“Make America great again” proceeds from a very different appeal than “national greatness” conservatism.
in the last quarter century many of the blue collar voters who had been integrated into the FDR-to-LBJ Democrats and then became “Reagan Democrats” in the 1980s have had no intellectuals or policy wonks of their own, no think tanks and magazines that respected their values and interests. Organized labor, which once represented their interests, is nearly extinct outside of the public sector. The cultural left despises and vilifies working-class white men as privileged bigots, period. Neoliberal “New Democrats” focus on an audience of tech billionaires and Wall Street financiers. Conservatives praise the service of working-class men and women in uniform—but God forbid that the same heroic veterans should ask for a raise or a higher Social Security benefit or try to join a union or vote for paid family leave. Lacking any establishment advocates and sympathetic intellectuals, on left, right or center, many white working class Americans have therefore turned to demagogic outsiders like Trump. Where else are they to go?
.. Neoconservative instincts in domestic and foreign policy were linked by the assumption that a broadly prosperous America would possess the moral resolve and economic resources to defeat Communism. With the Soviet challenge removed, neoconservatives lost the political glue that held them together.
.. The greatness Trump invokes is something very different than this shallow appeal to energy for its own sake. Rather than the moral equivalent of war, it’s about apparently small things: meaningful work, economic stability, ordered communities. Neoconservatives defended these small things when they they could be used as weapons in a great ideological struggle. Trump treats them as desirable in themselves.