A Workers' Revolt

Donald has changed the Republican Party into a workers’ party, trying to pursue trade and immigration policies intended to benefit U.S. workers, policies that threaten many U.S. elites.

From the 1960s until 2016, the Republican Party had been a party of wealth that attracted the votes of socially conservative voters who were not wealthy by promising but seldom delivering, decade after decade, things like bringing back prayer in schools, ending forced busing as a means of racial integration, and returning to the states the choice of the extent to which abortions should be permitted. The Republican Party thereby managed to keep the country committed to policies, such as free trade, that benefitted the wealthy. Transforming that party into a party of labor was more than a stunning accomplishment; it was a successful insurrection. Donald did that, too, before he was elected president; and that’s a huge part of why he was elected president.

Donald was able to do that in part because the Democratic Party, in recent decades, has ceased to be FDR’s party of labor. The Republican Party is now more a party of labor than is the Democratic Party – which certainly was never the case between 1912 and 2016 and arguably hadn’t been since Grant’s presidency. That seemed pretty obvious on election night 2016, and it still does.

However, if you need to be persuaded of it, you might read Frank H. Buckley, The Republican Workers Party: How the Trump Victory Drove Everyone Crazy and Why It Was Just What We Needed (New York: Encounter Books, 2018); a preview is on Google Books, here.

If you think the Democratic Party is still the party of the poor, you might also read Ken Fisher, “Poorest states have Republican legislatures, and richest have Democratic ones,” USA Today, 12 October 2018, online here.

Diverse folks who appreciate Donald but who are not PC-mocking comedians and whose minds work in more readily comprehensible ways than his wander about the country and the world telling anyone who will listen that Trump is leading a workers’ revolt against U.S. elites. Here are links to seven YouTube clips, each at least half an hour long, of lectures or interviews given by six of them:

• Newt Gingrich, “Understanding Trump and Trumpism,” December 13, 2016, speech at The Heritage Foundation, http://youtu.be/NIe95tyHQs4
• Charles Murray, March 31, 2017, address at Notre Dame University, describing the 2016 U.S. presidential in context of developments described in his 2012 book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, at http://youtu.be/rVDeBL6FuP0
• Victor Davis Hanson, “Taking stock of Trumpism,” Hillsdale College, May 26, 2017, http://youtu.be/pzXJi9-1SUs
• Ann Coulter, February 12, 2018, address to the Oxford Union, and responses to questions from students, http://youtu.be/EoQiRylIl_c
• Tucker Carlson, “What the Bleep Happened to America?” October 2, 2108, interview plugging his book, Ship of Fools, http://youtu.be/yun1Z2CNGJo
• Steve Bannon, October 11, 2018, interview with Bloomberg News’ Editor-in-Chief, http://youtu.be/Idpxb_Gp3GI
• Steve Bannon, November 16, 2018, address to the Oxford Union, and responses to questions from students, http://youtu.be/8AtOw-xyMo8

Although Carlson and Coulter are often deliberately provocative, and Hanson’s remarks sometimes have a sharp edge, Gingrich, Murray and Bannon are gentlemen committed to civility, masters of the art of disagreeing agreeably. In these YouTube clips, these six speakers are not chiefly trying to convert you to their political views; they’re chiefly trying to explain what they think is happening that has given us Donald as president in the U.S. and has also transformed politics in Europe.

Of the above-linked clips, our favorite is the last, Bannon’s November 2018 address to the Oxford Union. Whereas the other speakers above are reacting to Donald's 2016 victory, Bannon was instrumental in accomplishing it. Despite being widely demonized, Bannon is congenial as well as insightful. He’s also incorrigibly impish, an iconoclast who in his sixties still loves to be among a group of unsympathetic twenty-year-olds.

Bannon as an undergraduate at Virginia Tech, 1975