The 2024 presidential election would seem to give Americans the choice between the extreme left and the extreme right. Donald Trump, according to various Democrats, is an arch-conservative threat to democracy, a racist, oppressive, authoritarian fascist who would outlaw abortion, repeal gay marriage, and impose a theocratic dictatorship.
But Batya Ungar-Sargon, an opinion editor with Newsweek, offers a different take on Trump in the iconoclastic UK magazine Spiked, with her article The Truth about Trump? He’s a Moderate.
She focuses not on Trump’s abrasive personality but on his actual policies:
Far from being far right or extremist, Trump’s policy agenda is extremely moderate. Much of it wouldn’t be foreign to a Nineties-era Democrat. He believes abortion should be legal up to 15 weeks. He supports gay marriage. He’s courting labour unions. He believes immigration drives down working-class wages. He’s pursuing the black vote. He wants trade with China to favour the American worker – not the Chinese elites – and has proposed a 10 per cent blanket tariff on all foreign imports.
Indeed, it’s not despite Trump’s moderate agenda that his adversaries have sought to paint him in extremist terms. It’s because he has effectively co-opted some of the Democrats’ long-abandoned pro-worker policies.
She discusses Trump’s repudiation of Project 2025, crafted by the traditionally conservative Heritage Foundation, which offered proposals to cut the deficit, ban the abortion pill, cut Medicare, privatize government functions, and implement other conservative ideas at every level of the federal government. And though Democrats have tried to pin Project 2025 to Trump, he himself has utterly rejected it.
She also points to the Republican Platform, whose rejection at Trump’s behest of the traditional G.O.P. plank on opposing abortion she describes as “an astonishing development. It is basically the equivalent of the Democrats leaving fighting climate change off their own platform.”
She concludes that Trump’s beliefs, including his refusal to reject abortion, simply mirror those of average working class Americans:
On the whole, the agenda reflects a great deal of what ordinary working people want. It promises to end inflation and the outsourcing of manufacturing. It wants to ‘make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far’. It calls for ‘large tax cuts for workers’, rebuilding America’s cities, keeping trans athletes out of women’s sports and cancelling electric-vehicle mandates – all policy proposals popular with most Americans. Vitally, it promises to ‘fight for and protect social security and Medicare with no cuts, including no changes to the retirement age’. This is another departure from Project 2025 in favour of Trump’s working-class constituents.
“Stripped of mendacious liberal talking points,” she concludes, “this is the platform of a unity candidate.” Democrats demonize him, she says, because he has taken their issues and what was once their working class base. Today the party is dominated by a very different kind of ideology: the “identity politics” fixated on race, sex, and gender favored by the Democrats’ new base of the affluent, well-educated elite.
The liberal media have cast Trump as an extremist because the truth is so much more threatening. In policy terms, he is a moderate, even a liberal, who has assumed the kind of agenda that would have been very familiar to a Democrat 50 years ago. His base isn’t right-wing fanatics. It’s the vast, multiracial, deeply tolerant working class, many of whom were Democrats in the recent past – in some cases, the very recent past. That is the real affront the Democratic elites cannot forgive him for.
What do you think of Ungar-Sargon’s thesis, that Trump is a moderate? What about Trump or his policies is actually conservative?
His nationalism? Trump wants to make America great again. But cold-war Democrats like John F. Kennedy were also highly patriotic. But today the new Left is denigrating America’s history and its culture. Trump is certainly the polar opposite of that mindset. In that sense, he is conservative.
Just as Democrats have changed liberalism–which used to mean championing the working class–into woke intersectionality that reduces society to a network of oppression, Trump has changed conservatism. Now Trumpian conservatives are championing the working class and are defying the left’s new identity fixations.
However, if we go by normal policy standards, Trump is a moderate. That means he is not the threat that the left is making him out to be. But it also explains why traditional pro-life, pro-fiscal responsibility, pro-free-market, pro-religion conservatives have qualms about him.
Photo by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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