On January 19, in Ames, Iowa, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin—hitherto embodiment of Tea Party opposition to odious “crony capitalism”—took to the stage to endorse Donald Trump for President of the United States. Palin, who had catalyzed an insurgent cottage industry of laissez-faire resentment of the corrupt intermingling of Big Business and Big Government, endorsed someone who, in the eyes of many of us, was the decades-long corporeal manifestation of that very intermingling. The once-powerful Tea Party movement, always internally compromised by its warring constitutionalist and populist factions, effectively died that day in Ames, Iowa.
Indeed, since his stunning upset of Hillary Clinton on November 8, some of Donald Trump’s most important words and actions have borne out this skepticism. Trump, in planning an infrastructure splurge so massive it might make FDR blush, has spoken well of “pump-priming” Keynesianism. Chief strategist Steve Bannon—himself a self-described “economic nationalist”—has rubbed off so much on incoming chief of staff Reince Priebus such that Priebus is now forced to regurgitate illiberal “fortress America” talking points anachronistically befit for those halcyon days before economist David Ricardo introduced to the world the trade concept of comparative advantage. Nowhere was this Trumpist undermining of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” more evident than in the “visible hand of fascism” represented by the President-Elect’s gallingly cronyist strong-arming of Carrier. Even Vice President-Elect Mike Pence, a one-time happy warrior for laissez-faire and movement conservatism, has found himself corrupted by the taint of nationalist populism.
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