Saturday 4 March 2017
Trump to Undo Vehicle Rules That Curb Global Warming
Trumpism at Its Best, Straight Up
Who cares? Our grand kids, vacationing at the Kentucky or Nevada sea shores won't need to breathe that much, will they?
Trumpism at Its Best, Straight Up
Donald
Trump gave us Trumpism at its best on Tuesday night. And that was useful
because it gave us a view of the political movement he represents, without the
clownish behavior.
The first thing we learned was that
Trumpism is an utter repudiation of modern conservatism. For the last 40 years,
the Republican Party has been a coalition of three tendencies. On Tuesday,
Trump rejected or ignored all of them.
There used to be Republican foreign policy
hawks, people who believed that it was in America’s interest to serve as a
global policeman, actively preserving a democratic world order. Trump
explicitly repudiated this worldview, drawing instead a sharp distinction
between what’s good for America and what’s good for the rest of the world.
There used to be social conservatives, who
believed that the moral fabric of the country had been weakened by secularism
and the breakdown of the family. On Tuesday, Trump acted as if this group
didn’t exist. He didn’t mention a single social issue — abortion, religious
liberty, marriage, anything.
Finally,
there used to be fiscal hawks who worried about the national debt. Trump
demolished these people, too, vowing a long list of spending programs and
preservation of entitlement programs.
The Republicans
who applauded Trump on Tuesday were applauding their own repudiation. They did
it because partisanship is stronger than philosophy, but also because Reagan
conservatism no longer applies to current reality. ….
The old
Reagan conservatism was economic individualism restrained by social and
religious traditionalism. Conservatives could embrace the creative destruction
in the free market because they believed that the communal order could be held
together by traditional morals and the collective attachments of family, church
and local organizations.
But in the 1990s
conservatism devolved from a flexible balance to a crude anti-government
philosophy, the Leave Us Alone coalition. Republicans talked as if Americans’
problem was they were burdened by too many restraints and the solution was to
get government off their backs.
That may
have been true of the businessmen who make up the G.O.P. donor class, but
regular voters felt adrift and uprooted, untethered and exposed. Regular
Republicans didn’t want more freedom and more risk in their lives. They wanted
more protection and security. They wanted a father-figure government that would
protect them from [terrorism and] the
disruptions of technological change and globalization.
Donald Trump
came along and offered them exactly that kind of strong government….
Trump
would use big government to crack down on enemies foreign and domestic. He’d
use government to create millions of jobs for infrastructure projects. He’d use
government to force or bribe corporations to locate plants here — the guarded
order of national corporatism over the wide-open riskiness of free-market
capitalism.
Brooks may be missing the main coalition that has spring
up to replace the fiscal and social conservatives & hawks: the Me-Firsters
whose main concerns are 1) keeping what they have and 2) getting more.
This coalition wants government to help them increase their assets and to
prevent others from getting any of them. They consider anything else the
government might do as mere gravy.
On the plus side, if we do move
to national corporatism, at least we will know that China thinks as we do.
# posted by Had It in Holland Park @ 03:11 
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