The Great Transmogrification

One of these things is not like the other.

I have a new article up at Discourse responding to a previous piece there claiming that the Trump-era Republican Party is the same as the party once shaped by Ronald Reagan. Look, I’m no Reagan-worshipper—he had his good points and his bad points—but as a child of the 1980s, I could not let this pass.

I’ll admit that I broke my rule that all discussions of Trump and this election have to begin and end with January 6. It’s obvious that denying election results and summoning a mob to storm the US Capitol is something Reagan would never have done. But I skipped over that because I wanted to capture the full breadth of the Republican Party’s break from Reagan, one that is likely to persist even when Trump passes from the political scene.

I start with the glaring difference in style between Reagan and Trump.

Reagan was as optimistic as Trump is apocalyptic, as humble as Trump is vain, as charismatically likable as Trump is combative and off-putting, and as personally wholesome as Trump is seedy. 

I juxtaposed a photo of the smiling, optimistic Reagan against the emblematic image of Trump: his glowering mugshot. I was amazed when my editors at Discourse found precisely those two images, side by side, on a mural Republicans themselves put up outside their convention this summer. (The same image is at the top of this post.) It is astonishing to me that people can walk by this and not see the contrast.

But it’s not just style, it’s substance.

I focus on Reagan’s advocacy of free trade and his assertive foreign policy, versus Trump’s policy of protectionism and “retreat from American leadership,” as demonstrated in his hostility to Ukraine. These points should be familiar enough to my readers, so I won’t repeat them.

I’ll just note one detail. I didn’t quote one of my favorite lines from Reagan—“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help”—because it turns out this was his introduction to a discussion of farm subsidies in which he ended up boasting, “our administration has committed record amounts of assistance, spending more in this year alone than any previous administration spent during its entire tenure.”

You see why I’m not a Reagan-worshipper. He would state that “our ultimate goal is economic independence [from government] for agriculture,” but in the meantime, he would act like a pragmatic politician handing out goodies to his constituents. At least he did advocate free markets and do some things to move us in that direction.

The biggest contrast between Reagan and Trump in our current context is their approach to immigration.

Trump launched his first presidential bid by accusing Mexican immigrants of being rapists, and in this campaign, he has accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country” and coming from “mental institutions and prisons all over the world.” This is a lie he has repeatedly told, for which there is no basis—other than his own prejudice.

He has been giving these claims an increasingly racist angle, spreading memesthat warn of “Third World” immigration by raising the prospect of Black people overwhelming our pristine suburbs. I might have given Trump the benefit of the doubt on this, but it’s part of a long-standing pattern. From the beginning, Trump has been posting memes from white nationalists, calling neo-Nazis “very fine people” and having rabid antisemites over for dinner.

I provide a few relevant quotes from Reagan, including his last speech in the White House, which has been described as “a love letter to immigrants.”

I had to cut this from the piece, but the small-mindedness and spite evident in Trump’s policies is intimately connected to his pessimism. Consider the contrast.

During a period of relative peace and prosperity—with unemployment currently lower than in any year of the Reagan boom—Trump insists on a narrative of American decline and describes us as “a Third World country.”

Coming to power during a period of economic stagnation and foreign policy crisis, which his predecessor infamously described as a “national malaise,” Reagan proclaimed that “America’s best days lie ahead.”

That optimism, Reagan’s appeal to confidence instead of fear, turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Read the whole thing.

It’s Not Reagan’s Party Anymore

The Crackpot Party

Meanwhile, real life has overtaken me and provided more garish proof of the transmogrification of the Republican Party.

For a few weeks now, we’ve heard reports that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was considering ending his presidential campaign. He first went to the Harris campaign, reportedly offering to endorse her in exchange for a position in her administration. She wouldn’t even meet with him.

But of course, Donald Trump did take the meeting and made the deal. Kennedy endorsed Trump, appeared at an event with him, and told Tucker Carlson, “I’m working with the campaign, we’re working on policy issues together…. I’ve been asked to go on the transition team, to help pick the people who will be running the government.” Trump has now also added former left-wing Democrat Tulsi Gabbard to his transition team, adding yet another pro-Putin voice to his inner circle.

Remember that Kennedy is a crackpot who has never met a conspiracy theory that he didn’t like. (Here is a sampling, and it doesn’t even include WiFi and cellphones giving you cancer.) The essence of his campaign was opposition to vaccines—a vital technology that has been saving lives for hundreds of years.

Meanwhile, Trump’s biggest accomplishment in office was Operation Warp Speed, the program that provided massive financial guarantees and streamlined regulatory barriers to help pharmaceutical companies produce covid vaccines in record time. But it has been a long time since Trump stopped mentioning that at his rallies.

Trump is the populist candidate whose whole base of support is hatred of “the establishment” and “the elites,” which includes some worthy targets but also includes basically anyone with real expertise in a scientific field. This has made him a magnet for cranks and crackpots, and particularly anti-vaxxers.

He has now fully embraced their cause. In a leaked phone call prior to Kennedy’s endorsement, Trump criticized vaccines, and now he is actively campaigning on an anti-vaccine ultimatum. This is not just opposition to the covid vaccine, it’s opposition to all vaccines, and it is specifically opposition to vaccines for children. “On day one, I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing Critical Race Theory, and I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.”

Here is Radley Balko with the story.

[Trump’s] covid skepticism almost immediately bled into sowing fear about a possible vaccine, even before it was clear that a vaccine was possible. Once it was clear a vaccine was coming, Trump pushed back on the conspiracists, rightly defending the coming vaccine and his record in accelerating its approval.

But with Biden in the White House, Trump has been increasingly willing to entertain vaccine conspiracists….

Trump has now completely capitulated to his base. He admitted as much last year in an interview with Brett Baier. When Baier asked Trump why he no longer touts his role in expediting the vaccine, Trump replied, “I really don’t want to talk about it, because, as a Republican, it’s not a great thing to talk about.” The RFK, Jr. campaign recently shared a video in which Trump told Kennedy in a phone call that he shares Kennedy’s vaccine nuttery.

It’s difficult to overstate the threat of Trump’s public school policy. Currently, even here in deep-red Tennessee, public schools require students to receive the vaccine for Hepatitis B; Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis; Poliomyelitis; Measles, Mumps, Rubella; Varicella; and Hepatitis A. 

Prior to vaccines, whooping cough alone killed 30,000 children each year. Polio killed 1,500, and paralyzed another 30,000. The World Health Organization estimates that measles vaccinations have saved 57 million lives globally since 2000. Forcing public schools to end these requirements would be a public health calamity.

Balko is an old libertarian, and I suppose we could spend time in Libertarian Debate Club talking about the theoretical validity of mandating vaccination. But what Trump is proposing here is not freedom of choice, but using the power of the federal government to force an anti-vaccine policy onto local schools. And he isn’t doing it because of his opposition to state power—where does that show up in his other policies?—but out of opposition to vaccines.

Balko points out that Trump is merely following his party’s trends.

In April the New Hampshire legislature passed a bill removing the requirement for a polio and measles vaccine to attend public schools. Republicans in Wisconsin, Georgia, Montana, and Iowa have tried to restrict or remove vaccine requirements for public facing government jobs, which may include public schools. Other Republican legislatures have passed or introduced bills that erode support for vaccines in other ways, such as barring state governments from advocating them. The Republican party in Lee County, Florida, wants to ban the COVID vaccine for everyone, and Montana Republicans have tried to ban people who have received the COVID vaccine from donating blood.

According to Pew, the percentage of Republicans who think the MMR vaccine should be required to attend public school has dropped 22 points since 2016 — from 79 percent to 57. The gap between those in favor of an MMR requirement and those opposed shrunk from 59 points to just 15. And while a large majority of Democrats and independents say the benefits of vaccines far outweigh the risks, slightly more than half of Republicans now say the opposite. And this is over a vaccine that has been safe and effective for decades.

The extraordinary paradox of the last four years is that, in response to a global pandemic that killed millions, we developed a vaccine in record time, saving millions of lives and allowing the world to return to normal—yet the response has been a large increase in opposition to vaccines. I have some theories as to why this is, but I also just stand in astonishment at the simple fact of it. I’ve been doing some work over the years relating to progress and why people oppose progress. I think this will have to be a leading case study to understand the phenomenon.

Whatever its causes, this is a rejection of at least 200 years of progress against infectious disease, and it shows the extent to which Republicans have become the Crackpot Party.