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Shows how weird and varied people are, especially on the right, maybe even more so than the left. One thing I have observed about many of Trumps young online supporters and the alt-right in 2016-2018 is how few of them fit the traditional conservative mold. They were much more diverse in almost every respect outside of supporting trump. Gavin McInnes, Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes, it's hard to come up with a more eclectic group of people than that. The idea that your typical anti-vax, conspiratorially-minded, or pro-Trump person is going to be some middle-aged guy with a pickup truck and listens to country music, is an way over-generalization. It may be who you would least expect.
The simplest and most accurate explanation is that "many of Trumps young online supporters and the alt-right in 2016-2018" weren't conservatives. Trump is first and foremost a populist who found the biggest issue that was unrepresented by the elites--systemic non-enforcement of immigration laws--and then broadened his base of support by promising to faithfully represent the interests of traditional conservatives as well (who also had reasons to dislike and distrust the R establishment).
In very general terms, most traditional conservatives are Republicans. The fit is far from perfect, and you can find exceptions near every boundary, but the overlap is substantial and central. You also have the loose group of "Republican-leaning independents" who 1) aren't Republicans, but 2) prefer Republicans to Democrats. Bits of this loose group can be found among centrists, libertarians, far-right fringes, etc.
There were people in 2016 whose top two choices were Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, in either order. From a left vs. right perspective, this makes no sense, but from a populist vs. establishment perspective, it captures rather neatly a broad, eclectic, extremely diverse "group" that felt unrepresented by the elites of both parties, and wanted a disruptive outsider who would shake things up. The populist sentiment won resoundingly in the Republican party primary--the top establishment candidate came in third--and lost in the Democratic party primary.
I'm not sure conflating 'the populist base' and 'the alt-right' makes sense though. The latter talk about jews and retvrning and hierarchy and anime on the internet, the former are - as far as i can tell - mostly normal american christian republicans who, if politically active, were conservative ten years ago.
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Well said.
The biggest draw for Trump wasn’t that he was a successful businessman or a social conservative. It was that he actually bothered to promise anything to 40% of the population. The rest of his positions and popularity coalesced around that image.
...this has got me thinking about what’s it would have taken for Trump to run as a Democrat. “Make America Great Again” is an equal-opportunity slogan, and he’d have demolished any of his primary opponents in a general. I suppose all the actors which pushed against Bernie might have found better leverage against Trump, though.
I think Trump has some policy preferences of his own, and they are likely a mix of "more-right" and "more-left" opinions. My guess is that there's a bit of a bias to the right, but not to a great degree--in fact, in terms of personal policy preferences, I suspect that Trump averages out to a right-leaning centrist in an American context, even though that probably sounds crazy to most people.
Also, Trump was always going to present himself as populist/anti-establishment. From that angle, his first hurdle would have been the establishment candidate of the respective parties. As much as many people love to hate Hillary Clinton, she was wildly popular compared to Jeb Bush.
The crazy thing is that it's not crazy. As was pointed out a number of times during the 2016 election Trump was effectively a 90-era moderate in terms of policy. The fact that this was now seen as "beyond the pale" was held up as of evidence of just how out of touch the media had become from the regular population.
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i can agree with the idea of trump being somewhat centrist in his own political leanings but only for social policies. His personal preferences for economic policy and especially taxation are way out of line with the leftist overton window. I can't imagine the guy standing for anything that would mess with his bottom line in any substantial way.
That said, i wouldn't mind if trump had run as a dem, he's good at riling people up and i think he is unprincipled (flexible? creative? choose how charitable this adjective should be) enough to say most stuff democrats would like to hear if that was the most realistic path to power for him. Like you say though, i think clinton vs trump in a dem primary is a way worse matchup than jeb, who trump basically ridiculed off stage.
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I'm not saying anything more than we know about the facts of the case, but I continue to be flabbergasted by the way the "look at how weird this guy is, he could possibly not be a far-righter!" argument is used! It's perfectly plausible these days (typical? No, but plausible) that one might have a guy going from hippie new age Green Party type to far-right within a short period - I've witnessed numerous similar types doing the same thing because of Covid here in Finland, and there's an entire microparty - "Kristallipuolue", "Crystal Party" - which consists of alternative medicine / new age hippie types who went hardcore antivaxx and anti-measures during the pandemic, started picking up things like anti-immigration thought, and are now in an electoral alliance with a couple of far right parties.
The pipelines from new age to right-wing are often quite clear. Left-wing conspiracy theory gives way to right-wing conspiracy thinking (QAnon and so on). Localist preference to local products can be expanded to general anti-internationalist thinking (opposition to UN and EU, and so on). "Get your vaccines out of my body!" is expanded to more generic libertarianish thinking. "Male and female energies" earth-mother-type thinking can become advocation for traditional gender roles. And so on.
There are plenty of right-wingers who are generally able to conceptualize the fact that left-wingers can take sharp turns to the right, even suddenly, who have done the same themselves, but who then instantly start feigning ignorance of such potential mechanisms when it looks like one of those recent converts might have done something, you know, crazy. Something with bad optics. Then you can only be counted among the right wing if you've been a stable and solid normie law-abiding middle-class whitebread person for your entire life.
Woo always drifts right. And in the American context(not sure about Finland) there are reasons for that.
Would you mind elaborating on that thought? It’s not immediately obvious to me why that should be the case.
Not OP, but considering the educational polarization happening in America (where the less educated are more likely to be on the right), it seems reasonable to think that superstitious beliefs will cluster on the right.
This is of course not universally true. There are plenty of nonscientific beliefs cherished by the left. But in my anecdotal experience living in red states, you're going to see a lot more distrust of "mainstream" science and medicine on the right. These people love their CBD oils and naturopaths.
Lmao, I know half a dozen Reed graduates who run the local homeopathy ring. Education doesn't have much effect on believing silly things, only ensuring that people believe the correct high status silly things.
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