Trumpism certainly represents a departure from “traditional conservatism,” but there are also continuities that are worth noting./1 washingtonpost.com/politics/balzt…
“Owning the libs,” for example, is not a departure from traditional conservatism./2
Also, the cultivation of grievance and victimhood are not departures but continuities, as I show in my book, and I don’t think it is much of a stretch to consider them constitutive ideas./3
In my @BostonReview piece on how the GOP became known as the “party of ideas,” I argued that “cultural anxieties and backlash politics” were part of the mix. /4
This is an insightful piece by @chrislhayes on how the GOP is radicalizing against democracy but I disagree with the claim that the GOP is "moderating on policy." /1 theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
Yes, "public opinion is trending left" but I don't see a lot of evidence that the GOP "moderated" during the Trump administration, which pushed tax cuts for the rich, repealing ACA, deregulation, conservative judges, all with near-unanimous support from the GOP conference. /2
Hayes say, "If Trump had come out strongly for a $15 minimum wage, the party’s base would have backed him." Perhaps. But Trump opposed an increase in the minimum wage, & as this piece notes, “The vast majority of Republicans" oppose it. /3 cnbc.com/2021/01/26/dem…
This is a good piece on fissures within the GOP but I think it mischaracterizes the Trump presidency as “populist” & repeats a story about how conservatives & the GOP expelled the far-right in the mid-1960s that is actually far more complicated. /1 washingtonpost.com/politics/senat…
I don’t think the sharp opposition between “hard-edge populism” & “conservative orthodoxy” holds. Many of the Trump administration’s achievements were boilerplate conservatism. Its own website trumpets things like “massive deregulation,” tax cuts, etc. /2
The claim that Buckley and “key GOP politicians banded together to marginalize anti-Communist extremism and conspiracy-mongering” of the JBS has been widely repeated lately but the history is more complicated. /3
Why the divergence between perception and reality? Lots of reasons but it partially has to do, IMO, with the success of anti-New Deal free enterprisers transmuting their ideology into an invented tradition a kind of common sense.
Here’s a link to the excellent piece by @DLeonhardt, summarizing research by the economists, Alan S. Blinder and Mark W. Watson. /2
It calls to mind the statement often attributed to Harry Truman (and here in 1952 to Adlai Stevenson) that, "If you want to live like a Republican these days, you have to vote for a Democrat." /3 newspapers.com/clip/69164274/
This profile of Josh Hawley, which highlights his supposedly “ferocious populism” and quotes somebody calling him a “true populist,” barely discusses his policy positions, which on ACA, taxes, minimum wage & many other issues are not “populist” at all. /1 washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/styl…
We don’t, for example, learn that Hawley, although not yet in the Senate, supported the Trump tax cut for the rich, that he opposed raising the minimum wage, that as AG, he fought to take health care away from millions of Americans./2
If to be a “populist” is to use the word “elite” in almost every paragraph and to condemn “cosmopolitanism,” than perhaps Hawley qualifies. /3
"Charming" Kevin McCarthy met with birther activists in his office in 2013 and accused three Jewish people--Soros, Steyer and Bloomberg--of trying to "buy" the midterms in 2018.
Given McCarthy’s misleading stories about the “deli” that he operated out of his aunt and uncle’s frozen yogurt store, it is interested that this is still up on his website bio.
Here's a @washingtonpost fact check about his deli. "Yet there are no ownership or sales records that can be located for a Kevin O’s Deli in Bakersfield, according to the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration." washingtonpost.com/news/fact-chec…