Okay, so for a moment let's gently glide up from idiot snark and ask an important question: can there be such a thing as "Trumpism without Trump?" Well, if you've been following me long enough and you're willing to understand nuance, I hope there is. (apologies, thread)
This is the most important conversation to have right now. I,for one have been upfront in my belief in the electoral (and, frankly, moral) value of a "Trumpism without Trump" in the sense that the completely shameless discarding of several sclerotic GOP orthodoxies was necessary.
The "old" GOP (last represented by Romney, good man though he is) was no longer a viable electoral coalition; therefore my opening contention is Trump may have ultimately an emetic, or like chemo: toxic and terrible to experience, but purging many things that needed to be purged.
The problem, of course, is always about whether the 'cure' is worse than the disease. And there is a VERY creditable argument to be made for that about Trump as well (witness his unwillingness to go into that good night as he obviously now must, and that's just for *starters*).
The part of "Trumpism" that is good isn't the shithead bigotry, or the idiocy, corruption, or manifest lack of qualification in any way for the job. That's the *toxic chemo* part. It's awful. It revolted me. It's why I was anti-Trump.
No, the part of Trumpism as a populist proposition (witness his gains among minorities nationally for proof you may not enjoy having to look at) is one of the most important points and the one most likely to set me at odds with many of my friends at may other places. To wit:
The GOP (and the elite Clinton-era Dems; for that matter, even the current set) have been treating actual human souls as fungible widgets, best embodied in the Acela-corridor journo snark of telling people in OH and PA and MI etc., to "learn to code" for years now.
But actual humans are not fungible like that. You can't tell a manufacturing guy to suddenly retrain as a coder and expect it to work. And the point of a morally decent government is NOT to treat someone in Guangzhou, China as the policy equivalent to someone in Youngstown, OH.
The entire point of nations is to protect the interests of their own, particularly their most vulnerable, even at the cost of (God forbid!) a $10 price increase on an iPhone.

This, more than anything else, is the biggest shift I've made from 2000 to 2020, politically.
I'm tired of sitting comfortably on the sidelines, watching my peers treating those less fortunate to me as if they're interchangeable widgets, cogs in a great economic machine where we pretend "Everyone Wins" because the graph looks good.
Everyone doesn't win. There's a difference between the hardship of having to pay marginally more for your tech geegaws or decide whether you'll get extra-firm tofu or that loaf of sourdough bread at the Whole Foods, versus your entire industry leaving town for China.
And I'm similarly tired of the argument that (far more common than you might think) "they're born losers, screw 'em." Well guess what? I don't necessarily like a lot of those people either, they're usually the ones that say nasty things to me on Twitter b/c I don't like Trump.
But they're still human souls, and *Americans*. We are supposed to take care of our own. Even if they don't like the Phil Collins-era of Genesis as much as I do. A party that doesn't care about that, doesn't push that, is a party that deserves to lose.
A lot of my more left-leaning (or even old-school GOP) friend gave me stick for signing that manifesto in @firstthingsmag a year ago, but this...THIS is why I signed it. Against the dead consensus. And it's dead, dead, dead.
The GOP needs to be, not just for electoral reasons but for *ethical* and *moral* reasons, a party that doesn't simply give up on the Forgotten Man. And let's make one last thing clear about who that person is...
that man or woman isn't just a white guy in Youngstown OH. He lives in South-Central L.A., in the Rio Grande Valley, in southwestern Arizona, northeastern Pennsylania, in Philly and Balto, on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, in upstate New York, in Detroit, MI. Everywhere.
I had people (no joke!) call me a 'traitor to my class' in so many words when I signed that. But my entire arg is I want to try if at all possible to FORESTALL the creation of a permanent class society here in America. We're so far along the way but I still know where I stand.
Anyway, that's all. Have a lovely night. God bless America.
would like to thank the four GOP folks who DM'd me that I should be running the GOP nominee's 2024 genelex messaging but frankly america in 2024 would revolt against that much phil collins content.
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