MICHAEL BARONE: Toward A Trump Republicanism.
Donald Trump’s surprisingly good State of the Union speech got a record 70 to 75 percent positive poll approval from those who watched. Even if you discount (as you should) for the Trump haters who can’t bear to watch him and chose another of their 100-plus cable channels, that’s not chopped liver.
If they’d watched, their reactions would undoubtedly be as sour as those of the Democrats in the hall, who stayed slouching and frowning in their chairs even at some patriotic lines. . . .
Back in the 1990s, I wrote an article for Irving Kristol’s the Public Interest, dividing parties that have emerged over the 150 years of electoral democracies in various countries into four types — religious, liberal (classical free market liberal, that is), socialist, and nationalist.
The Bush Republican party leaned free-market liberal on economics and religious on culture, the Clinton Democratic party leaned mildly socialist on economics and liberal on culture. Both were quietly nationalist.
Trump is different. He has embraced the causes of religious conservatives, as anomalous as that may be given his persona. But you didn’t hear too much about that in the speech.
He has abandoned much of free-market Republicanism. You heard no mention of the national debt, no hint of entitlement reforms in Social Security or Medicare entitlements. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., sitting behind him, must realize with sadness these are nonstarters in the Trump presidency.
You did hear a lot about the new tax law, formerly known to Democrats and their media allies as the “tax scam,” and how it’s producing wage increases and bonuses for those at the low and modest ends of the income scale. And how paychecks will rise when the IRS’s new withholding schedule goes into effect in two weeks.
What you heard most of was nationalism. To some Democrats, including many in the chamber, the very mention evokes Hitler’s National Socialism. But to those who realize that we have no political prisons full of reporters and less government surveillance of the press than in the Obama administration, it sounds more attractive.
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