Over the last two plus years, the prevailing assumption has been that the Trump phenomenon is part of a greater populist backlash against the corrosive effects of cosmopolitan globalism. Trump’s alleged populism is linked to nationalist movements in Europe, where natives are rebelling against the migrant invasions. Despite the superficial similarities, what’s happening in America may not be analogous to what’s happening in Europe. Instead, the Trump phenomena may be the last echo of old stock America.
If you look at what Trump has actually done in office, versus what he has said, his presidency has been rather conventional. He has cut a lot of regulations, which is pretty standard Republican stuff. He got a tax overhaul passed, which is also standard issue Republicanism. His judges are all right out of the Federalist society. Otherwise, the Trump administration has been what we would have got from Jeb bush, except the marketing of it has been much more entertaining than what you get from standard issue conservatives.
What Trump’s presidency looks like is an echo of the Reagan presidency. Reagan ran on a platform to roll back the cultural revolution of the 60’s and 70’s. He did not explicitly say it, but that’s what everyone assumed. He talked about shrinking government, reforming taxes, rolling back the cultural excesses like abortion and affirmative action. He also talked about economics and foreign policy, but the people who voted for him were looking at the domestic items. People really believed the Reagan revolution was a rollback.
That last bit has been understandably forgotten by the current ruling class. They don’t even talk about the Reagan Democrat phenomenon. That was the great re-alignment in the 1980’s that carried into the 1990’s. Working class whites, who had always voted Democrat, changed parties over the culture issues. Things like taxes and regulation were nice, but what got them to change parties was the culture war. They voted for Reagan because they believed he would fix everything broken in the 60’s and 70’s.
Instead, Reagan delivered a huge military buildup, massive deficits, bigger government and a debt fueled economic boom. All the talk of entitlement reform ended, for example, when it threatened the military buildup. Despite the enormous support from social conservatives, Reagan delivered nothing on that front. Of course, the currency reforms in the Reagan years made today’s debt boom possible. Then there was immigration reform, which is turning out to be the Gipper’s most important policy achievement.
Reagan was the Baby Boomer’s ideal president, in that he delivered to middle-class boomers exactly what they wanted. They were in their prime work years, so they got low taxes, a roaring economy and booming investment climate. Their parents were getting old, so they got assurance the government would pay for all the entitlements. Of course, the boomer kids were in school, so we got a boom in education spending. Boomers have always been socially liberal, so nothing was ever done to address the cultural stuff.
The way to look at the 1980’s is as an echo of Eisenhower’s America. Watch movies from the period, like Star Wars or Indiana Jones, and what you see are remakes of the wholesome action films middle-class boomers grew up on as kids. Even the foreign policy stuff had a whiff of Eisenhower’s era. Instead of kids hiding under their desks at school, kids watched movies like Red Dawn or The Day After to get good and scared about the the Soviets. The 1980’s were a Spielberg remake of the 1950’s.
Trump won election as a remake of the Reagan election. It’s not a perfect analogy, but people forget that the Gipper talked pretty tough on the campaign trail. The tone police followed him around too. As much as Trump gets cast as the white nationalist’s president, he’s pretty much just standard middle American white guy, in terms of his politics and delivery. Like Reagan, the white working class voted for him thinking he would roll back the last three decades of excess. Just as with Reagan, none of that is going to happen.
Instead, he is delivering what the middle-class boomers want. They are heading into retirement, so keeping the stock market humming and making sure inflation is in check is their top priority. Of course, entitlements cannot be touched. As for immigration, nothing is going to change, because this is not important to them. They live in nice safe suburbs and rely on the little brown guys to mow the lawn. Maybe the visiting nurse is from Trinidad or perhaps the grand kids nanny is a nice Guatemalan woman who is teaching them Mam.
The trouble, of course, is that middle-class boomers are a shrinking block. The invasion plus the actuarial tables are making them less of a factor. The remnants of the old Reagan coalition came out of mothballs to shock the pollsters and the political elite in 2016, but they are not making that mistake again. As we saw in the midterms, they can manufacture all the foreign votes they need to win the 2020 election. This echo of old heritage America, is going to be weaker and shorter than the Reagan echo. It will be the last.
Z, this isn’t completely off topic. Steve Bannon has started to get a little airplay on Youtube, and I think it stands up well as a offset to the slanderous accusations that pass for his positions in the mainstream. I personally find his story pretty compelling, even if the man himself reminds me more than anything, of one of my irish alcoholic uncles. Smart? Clearly. Well Spoken? Mostly. Disheveled outwardly and inwardly? A bit yes. But there is definitely something there. It’s not your garden variety Cuck-omatic ‘buy in’ to the left liberal moral orthodoxy. I’d be very interested in… Read more »
Bannon is angling for a spot on the wall at Yad Vashem. Should the West go into a tailspin, the elites have an exit strategy. He’s always counter-signaling to no benefit, and he’s smart enough to know it isn’t working.
Altering the trajectory of current trends will take voices from inside the Jewish community that reject the post-Enlightenment paradigm, and argue for a realignment to “Ottoman Zionism”. Outsiders like us will never have much appeal, so we do what we can to avoid the pitfall traps that many of the people in the Dissident movements have fallen into.
Aged boomers sound like dragons in myth.
Dragons guard their caves, where they hoard gold and virgins, and they can’t make use of either of them.
Dragon just hoards and guards, until he’s slain by the karma of the Universe.
This is one boomer who has opposed “the agenda” all his life. Assuming I have another twenty years, I keep hoping they won’t be years of despair.
I think the other thing about Trump is his overwhelming vigor. The guy can do three or four rallies a day in his 70s. He’s had non-stop abuse heaped on him for years and he takes it all in and turns it into energy. It’s extraordinary. I think he’s an extreme case but I also think that’s a real trait of Heritage America. I love to work, I have my own business, it’s small but I love the organization, the efficiency, I love when my clients tell me how wonderful I am. Heck, they don’t even know me, some of… Read more »
As an old white guy, your cold splash of reality in the morning really gets my heart pumping. Then I take my angina medicine, and I’m fine
Sad but true. The effect of 70 years of mass media indoctrination is real. Bernays knew this, explained what was going on on the first page of his book ‘Propaganda.’ “Unseen men move events.” And Jacques Ellul, in his far-better book of the same title, noted that despite their protestations, it is precisely the intellectuals who imbibe most thoroughly the lessons of media propaganda. And thus, here we are: a father in TX who wants his boy to be a boy is probably going to lose custody rights. Trump offers nothing but symbolic acts to thwart the demographic tide. We… Read more »
Whatever happened to defund sanctuary cities?
Congress
That would be fighting the culture war, and see, and that’s not what Republicans do. We were all a little naive to believe that Trump could get things done. Instead, we all got a lesson in Washington politics. It turns out Presidential campaigns are worthless without a compliant Congress and there were to many cucks like Ryan. Bernie would’ve had the same problem with a Democrat congress. Trump got it worse though, he was sitting on a corrupt bureaucracy that fought him all the way. He didn’t have enough MAGA men to fill out the executive branch, and he lacked… Read more »
A city in Washington State has declared itself to be a Second Amendment sanctuary city.
I think that if Reagan had faced the mass lunacy that Trump faces today – the loons would have eaten him alive. All Reagan had going for him was common sense, rhetoric and intellect. To survive against today’s left, I think you need to be one mean SOB and Reagan wasn’t that at all. I am impressed that Trump could do what he did in the face of the negative forces acting against him. We’ve never seen liberals as degenerate, diabolical and utterly toxic as they are today. To get anything meaningful done – let us face it – they… Read more »
Trump is like chemotherapy to our nation. It works for awhile and drives into submission the cancer but when it comes back, it is with a vengence. Supposedly Reagan defeated communism all by his lonesome. Turns out a rather pyrrhic victory given what the west has turned into.
As far as the boomer bashing, ok some points taken, but hey GenXers your up next. What did you do in the cultural war daddy?
Give RR a break. They shot him 5 weeks into his presidency, using the son of a wealthy Houston oilman who had helped fund GHWB’s campaign. RR had the luck of the Irish and, I’m sure to their chagrin, lived, but the message was delivered. GHWB was in charge, just like “Dick” Cheney ran his moron son’s WH. This game was over a long time ago. I heard Ross Perot say (after demolishing his opponents on the debate floor) that they had threatened his children, and he pulled the plug on “United We Stand.” They rigged the early primaries to… Read more »