To understand the crack up of the Republican Party, it helps to understand which faction is the temporary beneficiary of Donald Trump’s triumph. That would be the paleoconservatives, as helpfully explained by Dylan Matthews in Vox. A good introduction to paleoconservatism can be found at the Wikipedia page of Sam Francis, a former editor and staffer at the Moonie Times. I’ll just provide two examples to demonstrate the mindset of Sam Francis. The first came in 2004, and it was clear that he had already identified Barack Obama as a potential future leader of the Democrats.
An American traditionalist, one of his more cutting edge columns cited implicit miscegenation in a skit referring to the television series Desperate Housewives, which aired during ABC’s Monday Night Football. Francis denounced the advertisement, which featured sexual innuendo between a black football player and a white actress, arguing that “The point was not just to hurl a pie in the face of morals and good taste but also of white racial and cultural identity.” The advertisement, argued Francis, implicitly argued that “interracial sex is normal and legitimate,” an idea that Francis saw as “fairly radical.” Francis went on to argue that “breaking down the sexual barriers between the races is a major weapon of cultural destruction.”
Francis had also argued that Barack Obama’s campaign for the U.S. Senate from Illinois in 2004 would lead toward the moment when America ceases to be “characterized by the white racial identity of its founders and historic population.” The Anti-Defamation League branded Francis an advocate of well-mannered white supremacy, but Francis’ defenders maintained that he was being persecuted for his politically incorrect views.
That episode came nine years after he was fired from the Washington Times:
In September 1995, Editor-in-Chief Wesley Pruden fired Francis after conservative journalist Dinesh D’Souza described Francis’s appearance at the 1994 American Renaissance conference:
A lively controversialist, Francis began with some largely valid complaints about how the Southern heritage is demonized in mainstream culture. He went on, however, to attack the liberal principles of humanism and universalism for facilitating “the war against the white race.” At one point he described country music megastar Garth Brooks as “repulsive” because “he has that stupid universalist song, in which we all intermarry.” His fellow whites, he insisted, must “reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites… The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.”
One of the reasons it was so painful for me to watch Ben Carson rail on about the evils of “political correctness” is because it’s an echo of the defense used for the unreconstructed white supremacy of paleoconservatives like Sam Francis and 1992/1996 GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.
Of course, Buchanan is very enthused about the candidacy of Donald Trump.
There are elements of paleoconservativism that overlap with the progressive left, most prominently a skepticism about military adventurism and opposition to free trade. This is why some progressives will nod their heads in agreement when Trump makes certain critiques of the Democratic Party and the Washington Establishment. But the core of paleoconservatism is white and cultural supremacy with an accompanying panic about nonwhite immigration and a reactionary opposition to modern sexual mores. This not only limits the appeal of a paleoconservative candidate to a subset of the cultural right, it means that the philandering sexual objectifier Donald Trump is an imperfect representative of paleoconservatism.
From a historical perspective, you can consider Dwight D. Eisenhower to have marginalized paleoconservatives when he defeated the isolationist Ohio Senator Robert Taft at the 1952 Republican convention. As for more mainstream conservatives, they sidelined the paleos when William F. Buckley and the National Review ostracized members of the John Birch Society from the movement.
The elimination of the Jim Crow south further eroded their respectability, and the rise of neoconservatism in the 1970’s and their strong influence over the Reagan administration provided the paleos with a more powerful rival.
The presidential runs of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot were a kind of last gasp, but skepticism about sexual liberation and free trade, as well as an isolationist foreign policy inclination, and white supremacist views have always had a wider appeal than just on the right.
For paleoconservatives who have been marginalized for over sixty years, Trump seems like a vindication and a revival of their worldview and their power.
This is also how the other factions of the Republican Party see things. The Eisenhower Republicans are nearly extinct, but they’re completely repelled by Trumpism. The neoconservatives consider the paleos to be anti-Semitic, which is usually true, and they’re utterly opposed to their isolationism. The business community has always hated their opposition to expanding markets along with the exercise of military and diplomatic muscle that makes those markets accessible. That the paleo politicians can sometimes adopt a smidgen of economic populism, for example (in Trump’s case), opposing cuts to entitlements that benefit Wall Street, is another reason they aren’t welcomed by the business community or Paul Ryan.
Donald Trump has personality quirks that turn off a lot of conservatives. His business model offends a lot of conservatives. Others just think he’s unelectable and bad for their brand. But these are all just added reasons why he cannot unite the Republican Party.
In my opinion, Trump has never understood all this history or the factions in the GOP, but he identified a weakness within the party that was ripe for exploitation. And it turned out that he was inadvertently taking up the banner of the paleoconservatives.
He might not have realized just how marginalized this faction has been or how long they’ve been marginalized. But even if Trump was an upstanding, polite, well-informed and prepared citizen, his policies would badly divide the Republicans. While the paleos have always been a part of the Conservative Movement, the ascendant and well-financed elements of the Movement have, in important ways, defined themselves in opposition to them. Trump represents a massive reversal and defeat.
It’s true that the Movement’s massive failures have brought this defeat on themselves, but that doesn’t mean they will reconcile themselves to it. When combined with Trump’s personality defects and transparent lack of preparedness for the job of the presidency, this party will not unite.