A victim of its own ambitions, the Republican party has a choice to make; commit suicide by mistaking Donald Trump’s election as some kind of mandate to adopt populist policies, or stay true to conservatism.
In a not so surprising and UN-Republican move, Donald Trump issued to the public his version of an extensive policy paper. In a scathing and detailed rebuke to capitalism, The Donald issued on Sunday a presidential threat on Twitter to every American corporation thinking of making the strategic business decision of shifting jobs to overseas factories. He warned every company moving jobs overseas that they would automatically be slapped with a 35% tariff.
In making his case for the “policy”, Mr. Trump showed that he, like most Americans on the right and left, hasn’t really grasped the main reasons for manufacturing job losses in America. Offering a future corporate tax rate to rival that of most states sales taxes, he believes it to be incentive and reason enough to keep manufacturing jobs in the U.S. As so many economist and journalist have already noted exhaustively, most of the manufacturing job losses in America have been due to modernization and automation. Even in cases where American companies have decided to return production to the U.S., they don’t bring back all of the jobs. They usually have been able to return jobs to the U.S. only after automation has taken over most of the production process making the costs feasible.
Useless facts and reason aside, it appears that Donald Trump will continue to pursue, at least in public, his populist policies. The question then becomes, are Republicans afraid of him enough to pull the trigger on the gun they hold to their own heads? The fact is that if they choose to support his anti-capitalistic and populist policies of tariffs and unchecked deficits, the republican party will be admitting that their platform is dead. They will signal loud and clear that deficits, national debt, and free markets are as irrelevant as the Republican party will be the second they concede. The sound will be of bullet being fired into the heart of the party and its ideology.