"He managed to prevail—to mount the
most astonishingly successful insurgent campaign against a party
establishment in our lifetimes....He won the GOP’s untapped residue of nationalist voters,
in a system where the elites of both parties are, as if by rote, extreme globalists. He won the support of those who favored changing
trade and immigration policies, which, it is increasingly obvious, do
not favor the tangible interests of the average American.He won the backing of those alarmed by a new surge of political correctness, an informal national speech code that seeks to render many legitimate political opinions unsayable. He won the support of white working-class voters whose social and economic position had been declining for a generation."...6/27/16, "Why Trump Wins," "He knows border wars have replaced culture wars." The American Conservative, by Scott McConnell
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1/3/17, "Trump is going to body slam the GOP a lot more in 2017," CNBC, Jake Novak
"Let's get one thing straight: Donald Trump won the 2016 election. Everyone else, including the Republican Party, lost. And boy, is the GOP about to learn this the hard way.
First, President-elect Trump is not going to be shy about embarrassing them. Take Tuesday's Twitter storm and Cabinet news from Trump as an example. If anyone thought Trump favored or would ignore the House Republican's move to weaken the powers of the independent Office of Congressional Ethics, they thought wrong. Trump tweeted against the move, sharply criticizing it as being a bad priority compared to the more pressing need to fix health care and taxes. The House Republicans quickly responded with an emergency meeting and reversed their plans to gut that office. That was fast.
But that's not all. Trump is also not going to be shy about challenging them. Earlier Tuesday, reports came out that Trump is going to name former Reagan administration official Robert Lighthizer as U.S. Trade Representative. Sure, Lighthizer is a lifelong Republican, but his M.O. over the past decade has been to castigate his fellow Republicans for not being protectionist enough.
He even wrote a 2011 op-ed in the Washington Times explaining to Republicans that President Reagan enacted protectionist policies, too — especially to save Harley-Davidson — and slapped quotas on imported steel.
That thinking doesn't sit well with conservative thought leaders [nor Wall St. and globalist donors] who still hold sway with a lot of Republicans. The leading critic of Trump's trade rhetoric and expected policies is Mark Levin, another former Reagan administration official, who has a nationally syndicated radio talk-show. Levin regularly slams Trump on free trade with his unique combination of historic and legal knowledge mixed with palpable anger. And he and many other conservative free traders sure don't like the other tweets Trump sent out Tuesday slamming General Motors for making some cars in Mexico that it ships backs to dealers in the U.S. tax free.
It's become very clear that Trump will continue to make a lot of conservative Republicans very mad in 2017. And here's why he can get away with it: It's not just that Trump won the election and he's going to be the president. Remember that, while the general election was very close, Trump utterly gutted the GOP in the primaries. That was the real landslide of 2016 and it sends the message that he doesn't really need much from the Republican Party — especially its ideology— to succeed. Trump needed and probably still needs the official Republican label after his name, but that's about it.
Based on what the GOP House members did on Monday to gut the independent ethics office and the way Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell carries himself, they still haven't gotten the memo. House Speaker Paul Ryan seems closer to understanding the state of things, but even he isn't completely on board with the new realities. Maybe after Trump proceeds with more protectionist policies or pushes for big infrastructure deficit spending projects they'll start to come out of denial. But Trump was a candidate and is going to be a president who likes fighting lots of battles all the time, and he's really not going to care much about which side he's fighting."
"Commentary by Jake Novak, CNBC.com senior columnist."
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Added:
1/3/17, "AFL-CIO, House Dems pledge to help Trump in push to rework NAFTA," Fox News, Joseph Weber
"House Democrats joined Big Labor on Tuesday in voicing support for Donald Trump's push to renegotiate NAFTA and other trade deals -- while also vowing to hold the incoming Republican president to that campaign promise.
“Trump said he wants to fight for trade deals that put American workers first, and so do we,” said Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio. “We are going to give very strong support for rewriting NAFTA. The momentum for a new direction is very, very clear and growing.”
The Oregon congressman was joined by several other House Democrats and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in arguing that decades of unfair trade deals have eliminated millions of U.S. jobs.
The press conference on Capitol Hill, held at the start of the 115th Congress, offered a glimpse at an area where Trump and Democrats could find common ground.
Trump won the presidency in large part by appealing to disaffected Americans, including many across the Midwest who have lost good-paying manufacturing jobs and have been marginalized in the workforce. The Republican threatened to scrap NAFTA if Canada and Mexico do not come to the negotiating table.
Trumka -- leader of the country’s largest trade union group -- said Tuesday he told Trump after his upset victory in November that he’d be willing to work with him.
“Entire communities have lost their purpose and identity. And we have to fix that,” said Trumka, whose union backed failed 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. “Working people are looking for a new way forward on trade...and we have to begin today.”
Trumka outlined what he called several “broad” changes to NAFTA that include tougher trade enforcement and reworking labor agreements but later acknowledged, “Frankly, every chapter should be improved.”
At the same time, the House Democrats rolled out their 21 Century Bill of Rights, which they called “key principles” for rewriting a host of international trade deals including NAFTA, which Clinton’s husband, President Bill Clinton, signed into law in the early-1990s.
Trumka and House Democrats also boasted that they have essentially defeated the Obama administration-driven Trans Pacific Partnership pact and called for Trump to put an official end to the deal, along with reworking NAFTA with Canada and Mexico in his first 100 days in office.
“TPP is dead,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, of Connecticut."...
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Added: The Republican party has exhausted the ideological theme of 'free markets' it has ridden since about 1980. Enter economic nationalism and Donald Trump to give the Republican Party a reason to exist-Sept. 2015, Ian Fletcher
"The Republican party has essentially exhausted the two ideological themes it has ridden on since about 1980-- free markets and social conservatism -- and needs new ones to survive."
9/30/2015, "Donald Trump Is Trying to Save the Republican Party From Itself," Ian Fletcher, Huffington Post
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"I'm neither endorsing nor condemning Mr. Trump, but I do think he's trying to save the Republican party from itself in a very rational way. The last thing he is is a clown or dilettante. (OK, maybe a clown.)
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Why? Because the Republican party has essentially exhausted the two ideological themes it has ridden on since about 1980-- free markets and social conservatism -- and needs new ones to survive.
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Any ideologues out there, I'm sorry: American history makes quite clear that partisan ideological themes don't last forever, in either party. They're good for a few decades, then they evolve or get dumped....
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First, consider the exhaustion of free-market ideology. This doesn't mean that free markets per se, which obviously have enormous validity, are dead as an idea. But it does mean that pushing even further in the direction of free markets is dead as an idea.
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Why? Most obviously, the 2008 financial crisis, whose effects we're still dealing with, was an effect of markets allowed to run amok, not of markets being insufficiently free. (Yes, I know you can blame it all on the government, but that's a tendentious "reality is the opposite of what you see" argument.)
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There's a happy medium between too much and too little regulation, and we've basically reached the limit of our ability to improve our economy by deregulating further.
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In public perception, this wasn't always the case. It certainly wasn't in 1980, when Ronald Reagan rode this theme to victory. And argue the timing if you like, but surely the reader recalls the romanticism about markets of the late 1990s? Remember California deregulating its electricity market in 1996? (Which handed control over to Enron, by the way, and led to blackouts in Silicon Valley.)
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So "Even freer markets!" has lost its credibility as an ideological theme. If you disagree, then what industries would you now propose to deregulate, and how do you think that would improve things?
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The increased public interest in economic equality is also playing a role here. There are conservative policies that reduce inequality, but they're old-school paternalist conservative policies, not free-market conservative policies. (Some people will tell you that "conservative" simply equals "free market," but this is simply ignorant of history, though I don't have the space to elaborate here.)
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Social conservatism is a more complicated topic, but in a country where both public opinion and the Supreme Court support, to take the obvious example, gay marriage, it doesn't look like a net electoral winner from now on....
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So what's the Republican party to do? Luckily, there are other right-wing themes out there to be had, though not an infinite number of truly big ones, substantial enough and popular enough to float a national political party on.
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Enter nationalism. Specifically, economic nationalism, because the economy is what voters care about most. Mr. Trump's protectionism is a form of economic nationalism. So is his stance against immigration. (Again, I take no position on the merits, but anti-immigrationism is definitely a form of economic nationalism.)
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Trump is not the first person to come up with this strategy: as I noted in an article during the 2012 election, Mitt Romney was going in this direction already, albeit much less aggressively than Trump.
Romney pledged to crack down on China's currency manipulation. He threatened the use of countervailing duties if necessary, a serious and previously ideologically taboo attempt to blunt America's trade deficit. He said illegal immigrants should "self deport."
Why was Romney less aggressive? For one thing, that was several years ago, and the causative trends hadn't yet gone so far. Two, he wasn't a billionaire, only a humble multi-millionaire, so he had to cater to the Republican donor class. Which, while not sincerely socially conservative, very much adores free-market ideology as the perfect rationalization for their crony-capitalist reality. (Their interpretation of "free" markets is "government won't interfere with private distortions of markets in my favor.")
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Come to think of it, even Patrick Buchanan got there first, in the sense of taking economic-nationalist positions (anti-free-trade, anti-immigration) as a Republican primary candidate in 1992.
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But Buchanan, of course, never attracted more than a fringe following. It's no mystery why. One, he wasn't a billionaire who could finance an entire campaign while defying the donor class and cowing the Republican establishment with the tacit threat of a third-party run tipping the election to the Democrats. Two, the credibility of "even freer markets are always the solution" economics hadn't exhausted itself in 1992. (As noted above, it didn't even peak until the late 1990s.) Three, there was not yet a collapse of social conservatism forcing a search for new ideological themes.
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Even poor old H. Ross Perot fits perfectly into this picture. He was a trade hawk, anti-immigration, and relatively socially liberal. But he tried to do it without the legitimacy and infrastructure of an established party, and his political inexperience led to him getting spooked out of the race by, among other things, Republican dirty tricks. Still, astonishingly popular with the voters for a while.
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So economic nationalism is a rich theme that's been waiting to be exploited for a long time. Like, say, civil rights in the early 1960s. Mr. Trump's comically blustering persona, which seems to confuse a lot of commentators, fits perfectly into this picture. Why? Because it enables him to seem much more right-wing than he really is, which is essential to retreating from obsolete rightist positions without incurring the wrath of primary voters. (Trump's the most experienced show-biz politician since Reagan; of course he figured this out.) Every time some liberal yaps about his being a dangerous crypto-fascist menace, it re-glues this mask, though one of his biggest vulnerabilities is that it will fall off.
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The bigger joke is that the Republican establishment is fighting so hard against being saved. They may be the last to figure this all out."
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