Report From The RNC
2 November 2024
I went to the Republican National Convention (RNC) right after Trump’s assassination attempt. In light of this, most Republicans I talked to made the point that the nation was more divided than ever and we needed to unify as a country. This was before Biden had dropped out. The stock market seemed to have priced in Trump’s victory, jumping the following Monday.
However, the first people we encountered at the convention were the Left. Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), Workers World Party (WWP), Students for Democratic Society, Progressive Labor Party, Landback, etc., were hosting a protest rally about 10 minutes from the entrance to the convention [I]. It was primarily concerned with the ongoing Israeli siege of Gaza but sought to also link it with issues in the United States e.g., Landback spoke about Milwaukee being colonized land. I walked around with Doug Lain, who was wearing a “Nixon More Than Ever Shirt.” There were quite a few reactions to Lain’s shirt: I think you might be in the wrong place?
We told people that we were making a documentary and we were going to go interview Republicans later. I was a little disappointed by some of the puzzled and even worried reactions: why would you go and talk to them? Joe Biden, who was still the nominee at the time, might be Genocide Joe, but Republicans are beneath even attributing a nickname [II]. This should be no surprise – the protests, the slogans were not opposition but pressure on the capitalist party that the protesters most identified with.
The first Republicans we interviewed felt that while divine intervention had protected Trump in Butler, PA, in a grander sense, the country had lost God. What did this mean for them? It wasn’t really about the absence of prayer so much as the capriciousness of bureaucracy. We asked: when did America begin to decline? Frequently, the answers emphasized periods of bureaucratic enlargement e.g., 1912 or post-Civil War.
For example, a teacher from Seattle said that the problem began with the turn to case law in the 1950s, or law based on judicial rather than legislative decisions. For her, the absence of God meant rule by man rather than respect for our God-given rights. It created a judicial dictatorship where the rights inscribed in our Constitution are nothing but centuries-old ink. When we asked how she felt about the state of our democracy, she said “well, we are a republic,” but she said she understood the intention of the question.
I mention this because I know my Lefty friends may be trying to catch the smoking gun in this report about Trump voters at the Republican convention. This lady mentioned the problem began with case law in the 1950s. What is she referring to, Brown v. Board? She must be a segregationist.
She didn’t give an example of case law dictatorship but let’s say she did mean Brown v. Board. It can hardly be assumed that judicial rulings are necessarily a path to socialism. Plessy v Ferguson (1896) was ruled in the denouement of the failure of Reconstruction. Dick Fraser was right to point out that precisely because Jim Crow was “a simple matter of skin color [, this indicated] in the first place the extremely unstable foundation upon which it rests.” What was ruled was not the victory of the bourgeoisie but the necessity of violating bourgeois right in order to try to preserve bourgeois society. Social practice – the social, not interpersonal, relation of labor – made segregation irrational and absurd. Martin Luther King’s strategy of nonviolence was precisely about raising this contradiction to palpable level [III]. Congress and the Supreme Court had to acknowledge the reality.
But, unfortunately, the abolition of segregation did not happen in a vacuum. Social movements that had entered the Forties and Fifties with an independence crafted in civil society, pushed the ruling political coalitions to a crisis that necessitated change. The 1960s ended by the same forces being captured in the transformed capitalist parties. Their defeat was precisely in their victory. The condition for counterrevolution is revolution. This cannot be reduced to betrayals or anti-communism, but should be faced squarely: they were captured in the absence of a political organization that could take independent responsibility. Consequently, the discontents of society were utilized as a means of extending the administrative state. This wound has sat ambiguously with the Left. As Adolph Reed put in 1979, “the left collapsed before the cretinization of its own constituency.”
Could socialists fulfil this lady’s demand for a republic and the overcoming of case-law bureaucracy? Socialism promised to free the individual as much as it promised to free society. That an individual is a social being does not give carte blanche for the latter to oppress the former. A crime against one individual, no matter how wealthy, is a crime against Society. Individual rights are more general than even the largest majority – they are truly about everyone. Socialism is about Society, which is deeper than Democracy. “Indeed, if there were no prior convention,” asks Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “where, unless the election were unanimous, would be the obligation on the minority to submit to the choice of the majority?” Democracy was only ever a means and could always be an obstacle, in the last instance, to emancipation [III]. To the degree that any emancipatory movement justifies itself on the extension of democracy, it threatens to fall into an apologia for the imperialist plebiscite; for Bonapartism [IV]. The emphasis on “our Republic” the lady accented was not mere individualism but to allow for diversity. In her account of the innovations of the American Revolution, Hannah Arendt notes that if “public opinion, by virtue of its unanimity, provokes a unanimous opposition and thus kills true opinions everywhere,” then purpose of the Senate was not anti-democratic, but to allow for Democracy to unfold the richness of its content in “[b]oth multiplicity of interests and diversity of opinions [which are] among the characteristics of ‘free government’” [V].
But let’s give another example of notable case law: Roe v Wade. Throughout the whole convention, there was a cohort of young pro-life protesters who were standing outside the entrance to the convention. If you didn’t look at their signs, their dyed hair and tattoos would make them indistinguishable from the Leftist protest we saw earlier. These protesters were not looked upon sympathetically by Trump voters.
I remember talking to a Trump campaign organizer from Chicago and while overhearing the slogans of “Make America Gentile Again,” he pointed over my shoulder to them and said that they were the 5% that didn’t represent the Republican Party base. This feeling has only accelerated since the Republican’s disappointing 2022 Midterm results. Trump put the blame for the “abortion issue” on the extreme stance of many Republicans after the 2022 Midterm [VI]. The cynical view of this might be that the Republicans want to lie about their “position” on abortion to get into office and then enforce the Handmaid’s Tale, but why should the same not be applied to the Democrats? They too, need to sustain the threat in order to garner votes. Sanders was not wrong in 2016 when he said Planned Parenthood was part of the establishment. The Republicans I talked to did not have unconditional support for abortion but rather felt like it was not a hill they cared to die on. When I mentioned that Trump said in the first debate that some states since the ruling were “a little more liberal than you would have thought[,]” there was no concern that abortion may have been expanded in some states [VII].
For the anti-abortion activists, they felt they had been used by the Republican Party. One pro-lifer expressed that the Roe v Wade overrule was just about distracting them — throwing them a bone — in order to prepare them for the Republican Party abandoning them. In fact, since the RNC, prominent anti-abortion activist Lila Rose said she would not vote for any party. Pro-lifers made up a part of the Reagan Coalition for the last several decades and here it felt like they were explicitly recognizing the end of the coalition.
My Leftist friends will no doubt point me to the comments by Trump or Republicans that ring as classic conservative views on abortion. But politicians cannot appear to merely change their mind because something else is now popular. We call that unprincipled. The capitalist parties are not going to change like a random number generator but must grope towards the necessity out of the present form. What is contradictory here necessarily appears as hypocrisy or flip-flopping because of the form of capitalist parties. This becomes most apparent when considering the self-justifications given by Republican intellectuals.
Two interviews in particular express this: one with Charlie Sykes and one with Batya Ungar-Sargon. These have stuck with me because they had almost opposite views of the last 30 years of the Republican party.
Sykes is a classic Reaganite Republican and because of this, he was able to take a more historical view on the Republican party. For Sykes, the Reagan Coalition had succeeded in defeating the Left abroad (the Soviet Union) and at home (the New Left). But in the early 1990s, the Reagan Coalition’s raison d’etre seemed to disappear precisely because of this success. Indeed, the crisis of neoliberalism was first politically expressed in the Republican Party, with the delegitimization of neoconservatism and neoliberal sections of the Reagan coalition in the 2000’s (Iraq and the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis). The reaction to this despair took the form of the Tea Party opposing Obamacare, but the Tea Party was just as much a reaction to the Republican Party. Sean Trende summed it up in his much-quoted article from 2014:
The Republican elite looked to be consorting with their Democratic rivals when they decided to bail out the “too-big-to-fail” banks rather than Main Street. The Tea Party ended up running candidates in 2010 and 2012, but the insurgency soon petered out once the political neophytes had the opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot [VIII]. Nonetheless, it hit a chord with the party faithful. David Frum acknowledged that “[r]ank-and-file GOPers [were] giving vent to their disappointment and frustration—and with or without Trump, their insurrectionary mood [seemed] unlikely to change” [IX].
I brought up the John Hay Initiative to Sykes. After the 2012 election, members of Mitt Romney’s campaign team tried to prepare the next round of Republican presidential candidates to become “educated” on foreign policy and national security issues. They were worried about two things: “out-of-their-depth candidates like Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachman and pizza mogul Herman Cain” and critics of “conventional Republican talking points” about foreign policy, made by candidates like Ron Paul [X]. Apparently Sykes told Reince Preibus after 2012 there was a problem in the Republican Party, but the gravity of the concern went unheeded.
Sykes’ last statement was telling. He said he had been reading Seneca. I took this to mean an honorable stoicism in the face of declension. That an era was ending was palpable. While he said this, I looked to my right and saw former Republican Chair Michael Steele being interviewed in the same coffee house. Indeed, eating dinner later, I saw former House Majority/Minority Leader John Boehner sitting with his wife and Lee Greenwood at a German restaurant outside the convention. It was kind of sad, as if he was there under obligation. Flying out from Milwaukee later, Newt Gingrich sat down next to me at a Starbucks. He is a little bit more tied to the Trumpism of the Republican party, but it still hit me that this is no longer the Republican Party of 1994.
One Lefty skeptic put it to me recently that the only thing that has changed about the Republican party is that there is a different “cadre.” Sykes would beg to differ on this and indeed, he himself is a causality of this cahnge. In an interview with Robert P. Saldin and Steven M. Teles, Sykes had mentioned that “by August [2016 he] was telling people, ‘Look, I know I’m losing the audience. People that have listened to me for 20 years and trusted me, they’re not going alone’” [XI]. But Sykes has resolved to maintain his principles. Sykes remarked to Saldin and Teles that David French gave him an “eloquent little speech about what it’s like being in the remnant, and sometimes a small group of people who pull back at moments when they are regarded as irrelevant can actually do incredibly important and consequential work, and that the value can’t necessarily be determined by [what’s happening] tomorrow” [XII].
The success of the Reagan coalition, as Sykes would tell us, was mirrored by the "barbelling" in the Democratic Party (wealthy professionals with constituencies of poor people).
This naturally set up the interview with Batya Ungar-Sargon the next day. Batya is both sympathetic to Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, although obviously was there to support Trump. Her account of the crisis of the last thirty years moved in the opposite direction from Sykes. The neoliberal era had been destructive to the working class, undercut wages, hooked workers on fetanyl and browbeat their criticism as racist, white-privilege.
From my time on the Left, I usually heard this story as directed at the Republicans. The standard account is: after Richad Nixon suspended the convertibility of dollars into gold (this was in response to inflation), Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuk write “The Crisis of Democracy” in response to the growing power of the social movements that developed out of the New Left. Right-wing think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, sprout up to give intellectual cover to the Big Business assault on unionized labor. Jobs are offshored in the name of wage competiveness. Paul Volcker’s interest rate shock penalizes the precarious at home by sending the economy into a recession. Ronald Reagan, beginning with a dog-whistling campaign inauguration at the Neshoba County Fair in the name of “States’ Rights,” rewards Big Business with supply-side tax cuts optimized to the Laffer Curve.
But here, the antagonist seemed reversed: it was the Democrats that brought us the neoliberal shock. Robert Lighthizer, former United States Trump Representative for Donald Trump’s administration, remarks in his most recent book that “[t]he thinking at the time [of the fall of the Soviet Union] was that this trade liberalization had no downside and that with the fall of the Soviet Union, in the rearview mirror, the whole world, including Communist China, was being swept up on a rising wave of liberal democracy” [XIII]. While free-market fundamentalism is usually tied to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Lighthizer puts the responsibility primarily with Clinton; this is a view shared by political scientist John Mearsheimer. Of course, if Margaret Thatcher could say that Tony Blair was her greatest victory, Ronald Reagan could say the same about Bill Clinton [XIV].
Off of the Sykes interview, I asked Batya if neoliberalism was ever successful. She responded that perhaps it convinced workers to not speak up or submit to the assault on their living standard. The implication was that it was not a success for working people. The Democratic Party, agreeing with Sykes, had become the party of professionals, who had little, if anything, to do with working-class interests. But now, Trump had at least changed the Republican party be more worker-friendly. For example, I remember Batya crossing her arms to represent the supply and demand of labor. The straightfoward fact, for her, about immigration was that it was used to reduce wages.
The question of immigration was not only or even primarily about wages for people at the RNC. It was bound up with Trump’s general ideology of stopping the “American carnage” wrought by “globalism” I regularly heard the story of immigrants in hotels counterposed to cuts to military family housing. Of course, our Leftist sensibility is triggered: we see this as setting up immigrants to be scapegoated. We fear putting the vulnerable in harm’s way. I can’t deny this may happen – really, it already does happen. The social crisis of capitalist society pits groups against each other and immigrants become political football not just between countries but also between capitalist parties. But I want to note how this fits into the self-understanding of Republicans. At best, there is only a hypothetical connection between cutting military housing and immigrants in hotels and of course, many kinds of contributing factors are left unmentioned. But what is the rationale? For Trump supporters, the idea is that our government is either more concerned with foreign peoples than its own citizens (which would be understood wrong) or more concerned with politics (gaining voters, either directly or indirectly) than solving problems. Immigrants’ Rights activist Jorge Mujica described the trap in 2016:
Furthermore, Trump’s immigration policy is really just the old Democrat’s immigration policy. Historically, the Republican party was the party of open borders. The AFL opposed the Bracero program in the 1950s and later as the AFL-CIO, was fundamental in terminating the program and passing the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Ironically, it was the end of the Bracero program and the end of the pre-1965 National origins quotas that led to the surge in undocumented immigration from Mexico [XV]. It was in response to this that Caesar Chavez organized the 1974 “Campaign Against Illegals,” which called on the government to “remove the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens now working in the fields” [XVI].
The Republican party’s change towards a policy of immigration restriction began with Congress when Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House. Bob Dole tried to make an issue out of it in the 1996 campaign but that cost him significantly – he won only 21 percent of the Latino vote in 1996 [XVII]. George W. Bush, we may forget, was relatively liberal on this issue. He outspent Democrats in outreach to Latino voters in 2000, emphasizing his rejection of Proposition 187, which established state-run screening of citizenship status to gain access to various public goods. It was only with the War on Terror and the extension of intelligence overhauls that Bush came into conflict with his own party vis-a-via Tom Tancredo [XVIII]. Obama began his presidency facing pressure to pass the DREAM Act after the “Trail of Dreams” march in 2010 and he left office known as the “deporter-in-chief.” His flagship executive order, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), was suggested by immigration activists who were able to brilliantly play the Republicans and Democrats off of each other [XIX]. Obama’s former presidential rival, John McCain, was truly an “eleventh-hour border hawk” [XX] when he shifted to a position tough on immigration in 2008 (and later “Complete the Dang Fence”), because he had just helped to drafted the 2005 “Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act” (co-sponsored by Barack Obama), which also influenced the 2007 Comprehensive Immigration Act. Biden did not halt border construction and approved a new section last year. Since his replacement as Democratic Party nominee, Kamala Harris has come out strongly in favor of extending the southern border wall.
Still, even in 2015, Bernie Sanders called open borders a “Koch brothers proposal.” Trump’s campaign focused on immigration because that’s where there has been such clear deadlock – there are no differences in terms of policy decisions. Immigration reform had been tried, again and again (2007, 2013). Jeb Bush thought he had caught Trump in 2016 when he said with a laugh that he had “influenced [Trump’s immigration] position.” However, it is not at the level of policies that Trump should be judged. As Victor Davis Hanson wrote in 2019:
“Both as candidate and president, Trump also was judged by his critics in the media in an ahistorical vacuum, without much appreciation that prior presidents had on occasion adopted his brand of invective without commensurate criticism, given the pre-internet age and a media that was often seen in the past as an extension of the Oval Office. In addition, Trump’s method method and message could not be separated, either by critics or supporters. If other politicians had adopted his policies, but delivered them in the manner of Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, then they would have likely failed to ge elected, and if elected likely not carried them all out. Yet if different candidates had embraced Bush or Rubio agendas, but talked and tweeted like Trump, they would have certainly flopped even more so.” [XXI]
While I was conducting an interview, Riley Gaines—the swimmer known for speaking out against transgender athletes in sports—walked past me to cheers from the crowd outside the RNC. I asked one of the cheering spectators about her (I didn’t know who she was at the time). Their concern seemed to be less about the existence of transgender individuals and more about discontent with what they perceived as the intrusiveness of some alien Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) force compelling them to accept beliefs they did not share. Simply put, they were not saying, "I think there should be no trans people," but rather, "Why do I have to like this?" Their tone was reminiscent of someone asking, "Why do I have to like this music?"
Another common theme among Trump voters was their feeling that Obama seemed to appear out of nowhere in 2008. We might forget that 2008 was originally supposed to be Hillary Clinton’s year and yet, here was a junior senator from Chicago dancing on Ellen Degeneres, while photos of him shirtless circulated throughout the media. All of this confirmed their suspicions. Indeed, Obama tried to use the brevity of his voting record to his advantage in the 2008 election [XXII].
In an ironic foreshadow of 2016, Obama had his own “basket of deplorables” moment in 2008, when he remarked on the campaign trail that:
Clinton responded by calling Obama an “elitist” and her campaign passed out stickers saying “not bitter” [XXIII]. This period of the 2008 primary was, unfortunately, quite bitter and it was during this period that the birther conspiracy originated from the Clinton camp [XXIV]. This is usually associated with Trump today and interpreted as evidence of racism, whether of Trump or Trump’s voters. I didn’t hear this at the convention but I do remember that Trump also played with Ted Cruz being born in Canada during the 2016 primaries. It would be rash to assume that any concern about Obama’s mysterious rise can only be explained by racist motivations. This is a crutch that the Left too frequently falls back on.
One of the most intriguing interviews I did, was with a January 6’er. She had been to many Trump rallies (well into the double-digits) and in fact, had already served a sentence for being in the Capitol building on January 6th. She told me she didn't care about politics until Trump. With Trump, she felt he was not a politician but real and genuine. She said she felt proud to be American, in a way that she had not felt prior to him.
She is a white lady whose children are fathered by a Black man and she relayed that her children had participated in the George Floyd Protests and she told me she was fine with that because they identified with that cause. This is why the unequal treatment betewen the January 6th riot and the George Floyd riots stood out to her with particular acuteness She had been a part of the "Stop the Steal" rallies following the 2020 election, so attending the protest on January 6th seemed like a natural continuation of that activism [XXV]. She told me a lot of the protest was just a bunch of people standing around and so she was surprised that 18 months later (yes, 18 months later), she received a call from an FBI agent who tracked her down to put her in jail for one night.
The critical point is that I tried to preserve an openness to experience and receptivity to how issues could be framed at the convention. One has to leave their Leftism at the door – do not forget it is there but check the urge to fit Republicans into something comfortable. One of the problems with the Left’s approach to Trump-ism has been trying to nail it down according to the Left-Right split of the neoliberal era. For example, Trump’s 2017 Tax Breaks are used as examples of his continuity with Reagan. “But politics is more like algebra than like arithmetic, and still more like higher than elementary mathematics.” It is not about pluses or minuses here – as if Reagan could ever be reduced to tax cuts – but about the ideology and in particular, about the ability to democratically mobilize people to consent to the capitalist system [XXVI].
The Left has a tendency, especially in the present, to overestimate how much certain issues, which matter to them – and may be very important – matter to the rest of the public. Besides maybe one person I talked to who had changed from Democrats to Republicans on the basis of the Israel-Palestine conflict (they felt the Democrats were beholden to “pro-Hamas” activists), foreign conflicts, let alone Israel-Palestine, were not the focus. Certainly, the voters I talked to all wanted the conflicts to end, but the protesters, the student encampments, were received as “luxury beliefs.” Parts of the Left have projected their geopolitical, “anti-imperialism” onto Trump-ism as some kind of incoherent retreat of the “Empire.” They counteridentify with what the Democrats accuse Trump of doing: cozying up with dictators (who are instead the “Axis of Resistance”) and seeking to undermine NATO. Trump, however, connects with his voters more at the level of the incompetence of our diplomats. This is why Trump seems to take contradictory positions from an “anti-imperialist” perspective. During his debate with Kamala Harris, Trump could accuse Harris of both “hating Israel” (the protesters feel the exact opposite is true) and “[hating] the Arab population” (which the protesters may agree with in word, but not in meaning). Trump is a realistic, capitalist politician. The point that he tries to make to his voters is not about “taking sides” but about managing and really, preventing the conflict. No doubt, there are Progressives who will say, whatever Harris’s complacency in sending weapons to Israel, Trump would be “absolutely devastating for Palestinians.” After all, didn’t Trump move the American embassy to Jerusalem, go over the heads of the Palestinians with the Abraham Accorrds, back out of the Iran deal, and assasinate Qasem Soleimani? He did. But how does this appear to non-Leftists, who might have to be organized?
A Challenge
Imagine that you had to teach Trumpism to a room of people. One half of the room is a perfect mix of Trump supporters and Harris supporters. The other half are people born in 1924, who “fell asleep” in 1990. You can’t see the students but they promise to remain quiet for the period of the lecture (no matter how long you want) and will grade you anonymously afterwards on the verity and persuasiveness of the account. No doubt, your biases will be recognized by one portion of your students. You can’t be “fair and balanced.” But you would have to know how things appear to people, even when you don’t agree with the claims.
The people who fell asleep in 1990 know of a Trump as a real estate developer at most and perhaps, don’t really care about him. But they have a life’s worth of experience. They have seen the Great Depression, fascism, communism, segregation, wars, demagogues – but also political crises and change. Everything that Trump is analogized with, they’ve seen and they would want good reason to believe that Trump-ism is a repetition of these earlier catastrophes.
You don’t have to agree with what you teach, but could you do it? Could you exercise private reason to open the door for public reason?
[I]: I would run into Medea Benjamin on the last day as well.
[II] While I have seen George Galloway use “Zion Don,” it hasn’t caught on.
[III]: E. Balfort Bax warned socialists a century ago from raising Democracy to an “ultima ratio”:
“There is no word in the current vocabulary, political, ethical, or religious, more adapted to conjure with than the word “Democracy.” For many Democracy is a political end in itself. A perfect Democratic Government is for such synonymous with a perfect society...Notwithstanding that Socialists regard Democracy, given present conditions, as the best available means for attaining their end, yet let us never forget it is but a means after all. The aim of Socialists is not Democracy, but Socialism, and this aim they are prepared to attain, supposing them consistent, through the votes, or, if need be, through the heads of the Democracy. It is indeed remarkable that anyone should be found calling himself a Socialist who, nevertheless, would place Democracy before Socialism, and who would, if it came to the point, rather sacrifice Socialism to Democracy than Democracy to Socialism; in other words, who will talk as though he would only accept Socialism if it came with the sanction of a majority vote. That a conditions of things is conceivable under which the will of the large majority of a given Society would, in the highest probability, represent the supreme will of the community I am fully prepared to admit, but these conditions would be none other than Socialism itself...For all ‘ocracy,’ whether autocracy, ochlocracy, or democracy, implies government – government of persons. Socialism, on the contrary, as regards the functions of Society in its corporate capacity, stands for the administration of things rather than the coercion of persons... No Socialist would assuredly wish to disparage, in any way whatsoever, Democracy as an instrument, a tool, though a bad one sometimes, for obtaining the highest welfare of the people. But the idolisation of the principle of Democracy – i.e., of majority rule – as though it were an end in itself, above and beyond everything, even Socialism, seems to the present writer a dangerous fallacy, and one under the influence of which Labour men and Socialists of the present day are especially liable to fall. Government by a count-of-heads majority of this – or, indeed, of any – country may be the least of evils, but it is not in itself a panacea for anything. If by Democracy this is meant then is Democracy, as I have repeatedly insisted, a very imperfect means to an end other than itself.”
[V]: Hannah Arendt. On revolution. Penguin, 2006: 266.
[VII]: Trump’s former Deputy Assistant to the President, Peter Navarro, begins his most recent book by stating that the “golden opportunity” missed by the Republican party partly to “[t]he Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade and a concomitant political backlash that boosted Democrat turnout.” See Peter Navarro, The New Maga Deal: The Unofficial Deplorables Guide to Donald Trump’s 2024 Policy Platform. Winning Team Publishing, July 2024: 1.
[VIII]: “In 2011, 30 percent of Americans told Gallup they considered themselves “tea-party supporters.” By October 2015, only 17 percent said the same.” Jim Geraghty, January 20, 2016. “The Death of the Tea Party,” National Review. Trump did not simply follow from the Tea Party. He was equally partial towards Occupy. See Donald Trump, Time to Get Tough (Washington, D. C.: Regnery Publishing, 2015), 188: “As for the Occupy Wall Street protesters . . . They are angry at the banks and they should be. They are angry at the government and they should be . . . One thing the Tea Party folks and the Occupy Wall Street people can and should agree on is tackling the rampant problem in the Obama administration of crony capitalism . . . Likewise, I think the Occupy people and the Tea Party can agree to get rid of the corporate welfare that gives tax subsidies to oil companies. How does that make any sense? Oil companies make billions. Why should the taxpayers have money taken out of their hard-earned paycheck to hand over to the oil companies, many of whom are in cahoots with OPEC? That's stupid and unfair as anyone can clearly see.”
[IX]: I will just note that I think it is irrelevant whether or not Republicans like Frum were responsible for Trump (as Charles Pierce fired back at the time). There was a need for change, which comes from the whole social process. The claims of culpability try to render this need accidental.
[X]: Robert P. Saldin, and Steven M. Teles. Never Trump: The revolt of the conservative elites. Oxford University Press, USA, 2020: 28-35.
[XI]: ibid: 148.
[XII]: ibid: 191-192. Sykes had hosted The Weekly Standard’s podcast in 2018, The Daily Standard, and while founder John Podhoretz denies that this was related to Trump, the Standard’s editor-in-chief Stephen Hayes claims that the magazine’s end was partially due to “the magazine’s persistent critiques of Trump.”
[XIII]: Robert Lighthizer, No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America's Workers. HarperCollins Publishing, USA, July 27, 2023: 17.
[XIV]: Early after the 2016 election, Steve Bannon told Richard Draper: “And then the Republicans, it’s all this theoretical Cato Institute, Austrian economics, limited government — which just doesn’t have any depth to it. They’re not living in the real world.” Bannon was clearly responding to the Tea Party residue in the Republicans. For example, Tea Party favorite, Michelle Bachmann told the Wall Street Journal that “On the Beach, I bring [Austrian School Economist Ludwig] von Mises.”
[XV]: Fine, Janice, and Daniel J. Tichenor. "Solidarities and restrictions: labor and immigration policy in the United States." In The Forum, vol. 10, no. 1. De Gruyter, 2012: 6.
[XVI]: Bardacke, Frank. "The UFW and the Undocumented." International Labor and Working-Class History 83 (2013): 166
[XVII]: Tichenor, Daniel J. "The Congressional Dynamics of Immigration Reform." In Undecided Nation: Political Gridlock and the Immigration Crisis, pp. 23-48. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2014: 21
[XVIII]: ibid: 24.
[XIX]: “In Los Angeles, Ms. Dominguez, an aspiring attorney, ahd begun to study other ways the executive branch might help Dreamers in the absence of new laws. For example, the administration could grant ‘deferred action,’ a form of relief that halts deportation and allows people to work. In early 2012, Dreamers on both coasts enlisted attorneys to make a legal case for deferred action or other relief...When Ms. Dominguez Googled the term, she learned it had been applied in 1972 to John Lennon – to prevent deortation when he was protesting the Vietnam War – on the grounds that he was a low-prority case. Then, an unexpected catalyst came from Florida. Amid worry that Republicans were alienating Hispanic voters, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said I nApril he would draft a measure giving undocumented youth a nonimmigrant visa, but not citizenship. That proposal, coming from a prominent Republican, made activists think, ‘Let’s bet on two horses and see who gets us to the finish line first,’ says Ms. Pacheco.” See Miriam Jordan, October 14, 2012, “Anatomy of a Deferred-Action Dream,” The Wall Street Journal.
[XX]: Tichenor, Daniel J. "The Congressional Dynamics of Immigration Reform." In Undecided Nation: Political Gridlock and the Immigration Crisis, pp. 23-48. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2014: 29.
[XXI]: Victor Davis Hanson. The case for Trump. Basic Books, 2020: 10. Compare Trump in his 2016 campaign book: “The career politicians love to talk about having a nation-wide ‘E-verify system’ so potential employers will be able to determine who is here legally and eligible for work and who isn’t. Certainly, this will help protect the jobs for unemployed Americans. But let’s not kid ourselves. Our ‘leaders’ must lead on this, and engage with foreign governments to stop illegal immigration, and not simply impose something on our businesses and think that some Internet verification system alone will solve the problem” Donald J. Trump, November 3, 2015, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again (Simon & Schuster: New York, New York): 27.
[XXII]: Trump felt this was Obama playing to his advantage. At his 2011 CPAC speech: “Our current president came out of nowhere, came out of nowhere…With no track record, and I will tell you, he's got nothing to criticize—you've got no record, you can't be criticized. Wonderful guy, he's a nice man, but there was no record, nothing to criticize. He didn't go in wars, he didn't go in battles, he didn't beat this one, that one, have enemies all over the place. Nobody knew who the hell he was.”
[XXIII]: Unfortunately, among the Left today, you can hear a defense of Obama’s statement. See David Corn, June 7, 2022, “Barack Obama Was Right About the Gun Clingers,” Our Land: A Newsletter by David Corn.
[XXIV]: I say truly because I understand that Andy Martin had suggested Obama was a Muslim and Kenyan-born in 2004.
[XXV]: Julie Kelly’s book on January 6th captures this feeling well: “Every mistake, gaffe, or other unfortunate moment was amplified to drown out Republicans' justified concerns about the legitimacy of the election. Meanwhile blanket statements from the press and elected officials to the effect that this had been the 'fairest and most transparent election in US history,' obviously aimed at marginalizing and suppressing dissenting views, only fueled more skepticism among many Trump voters.
In short, the refusal of the courts, the mainstream press and establishment politicians to take their concerns seriously, coupled with the manifest and incontestable suppression of dissenting political views by major media and big tech platforms, inflamed their sense that some kind of grand conspiracy was taking place.
So, it's no wonder that so many of the president's supporters turned out to show their solidarity with him, and that many of them believed a literal coup had occurred and tat Biden was an illegitimate president.
To people in this state of mind, rebellious actions are not only permitted, but may be required. The same logic had earlier applied to the anti-Trump resistance, and to the violent aspects of the George Floyd protests that summer.
Reasonable people can agree that the events of January 6 should not have taken place. Things got out of hand, and those who intentionally broke the law clearly deserve to be punished.
That is not the question. The question is whether these events amounted to an act of insurrection in terms that can be prosecuted legally. At this point it is increasingly clear that they did not.
Indeed, the idea that a brief disturbance at the Capitol - a chaotic political protest that had pockets of violence and featured more clownish behavior than criminal misconduct - rose to the level of an 'insurrection' or attempted coup d'etat was absurd and overblown from the start. To be considered an insurrection or attempted coup as opposed to a spontaneous riot, a violent attack upon the seat of government needs to meet certain basic criteria. It must be organized and coordinated; it must be armed; above all, it must have a plan of action once it seizes the reins of power.
Ultimately none of the conditions necessary to meet either the legal definition or the popular understanding of an 'insurrection' have been shown to exist in this case." Julie Kelly. January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right. Bombardier Books, 2022: 56-57.
[XXVI]: That a book was recently published declaring the “The Myth of Left and Right” captures the ambiguity of this moment.
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