Lots has been said about how Trump represents the intrusion of reality-show culture and the celebrification of politics. That’s all true. But he also represents the return of Nixonian “conservatism.” His policy positions — such as they are — are fundamentally statist (and authoritarian). They are perceived as right-wing because Trump, like Nixon, has a gift for exploiting grievance politics, not just in racial terms but in class terms as well.
And that’s fair insofar as “right-wing” and “conservative” operate on separate tracks. In America, to be a classical liberal puts you on the right end of the political spectrum. But as a historical matter, it doesn’t have to work that way. In Europe classical liberalism was properly seen as a phenomenon of the Left, because it was opposed to the statism of Church and Throne. In America, classical liberalism became conservative because American conservatism aims to conserve the radical principles enshrined in the Declaration and the Constitution. (It’s telling that many of these “alt right” types deride constitutionalists as “paper worshippers,” “vellum supremacists,” and “parchment fetishists” while extolling royalist conservative opponents of the Enlightenment.)
Progressives brought statism to American soil. They largely succeeded by replacing the aristocracy of noble blood with the aristocracy of “expertise.” As a result, classical liberals migrated to the right side of the political spectrum. I don’t think Trump will ever be president, but he represents a return of a “right-wing statism” that is repugnant to me. As Yuval Levin put it, Trump “poses a direct challenge to conservatism, because he embodies the empty promise of managerial leadership outside of politics.”
I often read the Twitter profiles of the Trump supporters who pester me. Sometimes I discover they’re phony “TrumpBots” created by some marketing firm. Sometimes I see that they’re members of the coprophagic phylum of white supremacists using Trump as a blocking tackle for their repugnant cause. But just as often, I see these people describing themselves as “classical liberals” or “constitutionalists” or “Goldwater Republicans,” and my heart weeps. There’s nothing classically liberal about Donald Trump. To the extent he’s a conservative at all, he’s a throwback to a time when a Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon were “conservatives.” Nixon’s politics of resentment led to his impeachment. Hoover’s “best practices” gave us the Depression and Franklin Roosevelt (whose policies made the Depression Great).
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