Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Reaganism Is Dead
President Reagan’s final resting place at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, CA. CrackerClips Stock Media / Shutterstock.com
A longtime Republican conservative emailed me after Trump’s Tuesday night romp through the “Acela corridor.” “Is the GOP now the anti-trade, anti-immigrant party?”
I don’t think so, but take no comfort in the reason — Republicans haven’t signed on to protectionism and nativism (or at least, only a minority has), but they seem to have lost all philosophical coherence.
The lesson of the Ted Cruz campaign is that the party faithful are not nearly as conservative as some had thought. Even among “very conservative” voters in New York, Cruz carried only 27 percent of them. Were Empire State voters were still smarting from Cruz’s “New York values” snipe? Maybe, but Cruz won only 29 percent of “very conservatives” in Alabama, 31 percent in Virginia, and 41 percent in Pennsylvania. Cruz has worked assiduously to showcase his conservative bona fides, and while purists might raise an eyebrow at some of his foreign policy stands and his flip-flopping on trade, he passes every other conservative litmus test with deep dye. Yet even among very conservative voters, he failed to close the deal.
A lot of ink has been spilled analyzing why Trump was able to run away with Cruz’s “evangelical” voters, but less to the vertigo-inducing reality that people who call themselves conservative, even “very” conservative, can vote for someone like Trump – a liberal-leaning, Planned Parenthood-defending, Code Pink-echoing, flamboyantly ignorant swindler.
Anger about immigration isn’t it. I’ve always been a mushy moderate on immigration. At least with regard to Mexico, it’s a problem on the way to solving itself. The “wall” would be the greatest waste of money since the feds created the Department of Education – and threatening to dun Mexico for the cost is sheer flim-flammery. Still, I was willing to entertain the idea that voters were really exercised about it as an explanation for the Trump rise – until I looked at exit polls.
Since Iowa, voters have been asked to rank issues by importance. In New Hampshire, only 15 percent of voters put immigration at the top of their list of concerns. Fifty-six percent favored a path to legalization for illegals living and working here. In South Carolina, even fewer (10 percent) ranked immigration first among issues of concern and 53 percent favored that path to legalization. These results were replicated in the nearly every state that has held a primary so far. Among Republicans in Pennsylvania, for example, fewer than 40 percent favored deportation of illegal immigrants, yet Trump won nearly 57 percent of the vote.
The exception to this rule is the large number of voters who approve of Trump’s proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from the US – a very new wrinkle on the old immigration issue.
Trade has loomed large in a few states, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, but has been more mixed elsewhere, with voters divided on whether it helps or hurts the economy.
So the answer to my friend is that Republicans are not voting on issues, they are voting on personality and attitude, and thus revealing themselves to have fallen for one of the worst errors of the left – the progressive belief that all will be well provided the “right” people, the “best people” if you will, are running the government.
“This is the end of Reaganism,” former Senator Tom Coburn, a conservative hero, told me. The three-legged stool of strong defense, small government, and conservatism on social issues has been smashed. Republicans, or at least a plurality of Republican primary voters, no longer distrust government per se, they simply distrust this government. They dislike Obama and the Republican leadership. But they’re ready to believe that an outsider will be able to bring his annealing touch to the economy, to the culture, and to national greatness. If a Republican politician today were to tell the joke about “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you” – a reliable punch line in the Reagan repertoire – he or she would be greeted by incomprehension. This is a signal victory for the left: The triumph of faith in the state. Trumpites are reprising Obama’s “Yes We Can” with a new lead.
Republican politicians cannot rely on the healthy skepticism about government that was once woven into the fabric of the party. People used to know that bigger government enables more corruption, that the mediating institutions of society like family, church, and community organizations are better at nearly every task than bureaucracies, and that government undermines these institutions when it expands too much.
“All kings is mostly rapscallions as fur as I can make out” explained Huck Finn, a good American constitutionalist. It’s a lesson the Republican Party will have to relearn when this season passes.
Published in General
I have no idea what this is getting at-eminent domain, a cathedral sold by a church to a private buyer?
Speaking as an immigration-squish myself, I have never been able to put it as succinctly as you just did. Not bad.
Being opposed to illegal immigration, amnesty and desiring the existing laws on immigration and criminal deportation are enforced is not the same as being anti-immigrant.
The problem with Mexico hasn’t “solved itself”. The back door is wide open. Just because the burglars have stopped coming into the house, doesn’t mean the problem is “solved”. You close the f***ing door! Letting disease ridden peasants and terrorists walk right across the border is not in the interests of the American people.
Please explain to us what the American tribe is. I dare you to do this without using the word “white.”
Some of us are conservatives because we care about freedom and opportunity, not about balkanization and tribal unity. This is dangerous nonsense you are quoting.
Yes it is bad. Facts matter. Please read Ann Coulter. This is not about immigration in the traditional sense, but rather a sanctioned invasion. Read and THEN discuss…
Other than open borders proponents of the left, who has proposed this? If this is your characterization of the status quo, why not actually enforce the existing law and ramp up boots on the ground at the border?
Anti-immigrant and anti-immigration are different. People like Ann Coulter and NR’s Mark Krikorian are anti-immigration and don’t make a distinction between the legal and illegal kind.
Trump victory, picture of Reagan’s tomb.
Stay classy.
Ann Coulter opposes legal immigration.
You too!
My understanding is that she wants a temporary moratorium on immigration until we can process those already here. That’s different than a blanket opposition.
I’ll have to look it up. I have seen quotes from her saying we shouldn’t make a distinction between legal and illegal immigration, because it’s all bad.
I have heard people advocate a temporary moratorium, but not Ann Coulter.
Ah, the good old days. We’re arguing about immigration instead of Trump. :-)
I’m not positive I have my facts straight either. I have heard her say our Immigration Judges and Hearing Officers have to be purged of La Raza zealots before we can have more immigration, so I’m assuming she expects immigration to resume at some point.
No argument on that point.
So? Are we desperate for more dependent underclass residents feasting on my tax dollars?
Don’t engage him. We’ll both end up with CoC flags…
Nobody proposes this. It just happens when you ignore the laws and look the other way. I agree. Enforce the existing laws.
And what am I; chopped liver?
Present company excluded – as always!
Since when has adhering to the rule of law and enforcing immigration law against illegally entering the United States equal to abandoning Conservatism.
You want to know the real fissure here? It’s people telling us that we don’t need borders. It’s people advocating some sort of “bring ’em all here” mentality–the rule of law and sovereignty be damned. One reason why I can’t stand the current GOP leadership is that they are willing to import, through amnesty, at least 11 million new Democrat voters at the expense of the American ethos of rule of law and individual liberty.
Tom, Tyler:
Gentlemen, please refer to the On Good Faith article pinned to the member feed.
If the two of you want to have a substantive conversation here, do so within the CoC you agreed to.
This seems to me to be exactly correct. Reagan wasn’t one thing. He was many things all wrapped in one person. He surely was an intellectual capable of explaining freedom as he did in the Goldwater speech, which I listen to a few times a year just to remind myself about what is possible. He was also a social conservative.
But he also put forth a vision and a campaign that was predicated on a fundamental belief that America should come first, and that the intellectuals creating complicated schemes were doing more harm than good. He was about getting back to basics in many ways. That feature was side by side with the intellectual conservatism.
Fact is, the conservative movement has adopted the intellectual part and the social conservative part and completely jettisoned the keep it simple, America first part. We haven’t had a Republican candidate since Reagan who was so unapologetically American as Trump is today.
Trump has taken part of Reagan and shown its real value. Unfortunately, Republican leaders AND conservative thinkers abandoned that part in their mad-dash to the intellectual part and social conservative part. Reagan would never have won without also being brashly American, a fact that the squishy apologizing Republicans since then have failed to grasp.
Trump is pushing as much Reagan today as conservatives have since his time. It’s just the half of Reagan that the conservatives long ago forgot about as they wrote their lectures and drafted their opinion pieces.
I agree that Rubio got manhandled by people in his own party for doing nothing more than trying to find a middle ground towards a solution to the ILLEGAL immigration that is happening.
That said, the push for most conservatives and I don’t include the nationalists here, is to curb ILLEGAL immigration, which has had a very negative effect on our education system, health care, and voting. If you don’t see that then you aren’t paying attention to the data.
Still sounding deranged, but I am there for you Josh!
54 Senators have already voted to repeal and replace the First Amendment. Trump agrees with them in principle because he opposes Citizens United and its progeny, the reason the Democrats voted to repeal the First Amendment.
So who sounds deranged, someone who agrees with those voting to repeal a provision of the bill of rights, or someone who doesn’t?
Would you see an increase in legal immigration as part of the solution to illegal immigration?
So is James Madison. Guess we’re moving on from constitutional republicanism.
Succinct and incisive. Excellent rejoinder.