Trump's definition of "Trumpism" at CPAC showed the mistake of assuming that he carved out a distinct ideological path for the GOP. His message was more boilerplate conservative than "populist." /1
"It means low taxes and eliminating job-killing regulations," he said. He also mentioned strong borders, law and order, and "great trade deals." Only the latter can be seen as a divergence from mainstream conservatism./2
While he has been (inaccurately) said to have "outlanked" Democrats, his invocation of the "slippery slope" was even more extreme than typical postwar GOP rhetoric: "We will fight the onslaught of radicalism, socialism, and indeed it all leads to communism once and for all."/3
To the extent that there is a divide in the GOP, it is not about ideology. I thought a telling quote came from Josh Mandel in @jbouie's recent column when he conflated a "Trump America First Agenda" with "economic freedom and individual liberty." /4 nytimes.com/2021/02/17/opi…
Mandel was connecting Trumpism to traditional economic conservatism, not to populism, much as Trump himself did at CPAC./5
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In her CPAC speech, Kristi Noem quoted a JFK speech from 1962 as evidence of "a time when both political parties clung to certain fundamental principles" and before Ronald Reagan was forced from the Democratic Party. This is humorous for two reasons./1 rev.com/blog/transcrip…
First, because Reagan joined the GOP in 1962, the exact year of JFK's speech./2
Second, a few years earlier Reagan wrote of JFK to Nixon: "Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx -- first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother to us all." /3 upi.com/Archives/1984/…
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
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/