"Trump was successful in tearing the old Republican party down, but his Republican party is built around his personality, not an ideology or ideas that can outlast him."
The GOP was ripe for being torn down, because it had partially bought into the Left's paradigm of top-down technocratic rule. They thought that pleasing the people, remaining in office and maintaining the system was all they needed to do - skipping that hard part about securing our rights, even if that means telling us "no" on some things, that is a government's reason for being.
He might not be able to articulate it the way we would like, but Trump's policies are built upon an ideology that predates him, and can outlast him if we are willing to adopt it ourselves: respect for the rights of the individual, treating them as adults instead of "infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals" as the Nice People™ of the Left do to us and our neighbors.
Unless we are willing to adopt it ourselves, we will never have unity in this nation, only continued fighting for scraps from the elites' and demagogues' table.
The way I think about it is both parties have been having the wrong fight.
Their ideologies were organized in the middle twentieth century to fight over FDRs agenda and the New Deal / Great Society. That was a fight over the role and expansion of government bureaucracy as a corrective to the economic collapse of the Great Depression. That is what both parties were organized to do and for many decades it was the most relevant fight to be having in the country. But then it went on so long everybody forgot it wasn't the only thing relevant to politics.
So new problems cropped up and both parties ignored them because they were outside the window of the only things they knew how to do. When people complained about them and demanded solutions, the people running things got annoyed and told them to go away. Doing anything about these new issues was outside their window of vision and would entail disrupting the structures they supported them. So people started getting mad.
And now finally the weight of the things they ignored are heavier than inertia and things are coming apart.
The precursor to the New Deal was the half-century that preceded it, where people were moving from the farms - where they had to trust their own insights and common sense, and those of their agrarian peers, to protect themselves, physically and economically - to the factories, where those attributes were subordinated to a reverence for formal education and to rules-based "scientific management" by trained professionals.
And along with that, urban living encouraged them to become interdependent, then dependent, upon others - landlords, service providers, civic government - to solve the problems around them. To the degree that the immediate problems were resolved, this encouraged further trust in those entities (along with unions) to protect their interests.
The above way of thinking was encouraged by the elites of their day, as the organized application of intellect and science was accurately perceived as the paving machine for the road to the future … but we took this a step too far; we began to believe that the practitioners of intellect and science were the paving machine, worthy of our total trust: that they were capable of paving our way across any stretch of life that was in front of us ....
... and we were not worthy to compare their thinking against our own common sense.
This is what primed the pump for the expansion of government seen in the New Deal. An expansion that was reinforced by our victory in WWII; arguably the most successful application of government power in the face of adversity in our history, that in large part was built on our growth of industry and technological achievement. It was reinforced in the same manner, two decades later, by the successes of the civil rights movement and the space program.
All three of those victories have a common thread which facilitated their success: all were undertaken as part of efforts to preserve life and liberty (even the space program, which was significant to both defense and foreign policy) - i.e. the legitimate mission of government, producing outcomes that were universal and not individual-specific.
But we built upon the step-too-far we took during the New Deal, aided and abetted by the thirty years of American economic dominance after WWII as the rest of the developed world was literally rebuilding from the rubble. We got the idea that the same institutions that could defeat two global tyrannies, defeat Jim Crow, and put men on the moon could be trusted to solve ANY problem with its deep pockets and legions of "experts", all perceived to be (but not actually) disconnected from the profit motive.
Even problems whose attributes vary greatly from individual-to-individual - personal finances, career/unemployment, health care, education. Problems that do not lend themselves to the limited perception of a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital.
That thirty years of economic dominance acted as a buffer that allowed us to indulge the above fallacies with little/no damage for years. Millions came to believe that they had a right to work the same job the same way in the same place for a lifetime, because their employers could be turned into cash cows and social-services surrogates by bureaucratic fiat and (in some cases) union pressure. And if they weren't able to get a job, others would be there so they could "get by" enough that they didn't take the initiative to "get ahead".
We went a long way in "breeding out" the idea that the individual MUST be the primary decision-maker over the aspects of living that directly affect them, and that they must take the initiative to implement those decisions ... and instead we could just go to work and/or school and/or the aid office, and others would plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
The Right, instead of disabusing this fallacy at its fundamental level, deferred to the "experts" themselves; they didn't ignore the problems, but they only paid lip service to them in their own lack of confidence in their own common sense, affinity for political expedience, and/or their own elitist views of their "commoner" neighbors. They kicked the can down the road - even as things were coming apart, which has been happening since the end of that thirty-year economic dominance where today's generations learned all the wrong lessons.
My kishkes are telling me that it's the Democratic party that's in disarray and chaos. In fact, the headline of the NYT at this moment is a bemoaning of the steep drop in Black voters for the Harris campaign.
I see Trump as the consolidation of a movement in the Republican party than an outlier. I say this b/c I recall the earthquake that happened in the Republican Party after the 08 election. The rise of the Tea Party movement was the beginning of the Republican party's realignment IMHO. IIRC, there was a congressman who was a real power player for the Republicans, a sort of Frank Underwood type who got booted out by the Tea Party movement. It was an earthquake-- so much that even Aaron Sorkin addressed it in the (highly under rated) Newsroom TV series. To me, that's when the populist movement on the right began, not in the '16 presidential race.
It's ironic that the left also had a rise in populism at that same time w/ Occupy Wall Street. The quickest examination of these two dynamics shows how one died quietly while the Tea Party is still in play (Cruz, Rubio, MTG, etc etc) The left simply is unable by its nature to get it's act together.
No, I think Trump capitalized on the groundswell that first appeared in the era. Yeah, yeah, Koch brothers and all, but I think that they merely exploited an existing zeitgeist that Trump took over.
The way I see it, it's the Democratic party that's in shambles; the Republicans have a unity that is solidifying by the hour, and bringing in more and more followers.
Here's a thought experiment:
Let's say that Kamala wasn't the 'nominee'. Who would have stepped in? Huh? HUNH? Mayor Freaking Pete? Liz Warren The Snake? SANDERS???? LOL
OTOH... let's say Trump dropped out...
Well, for starters, there's JD of course. But there's also Vivek, and Tulsi; not to mention Bobby Jr., and frankly each of these people would make good presidents. And that's not even looking to the state levels where we find DeSantis, Abbot and the gov of VA.
This is right off the top of my head.
Also, taking into consideration the the Democratic war chest is at least 2x (or is it FOUR?) the size of the Republicans and yet AT BEST it's a tossup for Harris? WTF?
What kills me is that the Democrats (I used to be one) had the opportunity to figure this out back in 16. But like the weak kneed college kids, the absolute last thing they wanted to do was face the facts and take a critical look at themselves. But they didn't, instead papered over it w/ Russiagate, then Jan 6.
All the while appealing to people in a deeply racist and divisive manner through identity and other forms of grievance politics.
To me, the Republican party, on a national level is in good shape. I think that there is actually a possibility that Trump is going to win bigly.
At any rate, if Trump does win, I think you're going to see a collapse of MSM. Especially if they ban Pharma advertising.
Overall, I think the Republicans are much, much further along the road to renewal than the Democrats.
My take on Trump is he is like a surfer on a wave. There was a wave out there and everyone was ignoring it. Trump saw it and jumped on it, and it carried him farther than even he imagined he would go. But he didn't make the wave. He just jumped on it first.
The question now is whether anyone can or will turn all that energy into ideological infrastructure that can and will last past Trump. Or will it be like Perot's reform party. And can they turn that energy into ideas that actually address the problems people care about.
I think that's what Vance and a few others are hoping to do. They want to turn the wave into sustainable energy and institutionalize it. The question now is whether they can come up with something that's actually compelling and lasts.
1) Some neocon retreads from the old Republican Party
2) A man who is good as governor and was in the right place at the right time, but not as good as everyone thinks (he's still trying to push a six week abortion ban in a state that is going 70% against it in a referendum despite being deep red otherwise).
The Dems couldn't even have a primary despite having a senile old man with his finger on the nuclear button is how bad they are.
The Democratic Party is today like Wile E. Coyote suspended in midair just after he has run off the cliff and afraid to look down and accept his fate. Few in America are buying what they are selling anymore with their ridiculous open borders policies, their openly racist (against whites, Asians and men) identity politics, their acceptance of black criminal behavior, their coddling of the addicted and mentally unstable homeless, and their crazy beliefs related to transgender issues such as men in women’s sports, locker rooms and prisons. They are already falling.
I actually think the Democrats are in more long term trouble than they believe. Most Democrats I talk to and listen to clearly believe the party is positioned to do great as is. They appear to believe that once Trump is going they are going to have clear road to implement a bunch of great ideas that people love and give them a big permanent majority. I think they're wrong about that and it will be more like the Democrats after the Whig collapse, and the question is what they do when they figure that out themselves.
They spent the last four years passing legislation with no bi-partisan support and now everyone hates them. We got a good look at what they want to do with Trump gone.
I love the history, but think the parties are changing. The Democrats no longer stand for free speech. While Trump isn't a visionary, he is a populist. Tulsi and RFKs endorsements are creating a new coalition, just as the Cheney's are for the Democrats. The coalitions are changing.
Totally agree the parties are changing. The big question now is how. So I would say there's totally the possibility of a new coalition. In fact, there's a lot of possible ways to reshuffle politics right now depending on how you do it. The question is whether they can come up with the ideology, issues, and agendas to sustain it and sell it.
"Trump was successful in tearing the old Republican party down, but his Republican party is built around his personality, not an ideology or ideas that can outlast him."
The GOP was ripe for being torn down, because it had partially bought into the Left's paradigm of top-down technocratic rule. They thought that pleasing the people, remaining in office and maintaining the system was all they needed to do - skipping that hard part about securing our rights, even if that means telling us "no" on some things, that is a government's reason for being.
He might not be able to articulate it the way we would like, but Trump's policies are built upon an ideology that predates him, and can outlast him if we are willing to adopt it ourselves: respect for the rights of the individual, treating them as adults instead of "infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals" as the Nice People™ of the Left do to us and our neighbors.
Unless we are willing to adopt it ourselves, we will never have unity in this nation, only continued fighting for scraps from the elites' and demagogues' table.
https://thenayborhood.substack.com/p/cutting-to-the-chase
The way I think about it is both parties have been having the wrong fight.
Their ideologies were organized in the middle twentieth century to fight over FDRs agenda and the New Deal / Great Society. That was a fight over the role and expansion of government bureaucracy as a corrective to the economic collapse of the Great Depression. That is what both parties were organized to do and for many decades it was the most relevant fight to be having in the country. But then it went on so long everybody forgot it wasn't the only thing relevant to politics.
So new problems cropped up and both parties ignored them because they were outside the window of the only things they knew how to do. When people complained about them and demanded solutions, the people running things got annoyed and told them to go away. Doing anything about these new issues was outside their window of vision and would entail disrupting the structures they supported them. So people started getting mad.
And now finally the weight of the things they ignored are heavier than inertia and things are coming apart.
The precursor to the New Deal was the half-century that preceded it, where people were moving from the farms - where they had to trust their own insights and common sense, and those of their agrarian peers, to protect themselves, physically and economically - to the factories, where those attributes were subordinated to a reverence for formal education and to rules-based "scientific management" by trained professionals.
And along with that, urban living encouraged them to become interdependent, then dependent, upon others - landlords, service providers, civic government - to solve the problems around them. To the degree that the immediate problems were resolved, this encouraged further trust in those entities (along with unions) to protect their interests.
The above way of thinking was encouraged by the elites of their day, as the organized application of intellect and science was accurately perceived as the paving machine for the road to the future … but we took this a step too far; we began to believe that the practitioners of intellect and science were the paving machine, worthy of our total trust: that they were capable of paving our way across any stretch of life that was in front of us ....
... and we were not worthy to compare their thinking against our own common sense.
This is what primed the pump for the expansion of government seen in the New Deal. An expansion that was reinforced by our victory in WWII; arguably the most successful application of government power in the face of adversity in our history, that in large part was built on our growth of industry and technological achievement. It was reinforced in the same manner, two decades later, by the successes of the civil rights movement and the space program.
All three of those victories have a common thread which facilitated their success: all were undertaken as part of efforts to preserve life and liberty (even the space program, which was significant to both defense and foreign policy) - i.e. the legitimate mission of government, producing outcomes that were universal and not individual-specific.
But we built upon the step-too-far we took during the New Deal, aided and abetted by the thirty years of American economic dominance after WWII as the rest of the developed world was literally rebuilding from the rubble. We got the idea that the same institutions that could defeat two global tyrannies, defeat Jim Crow, and put men on the moon could be trusted to solve ANY problem with its deep pockets and legions of "experts", all perceived to be (but not actually) disconnected from the profit motive.
Even problems whose attributes vary greatly from individual-to-individual - personal finances, career/unemployment, health care, education. Problems that do not lend themselves to the limited perception of a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital.
That thirty years of economic dominance acted as a buffer that allowed us to indulge the above fallacies with little/no damage for years. Millions came to believe that they had a right to work the same job the same way in the same place for a lifetime, because their employers could be turned into cash cows and social-services surrogates by bureaucratic fiat and (in some cases) union pressure. And if they weren't able to get a job, others would be there so they could "get by" enough that they didn't take the initiative to "get ahead".
We went a long way in "breeding out" the idea that the individual MUST be the primary decision-maker over the aspects of living that directly affect them, and that they must take the initiative to implement those decisions ... and instead we could just go to work and/or school and/or the aid office, and others would plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
The Right, instead of disabusing this fallacy at its fundamental level, deferred to the "experts" themselves; they didn't ignore the problems, but they only paid lip service to them in their own lack of confidence in their own common sense, affinity for political expedience, and/or their own elitist views of their "commoner" neighbors. They kicked the can down the road - even as things were coming apart, which has been happening since the end of that thirty-year economic dominance where today's generations learned all the wrong lessons.
Meet the enemy ... he is us.
Vivek and Vance waiting in the wings, MAGA is now bigger than Trump for sure
Not just them … with governors like DeSantis, Abbott and Noem tag-teaming with Trump, Making Federalism Great Again is also a possibility.
As usual, a brilliant piece.
My kishkes are telling me that it's the Democratic party that's in disarray and chaos. In fact, the headline of the NYT at this moment is a bemoaning of the steep drop in Black voters for the Harris campaign.
I see Trump as the consolidation of a movement in the Republican party than an outlier. I say this b/c I recall the earthquake that happened in the Republican Party after the 08 election. The rise of the Tea Party movement was the beginning of the Republican party's realignment IMHO. IIRC, there was a congressman who was a real power player for the Republicans, a sort of Frank Underwood type who got booted out by the Tea Party movement. It was an earthquake-- so much that even Aaron Sorkin addressed it in the (highly under rated) Newsroom TV series. To me, that's when the populist movement on the right began, not in the '16 presidential race.
It's ironic that the left also had a rise in populism at that same time w/ Occupy Wall Street. The quickest examination of these two dynamics shows how one died quietly while the Tea Party is still in play (Cruz, Rubio, MTG, etc etc) The left simply is unable by its nature to get it's act together.
No, I think Trump capitalized on the groundswell that first appeared in the era. Yeah, yeah, Koch brothers and all, but I think that they merely exploited an existing zeitgeist that Trump took over.
The way I see it, it's the Democratic party that's in shambles; the Republicans have a unity that is solidifying by the hour, and bringing in more and more followers.
Here's a thought experiment:
Let's say that Kamala wasn't the 'nominee'. Who would have stepped in? Huh? HUNH? Mayor Freaking Pete? Liz Warren The Snake? SANDERS???? LOL
OTOH... let's say Trump dropped out...
Well, for starters, there's JD of course. But there's also Vivek, and Tulsi; not to mention Bobby Jr., and frankly each of these people would make good presidents. And that's not even looking to the state levels where we find DeSantis, Abbot and the gov of VA.
This is right off the top of my head.
Also, taking into consideration the the Democratic war chest is at least 2x (or is it FOUR?) the size of the Republicans and yet AT BEST it's a tossup for Harris? WTF?
What kills me is that the Democrats (I used to be one) had the opportunity to figure this out back in 16. But like the weak kneed college kids, the absolute last thing they wanted to do was face the facts and take a critical look at themselves. But they didn't, instead papered over it w/ Russiagate, then Jan 6.
All the while appealing to people in a deeply racist and divisive manner through identity and other forms of grievance politics.
To me, the Republican party, on a national level is in good shape. I think that there is actually a possibility that Trump is going to win bigly.
At any rate, if Trump does win, I think you're going to see a collapse of MSM. Especially if they ban Pharma advertising.
Overall, I think the Republicans are much, much further along the road to renewal than the Democrats.
My take on Trump is he is like a surfer on a wave. There was a wave out there and everyone was ignoring it. Trump saw it and jumped on it, and it carried him farther than even he imagined he would go. But he didn't make the wave. He just jumped on it first.
The question now is whether anyone can or will turn all that energy into ideological infrastructure that can and will last past Trump. Or will it be like Perot's reform party. And can they turn that energy into ideas that actually address the problems people care about.
I think that's what Vance and a few others are hoping to do. They want to turn the wave into sustainable energy and institutionalize it. The question now is whether they can come up with something that's actually compelling and lasts.
The Republicans had an open primary. Trump won.
The other options were:
1) Some neocon retreads from the old Republican Party
2) A man who is good as governor and was in the right place at the right time, but not as good as everyone thinks (he's still trying to push a six week abortion ban in a state that is going 70% against it in a referendum despite being deep red otherwise).
The Dems couldn't even have a primary despite having a senile old man with his finger on the nuclear button is how bad they are.
The Democratic Party is today like Wile E. Coyote suspended in midair just after he has run off the cliff and afraid to look down and accept his fate. Few in America are buying what they are selling anymore with their ridiculous open borders policies, their openly racist (against whites, Asians and men) identity politics, their acceptance of black criminal behavior, their coddling of the addicted and mentally unstable homeless, and their crazy beliefs related to transgender issues such as men in women’s sports, locker rooms and prisons. They are already falling.
I actually think the Democrats are in more long term trouble than they believe. Most Democrats I talk to and listen to clearly believe the party is positioned to do great as is. They appear to believe that once Trump is going they are going to have clear road to implement a bunch of great ideas that people love and give them a big permanent majority. I think they're wrong about that and it will be more like the Democrats after the Whig collapse, and the question is what they do when they figure that out themselves.
They spent the last four years passing legislation with no bi-partisan support and now everyone hates them. We got a good look at what they want to do with Trump gone.
I love the history, but think the parties are changing. The Democrats no longer stand for free speech. While Trump isn't a visionary, he is a populist. Tulsi and RFKs endorsements are creating a new coalition, just as the Cheney's are for the Democrats. The coalitions are changing.
Totally agree the parties are changing. The big question now is how. So I would say there's totally the possibility of a new coalition. In fact, there's a lot of possible ways to reshuffle politics right now depending on how you do it. The question is whether they can come up with the ideology, issues, and agendas to sustain it and sell it.