openpolitics.com

Securing the loyalty of the millions of white working-class Americans who lined up behind Trump will require that all three wings of the Republican Party — its business faction, its ideological purists and its cultural traditionalists — abandon any idea of strict adherence to core conservative principles on fiscal and social policy.

“Just as Reagan converted the G.O.P. into a conservative party, with his victory this year, Trump has converted the G.O.P. into a populist, America First party,”

.. Trade and immigration are in my view unambiguously good for the country — but new policies on these issues will have to be done in ways that are supported by the American people, not shoved down their throats by the elites. In this regard, I am a populist. The elites in both parties have not understood Trumpism and have often been contemptuous of the intellect and lifestyle of the Trump loyalists.

.. These voters have shunned Republicans because they disagree with the party’s focus on low taxes, small government, and pro-business policies. They benefit enormously from middle-class entitlement programs; their children get what they consider to be good educations from public schools and state universities. They have no problem with redistribution so long as it is focused on either people who can’t work or people who do.

.. Where movement conservatives see many social programs and the high taxes that fund them as threats to liberty, these voters see them as giving decent, hard-working people a hand up to live decent, dignified lives. Where business conservatives see free trade or immigration as helping people and increasing growth, these voters see those policies as favoring foreigners over themselves and as just another way that their bosses try to pay them less without justification.

.. newly recruited white working-class converts to Trump’s Republican Party do not consider conservative dogma on gay rights, abortion, gender identity, or traditional marriage their priority.=

.. Bannon described the goal of the “entirely new political movement” he believes Trump is leading:

It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.

.. Bannon is explicit in his identification of the enemy:

The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over. If we deliver, we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years.

.. This ad was part and parcel of an election that has put some of the most vocal House Republicans, including the vaunted Freedom Caucus, on notice that defying Trump’s right-populist orientation could put their political future at risk.

.. “Trump dominated — in the primary and general elections — those districts represented by Congress’s most conservative members,” Tim Alberta wrote in National Review (he is now at Politico):

They once believed they were elected to advance a narrowly ideological agenda, but Trump’s success has given them reason to question that belief.

.. Even if they support Trump nine times of ten, voting against him once could trigger a tweetstorm or the threat of a visit to their district. It’s a chilling thought for members who know that the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the House GOP leadership already want them gone.

Kevin McCarthy, the House majority leader, plans to make full use of Trump’s leverage to keep recalcitrant members of the Freedom Caucus in line.

 .. McCarthy pointed out that “Trump probably did the best” in the districts of caucus members, and

it would be hard for them to stand up if President-Elect Trump is asking for this fundamental change, and they’re saying no to it.

.. Page Gardner, president of the Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund, were cautious when they referred to identity politics in the Clinton campaign:

Instead of spending the final weeks of the campaign advancing a compelling economic message to show Clinton would bring change, the campaign closed with a promise to fight for opportunity and to unite a multicultural America under the banner of being ‘“stronger together.”

.. In late November such liberal icons as Bernie Sanders and President Obama cautiously broached the subject of identity politics. On Nov. 20, Sanders told a group in Boston:

It’s not good enough for someone to say, “I’m a woman! Vote for me!” No, that’s not good enough. What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry.

.. That same day, Obama addressed reporters traveling with him in Lima, Peru:

One message I do have for Democrats is that a strategy that’s just microtargeting particular, discrete groups in a Democratic coalition sometimes will win you elections, but it’s not going to win you the broad mandate that you need.

.. Then in December, Bobby Rush, a black congressman from Chicago, told the Boston Globe that if Democrats shift their primary focus to the “white middle and working class” and take “for granted the black working class or the black underclass, the party will add an arm and lose a body.”

.. A Vox.com postelection headline, “The whole Democratic Party is now a smoking pile of rubble,” contains more than a grain of truth.

.. Does the party move left, as a choice of Keith Ellison for D.N.C. chairman would suggest?

.. Or should the party edge toward the center, attempting a strategic reposition on thorny issues of race, immigration, gender and identity, in effect acknowledging pressures from the right — the very pressures that delivered crucial white votes to Trump?