Yes, Trump ran against "elements of movement-conservative orthodoxy," but Douthat overstates the extent he did so. He ran on tax cuts for the rich, repeal of ACA, guns, anti-abortion, calling climate change a hoax, & tough guy foreign policy. /1 nytimes.com/2020/08/22/opi…
His "populist" feints were obvious bs. He had no universal health care plan (unless "remove the lines" is a plan), he opposed raising the paltry minimum wage, he proposed a huge tax cut for the rich and corporations (still, his only signature piece of legislation)./2
Douthat risibly refers to the "populist pieces from his tax bill," one that even Forbes! said "helped billionaires pay less tax than the working class." /3 forbes.com/sites/camiloma…
I see what Douthat is doing here--he's saying, imagine if we took Trump's "populist" rhetoric seriously and eliminated the racism ("race-baiting"), the favoritism toward the rich, and the disdain he's shown in practice for the people he supposedly promised to help. /4
The question is whether you can really remove the racism, the plutocratic nature of his plans, and the disdain for governing--or whether those are the features and not the bugs of both Trumpism and the modern GOP./5
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One important point missing from the discourse about Steve Scalise calling himself ‘David Duke without the baggage,’ is that, when he used the label, this was already a viable political lane, one used to describe other politicians, before Scalise. /1 theguardian.com/us-news/2023/o…
In 1990, the Alexandria Town Talk used the phrase "David Duke without the baggage" to describe a winning political formula in Louisiana politics. /2
In 1991, U.S. Rep. Clyde Holloway, seeking to advance in the Governor's race, said he was "a great alternative to David Duke, without all the baggage."/3
A central fact is that, in the midst of a UAW strike, Trump spoke last night at a nonunion factory. Yet the @nytimes mentions this only at the end of the 6th paragraph and the @washingtonpost brings it up in only the 19th paragraph. These are failures of framing./1
It seems disingenuous for the Times subhed to claim that both Trump and Biden spoke to people "affected by the United Automobile Workers strike," without mentioning at the outset that only one of them spoke directly to striking workers. /2 nytimes.com/2023/09/28/us/…
Similarly, for the Post headline to be that Trump "demands union votes" without mentioning at the outset that he did so at a nonunion factory strikes me as somewhat misleading./3 washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/…
A few comments on this piece, which makes some good points but also imo mischaracterizes key issues. /1 nytimes.com/2023/03/27/bri…
To say, "Today’s left is less...patriotic than the country as a whole and less concerned about crime and border security," is to take the conservative critique of "the left" as accurate rather than the perspective of those who self-define that way./2
In contrast, this summation of the pre-Trump Republican Party accepts their self-description: "Republicans were mostly comfortable pushing for lower taxes and smaller government (other than the military)."/3
No doubt, GOP rhetoric in 2024 is "dark," perhaps unprecedentedly so, but this piece understates the continuity in the apocalyptic style in conservative political speech./1 washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/…
There's not much "sanguine optimism," in Ronald Reagan's fearmongering 1961 anti-Medicare speech, which ends with his claim that "you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children... what it once was like in America when men were free."/2 americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ronal…
Here's a thread I did last year on a NY Times article that posited a similar discontinuity./3
Republican claims of being angry--visceral or otherwise--is often reported as being newsworthy in itself, in a way that it is not for other groups in society.
One of the modes of elite victimization is to take claims of anger among the powerful to be a self-justifying force, rather than to address the question of what justifies that anger. /2
A good question to ask is why are they angry about the enforcement of the law--in this case ensuring that the wealthy actually pay the taxes they owe?/3
"Punctured myths make us better students of history, but they leave nothing to live up to. Shame is a shaky foundation for any project of renewal." I'm not sure why the first claim necessarily follows or why history should necessarily promote a "project of renewal." /2
Moreover, I don't think that the history of "terrible subjects" is necessarily based on a model of producing feelings of "shame." /3