Trump: Not a "Conservative" but an "Anti-Progressive"

[pbrower2a]

http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-middle-american-radical-128704

https://thefederalist.com/2018/02/05/trump-isnt-conservative-thats-good-thing/

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The gist of these two articles is the same.  Trump isn't a "conservative", but he is, very much, an "anti-progressive".  He views many American institutions as having been captured by the Left to the point where they don't deserve the reputations that they have enjoyed.  And he has chosen to take them on, and take them on directly.

True. He is a reactionary and a demagogue, neither of which fits the usual definition of 'conservative' as we might have understood in the Reagan era. He does not want to scale back institutions; he wants to destroy them, perhaps to replace them with something fitting his beliefs. He doesn't want a non-partisan FBI chary of doing the political dirty work of his Party; he wants a secret police. He wants the EPA to disappear. He has yet to call for the abolition  of Social Security, but it would not surprise me.

He wants government strictly as an enforcer of elite power. He does not want anything to interfere with such -- not even old standards of professionalism and integrity. I see evidence in his campaign that he hates the educated middle class,  believing that the role of anyone 'common' is to either do the hard, dirty work or to serve as obedient flunkies.

That, so far as I can tell is his idea of American 'greatness'. Everybody knew his place -- to work hard under rigid discipline for meager pay to buy bare necessities at monopolized prices, all the better for maximal profits. Profit is, after all, the only measure of progress. Look at the billowing smoke from the smokestacks and the effluents flowing into the stream -- now that is powerful evidence of progress.

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For others, the elite status is earned in learning, personal integrity, and professionalism. That status goes with legitimate achievement, and such status allows one to not have to think solely  of profit and loss as with people leasing property  or in retail trade. I can imagine what President Trump wants for schoolteachers: inculcating students with unlimited deference toward owners and executives, admiring slumlords more than such 'low-life' entities as scientists and scholars.      

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It is not only a culture war; it is also a class struggle.  Note that the 'ground' has been taken away from the class that Donald Trump admires over about 85 years (which corresponds to the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had to sacrifice class privilege to save capitalism. Donald Trump relishes a return to an economic jungle in which few Americans would be comfortable, a jungle that he does not understand and with consequences that only the reckless would seek.

[pbrower2a]

Pat Buchanan is correct. I think that's part of why Trump generated such enthusiasm from young white males fed up with SJWs. The graph is from a survey of something like 100,000 high school students in 47 states.

Call me skeptical but I'm not quite buying this.

1. Youth generally are much more conservative when they see themselves on a fast track to success -- which is before they go to college or start realizing that the 'great job' that they have is really dead end, and that the American dream is far more than being able to support a ten-year-old car and buy lunch at work.   

2. College education implies in most cases to getting to know fellow students who have different views about the world. Liberalism  is usually more exciting than bland conservatism. Add to that -- they often start finding liberal college professors who can convince them as their high-school teachers dared not try. A high-school civics teacher must be careful about deriding President Trump; a college teacher usually has no such restraint.

4. The generation born after 2001 often has slightly-older kids influencing culture and politics. The Millennial Generation is still quite liberal -- most  likely, the most liberal generation in American history.  Parental influence on political attitudes wanes some, and the new adults (who generally have Boomer or Generation X parents much more conservative than the Millennial Generation( are now coming under the influence of Millennial adults.

5.  Millennial adults are as competent at making their political points as any prior generation, and they haven't created too many problems.

OK, so the youngest voters of 2020 will be born in 2001 and 2002. Conclusions? Nothing definitive yet.     

[pbrower2a]

Anti-progressive?  Do we really need a new word to replace "reactionary"?

Are the only two options here "progressive" and "reactionary"? I mean, there are a zillion ideologies: liberal, libertarian, nationalist, mercantilist, interventionist, etc. that are neither inherently progressive nor inherently reactionary. It makes perfect sense to say Trump is neither progressive nor reactionary, though he is clearly actively anti-progressive while he couldn't care less about reactionaries.

Whether Trump himself is really reactionary is beside the point. His whole campaign was waged on classic reactionary themes such as Make America Great Again that invoke a past that never was.

If simple allusion to 'past' and 'future' are what makes someone a progressive or a reactionary, then only a moron could be either. Who really thinks that just because something was in the past it was either good or bad, or simply because we're heading a certain direction that makes it the right direction? A similar sort of argument can also be made for what some people consider the definition of conservatism, the idea that we should make slow careful changes (but never undo changes that have already been made because that would be reactionary). Who in their right mind could ever hold an idea as silly as that? Support the same positions as the progressives, just do it ten years later? All of these terms are silly and pointless when viewed as referring to the trajectory of time rather than a disagreement about which direction our politics will take while continually moving forward in time.

Anyway, Trump's theme was more restorational than reactionary: restoring America to its "rightful place" in the world.

Sometimes, going back to the old way is right (and not simply on the political spectrum). Elementary education decayed as the result of New Math and the look-say method, and there were reasonable alternatives to those well-intended but ineffective reforms. Don't get me to discuss the merits of the old liberal-arts approach to undergraduate education; with it we would end up with better teachers and less narcissism among the eventual leaders of business and government. But this implies a return to something proved effective in the past and unobjectionable from a moral standpoint.

An attempt to return to a mythologized past is far different from returning to something that worked better in the past. America does not return to greatness by condemning more people to poverty, especially if such implies malnutrition; to the business ethics of the Gilded Era; male chauvinism; or Jim Crow practice. The worst leaders typically have often offered a questionable ideal, such as the restoration of the 'glory' of the Roman Empire (Mussolini), the virility of of Teutonic barbarity (Hitler),  the cult of the samurai, admiration of such a tyrant as Nebuchadnezzar (Saddam Hussein), a twisted image of Simon Bolivar (H. Chavez), or even the alleged glory of the civilization that created Angkor Wat (the Khmer Rouge). The horrid KKK calls for the suspect glory of the era of planters exemplifying the alleged best of the Anglo-Celtic heritage, whatever that is.

It is best that any people recognize the faults in its past. Witch trials? Chattel slavery? Trail of Tears? Jim Crow? My Lai? we Americans need remember that, too, so that we not do it again.

After the attempt of this President and his Congressional lackeys to 'make America great again' only for well-connected people, I will be ready to make America GOOD again.  

[pbrower2a]

Trump is a conservative in the sense he wants USA to go back to 1956.

And when you look at what the country was like then, who could blame him.

Ike would have been too progressive to get the 2016 Democratic nomination.

What happened to THAT Republican Party?

The problem with the 1956 Republicans is that they enacted a party platform that a majority of their Representatives and Senators did not believe in.  That's what did Dewey in; Truman challenged the GOP Congress to enact their platform into law, and they didn't do it, mainly because they didn't believe in it.  That's why the "Do-Nothing Congress" label stuck.

Conservatism as I used to understand it implied a desire to preserve old decencies and some residual class privilege; to that end it sought to ensure that the common man would have something worthy of protecting from radical causes seeking radical redistribution of assets and income. Old decencies included the protection of the vulnerable from abuse and exploitation that could rend the social fabric. It thus rejected Communism and any form of fascism (including Ku Kluxism). It was also rather prudish on sex. This sort of conservatism was simply anti-radical. Capitalism would be protected, but never its worst depravities, the sorts characteristic of the vile social orders on the brink of proletarian revolution. It saw unrestrained greed more as a menace than as an ideal.

The 'conservatism' that we now have as an ideological label is mostly an exultation of crony capitalism, crass greed, government choosing winners (extant elites of ownership and management) and losers (everyone else), contempt for the intellect, a punitive economy, and even a personality cult (now that Donald Trump is available). It mythologizes history. It endorses oppression and monopoly.