The MAGA Doctrine Read online

  There is an unholy alliance between the left and the right. The left wants welfare spending and the right wants more military spending. The result is both sides come together in a bipartisan fashion and increase spending on both. As the losing 2016 presidential candidate might say, “What difference does it make?”

  Is it any shock, really, that in 2016 George H. W. Bush proudly announced that he voted for Hillary Clinton instead of Trump? Even though Bush’s own son, hapless Jeb, had wanted to defeat Clinton, in the end the Bushes and Clintons were like two branches of one big happy family, merely rotating who got a turn in the Oval Office this time out. How collegial.

  Trump was the first real disruption to that decrepitude in a long, long time.

  It helped maintain the two-party cartel if the two major parties, Democrats and Republicans, pretended, at least around election time, to be complete, diametrical opposites, even though the leadership of both parties would be sharing martinis and crafting pork-filled legislation together with knowing winks as soon as the every-two-years or every-four-years mock-battle was over.

  But the two parties were never quite literally opposites in their philosophies.

  The old Democrat formula, ideally stated, was something like: a big welfare and regulatory state combined with an American military subordinated to big international alliances and treaty organizations.

  The old Republican formula, ideally stated, was something like: free trade, big business, opposition to welfare, legislation defending traditional morality (such as pushing for pro-life measures when possible), plus never-ending military engagements overseas, with every dictator around the world due to become our fighting foe eventually.

  This two-party faceoff has changed a little on the left in recent years—and the situation has changed drastically on the right thanks to President Trump.

  The Democratic formula arguably once included respect for civil liberties and a welfare state that, however dysfunctional, was rooted in the moderate American understanding that it’s great to ensure everyone’s basic needs are met and that each person can go out and make his or her own way in the world. The new Democratic formula, exaggerating those impulses, appears to be moral relativism and flat-out socialism. Oh, they told us for decades that they weren’t socialists, just “liberals” (a once-honorable term that meant a believer in free markets and limited government back in the nineteenth century), but half of Democratic primary voters picking avowed socialist Bernie Sanders in the party’s 2016 primaries seems to put the lie to that distinction, as do the enthusiastic cries that socialist loudmouths such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are the “future of the party.”

  The Democrats, in short, appear to be getting worse—and as long as they could point to the rich, crony-capitalist Republicans with their eagerly doled-out corporate subsidies as the only alternative, the Democrats could still be pretty well assured they had nothing big, at least nothing fatal in the long run, to fear in the electoral arena. They could still present themselves as the great defenders of the working class, the only party really checking in on the common folk as the economy had its ups and downs. The blue-collar, average-American choice.

  And a rising tide of immigration could only help, the demographics favoring the Democrats, and almost no one on the Republican side was really willing to risk a potentially ugly fight on that topic. Too divisive, too offensive. The establishment Republicans, with no real, heartfelt governing philosophy anyway, might as well sit back and enjoy the long, slow ride to irrelevance and try not to sound too different from the Democrats during the process.

  Still, even among political philosophers, the assumption remained that as one moved leftward along a linear political axis, one grew more internationalist, more welfare-statist, and more comfortable with personal liberties such as free speech. As one moved rightward, one became more theocratic, more militaristic, more pro-establishment, more morally uptight, and more skeptical about free speech.

  Then came Trump.

  After decades of assuming that the two-party stasis meant the leaders of each party could keep dictating the same positions to the rank and file, Republican Party leaders were startled in 2016 to discover that their constituents wanted something else. The new de facto party platform would be trade with a dash of strategic protectionism, free speech, and skepticism about the use of military power overseas—combined with a desire to avoid socialism at home, avoid the erosion of our core culture, and avoid subsidizing other countries when our own has unmet needs.

  Trump has swept aside an astonishing number of conservative taboos, once-dominant institutions, and once-unbreakable rules through the sheer force of his personality—and the emphatic truths of the MAGA Doctrine.

  As Trump economic advisor Stephen Moore put it in a blunt speech to Republican House members, the Republican Party is in some sense no longer a conservative party, no longer the party of Reagan, but instead a Trump-remade populist party.

  Trump’s list of priorities—and in many ways they are uniquely his (aside from some populists whose ideas slightly resemble his in some areas and not at all in others, such as Pat Buchanan)—redefines what “conservatism” or “the right” is, offering a new Republican formula, a marked improvement over the old Republican formula, in contrast to the trajectory of decline in the Democratic Party.

  If old Democrat was something like civil liberties/welfare/internationalism and new Democrat is something like censorship/socialism/internationalism, while old Republican was something like theocratic/corporate/warlike, then the new Republican formula is roughly free speech/entrepreneurial/pro-peace.

  Not all change is good, but this is. Even founding conservative thinker Edmund Burke recognized that some changes can serve to conserve what is best about a society and its regime. Burke endorsed the American Revolution, in fact, whereas one might have expected a British conservative to say the king can never err. True conservatives recognize when things have gotten so bad that change is necessary. Those who don’t care about rescuing a society may just stay along for the ride as the whole thing goes over a cliff.

  The height of Republican decadence, in a way, was the neoconservative movement. It had respectable roots, with great thinkers such as Irving Kristol defending basic conservative moral principles at a time of moral relativism and political chaos in the 1960s, and the neoconservatives were stalwart defenders of Reagan and critics of communism. However, people in power will start getting cocky eventually, and by the time of George W. Bush’s presidency, neoconservatives such as William Kristol were talking not just about defending America (a noble goal, obviously) but about asserting “American Empire” all over the globe. They were also quite open about not wanting to waste too much time on free markets or the rhetoric of individualism—the libertarian part of the conservative movement.

  The neoconservatives, in publications such as the now-defunct magazine the Weekly Standard, defended grotesque ideas such as “big-government conservatism,” preferring founding Progressive Teddy Roosevelt to free-marketeers such as Steve Forbes, all the while claiming that they were promoting “National Greatness.” America was indeed in need of a renewal of its greatness, but fighting long, bloody, expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was not the way to Make America Great Again. Maybe if we had more quickly and decisively won those wars, the story would be different. But as candidate Trump so simply and insightfully put it, “We don’t win anymore.”

  A house-cleaning was necessary, and it is stunning how many old, fossilized things Trump swept aside on his path to electoral victory and national renewal, how many things he continues to sweep aside, things we thought surely no Republican could win without. He dismissed the Weekly Standard, he questioned the conservative bona fides of some National Review writers, he was skeptical of John McCain’s war record, he sometimes argued with Fox News (despite recurring leftist claims that that’s where he gets all his ideas).

  Who could have imagined back when I was born, in the 1990s,
that the Republican Party might become the vehicle for opposing endless warfare? This is change. This is disruption, right down to the very foundations of modern political ideology.

  Furthermore, Trump is obviously no prude (though his optimistic, Norman Vincent Peale–influenced religion-plus-business streak stayed with him during his election campaign, even as secular critics hypocritically questioned his Christian credentials). Trump has probably become the greatest living exemplar of free speech in the twenty-first century. As he put it, we can’t improve if political correctness prevents us from even talking honestly about what our problems are.

  It’s not that those of us on Team Trump long to be rude. It’s not that we look down on any subsets of American society. All individuals are created equal—but not all cultures and ideas are equal, and we need to be able to compare and contrast intelligently. Yet the left, with its warped and doctrinaire version of equality, really wants to replace the Founding ideas of striving, competition, and individual excellence with mediocrity, enforced mediocrity if necessary—and that’s not how America became great. It’s not how America is being made great again.

  The tragedy of the left is that while they may envision, or claim to envision, an America of happy equals, they also want endless conflict—anger instead of gratitude. They want people to be offended instead of being civil. What better way than to convince the populace that every advantage another citizen has over you, earned or unearned, real or imagined, is offensive and must be taken away? Who but the biggest of big governments will ever have the power to impose the entire anti-meritocratic leftist vision on society? I think on some level, they know their vision is unworkable, and they like the fact that it will leave the public frustrated and angry, ready to be stirred up and led against the next common enemy, just as they have tried to rally Americans against Trump, in whom they thought they had the perfect, easily defeated villain.

  Trump was saying the forbidden things that the two-party cartel had for so long rendered, by mutual agreement, unspeakable. And it turned out these weren’t things that Americans were horrified to hear. Once they got over the shock—once they recovered from some sharp insults and salty language—they realized Trump was articulating the things most of us take for granted and had long suppressed: competence matters, intelligence matters, American independence matters, defying the pretended authorities of media or state matters.

  The MAGA Doctrine is no mere return to nineteenth-century racism or narrow-mindedness, as should by now be obvious. It is something new, but if it must be likened to a prior era, or at least one aspect of a prior era, think of the great social mobility of the 1980s, when prosperity and newfound financial independence helped make full citizens at last of women and ethnic minorities so often left out before—even as the end of European Communism helped spread notions of entrepreneurship and individual freedom to places long deprived of them.

  The Trump plan is not to undo any of those gains but to build upon them. It is not the imposition of a strongman but, quite the contrary, the restoration of citizen government after too many decades of that two-party cartel thinking it barely needed to answer to the people.

  The Democrats cannot mouth the same old slogans and take it for granted that everyone will believe they are the only spokesmen for the poor and the workers. They know Trump speaks to those Americans as well.

  The Republicans cannot take it for granted that by the occasional salute to the soldiers or bowing of the head in prayer they will pass for true patriots and saintly neighbors. They know Trump has called their bluffs and shown Americans want greatness without needless war, belief without restricting speech.

  This is a liberation of America long overdue—and it may be the last chance to institute it, with the socialists and the stale corporatists still looming to the left and right. I hope we will not reverse course in the 2020 election. America really is, if I may borrow a phrase, at a turning point.

  That phrase suggests that the group I run isn’t just about opinions but about action. Disrupting the old coalitions is much more painful than just repeating old arguments or phrasing them in a new way. I’m an activist, not just a pundit—in much the same way that President Trump is someone who wants to get things done, not just stake out his ideological territory. You, too, can be an activist, and this book may help inspire you in that regard, but you will meet, to coin a phrase, resistance—and not always where you expect it.

  I do not go out of my way to make enemies—and I have great respect for the long line of conservative thinkers who have made my tentative contribution to politics possible—but sometimes the most vicious opposition to me, to Turning Point USA, and to Trump himself has come from the right, not the left. The left, after all, has an exciting new enemy to fight in the Trump era. Many on the pre-Trump right need to rethink their lives and ask if they still have a purpose. Most do, but some have to confess they were going about things entirely the wrong way, maybe even enjoying the endless stalemate between right and left, not really holding out any realistic hope of winning or causing change.

  Some folks at the older, established “conservative” publications have even made Turning Point USA sound like a nuisance, an upstart. They accuse us of watering down timeless principles to create mere clickbait. They say we aren’t bringing in intellectually qualified recruits. Every movement bigger than your living room will have a few embarrassing members, and every media and political organization fights to get attention in the modern media environment, but I think Turning Point USA’s real “crime” is that we expose how ineffectual the old ways had become and show that new audiences and bigger political victories are possible if people get a little more imaginative and provocative.

  Those complaints about Turning Point USA have some parallels, obviously, in the complaints from most of the conservative establishment when the Trump campaign first started picking up steam, defying the predictions of all the revered experts. Trump won’t last, he isn’t serious, he’s just stirring up the yahoo vote, and so on.

  But as union leader Nicholas Klein said in 1918 (if I may borrow a line from the left), “First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.” I try to resist the urge to tell the older conservative groups, “I told you so.” We just keep moving ahead instead of wasting too much time fighting old rivals we’ve already eclipsed.

  If the old conservative approaches were flawless, the whole world wouldn’t have been convinced in 2016 that Hillary Clinton’s presidency was an inevitability, and the pundits wouldn’t have thought that Jeb Bush was the farthest the right could safely stray from liberal orthodoxy in its thinking. Trump saw that these assumptions were a failure of imagination—and he knew the Republicans were making an immense, long-term tactical mistake because he talked to normal Americans outside the media/politics bubble. He heard and shared the average American’s worries about mass immigration, the shrinking middle class, thousands of friends and neighbors being wounded in wars that no one talked about winning anymore, and the ever-increasing restrictions on what we can say and think without sparking outrage.

  Why would a party establishment ignore those longings—and those votes—unless it were severely out of touch or just didn’t share the common person’s values anymore? The elites of both parties had developed beliefs and goals of their own, often antithetical to the public’s.

  But now let’s take a look at some of the deeper, older false assumptions the Trump movement has demolished.

  Chapter 2

  The Outsider from the Inside

  Imagine for a minute if Donald Trump had not won the 2016 presidential election.

  Imagine instead if Hillary Clinton had won—the electoral college tally, the whole nine yards.

  Next, just for the sake of argument, imagine if, during the first two years of her administration, she achieved stunning successes:

  The Dow rises 7,000 points after being nearly flat around 1
8,000 the two prior years.

  Consumer confidence surges to an eighteen-year high.

  Black unemployment hits 5.9%, the lowest level ever recorded.

  Hispanic and Asian-American unemployment also hit record lows of 4.5% and 2%, respectively.

  Female unemployment is at the lowest rate since 1953 (3.6%).

  Unemployment among the young is at its lowest in five decades (9.2%), among veterans the lowest in two (3%).

  Economic growth for the year nears 3% in 2018, for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis.

  There is a freeze on new regulations, to the relief of American businesses. For every new regulation, about twenty-two are repealed.

  Jobless claims are at their lowest level in five decades.

  Job openings outnumber people looking for jobs for the first time on record.

  The positive job-growth streak is the longest on record.

  Job satisfaction is at its highest level in a decade and a half, and 85% of blue-collar workers think the country is “headed in the right direction.”

  Some $5.5 trillion in tax cuts are instituted, with most families seeing savings as a result.

  The corporate tax rate is lowered as well, since it had been the highest in the developed world and was discouraging investment.

  The president cleared bureaucratic obstacles to constructing the Keystone XL pipeline and withdrew from the onerous Paris Climate Agreement.

  The president helped make the United States the world’s biggest crude oil exporter for the first time.

  ISIS’s Iraq arm is effectively finished off.

  The United States stops funding Syrian militias with terror ties, quieting that country’s civil war. Military conflicts in other parts of the world are largely avoided.

  NATO partner nations are successfully pressured into paying their fair share for the alliance, reducing the US burden.

  Sentencing reductions for nonviolent drug offenders are achieved, a big, libertarian step forward for criminal justice reform.