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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| No, Trump's not a populist – he's a breed all by himself |
| 2017-11-19 |
| h/t Instapundit You should never let your opponents define you, because they’re not looking to do you any favors. That’s why Republicans, especially those who voted for President Trump, should object to being called populists. Populism was one of the nastiest of American political movements. It was inevitable, therefore, that Trump would be called a populist. But that doesn’t describe Trump, or the Republican Party he re-invented. It’s true that, like most populists, Trump thinks that tariff walls that keep foreign goods out of the country might help American workers. But then Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley thought so, too, and they weren’t populists. It’s also true that, like most populists, Trump championed an underclass unjustly held back by an aristocracy of wealth. But then Karl Marx and socialist Eugene V. Debs thought the same thing, and they weren’t populists. And like most populists, Trump decried the influence of money in politics. But then so did Hillary Clinton and Liz Warren, and nobody called them populists. Here’s what the accusation of populism really means. It’s a smear meant to link one to people like "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, one of the vilest characters in American political history. Tillman was the governor of South Carolina from 1890 to 1894 and served as the state’s representative in the US Senate for the next 23 years. He invented Jim Crow laws in his state, defended lynch mobs and boasted of the African-Americans he had killed. Trump is something new in American politics. He’s not Andrew Jackson, or a plain-speaking Harry Truman. He’s not Ronald Reagan. He’s unlike anything we’ve seen before, for the simple reason that he’s up against something we’ve never seen before: a left that’s given up on the American dream of a mobile and classless society, that defends economic immobility and aristocracy. A well known phenomena in history - wouldn't have caught you unprepared if you were less emotionally invested in "American Exceptionalism" |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #3 He's one of the deplorable, unredeemable mutts. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2017-11-19 22:54 |
| #2 He's a tribalist, of the American tribe. Even though raised in a cosmopolitan environment, he didn't join the 'in crowd' internationalists tribe that predominates that environment. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2017-11-19 08:30 |
| #1 A particularly good one. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2017-11-19 07:28 |