Guest Post by Patrick J. Buchanan
“There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump party,” John Boehner told a Mackinac, Michigan, gathering of the GOP faithful last week. “The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.”
Ex-Speaker Boehner should probably re-check the old party’s pulse, for the Bush-Boehner GOP may not just be napping. It could be comatose.
Consider. That GOP was dedicated to free trade, open borders, amnesty and using U.S. power to punish aggressors and “end tyranny in our world.” That GOP set out to create a new world order where dictatorships were threatened with “regime change,” and democratic capitalism was the new order of the ages.
Yet, Donald Trump captured the Republican nomination and won the presidency — by saying goodbye to all that.
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How probable is it that a future GOP presidential candidate will revive the Bush-Boehner agenda the party rejected in 2016, run on it, win, and impose it on the party and nation?
Bush-Boehner Republicanism appears to be as dead today as was Harding-Coolidge Republicanism after 1933. And if Trumpism is not the future of the GOP, it is hard to see what a promising GOP agenda might look like.
A brief history: In seven elections starting in 1992, Republicans won the presidency three times, but the popular vote only once, in 2004, when George W. was still basking in his “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq.
What fractured and overwhelmed the Bush-Boehner Republican Party?
First, demography. The mass immigration of Third World peoples that began with the 1965 immigration act, and the decline in the birth rate of native-born Americans, began to swamp the Nixon-Reagan New Majority.
Second, the collapse of the Soviet Empire and USSR removed the party’s great unifying cause from Eisenhower to Bush I — the Cold War.
After the Red Army went home, “America First” had a new appeal!
Third, faithful to the free trade cult in which they were raised, Republicans championed NAFTA, the WTO, and MFN for China.
Historians will look back in amazement at how America’s free trade zealots gave away the greatest manufacturing base the world had ever seen, as they quoted approvingly 18th- and 19th-century scribblers whose ideas had done so much to bring down their own country, Great Britain.
Between 1997 and 2017, the EU ran up, at America’s expense, trade surpluses in goods in excess of $2 trillion, while we also picked up the bill for Europe’s defense.
Between 1992 and 2016, China was allowed to run $4 trillion in trade surpluses at our expense, converting herself into the world’s first manufacturing power and denuding America of tens of thousands of factories and millions of manufacturing jobs.
In Trump’s first year, China’s trade surplus with the United States hit $375 billion. From January to March of this year, our trade deficit with China was running at close to the same astronomical rate.
“Trade deficits do not matter,” we hear from the economists.
They might explain that to Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
And perhaps someone can explain the wisdom of handing 4 percent of our GDP each year to an adversary nation, as U.S. admirals talk tough about confronting that adversary nation over islets and reefs in the South China Sea.
Why are we enriching and empowering so exorbitantly those whom we are told we may have to fight?
Fourth, under Bush II and Obama, the U.S. intervened massively in the Near and Middle East — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen. And the forces that pushed up into those conflicts, and so disillusioned the nation that it elected Barack Obama, are back, pushing for a new war, on Iran. They may get this war, too.
Yet, given the anti-interventionist and anti-war stance of Trump’s winning campaign, and of the Bernie Sanders campaign, U.S. involvement in Middle East wars seems less America’s future than it does her past.
After his 16 months in office, it appears as though the Trump presidency, no matter how brief, is going to be a watershed moment in U.S. and world history, and in the future of the GOP.
The world is changing. NATO and the EU are showing their age. Nationalism, populism and tribalism are pervasive on the Old Continent. And America’s willingness to bear the burden of Europe’s defense, as they ride virtually free, is visibly waning.
It is hard to see why or how Republicans are ever again going to be the Bush-Boehner party that preceded the rise of Trump.
What would be the argument for returning to a repudiated platform?
Trump not only defeated 16 Bush Republicans, he presented an agenda on immigration, border security, amnesty, intervention abroad, the Middle East, NAFTA, free trade, Putin and Russia that was a rejection of what the Bush-Boehner Party had stood for and what its presidential candidates in 2008 and 2012, John McCain and Mitt Romney, had run on.
If the Republican Party is “napping,” let it slumber on, undisturbed, for its time has come and gone. We are in a new world now.
If Trump ends a couple of wars, and builds the Wall, then I would agree its Trump’s party. I now look at the RINOs as vampires – need to drive a stake through their hearts.
I’m with you
I fear RINO Vampires more than DEMONCRAT Zombies.
The former will stab you in the back and drink your blood, the latter are too slow and stupid to be a genuine threat.
The GOP is making a slow change toward becoming a party of its members instead of a party of its elite.
Their elite aren’t happy about that, not happy at all.
That’s a dream; the Plausible Impossible; we cannot take over and reform the GOP any more than we could take over and reform the public school system, or the Welfare/Warfare MIC, or ever win an election even if everyone voted for the Republicans. The whole TPTB Complex needs to be ripped from control of the USSA like the Communist Oligarchs were ripped from control of the USSR; like stripping the guts from a dead pig. We need a reset alright but we one that destroys the psychos that intend to liquidate the Middle Class and all Useful Idiots (they are no longer even needed as voters now that Dominion Systems Inc are used); and they intend to drive their slave workers around in tiny self driving “prison cells”, and replace US workers with robots who have no benefits and never collect any Welfare or riot.
As an individual freedom lover I always maintained that while the dummo’s are wretched, deceitful and devious bastards they shine bright with righteousness when compared to the repo’s. The dummo’s are truthful in their main proclivity that government is the answer to all of society’s ills. The repo’s are tape worms festering in the gut of the monster, gorging on the federal gravy train all the while promising to vanquish the evil foe. They’re evil fucking people and Boner is the embodiment of that evil. They can’t die agonizingly dead enough to satisfy me-just desserts for ‘the party of lincoln’.
Vote, my ass.
Reading Buchanan is like reading some conspiracy nut’s take on current events where everything can be reduced to, what’s the word, oh yeah – conspiracy. We heard way back in grade school in ’65 that in the future, America would have a more diverse population. The end of the cold war was already anticipated when the wall came down in Berlin and the decline of the Republican party was already telegraphed with the defeat of Pete Wilson in California.
The past proves the future and the future is now, the Republicans had to adopt Bushismo in order to survive. Trumpism is a flash in the pan, it is a mish-mash of leftist policies with a veneer of the right wing agenda. As soon as the populist is put out of the way in a few years, the corporatists will consolidate their power via electronic surveillance and tailored information manipulation that we may call close encounters of the FaceBook kind. You like the imagery, jFish? You magnificent bastard, I read your article!
EC
Trump has command of the apparatus right now, the armies of nameless bureaucrats and minions who write the regulations, apportion the tax payments, create the friction and drag that creates the waste, fraud and abuse. Few of them agree with his programs, positions and (philosophy?) paradigms; but they owe him their livelihoods, and know better than to openly bite the hand that feeds them. Once Comey, Rosenstein, Strzok, Page and company GO TO JAIL; the “Resistance” will consist of empty Hollywood celebrities, junior Democratic legislative staff and the FSA-wanna-bes that populate the crevices of society without actually building or earning anything; they will be impotent.
Trump owes the RINO establishment NOTHING; they have not helped, assisted or provided anything important to him, and they both know it. As Mitch McConnell was briefed on all that “Gang of Eight” bullshit INCLUDING the nascent conspiracy to overthrow an elected President and SAID / DID NOTHING, he can expect the primary opposition from hell until he is defeated. The rest of them are already going down, with Ryan just one of the earliest.
I have no idea what new gang of feckless cunts will arise to replace the old, but they will likely be Trump’s gang of feckless cunts, and if we’re lucky they will do more good than harm, or at least less damage. They can’t possibly be any MORE corrupt, lacking or incompetent that the ones we have now, so there’s that to look forward to. Pick your site for a last stand if the Crunch comes anytime soon, we have a lot of uneducated, untalented, unmotivated non-workers to go through (like Patton through Belgium) before it gets any better.