The Nationalist Edge
Trumpism beats dem-socialism
ALEXANDRIA Ocasio-Cortez’s primary victory in a Queens congressional race has been taken to signal a revolution in American politics, the emergence of democratic-socialism as a serious political movement. But while that overstates things, her victory does say something about the two holes in American politics, holes where the votes are to be found.
The first hole concerns social welfare, where her policies aren’t as different from those of President Trump as you might think. The second hole is over nationalism, where she and Trump differ greatly.
On economics and social welfare, Ocasio-Cortez and Trump are both to the left of their parties. Democratic Socialists want singlepayer, a national-health plan like one the rest of the developed world has. Not so long ago that was anathema for most Democrats, and congressional Republicans regard the idea with horror.
They’d like to preserve our freemarket system, never mind that it’s not a very free market. Betsy McCaughey reminds us that, with Medicare and Medicaid, we’re already at 49 percent single-payer, and Republicans aren’t about to touch that. And that’s without even getting into the employer’s tax deduction for health care and ObamaCare’s cross-subsidies.
During the campaign, Trump said good things about Canadian Medicare. But we can do better, he added. Indeed: If we gave the Canadian system the money we now spend on health care, we could solve the problems Canada has with its lack of proper high-tech medical equipment and wait times for elective surgery. At a minimum, government-run catastrophic medical insurance would be a winning ticket at the polls. I believe that that’s what Trump would’ve wanted, had he not run into congressional opposition.
Health-care reform would be welcomed by the voters who cast their ballots for Trump in 2016. It would also reinforce others of his ideas that voters supported — stricter controls at the border and renegotiated trade deals. They’re all of a piece, and constitute the Trump movement’s repudiation of former Republican right-wing orthodoxies.
People like Paul Ryan wanted Trump to talk about entitlement reform, but he wasn’t going to go there.
While Trump and Ocasio-Cortez are both to the left of their parties on social welfare, that doesn’t make Trump a socialist. But there’s another great difference between the two. Trump is a nationalist, unlike Ocasio-Cortez and the libertarian purists in the Republican Party. And that’s how you should understand Trump’s economic policies.
Nationalism isn’t the same thing as patriotism. The patriot supports his country, and that’s a good thing. But nationalism adds something more, which is a sense of fraternity with fellow Americans. The nationalist will prefer his fellow citizens to noncitizens. That implies he’ll offer benefits to citizens he’d deny to noncitizens. Otherwise nationalism is a hollow fraud.
So the nationalist is going to feel a sense of obligation to less-welloff Americans: those with a serious pre-existing medical condition. That’s why Trump’s nationalism pulls him to the middle of the road on social-welfare issues, and away from the Republican right.
That was the kind of nationalism the Tip O’Neill Democrats used to embrace. They were strong patriots, and nationalists too.
But the Ocasio-Cortez Democrats are a very different breed. They’re eager to tell you all the things that are wrong with America, they worry more about illegals than American citizens, they believe that Trump voters are deplorables and they think that nationalism is for dummies. (Which perhaps helps explain why some Democratic leaders are eager to change the subject when her name comes up.)
That’s a pity, because anti-nationalism dismisses the strongest of reasons to help those in need. On the left, anti-nationalists demand universal health care as a right, but this assumes a correlative duty to pay for this, and such duties are not owed to foreigners. I have no duty to support an Albanian health-care system. The better argument for universal health care is that it’s something a nationalist owes to his fellow citizens.
Ocasio-Cortez’s politics are very different from those of Donald Trump. But the difference isn’t just over economic policies. It’s more over nationalism, the sense of fraternity with all Americans. And whatever you might think of him, Trump better conveys this than Ocasio-Cortez or today’s other Democratic politicians.