Symptom, Not Cause

Editor’s Note: This is my final post before the election. Since my posts publish early in the morning, meaning I draft them a day or days in advance, whatever thoughts I have on the electoral outcome will drop in your mailbox on Friday. Wednesday’s post will be something more traditionally liberty-related. Thanks for reading!

There is a subset of the Right that believes that the only way the Republican Party - and conservatism itself - can be righted is if Trump loses next week. That many elements of Trumpism, including economic nativism, disregard for the national debt, suspicion of GloboCop America, and other nonconservatisms, will go away if the party can finally be rid of that meddlesome carnival barker.

To that end, they would prefer Harris win the election. They would rather risk a redux and amplification of the last four years, with rampant spending, inflation, an unrestricted southern border, insane and destructive energy policy, a radical social agenda, an assault on institutions such as the Supreme Court, amok and weaponized government, and on and on, all headed up by a President whose inability to put together a cogent extemporaneous thought is indicative of a massive intellectual inadequacy for the role she seeks.

You want to reward the Democrats for all that they've done to the nation, because you think that's how you get back "your" party?

Good luck with that.

Trumpism is a reflection of the state of the electorate, not the other way around. Trump is a symptom of where the Right has gone in the past decade or so, not a cause.

In 2016, the GOP primary saw a crowded field of contenders for the Presidential nomination. One candidate - Trump - "read the room" correctly. He saw that the hot-button issue in the Republican electorate was illegal immigration, and he fixated on that above all others. That issue was part of a broader populist shift on the Right, and recognizing (and playing to) that, he swept aside the rest of the field and eventually won the White House.

Trump didn't create the populist shift. He simply recognized it.

The shift was created by the Democrats. That "party of the people" began its shift away from post-94 Bill Clinton's political pragmatism during the George W. Bush years, when the intellectual elites, to borrow Thomas Sowell's label, grew ascendant in the 'party of the people.' The lunch bucket crowd was shouldered aside by the young college crowd, with the latter being herded leftward by a passel of ivory tower academics, social scolds, and legacy media taste-makers. Cultural "woke-ism" spawned a disdain for average Americans, who were called "bitter clingers," "deplorables," and most recently "garbage" by the Democratic Party's biggest stars.

That disdain prompted backlash, of course, and in politics, backlash is often about picking the most in-your-face policies of your opponents and embracing the opposite. And, while Obama did deport millions of migrants, that was done in a hush-hush fashion because the core of his party embraced the influx across the southern border. That the people who were fine with it live a thousand miles from that border only made things worse, of course.

Immigration is the biggest but certainly not the only triggering issue for the Right. For the sake of brevity, I won't try to list them all here. The crux of the matter is that:

All the policies that moved the GOP in a populist direction will continue under Harris.

The conditions that Trump identified as key to winning the 2016 primary and election, and that Trump is running against in 2024, will persist. The backlash to and resentment of those conditions will only get stronger after a Harris victory, because the Democrats will redouble their efforts in that direction should they win.

Whoever seeks the GOP nomination in 2028 will need to prioritize the same issues that Trump has. Traditional conservatism isn't selling right now because it isn't an anodyne to the Left's excesses. While it would produce some better outcomes, particularly on the economic front, people incensed by Leftism run amok aren't as apt to go with a dispassionate and rational alternative as they are an emotional pendulum-swing. If they were, they'd all be libertarians, of course, and while I'm doing my damndest to put some libertarian ideas in people's heads, I suffer under no delusion that a liberation renaissance is around the corner.

The bring-back-Reaganism (or Goldwaterism) faction in the GOP has, unfortunately, embraced the delusion that a Trump loss would mean the end of Trumpism. If that which spawned Trumpism remains and redoubles, Trumpism, whether you call it that or something else, will remain ascendant on the Right.

President Harris will prompt another Trump. Not the person, but an equivalent in terms of promises and policy.

Loathing Trump as a person may be the ultimate reason you choose to prefer Harris, but Trump is going away after this Presidential election cycle, win or lose. It is policy, not person, that persists. A Trump loss will prompt another Trump, because both voters and politicians will recognize that Trump lost on personality rather than policy. A Trump victory, on the other hand, will dull the edge of outrage that the Left has inspired in the Right, and Trump's successor may very well be able to sneak some liberty and trad-conservatism into his platform.