Writers like Rick Perlstein who find in 2016 evidence to validate their darkest views of Republicans miss the ways in which Trump’s rise is a story of discontinuity.
.. the United States has noteworthy traditions of illiberalism and political violence. The 1920s suffered terrorist violence not only at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, but also those of anarchist bombers who maimed and killed hundreds of people from 1919 to 1921. From the Civil War to World War II, American labor relations were more violent than those of most other industrialized countries. Four presidents have been assassinated; four others—Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan—only narrowly survived or escaped a bullet. Race riots have ripped apart American cities for almost as long as there have been American cities... The “Democrats founded the Klan” talking point is, of course, literally true. But it’s not deployed in the service of truth. It’s designed as an excuse and an attack, not an explanation... Contemporary progressivism values both cultural cosmopolitanism and also economic egalitarianism; both diversity and equality... The wealth and power of the country are moving into the column of the party supposedly of redistribution; disappointment and despair into the party supposedly of enterprise... The Second Klan of the 1920s originated in the Deep South, then rapidly spread after 1919 into the then most dynamic regions of the country: New York and Long Island; Detroit and Pittsburgh: Philadelphia and the anthracite Belt; the Pacific Northwest and Los Angeles. The Trump vote, by contrast, is concentrated in the least dynamic areas of the country. The 2,600 counties won by Trump produce only about one-third of America’s wealth... the Trump vote could be seen as the despair of defeated people—something more like the William Jennings Bryan candidacies... the appropriate source of concern for the American future is not Trump’s duped voters, but the politician who did the duping.. the story to tell is not that of the remorseless rise of fascism in the people, but the failure of popular institutions to resist and contain the ambitions and impulses of a charismatic authoritarian without a popular mandate.
Shields and Brooks on GOP health care bill pushback, Trump’s dramatic budget
Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week’s news, including the conundrum for Republicans trying to pass a health care bill to replace the Affordable Care Act in the face of different factions of opposition, the White House budget blueprint offering sweeping cuts, plus the continuing allegation of a Trump Tower wiretap.
The ACA is very redistributionist.
The budget and healthcare is robinhood in reverse.
Donald Trump is like Jimmy Carter in that the Democrats didn’t know what they wanted and he floundered.
$6 billion cuts from NIH
They are investing in hard power against threat and fear.
This is a man who says what he means and means what he says. But now we’re parsing his statements and talking about what is literal and figurative.
Talk radio was impressed by his force, about how he doesn’t back down.
What Does Your Party Want?
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.
The Case for Smart Protectionism
About 11.5 million of the 11.6 million jobs created in the recovery have gone to workers with at least some college education, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
.. The U.S. government spends 0.4 percent of GDP on childcare and early education, while France, Denmark, and Sweden all spend at least three times more as a share of their economies. It is cheaper to publicly invest in the achievement and health of poor young children than to spend billions trying to remediate them as adults.
.. Many workers don’t have time for training, because U.S. welfare policy pushes them to find work immediately, even if it doesn’t lead to a more prosperous career
.. Automation redistributes wealth—from routine-based work to work that cannot be automated. Globalization redistributes wealth, too—from activities that can be off-shored to the owners of global supply chains. Economic history is one long story of wealth being created, destroyed, consolidated, and, yes, redistributed.
.. Of the 27 million net new jobs created between 1990 and 2008, 99 percent occurred in so-called “nontradable” occupations, which is work that must be done locally, such as a treating patients, teaching students, or cutting people’s hair.