It’s Trump’s Party Now, by Pat Buchanan.
This is a struggle about policy, about the future. And Trump is president because he read the party and the country right, while the Bush-McCain Republican establishment had lost touch with both.
How could the Beltway GOP not see that its defining policies — open borders, amnesty, free trade globalism, compulsive military intervention in foreign lands for ideological ends — were alienating its coalition?
“Free” trade:
What had a quarter century of Bushite free trade produced?
About $12 trillion in trade deficits, $4 trillion with China alone, a loss of 55,000 plants and 6 million manufacturing jobs.
We imported goods “Made in China,” while exporting our future. U.S. elites made China great again, to where Beijing is now challenging our strategic position and presence in Asia.
Could Republicans not see the factories shutting down, or not understand why workers’ wages had failed to rise for decades?
The wars:
What did the democracy crusades “to end tyranny in our world” accomplish?
Thousands of U.S. dead, tens of thousands of wounded, trillions of dollars sunk, and a Mideast awash in blood from Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, with millions uprooted and homeless. Yet, still, the GOP establishment has not repudiated the mindset that produced this.
With the Cold War over for a quarter of a century, what is the case now for America, $20 trillion in debt, going abroad in search of monsters to destroy?
Immigration:
Consider. Bush-Obama “open borders” brought in tens of millions of Third World peoples, legally and illegally, to rising resistance from Americans forced to bear the economic and social costs.
What was the GOP establishment’s reply to the opposition to amnesty for illegals and calls for a moratorium on legal immigration, to assimilate the tens of millions already here?
To call them nativists and parade their moral superiority. …
It’s over for the GOP establishment. People have moved on, and they aren’t coming back:
Trumpism is not a detour, after which we can all get back on the interstate to the New World Order.
For though unpleasant, it is not unfair to say that if there was one desire common to Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump voters, it was be rid of the regime resting on top of all of us.
Should Trump fall, and a restored establishment attempt to reimpose the old policies, there will be a truly uncivil war in this country.
After the Trumpian revolt, there is no going back. As that most American of writers, Thomas Wolfe, put it, “You can’t go home again.”
Traditionalists have been told that for years. Now it’s the turn of the GOP establishment to learn the truth as well.
Goldwater lost badly, but the establishment that abandoned him never had its patrimony restored. It was the leaders they abhorred, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, to whom the future belonged.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
