Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee
North Carolina Yankee
Moderator
Atlas Institution
Posts: 54,118
|
|
« on: November 16, 2021, 08:23:18 AM » |
|
I have been toying with the concept of a "core four" elements for a couple weeks and that was my first attempt and articulating it in such fashion.
I was tempted to do for five with cancel culture/anti-wokism but frankly, I don't even think that is exclusive to the America First/Trump crowd and is historically very much in line with Republican approaches to such matters going back decades.
Likewise with a number of other items from pro-police, supporting the military/vets, tax cuts and deregulation, judges and a number of other things are standard Republican fair in some cases back to the 1960s.
The point is to find the most novel or core elements that drove support to Trump and got him the nomination besides just being tougher than all the rest and other intangible considerations like "he's a fighter" etc.
1. The anger at the repeated attempts by Bush era establishment to push immigration and amnesty 2. The anger at the devastation wrought by the incoherence of Reaganite fusionism's economic policies undercutting the social and cultural message, most notably in the form of trade, opposition to infrastructure investment, decline in defense spending and knock on effects in places like upstate New York, So Cal, and of course the Great Recession. 3. The anger at the never ending foreign interventions 4. The anger at establishment corruption that was exposed during 2005-2006.
The fact that all of these occurred against a backdrop of the GOP shifting considerably more non-college white thanks to the influence of the religious right alienating the secular wing of the college educated whites (still retaining the more religious CEWs at that point), which only served to undercut the GOP establishment even more.
The Tea Party combined all of these into one, but its leaders misread these core four and kept pushing generally the same line as before just more extreme (more hyper religious/hyper business) as you saw with the tea party coming to be defined by Todd Akin in 2012 and Ted Cruz in 2013 and afterwards. This is what created the opening for Trump in 2015 and 2016.
|