. Amy McGrath, a retired F-18 pilot in the Marines
and a Democratic candidate in Kentucky’s 6th District, created buzz with hers last summer. Butner
released one just a couple of weeks back. “Out
here,” he says at the start, “there’s no time for bickering or special-interest
politics. Working together is a matter of life and death.” Says Moulton in one of his own on behalf of
his Serve America PAC: “For a new politics, we need to elect
new leaders.”
“What we’re hearing
from a lot of the candidates who are veterans who are running for office this
year is that they are answering the call to continue to serve their communities
in a different way because of concerns that they have—some of which include the
president’s actions and all the dysfunction that they see in our nation’s
capital,” said Ben Ray Lujan, the New Mexico congressman and DCCC chair.
Talking to them, I
heard some altruism. I also heard no small amount of irritation.
“I am so angry at
what the politicians are doing to our country up there,” said Dan McCready, 34, who’s running in North Carolina’s
9th District, held by a Republican since 1963. “The lack of courage, the lack of American values up there …”
“Our current political system—and
certainly Donald Trump and what he’s doing—doesn’t really represent the country that we fought for,”
Crow told me from Colorado.
Dan Feehan was in college at Georgetown on
September 11. He could see the smoke coming from the Pentagon. “Because of
that, I made the decision to serve,” he explained. “That certainly drove the
urgency of that moment.” Now he’s running in Minnesota’s 1st, in the southern
part of the state—in a bid to replace Democrat Tim Walz, who’s running for
governor. “The feeling of uncertainty, the feeling of what’s going to happen
next—there’s a similarity there.”
“By the very nature
of what we were taught to do in the military, which is to solve problems, act quickly, build teams, engage in chaotic environments,
sort out problems, understand what you can fix—I mean, that’s what
we do,” said Joseph
Kopser, an Army veteran
running in the 21st district in Texas, which stretches from Austin to San
Antonio and has been in Republican hands since 1979. “No kidding it takes
veterans to step forward.”
Based on research
done by the Lugar Center and by West Point scholar and New
America fellow Isaiah Wilson III, there is evidence that veterans in
Congress actually do act in a more bipartisan way. Barcott and fellow Marine
Jake Wood wrote last fall in Time that
“lawmakers who have served in the military often have a special sense of duty
and an uncommon ability to reach across party lines and get things done.”
Retired U.S. Senators Richard Lugar and Tom Daschle, a Republican from Indiana
and a Democrat from South Dakota, respectively, expressed similar sentiments in U.S.
News & World Report: “We have come to believe that one solution to the
partisan crisis in national security policy is to elect to Congress more
veterans committed to bipartisanship.”
McCready agrees. “I
led a platoon of 65 Marines in Iraq during the surge of 2007 and 2008,” the
North Carolina candidate told me. “And I had folks in my platoon
from all over the country. We never cared where you came from. We never cared
about who your parents were or the color of your skin. The last thing we cared
about, actually, was whether you were a Republican or a Democrat. Because we
all wore the same color of uniform. And that’s really what the military teaches
you. It’s that we’re all on the same team, you don’t leave a person behind, and
we all have a job to do that’s bigger than ourselves. That’s what’s missing
right now in Washington.”
Rose, for his part,
in the two days we spent together on Staten Island and in Brooklyn, was a
nonpartisan turret-turner with his frank talk.
The Republican Party as a whole,
he said, “has wholly
abandoned the middle class and the working class,” with “this fallacy,
this laughingstock, of trickle-down
economics, which they have bought into yet again.”
Rose, though,
chastised his own party
as well—for abandoning the
working class, too, and for taking for granted other segments of its
traditional coalition.
“The African-American population
is a great example,” he told me at Jody’s. “You raise money, you raise money,
you raise money—and then you show up about 30 days prior to an election and you
say, ‘Well, let’s talk about turning out the vote.’ There’s zero trust. There’s
zero relationships. If anyone’s sick and tired of it, it’s many, many leaders
in that community.”
Still, he said,
“you’ve got to choose a side in this game, and I’m a proud Democrat. But I want
Democrats to be Democrats again.” Which means? “It means that if you’re telling
me you think government has a
role for this country,
then say it. … Be bold about it. If you think that the working class has been gypped, then say it. And
tell me how you’re going to fix
it.”
He ticked off his
list: Massive public works
initiatives like the interstate projects of the past. Twenty-first-century smart grids.
A widespread national effort to address the opioid scourge—a pressing issue in Staten Island, as
in so many places around the country—a la the response to the HIV and AIDS
epidemic of the 1980s. Something akin to the Apollo project in the tech and
health care spaces.
“And that active role
for government is not just
tax cuts for rich people and corporations,” Rose said. “It’s not just cutting Social Security
and Medicaid and figuring out ways we can restrict legal immigration. There’s far more of a
role for government. And that’s why I’m a Democrat.”
The night
before, Rose had been at a
fundraiser in Manhattan, late. He was on the ferry as the clock approached 1
a.m. I met him in the lobby of his Staten Island apartment building at 6:15.
Then, in a near-zero-visibility mixture of icy rain and fat flakes of snow, we
crossed the Verrazano Bridge to Brooklyn to a subway station, where he shook
scores of hands and at one point helped a woman with a toddler in a stroller
descend a set of stairs, and then we went to a breakfast back on Staten Island
for an organization for people with disabilities, where he worked the room, from
table to table. Later, he laced up his sand-tan combat boots to do a round of
door-knocking in a nor’easter.
“I’m the guy that
showed up in the snow. I can’t be all bad,” he said through another glass door,
showing his card.
This
means that Trump’s welfare
is inextricably caught up with the party’s. Every point his approval
rating ticks up means fewer House seats lost in the midterms. It’s quite
possible that in 2020 his prospects will be the difference between Republicans
controlling one or more of the elected branches in Washington, or unified
Democratic control.
The
hold Trump has on the party has a lot to do with his mesmerizing circus act and having the right
enemies. But it’s more than that.
Surprisingly,
he’s been loyal to the constituent parts of his coalition. On judges, social conservative and
anti-abortion causes, and gun rights (with the occasional rhetorical
wobble), he’s been solid. His desperation to get anything he can call a wall on the southern border
speaks to his genuine desire to deliver on one of his signature promises. The
same is true of his bout of tariffs this year.
The
last two items speak to Trump’s heterodoxy, although the president isn’t as
ideologically aberrant as Never Trumpers would have it.
Republicans
have never won on the strength of a textbook libertarian economics denuded of
any populist appeal, or an idealistic foreign policy devoid of a hard-headed
focus on the national interest and a Jacksonian element (if the Iraq War had
been sold at the inception as entirely a democratizing enterprise, it would
never have gained sufficient political support).
In
his 1965 New York mayoral campaign, Bill Buckley found his constituency among
outer borough Archie Bunker-type voters, a preview of Reagan Democrats; if
Donald Trump’s father, Fred, voted in that race it’s easy to imagine him
pulling the lever for Buckley.
Ronald
Reagan wouldn’t have been the powerful conservative figure he was in the
late-1970s if he hadn’t pounded away at the premier populist-nationalism issue
of the time, resistance to giving back the Panama Canal to Panama. “We bought
it. We built it. We paid for it. It’s ours.”
Even
George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis in 1992 not as a WASPy
establishmentarian, but on the strength of the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance
and crime, especially the emotive Willie Horton case.
We
can argue about what role populism and nationalism should have in conservative
politics, but that they have a place, and always have, is undeniable.
With
Trump, the danger was that the populism would overwhelm the conservatism. But
there have been no populist judges, regulation or tax policy. His presidency
has been a crude shotgun
marriage between the off-the-shelf GOP agenda and his own impulses on
immigration and trade, when, ideally, there would have been a more fully
thought-out and integrated conservative populism.
Trump
is not seriously engaged enough to drive this himself, while congressional
Republicans lack interest in immigration restriction and are opposed to Trump
on trade. But make no mistake: On immigration and China trade, Trump is closer to the national
Republican consensus than his conservative detractors.
A
realistic attitude to Trump involves acknowledging both his flaws and how he
usefully points the way beyond a tired Reagan nostalgia. By all means,
criticize him when he’s wrong. But don’t pretend that he’s just going away, or
that he’s a wild outlier in the contemporary GOP.
→ Please, use this and my other blogs as references to prove points; they’re well cited.(Citations are present through blue links.)
