There have been any number of attempts to normalize Donald Trump. Let me admit a couple of things up front. I don't think Trump is a "normal" politician in any sense of the word, and I don't think he represents an ideology beyond an aggrandized idea of himself and his significance in the world. If he begins to seem normal, his normalcy will be sheer habituation of the sort adduced in the opening episode of the Handmaid's Tale -- no more, no less, than what one becomes used to over time. Nevertheless, the Times published an editorial by Charles R. Kesler which gives voice to yet another attempt to "normalize" Trump and place him in the "mainstream" of American politics. Methinks he doth protest too much, beginning with his title, "Donald Trump is a Real Republican, and That's a Good Thing," because, of course, as Kesler admits, as "Mr. Trump is not and never was a movement conservative," and for better or worse the republican party has become identified with the ideological outlines of movement conservatism. And I think Kesler is correct when he point out that Trump "has displayed little to no patience for libertarianism, traditionalism, neoconservatism or the other endangered ideological species that the movement has sought to conserve for so many decades." Some of his impatience, of course, is the petulance of a school boy more interested in recess at Mar a Lago, than the examine the fine points of ideology, but a greater part of the impatience is simply his sense of messianic narcissism. To adopt and believe in an ideology -- including the sorts of theocratic ideology imagined on the Handmaid's Tale -- is to subordinate "self" to a set of ideas, and Trump is temperamentally unable to do so. It is not that he is an "independent thinker," because the ideas that flow through his mind and out through his twitter account can be easily traced to their sources, it is more that he cannot conceive of anything greater than Trump himself.
I won't engage in the sorts of psycho-babble that sees alienation and insecurity at the core of Trump's messianic narcissism. The perpetual need for affirmation, even if it is false affirmation, burbles up from within because Trump fears what most know, that the aggrandized sense of "self" ought to come from real accomplishment, not indulgence, particularly not self-indulgence, and in the absence of real accomplishment, the aggrandized self must seek its affirmation again and again in others. Karen Horney's essays lay it out in more detail, but there, I've said it, I believe Trump has a personality disorder of the first degree. When Kesler writes that Trump "must be some kind of conservative, because for nearly 100 days and counting, liberals have poured on him the kind of vitriol they do not reserve for moderates or ideological nobodies," he misses some of the point. The liberal attacks on Trump, personally, are not ad hominem evasions. They are, in one respect, precisely to the point. There is little in the way of ideological consistency that one can argue for or against, nor do the resultant affirmation seeking flip flops add up to vote seeking political expediency. All that remains is his "disordered personality," and the liberals have heaped vitriol on him, personally, because his disordered personality, armed with nuclear weapons, is dangerous. Kesler ignores just how embarrassed the republican response to Trump has been. It is as though they are saying "he must be some kind of conservative," because he has captured core republican constituencies, and he did so in ways that, for the party of Lincoln, were rather embarrassing. As Kesler notes, "some famous conservatives have joined in the sport" of Trump bashing "but for the opposite reason." As he points out, they have done so, in part because Trump's ideological inconsistencies reveal that he "is no conservative but a populist demagogue out to discredit and destroy their beloved movement," and in part because they actually have common ground with liberals. Famous conservatives like David Frum and Andrew Sullivan also disparage Trump because his disordered personality, armed with nuclear weapons, is a threat to the very world civilization they would conserve.
Having said that, it is difficult to take Kesler's argument seriously. Nevertheless, I'll give it a shot. At the core of his argument is the assertion that Trump does, in fact, match up well with a clear historical precedent. Trump, he writes, "remains the kind of conservative president whom one expects to say, proudly and often, 'the chief business of the American people is business.' Although Calvin Coolidge said it first, Mr. Trump shows increasing signs of thinking along broadly Coolidgean lines, and of redirecting Republican policies toward the pre-New Deal, pre-Cold War party of William McKinley and Coolidge, with its roots in the party of Abraham Lincoln." If liberal alarm, including my own, too quickly saw Trump being in thrall to the likes of alt-right Bannon, I would encourage conservative pundits to withhold judgment on the "increasing signs" that he thinks along broadly Coolidgean lines. The "increasing signs" will be, one suspects, about a predictive as augurs interpreting the flight of birds or the entrails of the sacrificial lamb, but it might be worth pausing to ask, "what if the time of American greatness was the pre-New Deal, pre-Cold War republican party?" There is a huge historical irony that Kesler fails to note. The republican party held sway over the American presidency from 1021 to 1933, through the three successive administrations of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. It is disheartening, of course, that still, today, the republican party is viewed as more effective on economic grounds, but it was republican ascendancy that led us into and failed to lead us out of the Great Depression. We tend to elect them to office when the economy is going in the right direction, on the promise of even greater things ahead if only government would get out of the way, only to find that laissez faire economics enables the capitalist self-destruct button and things do go swimmingly until, that is, someone comes along to press it. How great were things under Reagan, Bush (hiccough) and Bush until, that is, the banks found a way to press the self-destruct button, giving us the Great Recession.
At the risk of being too philosophical in anti-intellectual times, there is a fatal flaw in laissez faire thinking -- what gets popularized as "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." If the economic engine is humming along, there might be some wisdom in doing nothing, though to carry the analogy out, it might be equally wise to do some preventive maintenance. Coolidge was blessed with good timing. The economy was humming right along. Hoover, however, was not. The difficulty comes when the economic engine fails. Laissez faire, do nothing, in and of itself, doesn't have repair strategy, and doing little or nothing while expecting great results is as self-delusional in economic venues as it is auto mechanics. Confronted with the great depression, he did what most men do when the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. He popped the hood, stared at the engine, and did too little, more or less hoping that it would simply start running on its own accord if one jostled this wire, wiggled that hose, and hoped for the divine intervention of the invisible hand. OK, I'm being a bit unfair, and the causes and laborious climb out of the great depression can't really be compared to a busted timing belt, but when Kesler writes, "Mr. Trump’s policies suggest that what he calls his 'common sense' conservatism harks back to the principles and agenda of the old Republican Party, which reached its peak before the New Deal," he fails to ask himself, "why did anyone feel the New Deal was necessary?" Could it have possibly been that "common sense conservatism" of the old Coolidgian republican party had allowed, if not facilitated, the catastrophic economic failure of the Great Depression? Could it have possible been that "common sense conservatism" of the old republican party failed to address the failure effectively? Just saying. Historians can debate the efficacy of the New Deal, but it is historical revisionism of the worst and most blatant type to imply, as Kesler does, that the New Deal was a "big government" imposition out of nowhere. It was a big government response to the catastrophic failures of small government ideology ensconced as policy.
Ok, then, to be fair. Kesler writes that, "in those days the party stood for protective tariffs, immigration tied to assimilation (or what Theodore Roosevelt called Americanization), judges prepared to strike down state and sometimes federal laws encroaching on constitutional limitations, tax cuts, internal improvements (infrastructure spending, in today’s parlance) and a firm but restrained foreign policy tailored to the defense of the national interest. Are these not the main elements of Trump administration policies?" Here again, it feels premature to call much of anything "elements" of a coherent set of policies. As Kesler admits when he also tells us that "It’s not that Mr. Trump set out consciously to return the Republican Party to its roots," because it's difficult to believe that Trump consciously -- that is to say, thoughtfully, strategically -- sets out to do much of anything, but based on past statements and current actions, there seems to be some justification for the idea that Trump does stand for "protective tariffs." As noted by Bloomberg, he "intensified a trade dispute with Canada, slapping tariffs of up to 24 percent on imported softwood lumber in a move that drew swift criticism from the Canadian government, which vowed to sue if needed." The real crux of the matter is contained in the final phrase, because it seems pertinent to ask just how Canada, a sovereign nation, can sue the US, a sovereign nation? The answer, of course, is complicated. As noted by Fortune, every US industry has a right to file a complaint with the Department of Commerce to determine if foreign imports are "unfairly" subsidized by foreign governments. If so, the DOC sets a duty rate for the imports, after which "an independent agency, the U.S. International Trade Commission, still has to find that the subsidized imports injured the domestic industry before duties are applied." If duties are applied, then "Canada can appeal U.S. agency decisions to a World Trade Organization (WTO) panel and under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to a bi-national panel," and as it turns out such "challenges to U.S. trade remedies are often successful." It is, in other words, not so much a question of trade as "sovereignty" insofar as the US has relinquished its individual sovereignty to the WTO and NAFTA, and consequently "Trump’s 2017 Trade Policy Agenda criticizes international dispute settlement as an interference with US sovereignty." The US is (or ought to be) powerful enough to ignore any interference with US sovereignty. Of course, "If Canada and the US cannot come to an agreed or at least tolerable result on lumber trade," Canada would be left with little recourse but to retaliate, and ultimately "the costs to our two economies would be very high" as they lose billions in lumber exports and the price of home construction, among other things, would quickly escalate in the US. "There would be no winners."
Having just scratched the surface of what is a decade long dispute, it's complex. And yes, Trump, like Coolidge seems reluctant to reluctant to enter into the on-going complexities of "foreign entanglements." Coolidge, for example, considered the election of Harding in 1920 as "a rejection of the Wilsonian position that the United States should join the League of Nations," and though he spoke in favor of the United States joining the Permanent Court of International Justice (World Court)," he could live with it "provided that the nation would not be bound by advisory decisions," which is, in effect, saying "we'll play along, but only as long as things go our way." There is, however, another layer of complexity. As Bloomberg again points out, "Most of the softwood in Canada is owned by provincial governments, which set prices to cut trees on their land, while in the U.S. it’s generally harvested from private property." Implicitly it is not only a question of individual US sovereignty, but a question of public vs. private ownership, and the on-going republican belief that the government itself should have little or no interest in "ownership," particularly the ownership of property that has commercial value. It is part and parcel of laissez faire ideology hat government exists solely -- solely! -- to guarantee the property right of private owners who should be free to exploit their property to their advantage. Anything else smacks of socialism. US lumber producers believe that "the fees charged by Canadian governments are below market rates," in effect creating a government subsidy and "an unfair advantage." Of course, "Canada disputes that," but let us assume, just for the sake of argument, that there is in effect a Canadian subsidy. The US need not necessarily retaliate by blowing up the WTO or NAFTA, but by simply creating a "lumber subsidy" of our own, similar to farm subsidies. Of course, Coolidge in his day opposed farm subsidies, insisting that agriculture must stand "on an independent business basis," in part because, as a matter of principle, "government control cannot be divorced from political control." There has been, to the best of my knowledge, no discussion of "lumber subsidies," perhaps because they do not want to create yet another politically manipulated "entitlement." One could admire the principle, but it seems there are two types of subsidies. Those that go to business, and those that go to needy individuals. As Politico reported a few years ago, "House Democrats are targeting Republicans who receive farm subsidies but opposed a stripped-down farm bill with no food stamp assistance." They did so for two reasons, one being that many GOP legislators themselves benefit from farm subsidies. As Poitico reported, "fourteen GOP lawmakers have received a total of $7.2 million in farm subsidies, according to the available data since 2004, but all voted for an amendment that would have decreased the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program" or food stamps. That, of course, is only the most blatant form of kleptocratic hypocrisy. Unlike the smaller, family owned farms that prevailed in Coolidge's day, farming today is business, often big business, and it seems to be, as a matter of principle, OK to subsidize business, particularly those in which congressional members have an interest, but not OK to subsidize individuals.
Here again, I have barely scratched the surface and proposed simplistic solutions to complex problems, and late breaking news! It seems that governing, certainly to Trump's surprise, turns out to be complex, perhaps even more so in our increasingly complex world. If Trump has concerns about NAFTA and wants to protect American sovereignty and business, it seems his GOP counter-parts have more nuanced concerns. Again, as Politico reports, "The Trump administration alarmed Republicans on Wednesday with its consideration of an executive order that could lead to the United States' withdrawal from NAFTA — with some lawmakers warning that such a move would be a 'disaster.'" Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, points out that “I think we’d better be careful about unintended consequences.” While some might characterize this as the wisdom of caution, others might simply react with a frustrated expletive -- no shit sherlock. And that's just trade. Immigration is no longer what it once was, nor are taxes, nor is just about anything else. The most damning statement in Kesler's tome is this: "America today is a very different country from what it was in the 1920s or the late 19th century, when Republicans reigned." I honestly don't know how to react to this except with a frustrated expletive -- no shit sherlock! And yet, you are lauding a man whose policies were, even then, unsuccessful. We cannot reset to Calvin Coolidge, nor for that matter can we reset to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in part because the problems of the past are not the problems of the present and the solutions of the past will not solve the problems of the future.
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