As a gesture, it was immensely powerful. Anyone who came of age with Ronald Reagan found more to recognize in the Democratic Party’s rhetoric last week than in Donald Trump’s self-aggrandizing George Wallace imitation.
.. Yes, the convention’s showmanship was strikingly unifying, bipartisan, moderate — but Hillary Clinton’s domestic agenda is not. She’s running as a liberal, full stop, with a platform well to the left of where her party stood five or 10 or 20 years ago.
.. But on social issues, Clinton and her party aren’t even offering the fig leaf of her husband’s “safe, legal and rare” formulation.
.. But the absence of outreach is still notable, especially in a campaign that the Democrats are casting as a kind of national emergency.
Who Loves America?
That love of country doesn’t have to be, and shouldn’t be, uncritical. But the faults you find, the critiques you offer, should be about the ways in which we don’t yet live up to our own ideals. If what bothers you about America is, instead, the fact that it doesn’t look exactly the way it did in the past (or the way you imagine it looked in the past), then you don’t love your country — you care only about your tribe.
And all too many influential figures on the right are tribalists, not patriots... What this tells you, I think, is that all the flag-waving and hawkish posturing had nothing to do with patriotism. It was, instead, about using alleged Democratic weakness on national security as a club with which to beat down domestic opponents, and serve the interests of the tribe... Now comes Mr. Trump, doing the bidding of a foreign power and inviting it to intervene in our politics — and that’s O.K., because it also serves the tribe.
Trump Has Officially Inaugurated Post-Movement Conservatism
Trump’s speech was also notable for his refusal to make a hackneyed paean to the GOP’s most admired recent president, Ronald Reagan. Pundits, in their typically shallow manner, said they wished Trump had been more cheery—but anyone who actually recalls acceptance addresses of past successful nominees knows that the non-incumbent party’s words must of necessity be filled with criticism. Reagan in 1980 was far more dour than Reagan in 1984.
.. Mitt Romney’s entire convention in 2012 was essentially a long-running celebration of business owners. Instead, Trump made it a point to say that he was on the side of the “forgotten men and women of our country.”
.. Mitt Romney’s entire convention in 2012 was essentially a long-running celebration of business owners. Instead, Trump made it a point to say that he was on the side of the “forgotten men and women of our country.”
.. Donald Trump has officially begun post-movement conservatism. Whether spiteful and bigoted or vigorous and compassionate, it will resemble the man who first ushered it into the world.
The Donald Trump Show
The Donald Trump National Convention in Cleveland .. wasn’t really much for storytelling. Its messages were muddled, its shared agenda boiled down to hating Hillary Clinton, many of its speakers didn’t want to talk about the candidate and one declined even to endorse him.
.. First, it was a showcase for the institutional failure of the Republican Party in the face of Trump’s assault.
.. Almost none of these figures made a positive case for Trumpism
.. Trump’s campaign actually seemed to hype — by apparently whipping boos against Cruz from the floor, and by having Trump show up in the hall as the speech wrapped, as though the two men might stage a W.W.E. confrontation.
.. the greatest danger of a Trump presidency might not be his transparently authoritarian tendencies, but rather the global chaos that a winging-it Great Man in the Oval Office could unleash.
..free of policy beyond the promise of quick fixes and delivered with a strongman’s permanent shout — while also pulsing with an ideological message whose power will outlive Trump’s wild campaign...That message was a long attack, not on liberalism per se, but on the bipartisan post-Cold War elite consensus on foreign policy, mass immigration, free trade.