Here are my thoughts:
In 2021, the Republican Party is two parties. It is the Trump Party and the Republican Party. Republican voters are split about 50/50 between people who identify more as traditional Republicans and Trump supporters. The strongest Republican voters are now the newcomers.
Approximately half of the Republican Party is what I think of as the GOP and the conservative movement. The True Cons or Free Marketeers or Never Trumpers are approximately 15% of Republican voters. These people are fiscal conservatives and social liberals. 35% of the Republican Party are the Republican base. These people are fiscal conservatives and social conservatives. They are Ronald Reagan or Ted Cruz Republicans. The common tie that binds them is their fiscal conservatism.
Half of Republican voters are Trumpists. They are populists and nationalists who are very conservative on social identity issues, but moderates on economic issues. These people are a different kind of social conservative than the Religious Right. They are mostly racially conscious nativists who are opposed to political correctness. We don’t know the exact degree of overlap with White Nationalists, but I strongly suspect that anywhere between 25% to 35% of Republican voters are essentially White Nationalists or close enough to be indistinguishable from them in their identity, values and beliefs in polling. Conspiracy theorists are 10% of Republican voters. Some number of non-Whites fill out the rest of this category because they are also social conservatives and economic moderates like the White populists.
Outside of the Republican Party but adjacent to Trumpists, there are more moderate and populist voters who are Independent voters. This is the Left Populist space. These people are White moderates, Hispanic moderates, Asian moderates, black moderates. These people are social conservatives and economic moderates who vote more on the basis of economic issues than social issues. The next adjacent group are people who are economic populists and mild social liberals who prioritize economics. Beyond these people, you begin to move through the working class into the middle class and shade into libs who increasingly prioritize social liberalism at the expense of economic progressivism.
The major divide in the Republican Party is between the True Cons or Free Marketeers or Never Trumpers or GOP establishment voters and everyone else. They are social liberals who have modernist and cosmopolitan values in a party that is defined by social conservatism. These people are now the disaffected wing of the party. They identify as liberals or moderates because of their views on social issues. 85% of Republican voters have a broadly similar outlook on social issues although the party is more divided on economics with about 40% to 45% being populists on economic issues.
In public opinion polls, populist voters will describe themselves as “very conservative” based on their views on social issues while True Cons will describe themselves as liberals or moderates based on their views on social issues. They are flipped on economics. The True Cons are free traders and fiscal conservatives. The populists are trade skeptics who are deeply skeptical of globalization and corporate power.
What are the most likely future scenarios?
Red Dogs Are Whipped And Come Home
In the 2022 midterms, it is possible that with Trump gone that the Red Dogs or True Cons in the wealthy suburbs who became Joe Biden voters could return to the Republican Party. As much as they hated Trump, Joe is taking advantage of their adventure into the political wilderness to push a massive tax hike on them and to add trillions of dollars in new spending on programs that benefit working class voters. COVID was also the reason that most of them abandoned Trump and the pandemic will be over by the 2022 midterms. These people held their nose and voted for Trump in 2016 and he actually catered to their interests as president. They just didn’t reward him for it with their support due to their cultural values.
Trumpists Consolidate Power
The electorate is polarizing along the lines of class, culture, education and ideology and that seems unlikely to change in the near future. If this trend continues, we can predict that the Democrats will continue to become more liberal, more cosmopolitan and more modernist and alienate more working class voters with conservative cultural values and drive them out or away from the party and into the Republican Party, which will become more moderate and populist on economics. Eventually, this shift in the electorate will realign White moderates and transform the Republican Party into a populist party.
Both Of These Things Happen
It is possible that both of these things could happen in the 2022 midterms with Joe in the White House. Joe is doing a good job angering both the Trumpists with his open border policies and the Red Dogs with his spending and proposed tax hike. Donald Trump also won’t be on the ballot in 2022. The Red Dogs generally voted for Republicans except for Trump in the 2020 elections. In the short term, the Trumpists and the Red Dogs have a shared interest in putting a check on Joe by throwing the Democrats out of Congress.
What is possible, but unlikely to happen?
Trumpists Return To the Democrats
Democrats actually think this is realistic. In this scenario, working class voters respond favorably to the Biden stimulus check and child tax credit and return to the Democratic Party in spite of the fact that it has gone woke on racial issues and now supports full open borders. I find it highly unlikely to happen because all the evidence suggests that Trumpists prioritize their cultural views over their economic views and they are now the majority in the Republican Party and have no incentive to return.
Red Dogs Somehow Retake Power In the Republican Party
In this scenario, the Trumpists are lured back to the Democratic Party, the Red Dogs return to the Republican Party and somehow retake power within the party in 2024 by nominating someone like Nikki Haley. Gen X, Millennial and Gen Z voters who are significantly worse off than the Baby Boomers suddenly realize that True Conservatism is the way to go.
Socially conservative Republicans were a big part of the GOP’s support base at one point.
However, they never truly consolidated power. The party paid lip service to their issues, but never consistently followed through with policy.
Instead, it used social conservatism to get elected and once in office it focused on fiscal “conservatism”, which is what the more sophisticated and powerful elements of the party truly cared about.
Trump played a similar game with nationalism and populism. Although what he did in office wasn’t exactly in line with traditional fiscal conservativism, it did serve the interests of established elite groups.
It’s likely that “Trumpists” will serve as a key voting block for some time to come.
But unless their attitude towards their leaders changes significantly, they will never actually take control of the party, but will forever remain Trump’s chumps, just as social conservatives repeatedly got taken advantage of by “RINOs”.
One definition of populism focuses on the competition between ordinary people and the established elites who disregard their interests.
Trumpist “populism” is not even consistently hostile towards Republican elites whose role is manage and sabotage populism. As long as they came around to supporting Trump, they were accepted, shielded from criticism and given support.
As you documented on this website, in GOP primaries Trump repeatedly backed establishment candidates and sabotaged right wing populists… and the most the chumps could manage was a little grumbling… as they voted for the establishment candidate.
Arguably, Trumpism is not even populism, but an updated version of standard GOP cultural grievance politics.
As of 2021 (and for some time before), Trumpists are no longer motivated by their grievances towards the GOP elite… or the overall American elite… but only the liberal Democrat elite, which isn’t the elite that purports to represent them in the first place.
Trump’s campaign had a uniquely populist tone when he criticized the Bush presidency in strong terms to a GOP audience… and called into question the bipartisan foreign policy consensus of the American establishment.
But just complaining about what the other party is up to? That’s conventional two party politics.
Republicans morph with some more Nationalist rhetoric yet still pushes the similar policies, at least as best as possible in the changing political climate. It simply needs to evolve and alter its rhetoric and style. It largely succeeds and keeps the Republican Trumpian base that is easily manipulated with cultural/racial issues. The Trumpian base is unable to break from totally from its Conservative and conspiracy Qanan threads and become a truly Nationalist independent movement that is truly willing to politically break from the Republican party, create a new party, and not be gaslit every election cycle. Which ironically makes it harder for any Nationalist movement to ever gain momentum.
I see a more fundamental political dichotomy, thats likely to have an actual effect on reality, and thereby politics.
Over the last year and a half the ruling/managerial class have usurped the social liberties, civil rights and basic freedoms of the entire working class by leveraging a minor epidemic to restrict all freedom of movement by way of an obliging corporate media structure happy to go along with a national gaslighting campaign.
The outcome has been unprecedented economic damage incurred by the working class, and a continued loss of civil liberties to the ongoing campaign of social pressure to conform to the narrative of fauci and the democrat donors of big pharma.
Increasingly the actual divide is becoming more clear as those who are getting ever more fed up with the pearl clutchers pretend concern for the populace while consolidating power over basic social gatherings like weddings increasingly resent openly their new overlords.
https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1371088337063272449?s=20
Real people are being effected by the bullshit covid hysteria. This has been weaponized against us from day one.
It seems a matter of time before everybody is called to account for their position on the unnecessary ecomonic destruction that increasingly is being understood to be the only result of lock down procedures, which haven’t been shown to positively effect pandemic control efforts.
Not everybody lives in the middle of nowhere with a job that doesnt require travel, human contact or accountability to an organization that requires them to work from somewhere besides their couch.
This increasingly obtuse political taxonomy outlined by the world of pollsters isn’t going to successfully muddy the waters enough to make the majority of people forget who sided with the media narrative against the small business owners (100,000 small businesses shuttered) , for political expediency in an upcoming election.
Now that it is becoming less risky to be critical of the ongoing lockdowns, maybe the politically risk averse in the dissident right will start coming out and calling this what it has been all along. A power grab.
I for one, am losing patience with the “intellectuals” who it is ever more clear have few hard convictions, and will never be in a foxhole with me or anybody like me when the going gets rough.
The burgeoning Republican Party is actually an unlikely reassembling of the Jim Crow Era Dixiecrats, which is why the real establishment GOP hate it so much.
They, the establishment GOP types, are the spirit of New England, whereas this new party is the spirit of Dixie.
That’s got to gall the George Will, Mitt Romney, and Jeff Flake types to suddenly find themselves in the former Dog-patch coalition of George Wallace and Lester Maddox, which was, and, indeed, is, comprised of the less educated and well-coiffed Whites that they were trying to avoid in the first place.
By the way – love the picture above, most especially that cute chipmonk Deep Southern chick with our flag. She’s the kind you put on the Butternut and go to war for.
Perhaps Hunter can answer this, but what’s it about far right websites like yours that attract nutty Covid deniers and conspiracy theorists? Far left sites seem to attract yahoos too. Just goes to show moderates and radical centrists are where common sense lies.
“By the way – love the picture above, most especially that cute chipmonk Deep Southern chick with our flag. She’s the kind you put on the Butternut and go to war for.”
She was indeed a dollbaby: 100% my type.