Trumpism is the modern set of conservative values that appeals more to younger voters. Trump was the one that killed GOP efforts to privatize social security and cut Medicare, and he’s been critical of the party’s more extreme positions on abortion.
We just had an election where the GOP won 3 million more votes than Democrats. Trump and Biden are tied in national polling: https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4155482-biden-trump-vi...
Meanwhile, Democrats have managed to fend off Trump only through a coalition that includes AOC, most of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and Liz Cheney. How long do you think that’s sustainable? Democrats have been forced into a neoliberal corner where they can’t actually do anything liberal (raising taxes, criminal justice reform, welfare expansion).
Democrats jumped there headfirst led by Clinton in 1992, and have not, since then, been any farther out of a “neoliberal corner” than they are today (which is not that far, to be sure, but its absolutely not the case that its something they recently backed into in response to Trump.)
Just look at the electoral map. Obama beat Romney by about the same margin as Biden beat Trump. But Obama’s margin in Michigan was 10 points, while Biden’s was 3. Obama’s 7 point margin in Wisconsin evaporates to 1 point.
Where did those other votes come from? To a significant degree, it was from affluent suburbs were the management class lives. Democrats now are utterly reliant on the very people they need to heavily tax to deliver any of their progressive promises. You can’t have a meaningful liberal party which counts among its base Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Fortune 500 executives.
And it shows. Supposed democrats will now happily say we need immigration so we can have cheap strawberries. And they’ll embrace social ideas that alienate non-college educated working class people, because their priorities are different. A Facebook engineer can make whatever theoretical statements he wants about universal paid paternity leave. But at the end of the day, he or she gets 5 months from a big profitable corporation, and has no incentive to make the political compromises necessary to advance such a policy.
Social issues are really the only thing where the party is unified and can push through changes, especially through the administrative state. We didn’t get a permanent child tax credit, or paid family leave, but we did get abortions and DEI in the military.
His core support groups are anti-immigrant groups like CIS, FAIR and NumbersUSA. What is common between all these groups ? They are all founded by John Tanton one of the most pro-abortion and eugenics supporting individual in USA and also responsible for some of the initial Planned Parenthood organizations.
Tucker Carlson was the person who first wrote about this connection 15 years ago.
Trump's key aides like Stephen Miller, Bannon, Lee Cissna, Chad Wolf, Cucinelli all came from the umbrella of pro-abortion Tanton groups.
Arguing this when it was his three court picks that removed the fifty year old right to an abortion in this country is just a bizarre assertion. Whatever his words, personal positions on the issue (I don't doubt he's paid for a few), etc., he's been the single most effective for anti-abortion folks since Roe v. Wade.
Six week abortion bans are a different matter, both legally and practically. That’s where Trump (and many other business-oriented conservatives depart from the religious conservatives). There’s a reason the Mississippi test case in Dobbs was a 15-week ban with exceptions.
Court picks aren't political hacks. Trump elected fantastic SC judges all conservative, recommended by key Conservative and Libertarian think tanks and their judgement is very much rooted in principles. Congress should consider making abortion the rights.
I do not like the judgement either but I think it was a very good judgement perfectly in alignment with the US constitution and law.
Maybe personally and up until he started to run for 2024 maybe even rhetorically. But a lot of that is because other GOP politicians wanted the issue evergreen, as a perpetual carrot to dangle in front of the social conservative electorate.
Trump's the one taking victory laps for delivering on it via the people he put on the Court, and that's not something that just happened randomly or accidentally.
Remember, Roe did not say "abortion should be permissible sometimes." It created out of thin air a right to elective abortion until viability, and made that the law in all 50 states. It was an aberration in the developed world both procedurally (the ECHR has consistently refused to recognize a "right" to abortion, leaving it to legislation) and substantively (few countries allow elective abortion up to viability).
Trump is taking credit for overturning Roe--a case virtually everyone who is still a Republican agrees was wrongly decided. But at the same time, he's advocating substantive abortion laws that reflect the center of public opinion: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/trump-repu....
It cannot be stressed enough, moreover, that the abortion laws Trump is advocating, which generally reflects public opinion, were impossible under Roe.
No, he was laughed at because he's sort of a buffoon, and steel tariffs just raised the cost of everything for people using steel; it didn't have any big impact on 'steel jobs'. It didn't create big demand for more US-made steel. That said, IIRC, they're still in place, and current admin should remove them (perhaps gradual removal over 2 years?)
He did nothing meaningful to spur US-based manufacturing, despite talking a big game. But that was basically Trump all over. (attempting to not get too political here)
Why pretend that Trump was the first person to talk about creating manufacturing jobs when it has been a hot political topic since the first time jobs started disappearing in the US?
The Biden push for requiring federal purchases to have more 'made in USA' components seems a combination of stupidly simple, long overdue, and easy to understand. Govt requiring more stuff made in the US - and giving some tax cuts to help spur it - seems like it's a basic way to ignite manufacturing stateside.
Yes, I recently wrote about my own frustration with this: https://enki.org/2023/08/01/steel-prices/
Now now, I think you are being too generous. In fact, it takes a lot of effort to actively set the country back socially, culturally, and environmentally. Give credit where credit’s due. They work (in reverse) hard.
Arizona (Phoenix), Atlanta, Baltimore, Buffalo, Carolina (Charlotte), Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Green Bay (and Milwaukee), Houston, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minnesota (Minneapolis, St. Paul), New England (Boston), New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Seattle, Tampa Bay, Tennessee (Nashville), Washington D.C.
The Republican party runs on several broadly unpopular or unwise policy platforms (anti-abortion, anti-weed, anti-welfare, anti-healthcare, anti-immigration, anti-science) and is hesitant to actually implement any of them for fear of igniting opposition.
Recently they’ve taken the side-channel of stuffing the courts and then legislating from the bench, since judicial appointees are immune to voter pressure.
Time will tell how this all plays out for the Republican party. In the short-term, it causes tremendous damage to our institutions.
In the long-term, my best guess is that the current Republican platform will collapse within 10-20 years as the current leadership ages out, and there will be a phase change where the Republican platform recrystallizes around a more modern set of conservative values that appeals more to younger voters. The party itself will likely survive because the two-party system is too stable.