No. of Recommendations: 4
You're oversimplifying some other things. The average Joe has seen the 'traditional' GOP bulwalk of the Chamber of Commerce outsource all their jobs overseas, donate to democrats and embrace woke DEI bullspit (see Disney and Gilette as shining examples). Why support people who constant crap on your values?
So they're not. All Trump is doing is putting a campaign around it.
But that's a huge shift. That's the point. The Reagan Revolution, which basically crystallized modern conservatism in its current form, was based on the "fusion" of three strands of the conservative movement: social conservatism, free markets, and a hawkish foreign policy.
The free market strand was the principle that the government had no role in telling businesses and other economic actors how to conduct their business. If they wanted to send job overseas, they should be allowed to - after all, the invisible hand of the free market would drive them to make the best of all possible choices! And the government shouldn't be telling them what labor or management practices they should be employing....whether it's woke DEI or any other kind of bullspit. The only proper role for government is to get small enough to be drowned in a bathtub, which bathtub better not be bought with taxpayer money.
Right-wing populism rejects those premises. They very much reject letting private markets determine where the jobs go, where international labor and capital flow, or even the idea of a global free trade system at all. They want the government to intervene against private actors (like, say, a completely private university) rather than leave it up to the markets - they very much want government to be an active and powerful participant in deciding contested issues among private actors. That's an express rejection of the fusionist conservatism that Goldwater, Buckley and the National Review espoused back in the day - where issues of virtue are left to private actors, not the remit of the state.
Trump built his campaign around the huge part of the electorate that is socially conservative but isn't a free-market absolutist - people who want protectionism and Medicare and curbs on immigration and government sticking its nose into the affairs of private enterprise. That faction was not powerful in the fusionist era (roughly 1964 through the Tea Party Movement). They are in charge now.
