Tuesday, November 26, 2019

Recapturing the "Reagan Democrats"

While Donald Trump has done a yeoman's job in moving the Overton Window towards normalcy--against all odds and against most of the Government--he needs help in making that shift permanent.

Along comes Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO).

...As he explained in his Nov. 20 address, it’s a self-serving myth to think that anyone strives alone, outside of social grounding. So it was with regret that he added, “As it took hold in twentieth-century America, the Promethean ideal taught that the individual self exists apart from all social ties and relations.”

This Promethean vision, Hawley continued, held that family, religion, neighborhood — that is to say, the context of one’s life — means little, because the Promethean “exists separate from all of them.”..
Nope.  That's not Obama-Clintonism--because Hawley gets the "family-first" part that those socialist rabble-rousers prefer to forget.

...Hawley’s argument owes much to the conservative tradition; indeed, it is the conservative tradition of Aristotle, Edmund Burke, and Russell Kirk, emphasizing proper order and received wisdom as the glue of civilization....
The upshot??

...Yet all Republicans should recognize that Hawley’s vision also offers the prospect of gaining Democratic family guys and gals — those plain folks on the other side of the divide who also believe in community, continuity, and safety. In such a come-together reckoning, fidelity to ideological exotica is less important than a simple commitment to protecting basic human needs and verities. Protecting people, that is, against the outsourcing of their jobs and the insourcing of trans bathrooms....

In Wisconsin, the voters get that, as the Marquette Poll indicates.

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