{"id":34199,"date":"2016-01-30T03:00:48","date_gmt":"2016-01-30T08:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=34199"},"modified":"2016-01-29T10:05:37","modified_gmt":"2016-01-29T15:05:37","slug":"the-vast-chasm-between-trump-supporters-and-the-conservative-establishment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/01\/30\/the-vast-chasm-between-trump-supporters-and-the-conservative-establishment\/","title":{"rendered":"The vast chasm between Trump supporters and the “conservative establishment”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Politico<\/em>, Tucker Carlson<\/a> explains why the conservative establishment so badly misjudged the folks who are now vociferously supporting The Donald:<\/p>\n

Consider the conservative nonprofit establishment, which seems to employ most right-of-center adults in Washington. Over the past 40 years, how much donated money have all those think tanks and foundations consumed? Billions, certainly. (Someone better at math and less prone to melancholy should probably figure out the precise number.) Has America become more conservative over that same period? Come on. Most of that cash went to self-perpetuation: Salaries, bonuses, retirement funds, medical, dental, lunches, car services, leases on high-end office space, retreats in Mexico, more fundraising. Unless you were the direct beneficiary of any of that, you\u2019d have to consider it wasted.<\/p>\n

Pretty embarrassing. And yet they\u2019re not embarrassed. Many of those same overpaid, underperforming tax-exempt sinecure-holders are now demanding that Trump be stopped. Why? Because, as his critics have noted in a rising chorus of hysteria<\/a>, Trump represents \u201can existential threat to conservatism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Let that sink in. Conservative voters are being scolded for supporting a candidate they consider conservative because it would be bad for conservatism? And by the way, the people doing the scolding? They\u2019re the ones who\u2019ve been advocating for open borders, and nation-building in countries whose populations hate us, and trade deals that eliminated jobs while enriching their donors, all while implicitly mocking the base for its worries about abortion and gay marriage and the pace of demographic change. Now they\u2019re telling their voters to shut up and obey, and if they don\u2019t, they\u2019re liberal.<\/p>\n

It turns out the GOP wasn\u2019t simply out of touch with its voters; the party had no idea who its voters were or what they believed. For decades, party leaders and intellectuals imagined that most Republicans were broadly libertarian on economics and basically neoconservative on foreign policy. That may sound absurd now, after Trump has attacked nearly the entire Republican catechism (he savaged the Iraq War and hedge fund managers in the same debate) and been greatly rewarded for it, but that was the assumption the GOP brain trust operated under. They had no way of knowing otherwise. The only Republicans they talked to read the Wall Street Journal<\/em> too.<\/p>\n

On immigration policy, party elders were caught completely by surprise. Even canny operators like Ted Cruz didn\u2019t appreciate the depth of voter anger on the subject. And why would they? If you live in an affluent ZIP code, it\u2019s hard to see a downside to mass low-wage immigration. Your kids don\u2019t go to public school. You don\u2019t take the bus or use the emergency room for health care. No immigrant is competing for your job. (The day Hondurans start getting hired as green energy lobbyists is the day my neighbors become nativists.) Plus, you get cheap servants, and get to feel welcoming and virtuous while paying them less per hour than your kids make at a summer job on Nantucket. It\u2019s all good.<\/p>\n

Apart from his line about Mexican rapists early in the campaign, Trump hasn\u2019t said anything especially shocking about immigration. Control the border, deport lawbreakers, try not to admit violent criminals \u2014 these are the ravings of a Nazi? This is the \u201cghost of George Wallace\u201d that a Politico<\/em> piece<\/a> described last August? A lot of Republican leaders think so. No wonder their voters are rebelling.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Politico, Tucker Carlson explains why the conservative establishment so badly misjudged the folks who are now vociferously supporting The Donald: Consider the conservative nonprofit establishment, which seems to employ most right-of-center adults in Washington. Over the past 40 years, how much donated money have all those think tanks and foundations consumed? Billions, certainly. (Someone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,13],"tags":[1037,188,554,517],"class_list":["post-34199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-usa","tag-donaldtrump","tag-electionwatch","tag-immigration","tag-republican"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8TB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34199"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34200,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34199\/revisions\/34200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}