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The alt-right, with its emphasis on race and replacement, is fringe and represents a small fraction of Republicans.
The anti-Trump "moderate" Republicans poll poorly in primaries, and Trump's approval rating remains sky high among Republicans.
What do the above two assertions say?
They say two things.
Trump is not alt-right, never was.
There is a massive swath of Trump-loving voters who are off the radar of the media by being neither fashy-racist nor anti-Trump "moderates".
[Jerry Seinfeld voice] Who are these people?
I'll tell you who they are. They are the Rush Limbaugh crowd. Or wherever they are now. I grew up with them, they are my people. I listened to Rush in his final year, and listened to his callers, and the vibe of his following (which was massive) was the same as I remember it. On median: They are hardcore Trump supporters. Yet they find the emphasis on race of both the left and the fringe right distasteful. In fact they itch for national unity and an end to civil strife and they saw in Trump the best hope for unity. The whole idea of Trump being divisive they saw as media propaganda, e.g. to them Trump's stance against illegal immigration is in fact about illegal immigration and not secretly about "brown people". In their eyes Trump had the back of anybody with a Social Security card. They think Hitler was, in fact, evil af and love to relate their parents' or grandparents' stories about kicking his ass.
They have an essentially Reaganite attitude toward American politics. They see taxation as fundamentally a seizure of the productive elements of society and while they see it necessary they think it should always be done with great solemnity and respect for the taxed, whose sweat fuels all government projects. They saw Trump as the obvious candidate for anybody into Reaganite politics and are beyond infuriated that the left's propaganda painted them as Hitlerian for wanting the obvious best candidate for policy positions that had nothing to do with race.
Etc etc.
I don't know where this crowd is at now. But if anybody deserves to be called "silent majority" (if only among Republicans) it's them. Not that they were silent on Rush's show, "ignored" may be a better term for them, ignored by media and its focus on the battle between crazy fascist racists and the nice wholesome Cheney family.
I really think there's a massive, massive amount of these people and yet I don't hear these particular opinions being expressed basically anywhere.
I think there are plenty of people who are worried about brown people who are not alt-right. There are plenty of racists who are not fascist, just as there are "Eat the rich, man!" people who are not socialist in any narrow sense (nationalisation of industry, state planning, or even egalitarian outside of putting some limits against huge inequality).
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We’re working our 40 hr/wk jobs, or doing whatever has taken up our schedules since retirement, and coming home tired to watch Fox News not talk about the election fraud Dinesh discovered. We’re listening to podcasts by Jack Posobiec and Charlie Kirk and wishing we were young enough to be in TPUSA. We’re sending 5-year-old memes to our families on Facebook, never noticing they’re not promoted outside five or ten people. And between all that, we’re trying to avoid being called racist to our faces for holding the same pro-American colorblind ideals we have since The Cosby Show became our favorite sitcom in the 80’s.
I say “we” because I got my start in politics watching the short-lived Rush Limbaugh TV show with my dad before high school. I still consider myself a Rush/Reagan Republican, a libertarian in all but party affiliation. My parents are described above too.
Thank you for the post. I feel seen.
EDIT: another poster has given a more left-friendly explanation for “where this crowd is at now”: quietly coexisting with their liberal friends, and “hiding their power-level” as 4chan would say.
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They are called religious conservatives. They have pretty much accepted defeat in the public square, and thus only make their voices heard in their own communities and on election day. Can you even imagine someone openly saying they oppose homosexuality "because it's immoral" or "because God said so" in any respectable institution in 2022?
That's a subset, not the whole set.
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This would happen if someone did that in 2022
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/25/mastriano-danger-pennsylvania-governor/
They'd create attack ads that basically just quote his statements directly, because they genuinely believe that those are losing positions. I expect that they'll be surprised on election day.
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Ideologically and in other respects, conservatism is broad/diverse and seems to be always evolving whereas liberalism is more like something being stretched, in which the original shape is still the same.
Rush was a morbidly obese ideologue who had his heyday in the '90s and 2000s, especially during the Obama era, but since 2016 and especially since 2020 during Covid, his type of conservatism has been in decline online , imho, replaced by the likes of Rogan, Peterson, etc. who have more of an emphasis on self-improvement and salubrity (being healthy, working out, intellectual curiosity, etc.) while still opposing the far-left. Since 2021 I have also observed the rise of a sort of civic nationalism conservatism which combines 'Trumpism' with 'Roganism'. In keeping with the civic aspect of it, it's not necessarily opposed to diversity or immigration as long as said diversity holds anti-woke values. I think this is a tad overoptimistic given the tendency of second and third generation immigrants to vote left. I think this new brand of conservativism is very powerful and has considerable online support, and stands good shot at beating Biden.
It's hard to say what Trump is/was. He's not alt-right yet much more nationalistic than the typical conservative. His push for tax cuts early on is consistent with the mainstream GOP platform though.
In one of my blog posts I describe how the GOP has evolved and its likely direction:
'80s up until 2008-2013 Reaganomics, supply side
2008-2013 split or weakening cracks on the foundation of immigration and globalization
2014-2015: rise and fall gamergate, precursor to the IDW and trump-right
2016-2020 Trump and split between 'the base' vs 'the establishment', rise of civic nationalism
2016-2018 rise and fall of alt-right
2018-: rise of the IDW , which is related to the anti-idpol left
2020-: hybridization/amalgamation of civic nationalism ,self-improvement, and anti-woke populism
You're missing the rise of the Tea Party in 2010, which was the polite precursor to Trump support later on. The Tea Party had some accomplishments, but mostly ended up providing further education to the Republican base as to the extent of their problems, both inside and outside the R party. Mitt Romney in 2012 was the R establishment's "we've learned nothing" response to the Tea Party (and Jeb Bush, even more so, in 2016).
yea, tea party fits in perfect
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Some of these were a lot more high profile than others, e.g. I suspect that most Republican party members have never heard of gamergate. The IDW and Rogan are more well-known, although I still would try hard not to underestimate how much of the Republican party is made up of Not Very Online people who have at most a passing acquaintance with Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan etc.
possible but I see DeSantis as being someone who taps into online sentiment. Rogan is popular enough that he's drawing in a bigger audience than mainstream media. I think Peterson is getting there. I think the distinction between 'always online' and real life is shrinking or blurring.
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(Fat-shaming? He did slim down majorly from his obese heyday.)
His ideology was anti-progressive, anti-Democrat, and when woke started to be a thing, anti-woke. His personal nemesis was Hillary Rodham Clinton, the exemplar of everything he spoke against. He was against them because he saw them as trying to tear down everything he was for.
He loved the America of the myths: the good giant astride a continent, founded by freedom-lovers who risked everything, always striving to become better. The big picture, the legend of America the Great, was what he poured his heart and soul into keeping alive. He was the great civic nationalist, supporting legal immigration and calling out racists of any color.
His counterpart in Washington was Newt Gingrich, and he fully supported the Contract With America. His death by cancer has left us with the likes of Posobiec, Kirk, D’Souza, Gorka, and Hemingway to hold onto his bombastic America-loving conservatism.
It's not fat shaming. That's literally what he was. All that is true and made him special for that era. I think bombastic conservatism has two things working against it: more competition and change in tastes. It will always have an audience but Rush had way bigger relative audience share in the 90s compared to before he died. There was no YouTube, no podcasts, no twitter or substack back then . He was not just the voice of American conservatism but in some respects the only major voice..this was even before Fox News became as big as it is. .
In many ways, Rush was the proof-of-concept for Fox News, the blogosphere, podcasts, substack, etc. He demonstrated that there was a severely underserved market for broadcast media that wasn't ideologically D. I can't think of anyone who accomplished more for the cause of diversity in news and opinion media than Rush Limbaugh.
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Trump isn’t more nationalistic than the typical conservative though, given primary election results (and the fact he, yknow, won a national
Election as well). Conservatives in america are fundamentally nationalist
his rhetoric at least seems more nationalistic than the typical conservative , and also some of his initiatives such as his plan to return manufacturing jobs to America, which at best had mixed results but this seems like a departure from the Bush administration .
George W or George H. W.? The former was pretty protectionist and tried fairly hard to appeal to the American working class:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_United_States_steel_tariff
You could plausibly argue that that Trump was more protectionist, but free trade vs. protectionism has rarely been a simple Republican vs. Democrat issues.
Also, the Bush administration also had a lot of anti-elitism in their rhetoric, like Trump. While Bush was obviously from an elite background, he tried (successfully) to be portrayed as "One of the guys", in a way that his father, Bob Dole, or Mitt Romney did not. Quite an achievement for a teetotal, Ivy League educated, son of a wealthy family.
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I'd say the majority of the alt-right isn't even Republican, but properly speaking, "Republican-leaning independent." In other words, "I've got reasons to dislike both parties, but if I have to choose a candidate that's got a shot of winning, I'm voting R."
(Tangent: this comes up in polling a fair bit, but there's a big difference between "Republican-leaning centrist" and "Republican-leaning independent." The first group could conceivably vote for a candidate of either party, but more often votes R; the second doesn't identify with either party, but is closer to R than D. The important distinction is that a large chunk of the second group considers Rs to be moderate squishes, and are even further right. The phenomenon is symmetric; there are "Democrat-leaning independents" who consider themselves further left than the D party. "X-leaning centrists" are a subset of "X-leaning independents," but far from the whole picture.)
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