By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, March 01, 2016
Donald Trump will never be mistaken for a cosmopolitan,
but he will bring a distinctively European flavor to the 2016 presidential
election, should he win the Republican nomination.
As in continental Europe, the two parties in a Donald
Trump–Hillary Clinton race would accept the basic parameters of the welfare
state, and the debate about the size of government — so central to American
politics for decades — would fade to the background.
No matter how appalled the Left may be by Trump, his
prospective takeover of the GOP would be a watershed for progressives. For 80
long years, they have demagogued and shamed the GOP in a forlorn attempt to get
it to give up on fundamentally reforming the welfare state. How much time and
energy have been devoted to depicting Republicans as shoving elderly people off
cliffs and as hell-bent on destroying Social Security. And here comes Donald
Trump to finally cry “uncle.”
The mogul is adamantly — and apparently sincerely —
opposed to entitlement reform. He thus is perfectly content to accept the
status quo on half the federal budget. Never mind that the programs are built
on badly flawed New Deal and Great Society assumptions and, if unreformed and unconstrained,
will make it impossible to deal with the debt over the long term. These are
details beneath Trump’s notice.
The scholar Sidney Milkis has observed that the New Deal
sought to put the welfare state “beyond the vagaries of public opinion and the
reach of elections and party politics.” If Trumpism has any staying power, it
will be mission accomplished (although the congressional GOP will presumably
remain committed to re-shaping entitlements).
Consider how far the GOP has come. In the 2012 race, Newt
Gingrich said that Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform was “right-wing social
engineering” — he didn’t mean it as a compliment — and the former House speaker
saw his campaign nearly implode. Trump blames the selection of Ryan as Mitt
Romney’s running mate for the party’s defeat in 2012, and no one bats an
eyelash.
What has made American politics so distinctive for so
long is the presence of a mass party committed to limited government, thanks to
the conservative movement. In most European countries, there is nothing like
such a movement, and the limited-government tendency is relegated to think
tanks and small political parties, where it usually has no real influence.
Trump as the leader of the Republican party would, in
effect, reject limited-government conservatism and instantly make the GOP at
the presidential level more like an accommodationist center-right European
party in which a Ted Cruz would have no home.
Of course, mainstream European political parties tend not
to be nationalist or anti-immigration. Here, Trump bears a closer resemblance
to Europe’s outsider parties on the right. He is less the candidate of American
exceptionalism – which has a keen appreciation of our national creed as
enunciated in the Declaration and the limits on government power set down by
the Constitution — than a robust nationalism of a blood-and-soil variety found
nearly everywhere else in the world.
Trump’s understanding of the Constitution — the most
valuable American contribution to the art of self-government — runs somewhere
between attenuated to nonexistent. He has lately been making noises about
loosening libel laws so that he can more easily sue publications for printing
things he doesn’t like. On Fox News
Sunday, he complained that “in England, I can tell you it’s very much
different and very much easier.” Yes, it is — because England doesn’t have a
First Amendment. The United States happens to have a bulwark of free speech
written into its foundational law, although Donald Trump apparently can’t
fathom why.
You can say this about a Donald Trump–Hillary Clinton
race: It will be more nasty, personality-driven and entertaining than anything
we’ve seen in decades. It will also, in important respects, be less American.
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