Last November, I wrote a piece for The Freemen News-letter titled "The Conflation Problem." I was expressing a concern I've addressed here at LITD as well as at Precipice, namely, the increasing inclination of the general American public to associate populist positions that Trumpism came up with by winging it with long-established and deeplycontemplated conservative principles.
I launched my observation from the then-current development shaping the dynamic on Capitol Hill, namely, Mike Johnson's ascension to the speakership:
The current speaker could make the case for embracing the most consistent conservative set of principles of any of them, were it not for his wholesale enthusiasm for Donald Trump. But the fact that he has so vocally espoused those principles, and mixed them thoroughly with that enthusiasm, has had mainstream media outlets and Democratic politicians licking their chops from the moment he passed the 217-vote threshold.
That enthusiasm has led a lamentable number of right-of-center figures to succumb to the temptation to see "the times" as calling for the core's situational tweaking. We've seen such developments as "national conservatism," which is basically gussied up protectionism, and, more recently, a clouded understanding of the stakes involved in Ukraine.
This provides a ready-made heyday for the left to conflate these positions—and, more importantly, the election denialism that has poisoned the stances of all Republican Speaker aspirants in the past several months, to one degree or another—with solidly conservative positions that Never Trump conservatives get behind: unborn Americans' right to life, the understanding of what marriage is common to all cultures throughout all human history until five minutes ago, the understanding that cheap, dense and readily available energy sources have made for the quantum boost in human advancement over the last two centuries, and the principle that government ought to have to puke all over itself to take the first red cent of any citizen's money.
I thought about that when I read Batya Ungar-Sargon's piece at The Free Press this morning titled "Why the Average Republican Voter Hates the GOP." Ungar-Sargon is the deputy opinion editor of Newsweek. She was on staff at Forward prior to that, and has contributed to a wide variety of publications. I confess that I'm having to bring myself up to speed on where she's coming from; I feel like I owe it to her before I draw any conclusions about her latest work. A cursory glance at the kinds of subjects she chooses to write about seems to indicate kind of a dichotomy. When writing about antisemitism or wokeness, she infuses her work with a lot of viewpoint, but when she writes about Trump and the role of class in the changes of recent years in the Republican Party, she seems to wear - or want to wear - more of an objective-journalist hat. The Free Press piece certainly has a just-giving-you-the-facts tone.
And her facts do paint a picture of a class-based bifurcation:
According to MSNBC’s early entrance polls, Trump won voters without a college degree by 65 percent, to Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s 17 percent and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley’s scant 8 percent. Trump won college grads, too, but by a much slimmer margin—just 35 percent caucused for Trump. Haley, meanwhile, got nearly as many—33 percent, with DeSantis trailing at 23 percent. The AP had a similar breakdown.
That’s a 30-point gap in support for Trump—and a 25-point gap for Haley. It’s the gulf separating the college-educated from the working-class, who don’t just have different candidates of choice but different concerns, different struggles, and different priorities.
Working-class Americans are worried about the economy, immigration, our foreign entanglements, and the disappearing American Dream—all issues Donald Trump not only talks about but has a solid record on. Haley represents the GOP that Trump replaced—the free-market, chamber-of-commerce, nation-building version of the party that is dominated by a donor class whose interests are completely at odds with those of the working class.
Unfortunately for Haley, her party is now the party of the working class. In 2020, Bloomberg found that truckers, plumbers, machinists, painters, corrections officers, and maintenance employees were among the occupations most likely to donate to Trump (Biden got the lion’s share of writers and authors, editors, therapists, business analysts, HR department staff, and bankers.) As much as the Republican donor class wishes Haley were the party’s nominee, there’s no going back for your average corrections officer.
The thing liberals don’t understand about the average Republican voter in 2024 is that they hate the Republican Party. The average liberal feels well-represented by the Democratic Party because the Democrats’ base, like the party leadership, are college-educated elites. They share the same list of priorities. But the average Republican voter is working class and truly loathes the Bush-era version of the Republican Party, which meant tax cuts for the rich, failed wars, and an economic agenda that outsourced jobs to China.
What I'd like to know is how she feels about this. Is this a good thing in her estimation?
She makes no distinction between the Trumpist elements of the working-class sentiment and the actually conservative ones.
I think her following the mention of the free market with mention of the Chamber of Commerce is a tell. The one is not necessarily connected to the other. The Chamber of Commerce represents a certain kind of person engaged in what we broadly term business, but the free market is merely the natural manner in which two people or organizations come to an agreement about the value of a good or service to be exchanged. And is she really sure that her blue-collar types resent tax cuts for the rich? I know Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes and Bernie Sanders do. But is it really a preoccupation of the painters and plumbers?
Look, as reportage goes, she gives us a pretty sound analysis of where the Republican Party is now. But the fact that, for someone with pretty strong opinions about DEI and Hamas, she hedges her bets on this matter makes me wonder if she isn't genuinely excited about the Trumpist conquest of the GOP.
If so, she does no favors to the actual conservative principles she's forthrightly championed in lot of her work.
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