How Donald Trump Changed the Future of the Right

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Conor Friedersdorf:

During the final year of the Bush Administration, I began to attend a series of panels and conferences on what would come next––what’s next, a moderator would ask,  for the Republican Party or the conservative movement or the American right? Another round of panels began after John McCain and Sarah Palin were defeated. “Whither Conservatism?” National Review asked at its post-election conference.

Looking back on perhaps a dozen panels as an audience member and half-a-dozen more as a participant, I recall deep disagreements about the less predictable half of U.S. politics. But I can’t recall anyone predicting what we’ve now seen: Donald Trump decisively defeating a field filled with movement conservatives; elected Republicans renouncing their party’s presumptive nominee; even a push among some to ignore primary results at the Republican convention.

So Tuesday, when I attended “Deep Dive: The Future of the Right” at The Aspen Ideas Festival, co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, I decided to deeply discount all predictions about the future, a posture that caused me to perk up when Kristen Soltis Andersen, a close observer of public opinion research, offered a bit of backward-looking analysis. This year’s Republican primaries showed “the notion that in order to win a primary you have to be the most conservative person possible got blown up a little bit,” she said with understatement.

There are a lot of Republican voters, she added, who aren’t looking for an ideological purity test from their preferred candidate so much as someone who gets where they are coming from emotionally, even if he says things that conventional wisdom regarded as fatal.

With months to go until the November election, it’s far too early to know who will win the White House. And the fate of Trump––or his replacement, on the off-chance he is ousted or drops out––will have such a powerful affect on the future of the right that forecasting it today is even more difficult than it was in bygone years when we all got it wrong.

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But as always liberal wanks will always compar the right to Hitler even though hitler was a Liberal

There are a lot of Republican voters, she added, who aren’t looking for an ideological purity test from their preferred candidate so much as someone who gets where they are coming from emotionally, even if he says things that conventional wisdom regarded as fatal

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In other words, someone who expands or even breaks the Overton Window that constrains political speech into liberal talking points that only liberals can win.
Just yesterday, Obama was seeking to shrink that Overton Window by warning Americans that only HE knows the real definition of a ”Populist.”
He’s previously done the same thing with what ”marriage” is, what it means to be a ”Christian,” and a ”Moslem.”
But he and the liberals have lost control of the narrative due to firebrands such as Mark Steyn, Milo Yiannopolis and Donald Trump.
They don’t just ignore his calls for how to define reality, they openly laugh at his PC constraints to language.
Donald Trump has changed the future of the Right by liberating it from a losing PC language for debate.
Will the ideological right work with a Donald Trump, or will their globalist-open borders tendencies push them into the arms of the left instead? We will see more George Wills.
more strange bedfellows as this campaign goes on.
The elites are few (by definition.)
The people are many.

@Nanny G: To me it’s funny. You are old enough to remember when Repubs were considered the ladies and gentlemen in the political spectrum, with the Dems. being the uncouth masses.
Now your Party are the loud politically incorrect rabble rousers–things have changed. lol
We should get quickly to Nov. After multi millions wasted degrading each other it will come down to a few thousand votes in 3-5 states—what a waste–an awful choice.

@Richard Wheeler: You are old enough to remember when Repubs were considered the ladies and gentlemen in the political spectrum, with the Dems. being the uncouth masses.
Now your Party are the loud politically incorrect rabble rousers–things have changed.

You get it, Richard!
Staying inside the Overton window is a losing situation for the non-liberal crowd of voters and candidates.
Even many Democrats are realizing that the Overton Window has shrunk to the point where their particular issues are being shunted aside.
See how gays on the Left suddenly realized that their victimhood status was lower-to-non-existent compared with Moslems’ victimhood status.
All of a sudden you see the emergence of gay gun advocates, gay Republicans, gay conservatives.
An old Republican once noted that many conservatives were ex-liberals who had been ”mugged by reality.”
The Pulse shooting in Orlando, FLA was just such a mugging for the gay community.

@Nanny G: So Trump has shattered the Overton Window?
As in “That’s not a lady. That’s a Republican.”

Don’t think Pride Parades in L.A S.F and O.C had meaningful increase of pistol packing gays–though increase of police on hand—Log Cabin Repubs remain a lonely group.

@Nanny G;

“How Donald Trump Changed RUINED the Future of the Right”

“There are a lot of Republican voters, she added, who aren’t looking for an ideological purity test from their preferred candidate so much as someone who gets where they are coming from emotionally”

Evidently the republican base has morphed into a pregnant woman whose hormones are severely out of balance. Since when did hysteria become a valid ideological position?

“All of a sudden you see the emergence of gay gun advocates, gay Republicans, gay conservatives.”

No, Sweetie, not “all of a sudden”. Gays have ALWAYS had guns. (Some of mine have rusted, it’s been so long since I oiled them regularly.) And Gay Republicans (and gay conservatives, too) were always there… IN THE CLOSET.

“The Pulse shooting in Orlando, FLA was just such a mugging for the gay community.”

No again, NG. Gays have a LONG history of being violently persecuted by EVERYONE – including Democrats – and this instance was no different. Either we are someone’s excuse for violence, or else someone has a political or RELIGIOUS excuse to visit violence on gays. Either way, it’s always “justified” in the mind of the perpetrator.

@Richard Wheeler:

Now your Party are the loud politically incorrect rabble rousers

So, you think that was the Republican mobs at Occupy Wall Street a couple years ago? And you think that’s Republicans conducting the mobs outside the Trump rallies? And I guess you think Al Sharpton has moved over to the republican party? Name one Republican rabble rouser, just one.

@Richard Wheeler:

Don’t think Pride Parades in L.A S.F and O.C

You did carry your rainbow flags with you, didn’t you?