When I look at Trump’s first year of campaign promises and accomplishments I come to an outrageous conclusion: The Democrat Party will not be significant for a sixty year period.
The conclusion is not so outrageous on the face of it. The Democrat Party was out of power for sixty years from its defeat in the Civil War until the Franklin Roosevelt election in 1932. The reason is that the Democrat Party had no popular issues to replace its central issue in favor of slavery. During that sixty years of exile the Democrats became the Party of the working man with support of silver, unions and social security,
Democrats returned to power when the party became the champions of the economic victims of the 1929 financial crash and the economic collapse that followed along with the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff barriers. Democrats rode that tidal wave of change for the next sixty years.
Now the Democrats are out in the cold once again with no popular political positions.
Their two 2016 presidential candidates and national leaders have campaigned on anti-wealth, ethnic and gender divisions and support for illegal aliens. The Democrats also support an Armageddon anti-commerce theology. Those are not core American views.
Trump’s party, which hasn’t coalesced yet, is running on some very deeply held American platforms:
- America is a meritocracy and immigration should be based on merit.
- Americans are not envious people and accept great disparities in wealth ( but not class differences).
- Americans don’t identify or categorize other Americans based on race, ethnicity, or gender.
- Americans have great disdain for government bureaucratic rules and restrictions on commerce.
This distance between the Democrat Party’s positions and the Trump platform is as great as the divide between the 1800’s Democrat party of slavery and the new 1860’s Republican party of pro-commerce and triumphalism.