Here's an article about Trump and the GOP that is perhaps most interesting for referencing data to show the total lack of traction of actual movement conservatism's Small Government, free the plutocracy agenda among US adults, and even among Republicans.
Donald Trump, Mainstream Conservative
Follow the links to the data points.
The plutocrats' agenda of the movement conservatives who dominate the Republican Party and will do so still after The Donald is gone is the agenda of an insignificant minority of Americans.
Not even self-identified Republican voters buy it.
The agenda of the party has been set since Reagan's time by loons who want to make a reactionary revolution against Big Government and all its works, and its office-holders are dominated by that mind set.
Their problem has always been not only how to get people who loathe that agenda to vote for Republicans, but ensuring the party itself remains committed to it.
They have of course succeeded in both tasks, but not at all by convincing either the mass of Americans or even the general run of Republicans to embrace it.
You have to wonder how far Trump's success has been due to this one factor, that he was the only candidate on the Republican primary slate who openly rejected the Small Government agenda absolutely essential to movement conservatism.
Perhaps an Eisenhower, Nixon, or Ripon Republican - all of them the bane of conservatives - would have done as well, had any such showed up.
There is room for a very successful Republican Party accepting of the fundamentals of progressivism, though less adventurous than the Democrats on that score.
A party more sensitive to the liberty of association - or non-association - of private institutions and of individuals than the Democrats - think of men's or women's only golf courses or colleges, or religiously or racially or ethnically defined student bodies, clubs, or hiring policies but not of restrictive covenants.
Too, think of college tuition aid through the medium of GI Bill style vouchers without PC or anti-religious strings on their use, rather than money grants conditional on abject surrender to federal or state or local PC enforcement bureaucrats.
Or think of the rights of people or institutions to not provide services they don't want to for religious, moral, or indeed any reason.
A party more socially conservative than the Democrats (think about women in the military, abortion, and boys pretending to be girls using the girls shower rooms) though not wed to full-bore repeal of the sexual revolution, another side of the current Republican agenda popular only with an insignificant minority of Americans.
And not wed to using federal power to force an anyone can carry anything, anywhere gun rights agenda on states and locales of America that do not so highly value the wishes of gun hobbyists over citizens not wanting to be surrounded by boobs constantly armed with deadly weapons.
A party more friendly to the interests and self-respect of ordinary white Americans than the Democrats, but not interested in ethnic cleansing or anything like institutionalized racism in the actual, true, and literal senses of those words (think of legally mandated segregation and Jim Crow laws).
And all of that in a party much more respectful of American political institutions and government, of the separation of powers, of legality, and of the necessities of republicanism than that frightening clown, Il Duce.
I have no idea if we will ever see such a Republican Party.
I don't see signs of its approach, though conservative control of the party and its agenda is least secure exactly where it is most desperate to continue, perpetuating the party's utter and complete rejection of the economic and Big Government side of progressivism.
One of the most persistent right-wing claims against Trump has been that he is better described as a nationalist than a conservative.
The accusation has no power against him, however, since he has freely admitted to it, knowing as he did that the majority of Republican voters and the nation as a whole have never been particularly interested in constitutional conservatism.
The data points on this subject have been out there for years, but since most conservative political operatives have almost no grasp of political science, none of them seems to have been aware of this.
. . . .
In the end, the voluminous attacks against Donald Trump from the right didn’t amount to much, and not just because conservatives have long been far less numerous than they’d long believed.
The attacks didn’t work because they were so obviously hypocritical.
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