Why is the non-ideological Donald Trump able to implement conservative principles when previous Republican presidents failed?

It occurred to me in a flash of insight that one of the reason that Trump has successfully implemented some of the fundamental objectives of Conservatism was because he’s faced an unprecedented amount of hate from a broad spectrum of people.

Everyone agrees that he does not have an ideological bone in his body.  So why is he managing to implement so many Conservative goals when, with the possible exception of Reagan, previous Republican presidents failed to do so?   Why is he willing to back dramatic cuts in taxes for corporations, dramatically cut the regulatory environment, and drastically expand the production and use of fossil fuels?   

Conservative theory holds that corporations don’t pay taxes; they just pass them along to consumers so cutting corporate taxes increase economic activity.  Conservatives have campaigned against the regulatory state for as long as I have been alive, yet the regulatory state has grown under Democrats and Republicans.  Global Warming has been exposed as Fake Science for decades yet Republicans have gone along with the lie that it’s a threat out of fear of being labelled science deniers.   

Trump signed the largest corporate tax cut in history.  Trump is slashing regulations.  Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord and supports increased oil, gas and coal production.    

So what gives the most reviled President the courage to make moves that terrified his Republican predecessors?  I think that Solzhenitsyn provided a clue when he wrote (in the First Circle): “You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power — he’s free again.”

He was talking about prisoners.  But it applies in politics as well.  Politicians, more so than other people, depend on public opinion as both a weapon and a shield.  They can use favorable public opinion to advance their agenda but are acutely conscious of public opinion being used to reduce their power and to affect their re-election.  

Previous Republican politicians did not have opponents who were seeking to totally destroy them and their families.  They were not going to leave office financial ruined.  Their families were not threatened with jail, or worse.  They media and the culture were not out to assassinate them. 

In an unprecedented way, the insane level of vitriol directed at Trump frees him caving to the press and his political enemies.  He knows that they don’t want him to modify his policies but to overturn the election, to destroy him and remove him from office.  That leaves him free to counter-attack rather than hunker down as previous presidents did.  

He knows that the only people he has to care about satisfying is his political base.  That's what he meant when he spoke about being able to shoot someone on 5th Avenue without losing his base.

The great economic expansion that began with his election is either denied by his opponents or ascribed to Obama.  Whether he approves or denies the use of coal for power plants he knows that the level of vitriol with stay at Max levels.  Whether he increases or decreases the number of immigrants he will still be called a racist.  If he were to implement a policy to either increase or decrease CO₂ emissions his enemies would still denounce him as a science denier.  

My theory is that Trump knows that he has a rock-solid base of support – those who got him elected primarily because they are opposed to the “Ruling Class” (a term that covers the coalition that’s been running – and ruining –the country).  He’s also aware that his opposition is not persuadable.  They will oppose anything he does. 

So he’s freed of the shackles that restrained conventional Republican politicians who believed that they needed to do business as usual even after getting elected on promises to make major changes. 

Trump is free to use executive power, build over generations as Congress gave the Executive more power.  He has been freed of the illusion that he can persuade the opposition.  Like the prisoner who has had everything taken away from him, he’s much more free that those who still had that hope left.  He understands that it’s him, his base, and that part of Normal Americans who can be shown that his ideas work.

Thanks to an insane opposition, Trump is the Conservative they never wanted and they are in danger of creating the autocrat they feared.

Guns, and why the ideological screaming never stops

Where to place blame is a factor. It’s instructive that after Parkland liberal fire is aimed principally at the National Rifle Association (NRA) and not the FBI. This is though the FBI admits it didn't follow its own protocols, including not reacting to a tip that the reportedly-confessed killer wanted to be a “professional school shooter.”

Some ask what the FBI could have done even if it had acted. A person can’t be arrested for what they might do. However, that’s irrelevant. Whatever difference the FBI could have made was lost in the bureaucracy.

Trump is a Conservative

Matthew Continetti on "Street Corner conservatism"

I have been thinking about Gavin lately because his life and thought so perfectly capture the conservatism of Donald Trump. When you read Gavin, you begin to understand that the idea of Trump as a conservative is not oxymoronic. Trump is a conservative—of a particular type that is rare in intellectual circles. His conservatism is ignored or dismissed or opposed because, while it often reaches the same conclusions as more prevalent versions of conservatism, its impulses, emphases, and forms are different from those of traditionalism, anti-Communism, classical liberalism, Leo Strauss conservatism in its East and West Coast varieties, the neoconservatism of Irving Kristol as well as the neoconservatism of William Kristol, religious conservatism, paleo-conservatism, compassionate conservatism, constitutional conservatism, and all the other shaggy inhabitants of the conservative zoo.

Trump has always been careful to distinguish himself from what he calls “normal conservative.” He has defined a conservative as a person who “doesn’t want to take risks,” who wants to balance budgets, who “feels strongly about the military.” It is for these reasons, he said during the campaign, that he opposed the Iraq war: The 2003 invasion was certainly risky, it was costly, and it put the troops in a dangerous position, defending a suspicious and resentful population amid IEDs and sniper attacks. The Iraq war, in this view, is an example of conservative writers and thinkers and politicians following trains of logic or desire to un-conservative conclusions.

Nor is it the only example. Fealty to econometric models, Trump says, has led many conservatives as well as liberals to embrace a “dumb market” that gives mercantilist powers in Asia advantages over U.S. industry and labor. The rush to pass comprehensive immigration reform as a result of the elite consensus that immigration is an unmitigated good set the Republican Party leadership against its own voters. The desire to restrain entitlement spending through cuts rather than prolonging the lifespan of these programs through economic growth demoralizes Republican voters who count on their checks to arrive each month.

Indeed, Trump was so at variance with the mainstream of the intellectual conservative movement on these issues that he modified his political identity. “I really am a conservative,” he said last February. “But I’m also a commonsense person. I’m a commonsense conservative. We have to be commonsense conservatives. We have to be smart.” Common sense in this understanding is opposed to the theoretical and academic analysis that has led conservatives to nonsensical and unpopular positions because they are beholden to speculative conclusions or to creedal dogma.

Trump’s politics are grounded not in metaphysics but in what he understands to be the linguistic root of the term conservative. “I view the word conservative as a derivative of the word conserve,” he has said. “We want to conserve our money. We want to conserve our wealth. We want to conserve. We want to be smart. We want to be smart where we go, where we spend, how we spend. We want to conserve our country. We want to save our country.”

The conservatism of Donald Trump is not the conservatism of ideas but of things. His politics do not derive from the works of Burke or Disraeli or Newman, nor is he a follower of Mill or Berlin or Moynihan. There is no theory of natural rights or small government or international relations that claims his loyalty. When he says he wants to “conserve our country,” he does not mean conserve the idea of countries, or a league of countries, or the slogans of democracy or equality or freedom, but this country, right now, as it exists in the real world of space and time.

Read the whole thing.

The so-called future wasn’t. The real future has not happened yet.

Richard Fernandez on what's happening now and the upcoming changes.

The ideologies forged in the 20th century are dying and with them will go many of our familiar guideposts. They’ve been around for so long many will find it hard to believe they are actually slipping away. For decades it was the unstated assumption that superstates like the EU and a giant federal government were the coming thing. How if what we conventionally consider the “future” is actually the past?

That’s why things are so unstable. The so-called future wasn’t.

The real future has not happened yet. This is not an entirely trite observation. The years since the fall of the Berlin Wall have been characterized by a futile attempt to buy stability through risk sharing. There was no crisis, which if sufficiently enlarged, could not be solved. Yet it failed. In an era of rapid change emergent risks can no longer be spread. Survival will depend not upon building a bigger boat but making the right choices.

This breaks politics, especially redistributive and identity politics and hence the politicians have not accepted that yet. But they will, and relatively soon. The next decade will be hard; and our only consolation will be that if we win through we will be better men and freer too. But first we survive. First we survive.