In the wake of the Republican Party’s recent midterm election defeat, right-liberal sharks are circling. These devoted acolytes of what the prominent 2019 First Things manifesto called the “dead consensus” of the American right think they see blood in the water. Indeed, the “dead consensus” praetorian guard has apparently decided so Now it was time for a counterattack against forces with more nationalist and populist leanings, which were more broadly called the “new right”. The Federalist’s David Harsanyi’s recent outburst of anti-national conservatism reflects a broader subgenre.
The opportunistic timing of this rising line of argument is as obvious as its logic. The basic argument is this: Trump as an individual is largely inextricable from the substantive political commitments of the “New Right”; Trump was largely responsible for the Republican Party’s losses at the polls last month; therefore, the “New Right” in the “best case” itself bears vicarious responsibility, and in the “worst case” it simply hurts greatly. Either way, Republican disappointments in the midterm elections provide a golden opportunity for beleaguered right-wing liberals to turn the tables and go on the offensive.
This cynical strategy cannot succeed. A return to the status quo ante “dead consensus” would be a disaster for the American right and the Republican Party, and therefore for the entire nation.
Putting aside Trump’s various personal flaws and recent self-inflicted headlines, there is still a lot to learn from his dominance of the 2016 Republican primary. Trump placed “to the right” of his average competitor on some issues, such as immigration, but on other issues, such as trade, health care, and entitlements, he placed far to the “left” of his average competitor. On foreign policy, he was the most critical of any candidate on the debate stage of the instinctive ultra-hawkish stance that has become post-Cold War GOP orthodoxy.
While the dominant halo effect created by Trump’s status as a global celebrity cannot be ignored, GOP primary voters also aligned with Trump’s nationalist, populist strand of conservatism. In the general election, he broke through the Democrats’ Rust Belt “blue wall,” upsetting Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin (not coincidentally, all states that were disproportionate victims of globalization). He narrowly lost those same states in 2020, but all of them — along with Wisconsin’s western neighbor, Minnesota — are now much closer each election cycle in this more nationalistic and populist GOP era than during the “dead era.” consensus”https://townhall.com/”zombie Reaganism” from the 1990s to the mid-2010s
Lots of other examples. Also in the Midwest, Ohio, Iowa and Missouri, which were swing states in the recent past, now all look comfortably red. North Carolina and (especially) Indiana, which went blue under Barack Obama in 2008, now also look quite red. Virginia turned red in 2021 due to Glenn Youngkin’s “culture war”-focused gubernatorial campaign, and even New York state flirted heavily last month with Lee Zeldin’s law-and-order/crime-focused gubernatorial bid (as does New Jersey in 2021 r.). In the West, Nevada is now one of the most animated states in the country – a far cry from Obama’s basic victories in 2008 and 2012. In the Southeast, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), a prominent culture warrior on the American right, has transformed the once-iconic swing the state of Florida into the novel capital of America’s red state.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are only two electorally significant states that are significantly bluer today than they were a decade or two ago: Georgia and Arizona. That’s it.
A basic empirical assessment of the stated policy preferences of American citizens supports the intuition that a GOP with a more nationalistic and populist overtone will be better able to ensure electoral success. In June 2017, political scientist Lee Drutman used data from the 2016 election to plot voters in a standard quadrant scatterplot, with the X-axis of the “economic dimension” from “liberal” to “conservative” and the Y-axis of “social/conservative.” identity dimension” from “liberal” to “conservative”. The result: those who support the “right” on social/cultural issues were a 51.6% majority, but those who support the “right” on economic issues were a diminutive minority of 26.5%. (As has often been noted, the oft-discussed “economically conservative but socially liberal” voter made up just 3.8% of the electorate in 2016).
There is a political appetite for the kind of laissez-faire absolutism, free-trade maximalism, and fiscal austerity that long dominated the GOP before Trump and that still dominates the American Enterprise Institute’s donor class and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial-page-reading class. In fact, the key to Trump’s 2016 triumph in the first place was his exploitation of the gap between the GOP’s realistic base, the working class, and its ideological, business-oriented donor class – a gap that Trump was able to exploit thanks to his personal wealth and the ubiquitous, free the media it generated.
From the perspective of American national interest, the era of globalization has long since reached what economists call the point of diminishing marginal returns. It’s true that consumer prices on Amazon are perhaps slightly lower, adjusted for inflation. But this is very little consolation, because globalization has helped to relocate entire industries, corrode entire regions, exacerbate epidemics of loneliness and depression, and flood the interior of the country with criminal aliens and deadly fentanyl. Voters rightly sense this reality – and the Republican Party is now the party of the working class, whether its elites accept this fact or not.
Ronald Reagan’s presidency was extremely successful, but many of his potential successors essentially botched his legacy by viewing the Gipper as some kind of stubborn libertarian dogmatist. But Reagan, who once imposed import quotas on Japanese automakers to boost American car production, was no such thing. Above all, the man who defeated the Soviet Union was: winner. And time and time again, the market-idolatrous and culture-war-averse “dead consensus” right wing turned out to be failure. That’s the point.
To learn more about Josh Hammer and read articles by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
