Establishment Republicans have tried five ways to defeat or control Donald Trump, and they have all failed. Jeb Bush tried to outlast Trump, and let him destroy himself. That failed. Marco Rubio and others tried to denounceTrump by attacking his character. That failed. Reince Priebus tried to co-opt Trump to make him a more normal Republican. That failed.
Paul Ryan tried to use Trump; Congress would pass Republican legislation and Trump would just sign it. That failed. Mitch McConnell tried to outmaneuver Trump and Trumpism by containing his power and reach. In the Senate race in Alabama last week and everywhere else, that has failed.
.. The Bob Corkers of the party are leaving while the Roy Moores are ascending.
.. The only way to beat Trump is to beat him philosophically. Right now the populists have a story to tell the country about what’s gone wrong. It’s a coherent story, which they tell with great conviction. The regular Republicans have no story, no conviction and no argument.
.. The Trump story is that good honest Americans are being screwed by aliens. Regular Americans are being oppressed by a snobbish elite that rigs the game in its favor. White Americans are being invaded by immigrants who take their wealth and divide their culture. Normal Americans are threatened by an Islamic radicalism that murders their children.
This is a tribal story. The tribe needs a strong warrior in a hostile world. We need to build walls to keep out illegals, erect barriers to hold off foreign threats, wage endless war on the globalist elites.
.. Somebody is going to have to arise to point out that this is a deeply wrong and un-American story. The whole point of America is that we are not a tribe. We are a universal nation, founded on universal principles
.. The core American idea is not the fortress, it’s the frontier. First, we thrived by exploring a physical frontier during the migration west, and now we explore technological, scientific, social and human frontiers.
.. From Jonathan Edwards to Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglass, Americans have always admired those who made themselves anew. They have generally welcomed immigrants who live this script and fortify this dynamism.
.. The original Republicans were not for or against government, they were for government that sparked mobility; they were against government that enervated ambition.
.. Today, the main enemy is not aliens; it’s division — between rich and poor, white and black, educated and less educated, right and left.
.. Trumpist populists want to widen the divisions and rearrange the fences. They want to turn us into an old, settled and fearful nation.
.. with entitlement reform that spends less on the affluent elderly and more on the enterprising young families
.. this striving American dream is still lurking in every heart. It’s waiting for somebody who has the guts to say
- no to tribe, yes to universal nation,
- no to fences, yes to the frontier,
- no to closed, and yes to the open future,
- no to the fear-driven homogeneity of the old continent and yes to the diverse hopefulness of the new one.
The Four American Narratives
- First, there is the libertarian narrative that dominates the G.O.P. America is a land of free individuals responsible for their own fate. This story celebrates the dynamism of the free market. Its prime value is freedom. Packer wrote that “the libertarian idea in its current shape regards Americans as consumers, entrepreneurs, workers, taxpayers — indeed everything except citizens.”
Second, there is the narrative of globalized America. This is the narrative dominant in Silicon Valley and beyond. “We’re all lifelong learners and work for the start-up of you, and a more open and connected world is always a better world.” This story “comes with an exhilarating ideology of flattening hierarchies, disrupting systems, discarding old elites and empowering individuals.”
But in real life when you disrupt old structures you end up concentrating power in fewer hands. This narrative works out well for people who went to Stanford, but not so well for most others.
Third, there is the story of multicultural America. “It sees Americans as members of groups, whose status is largely determined by the sins of the past and present,” Packer observed. “During the Obama years it became a largely unexamined dogma among cultural elites.”
Finally, there is the narrative of America First, the narrative Donald Trump told last year, and which resonated with many voters. “America First is the conviction that the country has lost its traditional identity because of contamination and weakness — the contamination of others, foreigners, immigrants, Muslims; the weakness of elites who have no allegiance to the country because they’ve been globalized.”
This story is backward-looking and pessimistic. In practice, Packer concluded, “This narrative has contempt for democratic norms and liberal values, and it has an autocratic character. It personalizes power, routinizes corruption and destabilizes the very idea of objective truth.”
I’ve just read Michael Lind’s fascinating essay “The New Class War” in American Affairs, and under its influence I’d say the future of American politics will be a competition between two other stories
- The first is the mercantilist model, which sees America not as the culmination of history but as one major power in competition with rival powers, like China, Russia, Europe and so on. In this, to be American is to be a member of the tribe, and the ideal American is the burly protector of his tribe. America’s government and corporations should work closely together to “protect our jobs” and beat back rival powers.
- The second is the talented community. This story sees America as history’s greatest laboratory for the cultivation of human abilities. This model welcomes diversity, meritocracy, immigration and open trade for all the dynamism these things unleash. But this model also invests massively in human capital, especially the young and those who suffer from the downsides of creative destruction
Jonah Goldberg: Trump on Criticism as “Fake News”
Watching Chris Matthews interview Obama, I was struck by just how uninterested in policy questions Matthews (and his panel) were, and how almost every question seemed to be, at heart, about Obama’s emotional response to difficulties — not about policy itself, but about Obama’s Hero’s Journey in navigating the plot of President Barack Obama: The Movie. As with a MacGuffin in the movie, only the Hero’s emotional response to the MacGuffin matters.
.. Hume’s point about reason being a slave to passion should be more properly understood as “reason is a slave to narrative.”
.. The same people who rolled their eyes at every clickbait headline blaring “Watch as Jon Stewart DESTROYS” this or that Republican now cheer as Trump rails against the “Failing New York Times” or “Very Fake News.”
.. The “alt” in “alt-right” refers to a desire to replace the traditional Right with a new tribalist-nationalist Right. What “Left” is Chuck Todd trying to replace?
.. When Donald Trump says any — and I mean any — negative coverage of him is fake, he’s making a very, very different claim than that of traditional bias. He is saying that news stories — with multiple sources from his administration, sometimes on the record — are simply fabricated. And just because the self-loving press idiotically takes the bait every time, handing him the mallet tobludgeon them with, doesn’t change the fact that thepresident of the United States is not only wrong, he’s lying. Yes, the New York Times gets stories wrong (News flash!), but it is not a work of fiction.
.. One can see this most clearly when you hear radio- and TV-show hosts dismiss an argument by noting it comes from some alleged “Trump hater.” It’s the exact same tactic liberals used against those of us who criticized Bill Clinton.
.. my alleged feelings about Trump don’t make me wrong when I point out he’s lying when he says he won in ahistoric landslide or when he insists that his administration has been humming like a well-oiled machine.
.. Whether he understands what he’s doing or not, Trump’s goal is to delegitimize any critical voices. I think he’s motivated more by narcissism than by some evil-genius scheme
Who Are We?
In this narrative, which has surged to the fore in response to Trump’s refugee and visa policies, we are a propositional nation bound together by ideas rather than any specific cultural traditions — a nation of immigrants drawn to Ellis Island, a nation of minorities claiming rights too long denied, a universal nation destined to welcome foreigners and defend liberty abroad.
.. saying that’s not who we are is a way of saying that all more particularist understandings of Americanism, all non-universalist forms of patriotic memory, need to be transcended.
.. But the real American past was particularist as well as universalist. Our founders built their a new order atop specifically European intellectual traditions. Our immigrants joined a settler culture, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, that demanded assimilation to its norms.
.. Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.