The announced victory of Donald Trump for the Republican nomination and, above all, the withdrawal of Nikki Haley are leading many, in a very strange way, to mourn the Republican Party of yesteryear.
• Read also: Nikki Haley withdraws of the race for the Republican nomination
In a somewhat simplistic analysis, they associate Donald Trump with radicalism, while Nikki Haley would belong to the “moderate” trend.
We will see in this portrait further proof that the meaning of words is perverted, that it no longer means much. Unless it’s amnesia.
Because in this great story, we are invited to cultivate some nostalgia for George W. Bush. No matter how hard I try, I can’t do it.
Imperialism
Let’s do a little history: the Republican Party, at the time of the Cold War, was the party of the most resolute anti-communism.
He wanted to stand up to communism which subjugated people, which subjected them to totalitarian horror. He was absolutely right to do so.
On the scale of history, Ronald Reagan is a great man. He is also the last great American president. But following the fall of communism, the Republican Party asked itself: deprived of an enemy, what could it do?
It then refounded itself, around a doctrinal tripod: there was the religious right, there was the Wall Street right for the economy, and there were the neo-conservatives, for foreign policy.
The latter dreamed of exporting democracy throughout the world by imposing regime change as much as possible on refractory countries.
They used the September 11 attacks as a pretext to launch their war against Iraq in 2003. They believed they were exporting democracy with the bombers. Real geniuses…
This form of democratic imperialism, hidden behind an aggressive universalism, has opened a Pandora’s box. Should we really be nostalgic for these imperialist warmongers? What was moderate about these Republicans?
Throughout this time, there has been a dissident Republican current, which was notably embodied in the fight of Pat Buchanan.
He warned against the excesses of globalization, he denounced massive immigration, he worried, in a language that is certainly not ours, about the cultural decadence of his country.
Above all, he warned against democratic imperialism.
For this reason, he was presented as a monster, as a far-right populist. He didn’t manage to win, but he made a furrow.
Buchanan
We must keep this story in mind when we want to understand Trump’s success: it was by recovering this niche, which was very popular among independent voters, that he imposed himself, by embodying a populist insurrection against a oligarchic system.
We can criticize his personality, and above all, his lack of respect for institutions. With reason.
But we will understand nothing of its success if we do not understand the movement which carried it and which it carried, and if we persist in a stupid nostalgia for the bushist, imperialist, globalist, oligarchic, fundamentally deregulated right. .
