Trump’s Blue Collar Base Won’t Save The GOP. His Nativism Will Kill It.

Donald Trump is driving disaffected blue collar voters to the polls, according to The New York Times. And if the Republican Party doesn’t embrace Trump’s values, the Times suggests, Republicans will lose from here to eternity.

Nonsense.

Nicholas Confessore, writing for the Times, talks at length about how Republican elites have long supported free trade at the expense of uncompetitive domestic American businesses. Confessore writes:

[T]he story is also one of a party elite that abandoned its most faithful voters, blue-collar white Americans, who faced economic pain and uncertainty over the past decade as the party’s donors, lawmakers and lobbyists prospered. From mobile home parks in Florida and factory towns in Michigan, to Virginia’s coal country, where as many as one in five adults live on Social Security disability payments, disenchanted Republican voters lost faith in the agenda of their party’s leaders.

Confessore continues by noting that Republicans have lost support thanks to their belief in tax cuts, entitlement cuts, and freedom to import law-abiding labor. He quotes talk show host Laura Ingraham, an economic populist, who explains, “They have to come to terms with what they created. They’ll talk about everything except the fact that their policies are unpopular.” Major Republican donor Foster Friess adds that the GOP has forgotten “the people who truly make our country work – the truck drivers, farmes, welders, hospitality workers.”

Confessore concludes, “In Mr. Trump, [these voters] found a tribune: a blue-collar billionaire who stood in the lobby of a Manhattan skyscraper bearing his name and pledged to expand Social Security, refuse the money of big donors, sock it to Chinese central bankers and relieve Americans of unfair competition from foreign workers.”

This is undoubtedly true. But the implication – that if Republicans refuse to embrace Trumpism, they will lose blue collar voters forever – is false.

As Confessore admits, “Between 2008 and 2012, according to the Pew Research Center, more lower-income and less-educated white voters shifted their allegiance to Republicans. These voters had fled the Democratic Party and were angry at Mr. Obama, whom they believed did not have their interests at heart.” Why, exactly, did they run away from Obama? Confessore doesn’t offer a reason, but there is one: these voters felt that Obama didn’t care about America as a country, and actually favored an anti-American agenda that placed America last on the world stage while crippling citizens at home with redistributionist regulation and undermining American culture with unfettered illegal immigration. They certainly didn’t turn to Republicans out of some sort of bizarre notion that the Republicans were anti-free trade.

Confessore argues that in 2012, the nomination of Mitt Romney pushed these new Republicans away again; that’s likely true. He says that these blue collar voters viewed Romney as a Wall Street insider unconcerned with their needs, willing to cut deals with big business thanks to his career working in big business. That’s true, too. But in 2014, these same people gave Republicans another historic Congressional victory.

Again, that’s not because Republicans turned into the party of protectionism. It’s because Republicans were supposed to stand for three principles with which these blue collar voters agreed: border control, national security, and family values. Blue collar voters did disagree with Republicans on free trade, but they showed up anyway, because they agreed with everything else — even on immigration, where Republicans were supposed to stand against illegal immigration.

But Republicans lied. They didn’t stand against illegal immigration. They stood with crony capitalism for Wall Street while decrying it for Main Street. That led to the Trump backlash.

Now these voters are turning to Trump in outsized numbers, according to the Times, because they believe they can have it all — a closed border and crony capitalism for themselves. But Trumpism will not win. It is not a politics of common interest. Trump drives passion from his base but alienates everyone else specifically because he has no crossover policies with conservatives. No economic conservative (or, say anyone familiar with basic economics generally) buys the economic shamanism of protectionism; protectionism is economically disastrous. Few outside the blue collar work force buy the notion that legal immigration to the country by those who aspire to the American dream and have solid educational qualifications ought to be ended. Trump’s pledge to “win” for a certain crowd at the expense of others alienates people, too – far more people than he’s bringing in.

The Republican Party platform is built on American exceptionalism; Trumpism is built on nativism. There is a difference. American exceptionalism suggests that America’s founding values – economic liberty, freedom from government, strong national defense, personal liberty and responsibility – are better values than any other values, and that those values should be preserved. Nativism suggests that Americanism isn’t about values but about location. Nativism leads to backward economics, foolish immigration policy, a giant welfare state, and a self-serving paranoia about free trade that results in indirect theft from fellow Americans. Sometimes, there’s crossover between nativism and American exceptionalism. But under no circumstances should American exceptionalism give way to nativism. That’s both immoral and electorally suspect.

Sadly, the Republican Party undercut its own argument for American exceptionalism by betraying its own ideals. That made room for Trumpism. But Trumpism is no solution to the ills of the GOP. It’s like trying to cure cancer with heart disease.

Trump and his media friendlies crow that he’s bringing voters out of the woodwork to stump for him. They’re right. But his brand of politics will end in losses from here to eternity. There’s a reason for that. The Republican three-legged stool of national security, free economics, and social values still stands as the model for victory. Ripping away one or two of those legs isn’t likely to guarantee victory. It’s just likely to collapse the stool altogether.