National Review: The Ghost of Theodore Roosevelt

In a nutshell, this is why Trump lost the 2020 election:

National Review:

“In light of all this, it’s hardly surprising that the populist-nationalist wing of the Republican Party has picked Teddy Roosevelt to be their mascot. If you were to line Republican presidents up on an ideological spectrum, Roosevelt would sit at the opposite pole to limited-government icons such as Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan. For conservatives who want to pivot away from the libertarian-inflected fusionism that has dominated the GOP since 1964, TR’s presidency will always be a touchstone. …

What he did with this power didn’t really matter as much — note that he could hardly have been more of a “dead consensus,” “zombie Reaganite” president in policy terms if he had tried. …

Once the populists have chosen their champion for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, they will accept no one else. Populists, whose allegiance to institutions is nonexistent, turn out only for their chosen one. For evidence, look no further than the Georgia Senate runoffs: Traditional suburban Republicans came out in force for Loeffler and Perdue, and a critical mass of Trump devotees stayed home. …”

The Bulwark:

“There was a time when CPAC was generally regarded in elite conservative and Republican circles as merely a circus, a Star Trek convention, a freak show, even. The undercurrent of these comments and discussions was that while CPAC might be a cross-section of the weird edges of the conservative activist set it didn’t truly represent the seriousness and sobriety of the broader movement. 

And so establishment RINOs like me would go for the spectacle and to network with conservative influencers who had travelled to DC for the event. Staffers from Conservatism Inc. would trudge down to the Marriott to hawk their wares and promote their email lists. The mainstream media would flock to the nuttiest looking guy in a tri-corner hat and take the ample opportunities that the speakers provided to make conservatives look crazy. …”

In the 2020 election, Donald Trump lost two types of White voters on opposite ends of his coalition, but he lost them for very different reasons.

There were traditional Republican voters who are college educated Whites who live in the affluent metropolitan suburbs who voted for Joe Biden and Republican candidates down-ballot all over the country because they come from the True Cons wing and wanted to get rid of Trump. After he won the 2016 election, Trump formed an alliance with Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and catered to them for four years on policy and gave them pretty much everything they wanted from tax cuts to deregulation to libertarian judges and they still voted for Joe Biden because they wanted to return to the pre-2016 era.

There were disaffected Independent voters who are both college educated and White working class voters who live in rural areas and less affluent suburbs who strongly backed Donald Trump in 2016 (these were Alt-Right and Alt-Lite voters), but who didn’t show up at the polls in 2018 or 2020 because they were disappointed with Trump because he catered to the True Cons wing on policy and completely staffed his administration with those people and didn’t govern nationalist enough or populist enough for their tastes. He had become Blumpf as president. These people were not satisfied with “owning the libs” and Trump’s cult of personality and only cared about meaningful changes in policy.

If Trump had won White Indies in the 2020 election, he would still be president. He won Independent voters in all the swing states in 2016. He lost them in all the swing states in 2020. These people are not True Conservatives and dislike people like Jeb Bush and the sort of people who were behind the Lincoln Project. They are populist voters with different views on economics.

People like Charlie Sykes, Bill Kristol, Mickey Edwards, Joe Walsh and Mitch McConnell are a massive albatross for the GOP because their views are wildly out of sync both with the Republican mainstream and the Center of the electorate. Rightwing PMCs who only care about tax cuts, endless wars, political correctness and virtue signaling repulse far more people than they attract.

A smarter pol like Josh Hawley who embraces economic populism in substance, not merely rhetoric could win over both the “white supremacists” and blacks and Hispanics. This is because working class voters of all races tend of have a sharper sense of racial and ethnic identity. All the people in the middle are much more disaffected and more ethnocentric but tend to have more similar views on economics.

About Hunter Wallace 12380 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

14 Comments

  1. Biden a Roman Catholic was able to pull enough of the Roman Catholic vote to win. A good example by polling you have posted is that the pro-abortion Catholic Biden was preferable to Catholics, than the anti-abortion Protestant Trump by 6%.

    Meanwhile, the borders are open and the Latino Catholics are pouring into the US to take advantage of all that US has to offer, and all that we WASP’s have built.

    • K.W., there used to be a VERY clear Catholic-Protestant division in this town and county, and there were no African-Americans in the entire county before about 1970. Real estate red-lining was in effect, and an unwritten law was enforced that no Catholic could teach in the local public school system. Catholics had their own schools, neighborhoods and cemeteries,. I’ve heard of religious-conflict brawls in the streets of some of these towns about a hundred years ago. Military service and public schooling, and business trade and employment slowly blended them together.

  2. Trump is now corralling all of his supporters back into the Republican fold and endorsing loser establishment cons. His supporters were ready to abandon the party last month, but Trump is again breathing life back into the GOP establishment and redirecting populist energy like he did during his term delivering Paul Ryan’s agenda.

    And you can see the convergence clearly with AfPAC bringing in establishment cons like Steve King and Paul Gosar. That is the Republican strategy going forward. America First populist rhetoric in the streets, cosmopolitan plutocrat policies in the sheets. They will shift talking points a bit, but continue serving up the same policies designed to deliver cheap labor and funnel money upwards, as usual. Even now, the Republican “party of the multi-racial working class” is spending their time pushing for national right to work union busting legislation and fighting against covid relief.

    • Yes, the only thing we care about is policy. As long as they continue to push the same policies, we aren’t interested in cosmetic changes. At the end of the day, sounding more populist doesn’t do anything for us.

    • Yes. This is where strict desire for vapid winning gets you.

      A machiavellian attempt to just find the sweet spot to carry on through with the same bullshit but fine tuned enough in rhetoric (and even worse in ****substance**** [albeit superficially to give a veneer of real change and give scraps to the base and provide cover when accused by the more cynical]).

    • My prophecy…no.

      Race war is the last thing our side needs. For Rahowa folk, our side is very weak now and entire planet Earth knows this so whatever racial conflict in any form is pre lost issue now. Even Eastern Europe is afraid that when things go ugly, we may not succeed to defend our borders. Those others have unlimited manpower supply. Our side have very few best and brightest left.

      WW III will be warrior war like in ancient times .This time our technological and intellectual superiority gives us zero advantage and when we check the numbers of testosterone filled young men with ready to die and nothing to lose, we discover that we are so horrifically outnumbered that victory is just impossible.

      Donald is our great last hope. If his plan does not work, I do not want to even think, what will happen in next 10 years. Like a lot of Eastern Europeans, I do the private military contracting and believe me, when shit hits the fan, average western soldier has no chance against average nonwhite warrior.

      Those pathetic losers have zero willpower to control even their own municipality. What chances they have against high energy high testosterone filled Third World warriors ?

      Only one chance. Clever Donald will push their energy against institutions. So The Swamp is the one who get hit, not us.

  3. A lot of people don’t like Trump because he’s stupid and ineffective. I find that he shifted the overton window way to the left.

  4. Meanwhile the CIA, run by a Mr. Cohen, is pushing us toward war in the Middle East, very possibly a war with Russia, with attacks on Iran and Crimea.

    This is happening, and it will dominate the next four years.

    You will soon regret rejecting Drumpf. I voted for him for one reason: He started no new wars. But you wanted Biden, so you are going to get wars. It hasn’t sunk into your minds yet, but the wars are coming fast.

  5. Dump is the huge ass-log clogging the crapper: preventing a clean pro-White populist flush with his gobbage about starting a (((Patriot Party))) or a superpac.

    Get the fuckin’ plunger…

Comments are closed.