Conservatism, Inc.’s Counter Revolution Against MAGA

December 18, 2019 Hunter Wallace 2020 Election, Alt-Punditry, Conservatism 13

Do you remember the 2016 election?

It felt like the outcome of the 2019 British election. The same dynamic was at play with Trump running an insurgent campaign on a national populist message and platform against a neoliberal centrist. The media was stunned as the Blue Wall collapsed and Trump won the presidency. This was the expected result in Britain because the polling was more accurate. Both Trump and Boris Johnson leaned into the national populist wave that is sweeping the West.

American Renaissance:

“In the British parliamentary elections last week, Labour didn’t just lose the election. It lost its base.

The new Conservative majority will include MP’s from constituencies that haven’t supported Tories for decades. Prime Minister Boris Jonson broke the “Red Wall,” or Labour’s “old coalition of small-town, working-class voters in the Midlands and north of England.” In 2016, Donald Trump did much the same when he won most of the Rust Belt: the “Blue Wall” Democrats took for granted.

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is an old-school socialist. Despite this “radicalism,” he was spineless on Brexit. He promised a second referendum but said he would stay “neutral.” If you’re going to throw out democracy, you should at least defend your position. In contrast, Boris Johnson had a clear message: “Get Brexit done.” With his huge, newly won majority, he can.

Mr. Johnson also co-opted popular issues from Labour. In his post-election press conference, he said his “People’s Government” would focus “above all” on the National Health Service. He will increase NHS funding and spend billions in the (former) Labour heartland in north England, which has lagged economically. The Conservatives are becoming a working-class party. …

It’s tempting to think Boris Johnson’s victory is an omen. “If current trends continue, Trump may be on a firm path to re-election,” wrote The National Interest. Just as some saw the Brexit vote as a sign Mr. Trump would win in 2016, the Conservative victory might mean the same for 2020.

However, Republicans have problems that Boris Johnson and the Tories didn’t. President Trump arguably ran on a “Johnsonist” program in 2016. “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” he said in 2015. Yet President Trump’s main policy accomplishments have been tax cuts and a rising stock market. These may be good things, but they aren’t much different from what “every other Republican” would brag about.

In 2000, Donald Trump supported universal health care. During the campaign, candidate Trump said he would replace Obamacare with “something terrific.” However, internal staff battles and the president’s own incoherent demands mean he has nothing to offer in 2020. The President hasn’t built infrastructure. He’s been a disappointment on immigration. At the same time, there is no issue that splits the Democrats they way Brexit split Labour.

President Trump probably can’t adopt Matthew Goodwin’s “unwritten law of politics” and move left on spending and right on nationalism. The conservative movement, or “Conservatism Inc.,” is ideologically hostile to spending. The Beltway Right would never tolerate Boris Johnson’s subsidies for medicine and infrastructure. …”

Then a curious thing happened.

In the immediate aftermath of winning the 2016 election, Donald Trump began to cut in the Republican donor class he had ran against by self financing his own campaign. Reince Priebus who was selected as Trump’s Chief of Staff began to fill the administration with professional hacks from Conservatism, Inc. Gary Cohn who was the president and CEO of Goldman Sachs was hired as Trump’s top economic adviser. It was announced during the transition that Congress would immediately move on Paul Ryan’s neoliberal agenda on taxes, deregulation and health care. The plan to tackle welfare reform had to be shelved after losing the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections largely because of the unpopularity of Ryancare.

Three years later, Trump is being impeached because Paul Ryan’s Better Way agenda put Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in charge of the House. Charlie Kirk has become the face of Trumpism on college campuses. Trump can point to victories on moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, ending the Iran deal, the executive order on anti-Semitism on college campuses, tax cuts, deregulation, military spending and federal judges. Unlike Boris Johnson, Trump won by running as a populist and has governed as a neoliberal Zionist president in the Reagan tradition.

Fastforward to 7:07:

As we saw yesterday, Kim Holmes who is the Executive Vice President of the Heritage Foundation doesn’t see any reason to shelve the perfectly good California cabaret of mainstream fusionist conservatism and replace it with European national populism. We believe in “American exceptionalism” here. In spite of the 2016 election, America has nothing in common with Europe. So it is best to just ignore political reality and carry on with business as usual as Republicans have lost the House in 2018 and the recent elections in Virginia, Kentucky and Louisiana.

The 2020 election will decide whether Trump’s personal brand is strong enough to carry him to a second term in spite of his inability to push through much of his 2016 agenda. It could be that voters will perceive that the Democrats have gone insane and that Trump will succeed in blaming them for his failures. Impeachment will make it much easier for him to do so because he can legitimately point to three years of the Russia and Ukraine conspiracy. It could also be that voters will reelect Trump while letting cuckservatives go down in state and congressional races. Trump has been unable to carry them to victory in Alabama, Virginia, Kentucky and Louisiana. There is another scenario where Trump and cuckservatives go down together in defeat due to the same disappointment because populist voters aren’t motivated by their dismal campaign.

At the moment, the most likely scenario is that Trump’s base sticks with him. He has grown his support within the Republican Party. The normie patriot voter is far more forgiving of Republicans and far less informed about the issues. He did impose tariffs on China. He tried to build some of his wall. He plans to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. These people are far more likely to blame it all on Democrats and RINOs and impeachment allows Trump to legitimately say that his agenda was obstructed by the courts and Democrats. They also trust Trump when he tells them they are winning. Independents could still break either way depending on his Democratic opponent. Democrats could also splinter if someone like Michael Bloomberg wins the nomination. Bernie Sanders could win the nomination too and alienate moderate voters.

In the long run, continuing to push a wildly unpopular neoliberal policy agenda with a political majority formed by national populism which is its polar opposite is doomed to fail. This reality will eventually catch up with the GOP as we can already see in the state races here in the South.

About Hunter Wallace 12392 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

13 Comments

  1. Trump came into office facing four years of “lugenpresse” and “white sharia now” shouted in the streets. In other words, sabotaged by a manic base. It would have been better if, say, Richard Spencer was The Real William F Buckley instead of The Real Milo, but he wasn’t.

    But like Trump, our folk have been impeached, as it were, by The Rising Tide of Color who are just waiting until they have enough votes to remove.

    Folks will be scared in 2020, unlike 2018; whether remnants of the Alt Right want folks to sabotage Trump or not, they won’t.

    • Trump came into office facing four years of “lugenpresse” and “white sharia now” shouted in the streets. In other words, sabotaged by a manic base.

      This is patently untrue. The “Alt Right,” or whatever you want to call the online trolls, were never Trump’s base.

      Trump’s base were working class whites and plenty of non-liberal middle class whites. The online trolls had virtually zero effect, except for the fact the media tried to use them to defame Trump. It didn’t work, because when the media started showing pictures of Racist Green Internet Frogs Trump’s actual base just thought the media were smoking too much weed.

  2. I know on this site, there are those who swear they won’t vote for Trump, but on other sites, clearly with the letter Trump sent to Pelosi, all but calling her a traitor for attempting to do an ‘impeachment run’ around him, history will show that it was the Dems that sought to destroy the country, not DT.

    So, I am of two minds on this issue. Trump’s neo-Talmudic stances can only be derived from his bastard son-in-law, who should be hung for treason, and his shiksa daughter, whore of an animal named Kushner…

    But nevertheless, with the heartland, there seems to be a feeling that ‘What else could DT do?”

    Just pointing this out…..

    • Trump could have declared a national emergency and assumed temporary dictatorial powers. I do not believe there is anything in the Constitution that would have precluded him from doing so. But he is too weak, compromised and irresolute to take such draconian measures.

  3. Go to any Fox News YouTube video comment section. You’ll see a bunch of “@MAGAmom1776” praising the Orange faggot like he’s the second coming of Christ. Fucking pathetic.

    Oh, but he put Kushner in charge of building ‘the wall’…so there’s that.

    • I haven’t been on Facebook in ages… Just went on and it is the same thing. All these people with hacky memes like “You won’t take our MAGA” or cartoons of Bill Barr and Trump photoshopped as High Noon cowboys ready to take on the “DemonRats”…

      Too cringe… Even for me

  4. Blompf is a weak, vain, lying fool in over his head. I’m not one bit surprised he’s signing an amnesty, and that the wall isn’t built. But if the normies believe his excuses and vote him in again, then as Mencken said, the American people will get what they deserve, good and hard.

    No matter which lying tool the sheeple vote for, however, it won’t really matter. Forces of darkness rule the banks, media, education, entertainment, politics, corporations, and the bureaucracy. So I support building our own parallel institutions that will be islands of sanity in a sea of madness. We’ll have to do it ourselves, because there currently aren’t any broad-based nationalist movements in the US. Normies are sound asleep in their matrix pods. They’re dreaming of that new SUV and a bigger flat-screen TV while a soundtrack of modern “geniuses” like Lizzo liquifies their consumerist brains.

  5. One would hope that the British election would sober up some republicans, but I doubt it. They’ve so insulated themselves in their bubbles, it may take an election disaster to get their attention

  6. Time is on the side of the Democrats, they just have to wait out a bad election cycle or two and demographics will deliver them their victories. Texas, Georgia, Arizona and possibly Florida and North Carolina are turning blue slowly but surely as immigration and illegal aliens flood those states and inexorably vote Democrat. All could have been prevented had DJT just kept his campaign promises and stared down the cucks and donors. They have nowhere else to go but the miserable Republican Party so Trump could take their money then stab them in the back anyway,

  7. “his inability to push through….”.

    no, HW, Drumpf

    played you like a guppy. And

    you’re still acting like a guppy.

    Drumpf was always a liberal Zionist Jew-stooge

    and nothing else.

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