I'd rather be an optimist and a fool than a pessimist and right.
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Rebel Yell
Tablet – Part I: Donald Trump broke the back of the GOP establishment by driving blue-collar and lower-middle-class politics in a Southern direction. His gentry Republican critics have only themselves to blame.
Donald Trump’s first and in many ways most enduring political accomplishment is not the humiliation of the Democratic Party he has toppled in two of the last three presidential elections. It is the devastating defeat he has inflicted on the Republican establishment he has marginalized and dispersed.
Our once and future president will not win every battle with what remains of the old Republican establishment, and in politics nothing is eternal. But as of Nov. 5, 2024, the “man from Queens” has achieved a domination of the Republican Party that no previous Republican president has ever enjoyed.
The modern Republican Party that Ronald Reagan made, and that George W. Bush took into the 21st century, has fallen before the MAGA hordes, and today’s ambitious Republican politicos must say to Trump what Ruth said to Naomi: Whither thou goest I will go; and where thou lodgest I will lodge. Until recently, when people thought about the political divisions inside the Republican Party, they saw two camps.
There was the predominately liberal Republican Party rooted in the Northeast and represented by figures like Nelson Rockefeller and Mitt Romney, and there was the Sunbelt Republican movement led by Ronald Reagan. Sunbelt Republicans were seen as further to the right than their Rockefeller Republican rivals on both economic and social issues.
The shift of white Southerners in the 1970s and 1980s to the Republicans from their traditional post-Reconstruction Democratic affiliation decisively tipped the balance between Sunbelt and Rockefeller Republicans, driving the whole party into the more conservative form it assumed under both Reagan and Bush. Donald Trump clearly does not fit into this model, and his entry into Republican presidential politics in 2015 revealed the existence of powerful forces inside the Republican coalition that its nominal leaders knew little or nothing about.
Their consistent underestimation of the importance and staying power of the Trump phenomenon likewise betrays a preference for forgetting the past rather than being warned and instructed by it. Trump’s message and his style have antecedents in our political history, and his ideological, rhetorical, and cultural links to the Jacksonian tradition in American life suggest that his extraordinary political success represents the return to national prominence of potent and enduring forces in American political culture that establishment Republican figures still don’t understand.
The Reagan Republican old guard never understood the complex political cultures of the Southern ex-Democrats and the ethnic Reagan Republicans of the blue-collar Rust Belt. At least since the time of the Civil War, Jacksonian populists have felt deeply alienated from an intrusive and powerful national establishment.
The specter of a deranged wokitarian government aligned with the dominant media, the great universities, and enforced through the HR policies of “woke corporations” and “woke generals” is exactly the kind of thing that, historically, has triggered waves of popular and populist rebellion, particularly but not exclusively among Jacksonians.
It is a fear in Anglo-American culture that dates to the Reformation: a satanic conspiracy aimed at destroying freedom, reducing people to servitude, disarming them, and delivering them over to the ruthless designs of an internationalist elite…”