Donald Trump Sounds Like a Democrat From the 1980s
It's a return to the Reagan era, but not in the way that should make conservatives happy.
One of the most entertaining recent social media love fests involved President Donald Trump and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.).
Warren wrote that she and the president agree about scrapping the debt ceiling—a congressional limit on federal borrowing. Its goal is to force the government to live within its means. Congress often relaxes the limit, but "Katy, bar the door" if extreme progressives such as Warren get their way.
Trump was "very pleased" to announce his agreement with her that such limits would lead to "economic catastrophe." He thinks it's wrong to put such power in "the hands of political people," as if the root spending isn't done by politicians. Anyhow, it was the latest example of the Horseshoe Theory, whereby the two political extremes don't occupy distant points along a line, but are as close together as the two ends of a horseshow. There's indeed an odd similarity between right-populism and left-progressivism.
Justin Amash, the former Republican congressman from Michigan, is one of the few politicians who lives up to his own billing ("a principled, consistent constitutional conservative dedicated to individual liberty, economic freedom and the Rule of Law"). He threw shade on the Trump/Warren kumbaya session: "Donald Trump is, at his core, a big-government politician with misguided views on economics and the federal budget. He's a more socially conservative Elizabeth Warren, which is to say he's a 1980s Democrat." Bingo.
Having grown up as a Democrat in Pennsylvania in the 1970s—the only Republicans I knew were of the Rockefeller variety and wore bowties—I was greatly influenced by the rise of Reagan and eagerly switched parties after the 1980 election. I remember the era's politics clearly, as I was studying political science at George Washington University. (I couldn't get back to my dorm room after the Reagan assassination attempt, as the president was convalescing at GWU hospital and the streets were closed.)
So when I hear my Republican friends compare Trump to the Reagan era, I half-heartedly agree. Yes, we're seeing the revival of that decade's debates—except Trump is an almost exactly replica of the Democratic politicians of the time, but with a socially conservative twist. It's as if Missouri Democrat Dick Gephardt, the congressman and later a Democratic presidential candidate, had a love child (politically speaking, of course) with Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo.
I'm relieved that I'm not the only one to have noticed. In a February column in The Dispatch, Kevin D. Williamson quoted from the 1980 Democratic platform: "We will not allow our workers and industries to be displaced by unfair import competition." He added: "The Democrat Trump sounds like is Dick Gephardt," who "in the 1980s and 1990s…was the face of center-left trade Luddism, the union goons' answer to Ross Perot." Luddism refers to the Luddites, those 19th-century British textile workers who fought against technological advancements—mechanized looms—to protect their antiquated jobs.
Although an aside and the subject for another day, 1980s Democrats also were oddly unconcerned about the expanding, freedom-crushing Soviet Empire. They couldn't bring themselves to unequivocally condemn communist totalitarianism, preferring instead to seek out toothless negotiations, with some Democrats oddly sympathetic to dictators such as Cuba's Fidel Castro and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega. Yes, I'm referring to Trump's awkward praise for modern despots, and his amoral approach toward Vladimir Putin and his Ukraine invasion. Remember that democratic-socialist U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders—another progressive with whom Trump occasionally makes economic common cause—took his honeymoon in the USSR.
Gephardt was fairly hard-edged in his approach to immigration, at least by Democratic standards. But the alignment between MAGA and progressivism goes much deeper than agreement on particular pro-union, anti-trade, big-spending policies. The Washington Post's conservative columnist George Will—who I heard speak during the Reagan era at a conference in Washington, D.C.—recently listed the "nine core components of progressivism" and concluded that "Trump nails every one."
To summarize Will's points, Trumpism inserts politics into every aspect of society and its cultural institutions; is confident in using government to intervene; uses industrial policy to "pick winners and losers"; supports central economic planning, especially with manufacturing; expands his party's political base by handing out entitlements; uses tax policy for social engineering; believes in limitless borrowing (e.g., removing the debt limit); governs by executive fiat; and believes in "unfettered majoritarianism," or populism. There is nothing truly conservative about his administration.
Reason's Veronique de Rugy sees Trump's latest tax plan—one that's too much even for Elon Musk—as "a leftist economic agenda wrapped in populist talking points." The Trump team and its cadre of former Democratic advisers, "glorify union power, rail against globalization and scoff at the very idea of limited government," she added.
That is indeed pure 1980s-era Democratic leftism. If you support it, fine, but please stop accusing its foes of being RINOs (Republicans In Name Only).
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
