The Anti-Trump Bourbons: Learning and Forgetting Nothing in Time for 2020, by Victor Davis Hanson.
Trump’s enraged critics still do not grasp that he is a reflection of, not a catalyst for, widespread anger and unhappiness with globalization, interventionist foreign policy, Orwellian political correctness, identity politics, tribalism, open borders, and a Deep State that lectures and condemns but never lives the consequences of its own sermonizing. …
Trump now has a presidential record of eight months. Despite the media’s neglect of it, one can sense changes by just getting out and traveling the country. Even in rural central California, one can feel that it really is true that there is a 76 percent drop in illegal immigration, and immigration law is being taken seriously as never before.
It was no accident that the National Council of La Raza without warning dropped its racialist nomenclature and is now UnidosUS (“Together, US”). … The same pragmatics about changed attitudes are reflected in dozens of local roadside canteens in my environs that have taken down their showy Mexican flags and are now waving even larger American ones.
Cement trucks and construction cranes are ubiquitous on the roads in a way not true over the prior eight years. Talk to business people, and they are citing new projects and investments, not voicing anxieties about higher taxes and more regulatory hostility.
Much of Trump’s success so far comes despite congressional ossification and is clearly psychological: people with money to invest or to build things prefer to do so when the head of the regulatory state urges them to create jobs, make money, and help their country get richer, not when he warns them that it is not the time to profit, that they need to share and spread around their wealth, that they must calibrate when they have made enough profits, and that they should concede that the state built their businesses as much as their own daring and talent. …
Trump’s team is reinventing the Environmental Protection Agency, giving clean coal a second life, opening up natural gas and oil exploration on federal lands, building pipelines, and exporting energy. The crash in world oil prices is bankrupting exporters like Russia, Middle East autocracies, and the Gulf States, whose influences are now pruned back by a dearth of cash. …
Trump does not run in a vacuum, but always in a landscape of alternatives. The Republican Party is split, but so far the NeverTrump establishment is smaller and less influential than the returning Tea-Party/Trump/Reagan Democrat conservative base that in part sat out in 2008 and 2012 or once voted Democratic.
What Trump loses to elite Republican and conservative disdain expressed in op-eds and news show round tables or to Lindsey Graham and John McCain-like denunciations, he has more than made up with new populist Republican support in small towns and communities nationwide. For now, it is hard to imagine any other potential Republican nominee rallying a crowd like Trump or appealing to the losers of globalization in such dramatic fashion. …
One of the strangest ironies of the present age is that Trump’s populism (e.g., “our farmers”, “our vets”, “our coal miners”, “our workers”), which saved the Senate and House for Republicans and delivered the greatest Republican majorities on the local and state level since the 1920s, is either ridiculed or ignored.
Yet the more the economy picks up, the more the administration prunes back the regulatory state, and the more the United States restores deterrence, the shriller will be the argument that Trump’s tweets and behavior nullify solid achievement. Just watch. …
Almost any of Bill Clinton’s 1990s talking points on government, immigration, race, taxes, or law enforcement could not be voiced today by any mainstream Democratic politician. In 2008, Hillary drank with boilermakers; in 2016 she smeared the lower middle class with taunts of “deplorables” and “irredeemables.”
Truth is, the party mortgaged its soul to the identity politics lobby, and thereby embraced a number of fatally wrong assumptions.
First, record minority registration and turnout for Barack Obama were not automatically transferable to other Democrat grandees. Obama pushed the party hard leftward with a new strategy of uniting previously feuding minority groups under an us/them binary of anti-“white privilege” while at the same time soothing liberals with his Ivy League pedigree, his exotic hip multicultural name, and his mellifluent banality. …
Second, if Obama did not bequeath an upside legacy, he certainly left a downside. Tribal obsessions with identity politics were implicitly an attack on the white working class. Those in Ohio and Pennsylvania were not just angry for being written off as bitter clingers, irredeemables, and deplorables, but also furious to be scapegoated for having “white privilege” by those who alone enjoyed it. A party run by Pajama Boys, half-educated media talking heads, Middlebury-prolonged adolescents, Bay Area billionaire techies in t-shirts and flip-flops, Hollywood gated grandees, Al Gore green elites, and Black Lives Matter activists is not going to win easily back Michigan and Wisconsin.
Finally, the Democrats failed to see that class-based populism is a far more inclusionary and thus dynamic phenomenon than is racial tribalism — for both whites and non-whites. Democrats are finally worrying that they have lost the white working class; they should be even more terrified that they might lose 40 percent of the traditional minority vote if the economy keeps growing and Trump keeps talking about protecting low wage-earners from the dual threats of globalization and illegal immigration.
In sum, the Democratic Party has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. It is doubling down on exactly what lost it the Blue Wall.
Ditto the Republican NeverTrump establishment that seeks to recapture relevance by reemphasizing exactly what lost it influence in 2016.
