Trump supporters or “MAGA” as the left chooses to define them seem to have little interest in defining Trump’s philosophy, in general they see him as an America first advocate. “America first” means of course many different things to many different people but taken as a whole it means standing up for the great mass of mainly working-class folks, now a broad tent including Hispanics and Blacks, who have grown tired of being demeaned and forgotten by the left and especially the media.
But it is useful for an overarching philosophy for Trumpism to be defined, not only to stop the left from creating their own concepts and myths, especially the wilder shores of “a fascist threat to democracy” but to shore up a political, economic, and social underpinning which all great movements require.
This, not only for the looked for second Trump administration but vitally, as a basis for its continuation in under his successors. Only then will the complete transformation of the GOP with the last vestiges of Bushism and country club Republicanism be complete.
What little definition of Trumpism that has been attempted is that it is populism. That is correct as far as it goes but leaving it at that leaves it defined on an historical basis, whereas Trumpism is something completely new, populism plus, and that plus is most definitely not conservatism.
To understand the depth of the historical mistake that conservatism is, the best place to start is to see who holds to that defunct philosophy which holds to “incrementalism” i.e. holding office to “conserve the status quo while accepting the supposed inevitable move to so called progressivism, a cowardly and pathetic defeatism.
Those who hold to conservatism, the Bushites, the Christies and Romney’s, the entire conservative wing of the GOP are relics of a failed past, who could deny that and need for them to be jettisoned En-masse after the election.
To define Trumpism is to add reaction to populism. I’ve been on a one-man campaign to rescue “reactionary” from the political graveyard where it has been assigned by liberals for many decades. Over those periods Marxism, Fascism, National Socialism, and just plain socialism all have had their time on the left and with the intelligentsia and their media fellow travellers.
Fortunately, all of the above “ism’s” are in the dustbin of history at the cost of hundreds of millions of deaths and wrecked lives.
The similarity for all of them is state control, anti-capitalism. In the end they all collapsed under their stifling bureaucracy state “planning” and disregard of market forces.
What definition of reaction would be added to Trumpist populism to make it’s underpinning complete? In my opinion it is this. “Views that favor a return to the status quo ante, the previous state of society which possessed positive aspects absent from contemporary society. The reactionary stance opposes policies for the social transformation of society.”
I am happy with nearly all of that analysis but would add some qualifiers. A return to a total status quo ante is of course impossible and the question then arises when exactly is “before”. Nobody would wish a return to, for example, the time when women had very few rights, or before the Civil Rights Act. A reactionary would wish a return to the best aspects of the status quo ante, which includes a strong moral and religious element.
The current status quo is beset with a myriad of flaws which only the election of a genuinely populist president, with a large enough congressional majority to push through an agenda addressing those flaws-the economy, immigration, and crime foremost.
It is preposterous to imagine the current state of society is beneficial and a return to the status quo ante, the pre-Covid Trump administration of now happy memory, the Trump “nostalgia” boom would be a good starting point. An admixture of the best aspects of previous decades and ignoring the aspects under Johnson/Bush, and Obama’s “transformation of society” which were the starting point of moral/social implosion with its denigration of traditional values and the destruction of trust in government, to where we are now.
A Conservatism which seeks to preserve the structure and “order” such as it is now, is a complete bust, only a dedication by a new administration to a genuine populist reactionary agenda, with that as its proudly stated underpinning, can be the meaningful way forward, every other option is a band aid on a gangrenous sore.
