Trump the progressive: The manager versus the markets

But we should try to understand where it is we find ourselves on the political spectrum. Trump may be culturally attached to the Right — or, more precisely, the Right may be culturally attached to Trump — but everything he has said and done thus far points to his being a progressive in the ancient mold of Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and, yes, George Wallace and Theodore Bilbo. He means to put trade, and probably much more than trade, under political discipline. He means to stand between buyers and sellers with his hand out, making demands. He has expressed a longing for Keynesian stimulus projects, mercantilism, income redistribution, Bismarckian welfare-statism, and the consolidation of political power within the executive. He may talk like Archie Bunker, but politically he is Barack Obama rebranded for talk radio.

If we take him at his word, this is shaping up to be a case of talk right, govern left.

And power-worshiping Republicans are going along with this as quickly and as cravenly as they can. Mike Pence has declared himself a fundamental opponent of free markets. Quondam conservatives such as Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center defend instances of pure crony capitalism such as the Carrier bailout, insisting that free-market advocates must stomach these in the name of doing what is “politically sustainable.” Pro-lifers and immigration hawks spent many years listening to similar demands that they abandon their principles in the name of popularity, but tastes change, politics changes, and the electorate is fickle at best.

There was a time not long ago when Republicans complained that, with Democrats in possession of the White House and the Senate, they controlled “only one half of one third of the government,” as Darrell Issa put it. Republicans now control the entirety of the elected federal government and on a good day can win at the Supreme Court, too. But conservatives — here meaning the people who believe in limited government, laissez-faire, free trade, free enterprise, a shrewd and steady national-security policy — may not control even that one half of one third that Issa found inadequate.

And who is in control? A man with Otto von Bismarck’s conception of the state and Ed Anger’s temperament, George Wallace without the experience in office.