The GOP Wraparound

 

It is a Sunday, so there is not much to talk about headline-wise. But there is something that has been on my mind.  It is something that I like to call the 'GOP Wraparound'. Now, what is this?  

A wraparound is video game terminology for when a video game character, say good ol' PacMan, moves so far to the right of the game screen that he instantaneously wrapsaround to the left side of the screen. It is a common aspect of old-school sidescrollers and looks like this:

Right to left, round and round they go.

Well, this spatial twisting of reality does have a real-world counterpart, and that would be the world of politics.  You can see it happening right now with the Republican Party. Under the influence of MAGA and Donald Trump, the GOP has moved so far right that it is now a party that advocates left-wing policies.  

Take, for example, this recent madness of crippling tariffs imposed by Team Trump.  I am old enough to remember that protectionism was a core philosophy of Democrats in the 20th Century. Indeed, it was such Republican statesmen as Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp who led the charge to undo the economically strangling nature of international tariffing that so enamored the protectionist left. Instead, these men advocated for free trade. A legislative hallmark from that period was the Gramm-Kemp Trade Bill. It was crafted by the eponymous Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) and Representative Jack Kemp (R-NY) and advocated for free and unfettered trade amongst the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and the non-communist Caribbean Basin countries.  At the time, it was estimated that such a lowering of tariffs would give American companies access to foreign markets of over 140 million people and nearly $600 billion in gross national product. While the bill would not become law, its legislative successor, NAFTA, would, something even conservative luminary Rush Limbaugh got behind despite the bill being championed by his favorite punching bag, Democrat president Bill Clinton. 

Yet, here we are, in 2025, and the GOP, along with its bevy of erstwhile (turncoat?) conservatives, is advocating for the most comprehensive and destructive US trade policy shift since Smoot-Hawley from 1930s.  But the wraparound is even worse than a disagreement over a single policy. What I find particularly shocking is how in defending this obvious trainwreck, MAGA makes the case for a command economy. If you listen to Trump's defenders, the president should have absolute authority over all aspects of the economy. He should be able to tell American companies where to build factories, where to source needed resources, and even what occupations should be offered to the American people. In addition, the president should also have a say over the trade decisions of other nations as well! And if both of those levels of imperial oversight aren't enough, MAGA then demands that the historically independent Federal Reserve set monetary policy at the president's dictate.  For MAGA, the wraparound is so extreme that not only is free trade dead but so is the free market economy. Henceforth, the president shall exert the same sort of control over the American economy as Hitler had over Nazi Germany's economy or Mao had over communist China's economy.  The wraparound is real. I was gratified to see former Congressman Justin Amash make this same observation:

Such a wraparound extends beyond the current economic crisis. It was long a right-wing mantra that the First Amendment was first among equals with free speech at the top of the list. Protected speech was sacrosanct to the right because of the perception that the left was targetting conservative speech, something that was more than mere paranoia at the time. Now, under MAGA, the right has become as intolerant of free speech as the left was in past decades. Under Trump 2.0, we've seen legal immigrants, graduate students at prestigious universities no less, deported because they wrote op-eds critical of Trump (in one notable case, over two years in the past). Indeed, Reichsmarshall Rubio has now ordered that the social media history of, again, legal immigrants, be scrutinized to identify bad-think as a cause for deportation, perhaps even to that Central American's concentration camp this fascist regime is so chumy with. 

How did this happen? How did the right abandon its principles and become leftists of the most authoritarian sort?

The answer is simple: as former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt likes to say, "It was all a lie." In other words,  the bulk of the conservative right never believed in the principles they espoused. Rather, those principles were a figleaf to cover their lust for power and their inherent bigotry. I think the most damning thing I can say about these Benedict Arnold conservatives is that they ultimately have proven the left correct when, back in the pre-Trump days, leftists would hurl the insult that every conservative was just a closeted fascist. Yeah, it now looks to be that way for all but the roughly 5% of us who have held to our faith; who have opposed Trump since 2016 with the "Never Trump" movement.  

David Brooks recently wrote an excellent piece for The Atlantic that I encourage everyone to read because it deals with the shocking hypocrisy that I have attempted to explore here but he does so with far more erudition. There is one passage that I strongly agree with, albeit I think his division between 'conservative' and 'reactionary' is merely an attempt to salvage the conservative movement from the inevitable trashbin of history that awaits the MAGA right. Putting that aside, he writes: 

There were two kinds of people in our movement back then, the conservatives and the reactionaries. We conservatives earnestly read Milton Friedman, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and Edmund Burke. The reactionaries just wanted to shock the left. We conservatives oriented our lives around writing for intellectual magazines; the reactionaries were attracted to TV and radio. We were on the political right but had many liberal friends; they had contempt for anyone not on the anti-establishment right. They were not pro-conservative—they were anti-left. I have come to appreciate that this is an important difference.

I am often reminded of the Gospel of Mathew 26: 41 where Jesus warns his disciples to "Watch and pray that you may not undergo the test. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” In many ways, Trump was a test to see if conservative faith was as strong as often boasted. Unfortunately, as with Peter, they have been found wanting. Mark Levin would often shout how conservatives would never elect a morally corrupt person like Bill Clinton, but then Levin rallies around a man who was caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women. Glenn Beck would weave wild conspiracy theories about Obama preparing concentration camps for his opponents ('camps' that were later easily revealed to be FEMA-staging depots) but is now silent about Trump sending innocent people to an actual concentration camp in El Salvador, in defiance of a court order, no less. It is all reminiscent of how easily fascism was normalized in Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here:

Why are you so afraid of the word 'Fascism,' Doremus? Just a word—just a word! And might not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours—not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini—like Napoleon or Bismarck in the good old days—and have 'em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous again. 'Nother words, have a doctor who won't take any back-chat, but really boss the patient and make him get well whether he likes it or not!"

If nothing else, I can hold my head high and say I passed the test. That what I declared to be pre-Trump, which is to say a Reagan/Buckley conservative who believes in free trade, free markets, and in liberty and justice for all, remains what I believe now. I have not turned my colors, have not become a moral relativist of the sort that left-wing activist Saul Alinsky proclaimed himself to be. The putative conservatives of MAGA, on the other hand, have been revealed to be a rancid combination of stooping hypocrisy and shifting morality, of bankrupt anti-intellectualism, and purveyors of farce and fraud.  

I, and others like me, have formed the kernel of resistance to American fascism, and of that, I will always be proud. The Benedict Arnolds of "conservative" MAGA, on the other hand, will, as sure as the sun rises tomorrow, be as shamefaced when this madness passes as the German people were at the end of the bloody Third Reich.  I intend to see to it...