Rise of the new Republican Party under Donald Trump
The writer below seems unaware that the 10% tariff idea is perfectly orthodox economics. Economists accept that there are some reasons not to have pure free trade and their preferred tariff in that case is precisely what Trump says. He is a graduate in economics, after all
I give more background on Trump's tariff ideas below:
http://jonjayray.com/trumpism.html
Trump says he will put a tariff of 10 per cent on all imports into the US. If he did that it would hurt the American economy, raise prices for all American families and damage the less well off more than the affluent. Trump is the leading candidate for president and his most repeated and earnest commitments deserve to be taken seriously. Biden is also a tariff protectionist. Yet it’s likely Trump looks on the universal 10 per cent tariff as merely the first play in a negotiation. This approach is maddening and destabilising and yet it’s not as inherently incoherent as it first looks. The integrating idea is Trump’s vision of nationalism.
Trump also said this week that he thought Taiwan should pay the US for security protection, that the US gets nothing from Taiwan and has no inherent reason to protect Taiwan. Trump’s overall theme, taken up strongly by Vance, is that allies are free-riding on the US. Inconveniently, that’s substantially true. And it includes Australia.
In truth, Taiwan, as an exemplary democracy, deserves support. Further, it would be disastrous for the US position in Asia, for the whole of Asia, if China conquers Taiwan and can project its military power across Japan to the south and all the way east to Hawaii.
The US interests are enormous. John Bolton, president Trump’s national security adviser, wrote in his White House memoir that there was always a strong chance Trump would sell Taiwan out in exchange for a deal with China’s Xi Jinping.
Yet here again, Trump is unpredictable on both the upside and the downside. The Chinese understand, and have certainly been told, that if they take actions that humiliate Trump and make him and his administration look weak and beaten, or even credibly threaten such action, then all bets are off.
The pro-Trump case among hawks is that America will be stronger under Trump than under any possible Democrat. A Trump Republican administration will spend more on defence than any Democrat would. The economy will be more robust. America’s enemies will be more worried about what Trump might do if they push him too far.
Not only that, Trump has helped create the situation in which the whole US political class is critical of China and sees the Chinese Communist Party as America’s adversary. It’s one thing to do a trade deal with China. It’s another thing altogether to cede Taiwan to China.
More concerning than anything, Vance has said he doesn’t care what happens in Ukraine. Trump has opposed US aid to Ukraine and his foreign policy surrogates talk of the Europeans financing Ukraine’s military resistance to Russia. Trump also, rather bizarrely, has claimed he’ll end the Russia-Ukraine war in a single day, in the time between his presumed election in November and inauguration in January.
That’s completely unbelievable. What Trump plainly has in mind, and it’s probably what Biden in fact has in mind as well, is freezing the conflict and getting a ceasefire, which becomes a peace agreement. This would be bitter for the Ukrainians for they would have lost Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine forever. However, if they were given real security guarantees, such as EU and NATO membership, they could feel that they’d preserved their nation.
Trump’s first term, before he disputed the election result, is mostly reassuring on substance. The economy did well. America was strong. No ally was abandoned or betrayed. And no one much messed with America.
But Trump had conventional Republicans in the key cabinet positions. That’s less likely to be the case this time. The first evidence for that is the selection of Vance as vice-president. In 2016 Trump chose Mike Pence, a sober, responsible, reliable established Republican governor.
Yet it’s also fair to say that Vance has about as much experience going into the vice-presidential candidacy as Barack Obama had when he ran for president.
Many conservatives across the Anglosphere have become national security conservatives, putting the need for a manufacturing base and for control of key supply chains above the efficiencies that free trade and just-in-time supply chains offer. Vance is a bit beyond that. Initially he was highly sceptical of Trump, but now he has embraced Trump as someone who works for his type of community.
On the other hand, Trump’s tax policies were very sympathetic to Wall Street interests that Vance is inclined to denounce. Vance wants to inherit the MAGA movement, so he’s very unlikely ever to defy Trump. Unfortunately, part of the price of getting inside the Trump tent, for Vance at least, has been to buy into the toxic fiction that the 2020 election was unlawfully stolen from Trump.
Yet speaking at the RNC, Vance stressed that sometimes he persuaded his colleagues and sometimes they persuaded him. He communicated openness to change. The Trump-Vance ticket at one level therefore offers a great deal of uncertainty.
But in reality most presidential tickets are like this to some extent. In 2020 Biden ran as a centrist yet has governed as an increasingly left-wing progressive. Trump-Vance may be no more fundamentally unpredictable than Biden was.
Trump won’t want America to be pushed around and he won’t want it humiliated by having its closest allies attacked. All presidencies, and all foreign policy, are transactional to some extent. With Trump this will be naked, perhaps extreme.
The Trump campaign has not produced any ads from Biden’s woeful performance in the TV debate three weeks ago because they actually don’t want to push Biden out of the race. But if the Democrats get their act together and find a better candidate, the US could be at a fundamental fork in the road: progressive liberalism versus national conservatism, as starkly delineated as any time in history. Perhaps this is the most important election after all.
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Hillbilly elegist a considered voice for outsider America
Vance is a populist but populists can make importat points. And when an ill-effect is the result of good intentions, it is still right to point out the ill-efffect
Everyone’s talking about Vance this week. That’s quite a feat given the major dramas concern a senile old Democrat refusing to step aside for a younger, competent candidate, and an assassination attempt against Donald Trump so close that a tilt of his head would have left him dead. A Secret Service failure of such mammoth proportions understandably raises questions about recklessness, at the very least.
Those going crazy about Vance, one way or another, see another Trumpian-styled saviour or another Trumpian devil. It’s cartoonish. Vance is more complicated than that. His policy positions from Ukraine to globalisation and the role of government most certainly deserve scrutiny. He’s not a neat fit for Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush or even Trump.
His critics don’t like his lack of political experience. What they don’t address is this: what have the vast numbers of long-in-the-tooth experienced politicians done for American politics in recent decades? Except in many instances to ensure their disconnect from their own country?
The 39-year-old cleanskin gave an electrifying address at the Republican National Convention on Thursday. His pitch to the American heartland was authentic, compelling. “When I was in the fourth grade, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico,” Vance said.
When he was in high school, Vance noted, Biden backed a China trade deal and the US invasion of Iraq.
“And at each step of the way, in small towns like mine in Ohio, or next door in Pennsylvania, or in Michigan and other states across our country, jobs were sent overseas and children were sent to war,” he told the packed stadium in Milwaukee.
Watched by millions more outside that stadium, Vance beseeched Americans to be “united in our love for this country and committed to free speech and the open exchange of ideas”.
Trumpism was never about Trump. It’s not about his chosen running mate, either. It’s about people left behind by elites on both sides of the political divide. That said, it won’t hurt that Vance is smart, handsome and young – the first millennial to feature at the top of the Republican ticket – and he hails from the downtrodden de-industrialised American heartland. That’s why so many are going back to his memoir.
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis was a wild success when it was published in June 2016 just months before Trump won the November ballot.
Back then Vance wasn’t a politician. He was a guy in his early 30s who worked in finance and penned a gritty, gut-wrenching memoir about growing up in a de-industrialised part of America. Vance was among the millions of American outsiders cast adrift by an elite culture, left behind by Wall Street and ignored by Washington.
He grew up poor in the midwest rust-belt of Middletown, Ohio, and spent summers with his mother’s family, a ragamuffin crowd of Kentucky hillbillies. There is an alcoholic father somewhere, and a revolving door of deadbeat men who hooked up with his drug-addicted mother.
And a smoking, cursing, loving grandmother – his Mamaw – who extracted him from a destiny where kids leave school early and end up jobless and hopeless. Where teenage pregnancies are rife, along with broken homes, crime, addiction and violence. Against all odds, Vance joined the military, served in Iraq and went to Yale law school.
During Trump’s election campaign in 2016, everyone was interested in the bestselling Hillbilly Elegy. A New York Times review in August that year praised Vance for advancing an important conversation about the causes of dysfunction among America’s white underclass.
“Mr Vance has inadvertently provided a civilised reference guide for an uncivilised election, and he’s done so in a vocabulary intelligible to both Democrats and Republicans,” wrote Jennifer Senior from The Atlantic.
Vance ticked the top four boxes on the checklist of modern privilege, wrote Senior. He was white, male, straight, Protestant. But she pointed out that those boxes told you very little about Vance – and indeed many like him: “His people – hillbillies, rednecks, white trash, choose your epithet (or term of affection, depending on your point of view) – didn’t step off the Mayflower and become part of America’s ascendant class.”
“Poverty is the family tradition,” wrote Vance. White privilege was always a poor choice of words for Vance, and people like him who grew up in rust-belt towns and rural parts of America where blue-collar industries were dying. His life gave him authority to describe a broader social decay within a hillbilly culture where “learned helplessness” had taken root. His story about a substratum of American society untethered from personal responsibility resonated with its frankness.
Peak wokeness was just around the corner. The day before Netflix released Ron Howard’s movie version of Hillbilly Elegy featuring Glenn Close and Amy Adams, staff at Penguin were having a big cry – as in literally crying their eyes out during a staff meeting where they complained that their employer was publishing Jordan Peterson’s Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life.
In many ways, Trump picking Vance as his running mate makes perfect sense. Though Trump is not mentioned in the book, or the movie, Vance’s bootstrap story of survival and success explains why millions of Americans, left behind by globalisation and other elite obsessions, sided with a wealthy insider who campaigned for the working class as a shameless outsider.
Trump used three words during the 2016 campaign that resonated the most: “Drain the swamp.”
In the years since, Biden and the Democrats have done little to settle that sentiment. Neither has the other side, hence Trump’s takeover of the GOP.
It’s true that Vance described Trump as “unfit for office” in a column he penned for The New York Times in August 2016. But to understand why Vance is on the Trump ticket, one needs to move beyond an excitable media reaching into the past for “gotcha” moments. What matters is not that Vance has changed his mind about Trump. What matters more is the other stuff that Vance said that the media isn’t reporting.
Writing two months after Hillbilly Elegy was published, Vance recalled his grandma – Mamaw – reminiscing with pride about World War II.
“We did it,” she beamed when speaking to Vance some 50 years later. “We freed the whole world from tyranny.”
Yet when her grandson enlisted weeks after the US invaded Iraq, she called Vance a “grade A-idiot”. Though proud of serving his country, Vance wrote that “war is about more than service and sacrifice – it’s about winning”.
While tyranny was defeated in Europe many decades ago, “Americans today look at a Middle East that is humiliatingly worse off than when we found it,” he wrote.
Vance understood that the human cost of that humiliation fell hardest on Republican strongholds. The military is filled with men and women from the south, from rural communities, with whites making up a disproportionate number of those killed or injured in action. Add in the failure of Department of Veterans Affairs to care for those who returned.
“The Republicans never addressed the anger of their own voters,” wrote Vance.
But Trump did, Vance said in that New York Times column, some seven years before the man from Ohio entered congress. Trump spoke to those furious with a political elite that sent their children “to fight and bleed and die in Iraq”.
There is a lasting scepticism among many Americans towards spilling blood and treasure on foreign soil with no hope of winning.
This week, Meet the Press host Kristin Welker tried to ping Vance for something else he said years ago. As Trump took the mantle from Barack Obama, Vance wrote nice things about the former president. The NBC host thought she’d found a skeleton in Vance’s closet. It was amateurish stuff.
“The president’s example offered something no other public figure could: hope,” Vance wrote in The New York Times in January 2017.
“I wanted so desperately to have what he had – a happy marriage and beautiful, thriving children. But I thought that those things belonged to people unlike me, to those who came from money and intact nuclear families. For the rest of us, past was destiny.”
“On Jan. 20, (2017) the political side of my brain will breathe a sigh of relief at Mr Obama’s departure. I will hope for better policy from the new administration … But the child who so desperately wanted an American dream, with a happy family at its core will feel something different. For at a pivotal time in my life, Barack Obama gave me hope that a boy who grew up like me could still achieve the most important of my dreams. For that, I’ll miss him, and the example he set.”
Vance told the NBC host that he stood by his comments, that admiring a good husband, a good father, has nothing to do with politics.
Once you read Hillbilly Elegy, and go beyond clickbaity headlines about Vance, his meteoric rise to become Trump’s running mate is not hard to understand and admire.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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