Division on the right -- unity for the nation?
The elitists most strongly support free trade, "free markets" (that is, minimizing regulatory oversight over the predatory behavior of corporations), and relatively open immigration to guarantee a supply of cheap labor, while being largely indifferent to the effects of these policies on American workers; their holiest grail of all is tax cuts for the rich and for corporations. Many of them care little about cultural issues. They are conservatives with a strong libertarian streak. Many have an internationalist world-view. Most of them are rich or have economic incentives or ideological reasons to defend the interests of the rich.
The right-populist masses have little visceral interest in those elitist issues, though they tend to pay them lip service due to long exposure to propaganda outlets controlled by the elitists. Their real focus is on their economic interests and on cultural issues. The latter include Christianity (at least among older people), a traditional view of male and female roles, attachment to rural culture and suspicion of urban culture, hostility toward the normalization of what they consider sexual perversion and laxity and toward "weirdness" and "wokeness" generally, and (very important) a strong attachment to gun culture and gun rights. Immigration is an especially hot-button issue since it attacks both economic and cultural concerns -- it increases competition for jobs, and also exacerbates the presence of foreign cultures and languages and erodes the majority status of the white population. Almost all right-populists have a strongly nationalist world-view (though many prefer the term "patriot"), and many of them are isolationists, knowing little about foreign countries and caring less, except insofar as international trade plays a role in whatever business they are in.
Trump did not create this distinction -- it long preceded him. But he exploited it to rise to power and thus brought it out into the open in a way it had not been before. Please read this post and this post for more on that. Trump made himself the embodiment of right-populism in rebellion against the dominance of the elitist cadre, which I think accounts for the fanatical devotion that he inspired in so many right-populists -- at last, here was a major figure talking in blunt language about their issues, the things they really cared about, as opposed to the things the elitist Republican leadership was telling them they should care about. Of course, Trump turned out to be a con man and a bungler who has badly damaged the economic interests of the working class and of rural people and, despite much bluster, achieved little on the cultural front, while putting most of his energy into enriching himself and pursuing personal vendettas. Many right-populists now realize he is not what they thought, which accounts for his plummeting popularity these days.
It is important to understand what that drop in popularity, and the signs suggesting a blue wave in November, do not mean. None of it means that huge numbers of former Trump voters are starting to embrace DEI, abandon gun rights, and support men in dresses using the girls' bathroom. Their beliefs and values have not changed at all. What has changed is their growing sense that Trump has betrayed those beliefs and values. Many ordinary non-ideological people do not have much feeling of attachment to a political party -- when they feel that one party has failed them, they're guardedly willing to give the other one a try.
This article is an interesting assessment of the current situation within the right wing. The elitists, who have spent the last few years reeling at Trump's grabbing control of the Republican party away from them, see his recent decline (and the fact that he must leave power in 2029 at the latest) as an opportunity to take back control and put things back the way they were. They are wrong. The genie Trump released cannot be put back in the bottle. The right-populist masses have realized the elitists serve no practical purpose, and will not allow them to re-establish their dominant position. Politics cannot go back to what it was before 2016.
As I've discussed before, many working-class Democratic voters actually share many of the same economic concerns, and some of the cultural ones, as the right-populists. The left-activist fringe, which plays an outsize role in setting the Democratic party's agenda, occupies a position somewhat (though far from exactly) analogous to that of the elitists on the Republican side. Their obsession with identity politics, their visceral hostility to gun culture, their insistence on supporting freakish boutique cultural causes such as men playing in women's sports, and their bizarre use of language ("transwomen", "undocumented", everybody who disagrees with them being "fascist", etc) make them seem -- to the average American whose main concerns are things like gas and housing prices and getting a decent-paying job -- like aliens who time-warped in from the 1960s and have somehow taken over, constantly correcting everybody's opinions and choice of words. And elected Democratic politicians, hamstrung by the influence of billionaire donors, do little to advance working-class interests. The revolutionary spirit of the FDR era is gone. It's no wonder that the Democratic party now polls as one of the least-popular institutions in the country. Millions vote for it mainly because the Republicans seem even more in thrall to the billionaires -- just as millions vote Republican mainly because the Democratic party seems to be run by weirdos who disdain nationalism, guns, and mainstream culture. In both cases it's a matter of voting for the lesser of two evils, because nobody is offering what the voters really want.
The broad mass of people in this country share a lot of common interests and views, despite being divided into two camps who have been taught to hate each other. There is a widespread sense that the old politics is exhausted, and that something truly new is needed. Europe is already seeing the rise of vigorous new nativist parties, sweeping aside the old sclerotic establishment parties that enabled mass immigration and coddle Muslim violence and arrogance. The issues in the US are different, but here too, if the masses can overcome political polarization and sweep aside the ideological types on both "sides" who fomented that polarization and maintain it, the time seems ripe for a new economic-populist political movement which will, at last, offer what the majority really wants.
posted by Infidel753 at 12:23 AM
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