The Next Huey Long

February 11, 2021 Hunter Wallace Alt-Center, Political Science, Politics, Populists 6

I’m surprised there isn’t more talk about this.

In the 2016 election, Donald Trump ran in the Center in the Republican primaries and picked up two huge blocs of angry disaffected voters and moved them into the Republican Party. He transformed the party in the process. It is gospel in the corporate media that Trump voters were “white supremacists,” but the Pew Research Center surveys show that a majority of MAGA voters were Barack Obama voters less than a decade ago. The 2008 financial crash had an extremely negative effect on their lives.

Nate Cohn gave Donald Trump sound advice on how to win in the New York Times.

Donald Trump flipped this group to the Republican Party.

What defines the MAGA voters? 94% of “Market Skeptic Republicans” believe in the unfairness of the U.S. economic system. This group had been around in Pew surveys growing ever more cynical and angry for thirty years until Trump came along. The Democratic Party was content to ignore them.

Have you heard the corporate media say that MAGA voters are defined more by general economic anxiety than immigration or “racism” and “white supremacy”? I’ve never once heard that on television. Instead, the media screams in terror and creates hysteria like the Martians have landed.

This is where MAGA voters were in 2011:

As I have looked into this, I think I know why the corporate media is so bent on maligning and misrepresenting these people and is pressing the systematic racism conspiracy so hard and never brings up the fact that disaffected MAGA voters had been around for 30 years.

Let’s take a look at the Populist Left voters:

This sounded strange to me.

Do you think the corporate media is wildly exaggerating the difference between MAGA voters and other Democratic base voters? In these Pew surveys, they sound like mirror images of each other in their values, interests and beliefs and less like the “Solid Liberals.” These people are townies or settled people who have lived in the same community for most of their life and have seen it decline.

In the 2016 election, Donald Trump won 24.2% of the “Democratic Leaning Working Class” (DLWC) vote while virtually all “Democratic Independent Liberal Elite” (DILEs) voted for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Could this internal divide in the Democratic Party be the real threat?

In the 2016 election, Donald Trump took a bigger bite out of the DLWC vote than Mitt Romney by running a more populist and nationalist campaign, which sent Hillary Clinton tumbling to defeat in the Rust Belt. Over the next four years, Trump reverted to “fusionist” conservatism and lost his edge.

It is time for a Populist Left candidate to start thinking about running as a Republican in 2024. Just as Donald Trump tapped into all that disaffection and resentment and brought over the MAGA voters when he was railing against Wall Street in 2016 (as fake as it was it struck a chord with his target audience), it is conceivable that a candidate could run well to the Left of Trump on economics and win over MAGA voters by attacking the political correctness. They have the same beliefs on economics.

This is why there are polls like this: 76% of the public agrees the economic system is rigged to favor the rich and powerful and 78% don’t feel represented by politicians and the traditional two parties.

Could it work?

Could someone with the politics of William Jennings Bryan or Huey Long takeover and further transform the Republican Party beyond what we have seen? Could this person defeat an 82-year-old Neoliberal Joe with zero legislative accomplishments except the COVID relief bill in 2024?

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

5 Comments

  2. Reviewing some of the statistics on the market-skeptical and disaffected that you seem to be counting on to support a new Huey Long reformer for President:

    Three quarters of them are non-Hispanic White, and 23% follow NASCAR. So that means about one third of them are NASCAR-following Whites….

    Probably not one of them can find Myanmar on a map. But most of them have seen Tucker on Faux News, many have gone on controlled-opposition silly conspiracy theory websites, and some probably study instead of burn those “free sample” paper copies of Epoch Times propaganda that arrive in their rural postal mailboxes.

  3. according to the book “deaths of despair”,

    1.major depressive episodes have gone up among young people
    2. US white mortality rate hasn’t budged since the 90s, even though the rest of the first world has dramatically dropped
    3. all cause mortality has grown dramatically in rural white areas
    4. non college educated whites rate their health poorer in 2017 then in 2007 or 1993
    5. earnings has dropped among non college educated whites for several decades in a row
    6. marriage rates has declined, loneliness has inclined
    7. church attendance, union membership has declined, which have historically served as bargaining forces
    8. serious mental distress has gone up among non college educated whites
    9. fraction of whites who experience pain correlates quite well for people who voted Donald Trump
    10. Suicide and deaths of despair dramatic increase among non college educated whites
    11. alcoholism has increased among whites
    12. middle age whites have since the 2000s have reported increasing rates “not too happy”

    The book has a lot of major flaws, like not taking intelligence into account and using extreme PC Jargon that a lot of points became hard reads, a lot of libtard bullshit about immigrants. But the data is out there that whites are disaffected. It’s pretty obvious that pollsters are taking note of these facts, this how Trump got elected.

    Bannon was interested in the polling Caddell did for a hypothetical candidate “Smith,” who, like the hero of the Frank Capra movie, wants to break away from conventional politics organized on behalf of the donor classes. Caddell’s polling numbers suggested that the Obama administration no longer enjoyed the consent of the governed. Neither conventionally conservative nor liberal, “Smith” represented a politics of American common sense. Caddell’s data suggested that traditional politicians were “ignoring the volcano rumbling beneath them.”

    https://www.city-journal.org/pat-caddell

  4. “Trumpism” aka Zionist neo-liberal fake-populism / fake-nationalism is still overwhelmingly popular on the right.

    This works to prevent an authentic populist from arising and it certainly works to close off left populism a vehicle for a legitimately anti-establishment candidate.

    The deeply compromised Trump is in a position to play kingmaker and give his blessing to a chosen successor… out of the many fake populists in the GOP who are being groomed for this role.

    Furthermore, while people take populist positions on issues in polls, in practice they are easily fooled by politicians… many of these people still see Trump’s first term as meaningfully populist.

    They have been groomed to like false populism and they would not know real populism if they actually saw it. Much of the populist base in 2021 has now been strongly conditioned to REJECT any kind of left populist appeal as “socialism”, although they might benefit from that policy and approve of it if was presented by a “Trumpist” (aka controlled) figure.

    The prospect for an alternative, authentically populist center is pretty grim, as long as Trumpist fake populism remains popular.

    And no, they won’t just lose control of Trumpism. That’s the same AmNat delusion about taking over the GOP. Trumpism might eventually fade out and be replaced by something else, but as long as it exists they will use every bit of power at their disposal to ensure that it does not directly evolve into a vehicle for authentic populism that would challenge the power structure.

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