What Do Trump Supporters Even Want?
Do they have any idea?
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It’s pretty easy to carve out a time of death for the Republican Party’s tombstone. Maybe not down to the minute, but the year is obvious. It was in 2020 when the GOP agreed to cancel their primaries in favor of the Orange Nightmare and adopt no official platform. How can anyone take a political party, a candidate, or their supporters seriously if they don’t even pretend to have policies? A religion with no creed, but that worships the leader is just a cult.
Ideas evolve over time, as do populations, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Take any issue facing us today; there’s a classic Democratic position (with a range for acceptable debate from the centrists to the progressives), a classic Republican position, similarly spread but on the right, and a more-or-less consensus position that the United States has operated under for seventy years. Broadly speaking, growth-based capitalism with socialist elements, democracy with (slowly) expanding civil liberties, rule of law, and a muscular, internationalist foreign policy.
Then, completely separated from morality, reason, and tradition, there is the slapdash, ass-crack, fever dream, Trump position on seemingly everything that actually has nothing to do with traditional American conservatism. I know many readers may look at that and give me a resounding, “Well, duh” but hear me out. I think there are people out there, low-engagement but conservative-leaning, who will someday come to the realization that Trump has done and is doing real damage to the conservative cause.
Let’s look at a few randomly selected areas, just to make sure we’re on the same page here. Take national defense. Generally, the Democrats were in favor of a strong military, especially when perceived to be used in self-defense or the promotion of democracy and human rights. The progressive wing has traditionally been leery of adventurism abroad, human rights abuses, and inflated military budgets yet the Democratic party, as a whole, was anti-communist, anti-terrorist, and internationalist.
The Republican party, since WWII, was also largely hawkish on national defense. Nixon, Reagan, and Bush (W) were perfectly happy to bomb Cambodia, build 30,000 nuclear weapons to scare the commies, and invade Iraq and…
