Leon Hadar

Trumpism is, according to its adherents, meant to replace Reaganism, the political doctrine that has dominated the Republican party and the conservative movement since Ronald Reagan left office. Reaganism is identified by a commitment to free market economics, internationalist foreign policy, strong national defense and an open door to immigration.But then Reaganism and its British version, Thatcherism, have also been associated with an intellectual revolution that swept the West in the 1970s and that was headed by Nobel Prize-winning economists like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and driven by think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute and the Center for Policy Studies that transformed the political discourse worldwide.

It might be a stretch to compare the ugly-but-not-violent warfare of American politics in 2020 with the explosive politics of the 1960s. But history does repeat itself, as the hackneyed old phrase says: first as tragedy then as farce. Consider the common thread linking these two political epochs: the rise of a messianic left that sabotaged two attempts by the Democrats to take over the White House, which eventually forced the party to change direction and move to the center. In 1968, the Democratic leadership wanted to campaign on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s historic civil-rights legislation and his efforts to reinforce the foundations of the welfare state with the Great Society programs, steps that enjoyed wide national support.

Not so long ago in America, immediately after a Democratic politician announced a run for president, he or she would make a series of public gestures supporting Israel. This would range from a major address before an American-Jewish audience, to the required visit to the Holy Land. In a way, even mild criticism of the Jewish state would have amounted to political suicide when it came to a Democrat running for high office. Historical, cultural, political and geo-strategic considerations – including the influence of a politically active American-Jewish community whose members resided in key electoral states and contributed money for the Democratic party – made it politically axiomatic to back Israel.

The conventional wisdom about the 2016 presidential election is this: Hillary Clinton lost the election because Republican Donald Trump won Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, states which Democratic nominees had won for at least the past six elections. Bottom line: if Hillary had won those three states, she would be occupying the White House today. All she had to do was to spend more time in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and persuade just 100,000 plus voters not to cast their ballots for Trump.

There are two policy issues that you can count on to provide Republican Never Trumpers with a common ground. In addition, of course, to their almost pathological loathing of the man occupying the White House, it's support for a strong relationship between the United States and Israel—and a really bad case of Russophobia. In fact, if you were to prepare a list of prominent Never Trumpers, you would probably end up with an updated list of prominent neoconservatives who subscribe to these two foreign policy dogmas. It is true that the label of neoconservative has occasionally been abused by anti-Semites disparaging American-Jewish figures who happen to support Israel.

In the epilogue to the first volume of his biography of Henry Kissinger, The Idealist, historian Niall Fergusson notes that he asked Yale university professor, John Gaddis, whether he agreed with his designation of Dr K. as a foreign policy “idealist.” That assessment contrasted with the conventional view of the former U.S. Secretary of State as archetypal national security “realist,” the kind who hangs a picture of Otto von Bismarck in his study. It may be better to regard idealism and realism “not a the biographical equivalent of positive and negative electrical charges – either one of the other – but rather the opposite ends of the spectrum along which we act as circumstances require,” responded Gaddis.