Donald Trump Is Bidding to Transform the GOP Into a White-Identity-Politics Party - Jonathan Chait
The first three nights of the Republican convention turned in a halfhearted and largely unsuccessful effort to draw Donald Trump closer to the party he conquered. Here are speeches about the bills from Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell he will sign, the right-wing judges he will appoint, not to mention testimonial from women and minorities he has never harassed or offended. The final night is the one in which Trump fully consummated his conquest.
Trump’s acceptance speech is one of the most memorable and important ones ever delivered at a convention, because it reflects a conscious effort to alter the ideological orientation of its party. The speech bears the heavy imprint of its reported author, Stephen Miller, a very smart, renegade Republican staffer who advocates what he calls “nation-state populism.” Pat Buchanan, a sympathetic observer from a previous era, has described the ideology somewhat more bluntly and pithily as “ethnonationalism.” Ethnonationalism is a form of conservatism, and overlaps with standard-issue Republican conservatism in several ways, but the two philosophies diverge in ways that can leave their adherents bitterly at odds. (Buchanan worked for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, but ran as a primary opponent of George Bush and Bob Dole, and left the party altogether to oppose George W. Bush.) Programmatically, ethnonationalists differ from standard issue Republicans like George W. Bush or Paul Ryan in that they oppose free trade and immigration. Their orientation is nostalgic, rather than glitter-eyed about the future. Like traditional conservatives, they distrust federal power, but extend their circle of rhetorical enemies to include the corporate elite. Most important, unlike standard conservatives, who tend to disregard race, ethnonationalists have a deeply, explicitly racialized view of the world.
All those ideological markers appeared in Trump’s address. The speech focused on four issues: crime, trade, immigration, and terrorism. The first three are issues most Republicans have de-emphasized, or moved in the opposite direction advocated by Trump. The last, terrorism, he presented less as a foreign-policy problem — as Republicans usually do — than as an outgrowth of an immigration policy he believes should exclude Muslims. Virtually the entire speech was therefore consumed with what, from the standpoint of almost any traditional Republican leader, would be heresy.
The most important divergence was the question of race. Trump’s speech could be compared in some ways to Pat Buchanan’s 1992 address, which famously (or notoriously) cast the country as divided into a culture war. But unlike Buchanan’s speech, Trump’s contained hardly any sexual or religious component. Family life and the transmission of social values through parents and communities — hardy social-conservative themes — were nowhere to be found. Indeed, Trump reached out to LGBT citizens, as victims of Islamic terrorism, placing on the “us” side of his fence a group Buchanan had identified as one of “them.” Instead, Trump defined the culture war almost entirely in racial terms.
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