I keep telling people that Trump is forever and no one believes me.
I get that. I don't want to believe me, either.
But there are two ways to view 2016.
The first is that Donald Trump broke apart the fusionist Republican coalition by discovering that GOP voters have different policy priorities than GOP elites.
The second is that Donald Trump broke apart the fusionist Republican coalition by discovering that some large core of GOP voters are motivated primarily by identity-grievance politics and, unlike GOP elites, have no policy priorities.
Most of the post-Trump analysis you will see over the next couple years will assume the first view, which, just for shorthand, we'll call the Conservative Reformation Theory. My friend David Brooks lays this out very nicely in a long piece this morning that goes through all of the different strains of conservatism, from paleocons to reformicons to front-porchicons and more. And he notes the Republican politicians and professional conservatives who are diligently scurrying around, trying to build out policy frameworks for these varying ideological poses.
I suspect that everyone in Washington even tangentially connected to Team Elephant will subscribe to the Conservative Reformation theory because (1) it's comforting; (2) it means that their work is relevant; (3) to subscribe to the other view leads to a chain a logic that is not especially congenial.
I'm open to changing my mind—these are just theories, after all, and more evidence will accrue—but I am deeply skeptical of the Conservative Reformation Theory.
The other view—let's call it Identity Politics Conservatism until we come up with something better—is largely agnostic on questions of policy. Do these people want tariffs, or free trade? Do they hate socialism, or do they want the government picking winners and losers according to the national interest? Are they pro-life, or are the deaths of 160,000 people just something that "is what it is"?
The Identity Politics Conservatism theory would say that these people don't care a whit about the policies—they care about who is doing the policymaking. Like old-guard Leninists, their primary concern is Who? Whom?
And the logic of Identity Politics Conservatism suggests that all of this think tanking and speechifying is—at best—tertiary to what these voters care about. They do not want a new strategy for bringing tech giants to heel.
They want Lafayette Park.
If I could distill the difference between the Conservative Reformation and the Identity Politics Conservatism viewpoints to a single sentence, it would be this:
One theory holds that voters responded to Trump despite the tweets; the other posits that voters responded to Trump because of the tweets.
But as I said, to believe the second view is to be forced to confront a number of thoughts that aren't very nice.
thebulwark |
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