I was intrigued by a column by Joe Klein in the May 26 issue of Time Magazine. In examining the Donald Trump phenomenon he starts out by commenting on Trump's rejection of much of Republican orthodoxy, and the GOP electorate's acceptance of this. He writes, "It seems opposed to free trade, to entitlement cuts, to tax breaks for the wealthy and to neoconservative adventurism overseas...All of the above are positions--or 'suggestions,' in his most recent formulation--posited by Trump. What's left of "conservatism?" Klein offers "only the nasty bits: nativism, isolationism, protectionism."
So what is Trump really selling? Klein feels author Yural Levin, a conservative, is on to something when he says both parties are "trapped by nostalgia" into a veneration of their versions of 1950's and pre-Vietnam 1960's America. "Republicans are nostalgic for the family values of that period, the homogeneity of society and the fleeting reality of transcendent American power." Democrats are nostalgic for the economy of the 1950s, with "Big Business and Big Labor synergistic, and for the New Deal notion that massive government programs to alleviate poverty and regulate business were an unalloyed good."
Trump, he feels, is selling nostalgia big time. His very slogan, "Make America Great...Again" looks to the past, a past in which America "always won wars," of "humming factories with belching smokestacks, and, of course, the place where blacks and women knew their respective places and homosexuality and Latinos had yet to be invented."
What Trump has done is "a stunning job of repurposing the past as the future." In the end, though, a dated vision of "father knows best and racial privilege" is " a nursing home for those more comfortable looking back than looking forward."
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