“Make America Great Again,” Donald Trump’s campaign motto, implies that America is no longer great. Trump, not always one for nuance, often says it directly: “The American Dream is dead.”
Across the country, Trump voters, and millions of others, share this view. America is no longer great militarily, they say. Our armed forces have fallen behind, we’re letting the Islamic State run rampant over the Muslim world and “political correctness” has made it impossible for us to kill the bad guys.
Read Part 1: Economic insecurity
Read Part 2: Healthcare after Obama
Read Part 5: Education and labor
Read Part 6: National security
America is no longer great because it can’t pay its bills. The national debt is at $19 trillion and climbing. Medicare and Social Security pay out more every year than they take in, and that will only get worse. The imaginary “trust funds” will run dry in a few years, and even now have only IOUs in them.
Many Trump supporters point to Obamacare to prove the country isn’t great anymore. The government has taken away choices, socialized medicine, raised prices and bungled the execution.
If you want to see America’s diminished greatness, look at its schools, and the graduates they produce, Trump supporters say. Our schools lack discipline, kowtow to political correctness and fail to stimulate the brains or work ethic of video-game-addicted kids, the argument goes.
America isn’t great because it’s lost its values: patriotism, religiosity, respect for elders, respect for veterans and law enforcement. Trump supporters regularly cite this moral decay as the main way in which America needed to be made great again.
And America’s economy isn’t great if you don’t have a college degree, or if you live in a rural region, or a rusting industrial city in the Midwest, or in most of small-town America.
In coal country, American greatness is a distant memory. Bad energy policy, the fault of unambitious politicians and maniacal environmentalism, has kept America from returning to greatness, they say.
Donald Trump, amid this anxiety about lost greatness, promises: “I will give you everything. I will give you what you’ve been looking for for 50 years.” His policy promises aren’t that much more subtle: Build a wall to protect jobs from immigrants; wage a trade war with China and Mexico; make America wealthy; make people say Merry Christmas; ban foreign Muslims from entering the country, and more.
At the same time, the Democratic National Committee raises money selling hats reading “America is Already Great,” a snarky way to wave off these problems. “Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline,” President Obama said in his 2016 State of the Union Address, “is peddling fiction.”
The Republican establishment Trump defeated has been even more dismissive. In recent years, the GOP has focused on telling success stories, or grousing about regulations and taxes that “punish success.”
Herman Cain briefly became the GOP front-runner in 2012, saying, “If you don’t have a job, and you’re not rich, blame yourself.” Eventual 2012 nominee Mitt Romney explicitly declared that the lower and lower-middle class were not part of his coalition.
While Trump’s proposed solutions may make conservatives and policy experts wince, his willingness to talk about the poor and the struggling, and to channel the anxiety about the country, is a habit the GOP needs to acquire.
Republicans found it harder and harder in recent years to compile a majority coalition, in part because they were blowing off the working class and losing their grip on well-to-do whites while continuing to flail among minorities.
Trump brought out the “missing white vote,” and helped shake up the political battle lines. Like it or not, the supposed “Party of the Rich,” if it is to become a majority party, now has to become the party of Upstate New York, Parma, Ohio, and Lowell, Mass.
Trump’s ascendancy suggests an uncomfortable fact to conservatives and free-market advocates in Washington: Maybe the Republican base isn’t as conservative as had been assumed. Anti-elitism, anti-establishment sentiment lies closer to the heart of the GOP base than do the philosophy of Edmund Burke, the economics of Milton Friedman or the morality of the Christian Coalition.
If leaders want to keep the GOP as a conservative party, they will need to figure out how to harness conservative policy to the new political reality.
In this issue, the Washington Examiner begins its series exploring how to make conservatism happen given the reality of Donald Trump. This begins with acknowledging the problems, and the people, that Republicans have long ignored. Much of the work involves shifting priorities. Some requires bending on dogma.
The core issue areas where America’s greatness appears diminished and innovative policies are needed will comprise this series: economic insecurity, healthcare, debts and deficits, energy, education and national security. Meanwhile, the issue that has dominated the GOP primary, immigration, will not get its own installment, because it is part of every other issue area.
Immigration is so powerful as a Trump issue because it is an uber-issue, transcending and permeating them all. Mass immigration disrupts schools. Porous borders make us weak. Witness Trump’s poll surge after the San Bernardino, Calif., slaughter by adherents of the Islamic State.
Floods of low-skilled workers harm wages for the working-class people already here. Immigration is the river — the Rio Grande — that runs through every other issue. And tackling immigration is thorny because it could spur an intra-GOP civil war.
If any issue divides the GOP along class lines, it is immigration. While the business lobby drools over an expanded workforce, the working class fears competing against newbies who will work dirt cheap.
While the elites’ experience with immigration may involve a cosmopolitan array of grad school classmates at Georgetown or an Asian diplomats’ kid at St. Albans (the ruling class’ school in Washington, D.C.), the middle class and working class may see their public schools ground to dysfunction by a mass influx of children who don’t speak English.
The GOP and conservatives have long dodged and avoided immigration, and many of the other issues this series will cover. Donald Trump, among everything else he’s done, has forced the Right into a moment of reckoning. This series lays out the issues and some of the possible solutions that the Republican Party and its new leader need to consider if they want to be both electable and effective.
