By Charles C. Camosy, The Federalist, November 14, 2024
Charles C. Camosy (@ccamosy) is professor of medical humanities at the Creighton University School of Medicine and author of “Beyond the Abortion Wars: A Way Forward for a New Generation.”
Trump and Vance need to make dramatic populist moves now while GOP voters’ appetite for economic libertarianism has dwindled.
In theorizing about what it takes to actually break up with someone after a long-term relationship, Jerry Seinfeld came up with an analogy. “Breaking up is like knocking over a coke machine; you can’t do it in one push. You have to rock it back and forth a few times and then it goes over.”
Since at least the early 1980s, the Republican Party was in a long-term relationship with economic libertarianism, but with Trump’s hostile takeover of the party in 2015-2016 we saw the first attempt at a breakup. Old flames die hard, however, and since then there has been a lot of rocking back and forth. But with the 2024 election, we finally saw the machine go over: The GOP has finally broken up with economic libertarianism — for good — and replaced it with multiracial populism. …
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