The Republican Party no longer believes America is the essential nation
Except for an admiration for Ronald Reagan and tax cuts, it is hard to see how the Republican Party of Donald Trump resembles the Republican Party of George W. Bush just two decades ago. In place of the “compassionate conservatism”, which aimed for a grand bargain to settle the status of illegal migrants, is a paranoid nativism. In place of a foreign policy that saw America as a protector of freedom and democracy is a new doctrine of America First that shuns allies (barring Israel) and would give up on the Ukrainians fighting off a Russian invasion, even when no American soldiers are at risk. The free-traders in the Bush administration entered into trade deals with 13 new countries and tariff rates remained close to zero; Mr Trump wants to put a 10% tariff on all imports.
In the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians on October 7th, something like the old party shone through. Republicans unanimously condemned the terrorism and reaffirmed their alliance; they promised to send billions of dollars in security assistance to Israel; and some rattled their sabres at Iran, which sponsors Hamas among other proxies in the region. At the same time, though, much of the party is balking at the prospect of sending arms to Ukraine, which Reagan and both Bushes would surely have done. What happened? The obvious answer is: Mr Trump. But to make sense of this bewildering shift, it helps to look beyond a bit further back.
Ever since 1856 the Republican Party has published a party platform every four years as part of its presidential nominating convention—all the way to 2020, when it just re-endorsed the previous one. Read through them all (and the 2016 one twice) and the long intellectual arc that somehow bent towards the party’s current isolationism becomes a bit more comprehensible.
2023-10-26 04:13:45
Link from www.economist.com
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