* The history of the Obama years will be written under a Trump administration. Something about that feels so right.
* All these conservative commentators seem to forget that Reagan was offering plenty of his own brand of kick-ass nationalism. Does anyone remember the Mickey Mouse “Hey Iran” giving the finger?
Also dwept down the memory hole is the significance of his breaking of the PATCO strike. Such a thing would be regarded as authoritarian today, as it was then. Notice his solution wasn’t some think tank BS – privatize the air traffic system or whatever, but to press gang military controllers into service.
* The biggest risk of a Trump administration would be the reemergence of a broad prosperous middle class in the U.S.
* The good thing about gridlock is that it does not much stop Trump from enforcing existing laws. And the existing laws say nearly all illegals may be deported. They also authorize roughly doubling our current border fence with Mexico, which simply has not been funded even though it is planned and authorized.
Trump can just raise fees on legal immigrants and divert this money to building the authorized wall. He can also appoint US Attorneys who will prioritize immigration enforcement and deportations.
* With regard to the risks of the Trump administration, a few scenarios:
Trump picks a mainstream VP like Newt, then gets impeached or worse, then the VP creates something like the Bush II administration.
Most of Trump’s time and energy is taken up by the numerous scandals which will be created for him by the media.
Trump acquires neocon advisers who steer him towards the policies of the Bush II administration. His understanding of the big picture has so far been amazingly accurate, but he doesn’t know much detail, and that creates an opening for liars and frauds to “supply” it to him.
Trump gets senile and/or his energy level falls, at which point the establishment picks up the reins.
If Trump manages to get his domestic agenda approved by Congress, the left will create a civil disobedience campaign. Soros is in his mid-80s, but there will always be someone to replace him. Zucky, for example. SWPLs will lie prostrate in front of excavators building the wall and blockade whoever is tasked with deporting illegals. They will try to create martyrs for their movement, and then use that to push impeachment. If that doesn’t work they could resort to terrorism (blowing up INS offices and the like) and false flag events.
Trump is successfully blackmailed into dropping most of his agenda. Who knows what he might have done in his long, wild life? The world finds out about it 30 years later from participants’ memoires or leaked surveillance data.
It turns out that Trump didn’t mean much of what he said. Not impossible.
* Social conservatism, which is largely concerned with morals legislation, is essentially dead, and has been since the Supreme Court Lawrence decision in 2003 (as Scalia correctly prophesied.) Thus anyone could have predicted the victory of SSM, and the discovery of all manner of rights in terms of sexuality, since, apparently, one’s membership card in LGBTQQIV2A is the only self-identification that means anything (not race, not religion, not language, not culture: just with whom and how you like to have sex: this includes asexuals of course, the “A” above: there’s another one for Allies.) So Ross can just give up on that. The same pertains to third trimester abortions or anything else, because virtually any attempt to police human conduct (except the ingestion of drugs, of course) can and will be carried into an argument about our innate right to do whatever we want.
Hawkish internationalism is also a dead letter, since we just had a decade or more of foolishly prosecuted wars, and one can (some cynically, I suppose) claim that with the most pressing issues for the DOD being the extension of selective service registration to women, and the integration of transgender drill instructors into the the Marine Corps Recruit Depots, it is highly unlikely that there will be any non-foolishly prosecuted wars in the near or far future.
Free market economics is also dead, since the American economy has already been heavily socialized by a variety of government controls, restrictions, and, most importantly, benefits, which the citizenry (at this point) cannot live without.
So Reagan is dead, so is Reaganism. The only question is what can we do to improve the lot of regular Americans, materially, and what can we do to generate some kind of purpose for our people and our nation. I’m not sure who can do that, but I cannot vote for either Hillary or Bernie, so that leaves Trump.
The bigger issue is seems to me is that the value of most all of our handouts, and our pensions, and our medical insurance, is keyed to the time value of money as generated in the stock market and also by the profits the stock market generates. Those are the real reasons, I think, why the wealthy turn a blind eye to the emergence of an ever large serf-underclass in this country (better to call peons, actually.) These people feed the growth and the future value described.
I’m not sure how to fix this, I get the sense sometimes that the underclass will keep growing and growing and growing, as long as people have active EBT cards and cheap flat screens and other goodies at Walmart. But it’s ultimately suicidal and when the shortages occur — they are bound to occur, even if we have a billion people in this country by then — it will be chaos. I hope not, but that’s how it seems to be shaping up.
Maybe the next president can talk about how to fix that.
* Imagine a Jew in the 1930s criticizing Hitler on his tax policy. Absurd, no? That’s modern conservatives. Liberals hate whites in a way that’s open and vicious, and they have no response but to argue that their economic ideas work better.
* I suspect that Trump has changed Republican politics for the better already, because others in the party will learn from the success that he has had with primary voters.
Trump won the Republican primary in a landslide against some of the biggest heavyweights in politics without spending very much money, using a threadbare staff cobbled together mostly from his real estate company, having zero institutional support in the party, and only a vague understanding of the delegate selection process.
The Republican party has been so starved for new ideas for so long that when someone finally came along with some actual new and appealing ideas, it immediately caught fire.
If you’re an aspiring Republican politician, why wouldn’t you try the “Build the wall/Ban Muslims/End unfair trade deals/Protect entitlements” strategy?
* Reagan’s speech laying down the law to the air traffic controllers is vivid in my memory (“they are in violation of the law and will be fired…”). I was only a kid, but I understood right away that Reagan had done something monumental, marking a serious change in the way the country had been going.
You’re right that this moment is underplayed, even ignored, today. Even conservatives prove only dimly aware of it when I recall it in conversation. But I can easily envision Trump inhabiting such a moment in his presidency.
* Reagan was the consummate golden-mean moderate on trade, as he had to be to placate his coalition.
That’s the best policy. Threaten free traders with protection, and protectionists with free trade. That way you can prevent both sides from taking advantage of you. As they are sure to do if permitted. Business is business.
By the way, that tariff that “bailed out” Harley also helped Honda and Kawasaki, who were already manufacturing motorcycles here and thus were not subject to it.
* What I would do is drop any explicit racial/religious stuff and go for policies that have the same effect. You don’t spend time calling Mexicans rapists–but you do campaign on the need to secure our borders and keep jobs for Americans. You don’t insult Hispanics–but you do enforce laws against illegal immigration and crack down on employers, since after all, you’re just enforcing the law, right? If I go to France and overstay my visa, they’re going to deport my butt back to JFK. You don’t say most of Islam hates us–but you do ban (or severely restrict) immigration from countries that have a history of terrorist acts against us or our allies.
You don’t hate any shade of person, you just want to make sure Americans have enough jobs and are protected from terrorists, and the laws are enforced.
* It makes no difference if you call out these policies explicitly or leave them implied. The press and the Democrats (the same thing really) will take you to task for your “racist dog whistles” anyway.
And essentially they will be right. The fight against “terrorism” is really the fight against Muslim terrorism. Saying otherwise means that TSA will be body cavity searching white grandmothers. The fight to “control our borders” means the fight to control the southern border – no one is worried about hordes of Canadians sneaking into Alaska.
Part of Trump’s appeal has been that he isn’t a slimy politician who speaks in circumlocutions – he is not afraid to say exactly what he means and you don’t need to read between the lines to discern the real meaning as if you were reading Pravda or a Hillary speech. If you ask Hillary what she had for dinner, you can see the little gears turning in her head as she calculates the optimum answer if she hasn’t already focus grouped it, which she probably has (Bill did the same but made it appear effortless). Trump will just tell you.
