ARTICLE AD BOX
"To those observing from the outside, it is obvious that people who sign up for Trumpism completely transform themselves. Free marketers become protectionists, secularists become 'culture-war Christians,' people who once sang paeans to the Constitution become advocates of one-man rule. Most disturbingly, people who used to talk in old Reaganite terms about the positive contributions of immigrants now delight in the administration’s performative cruelty toward immigrants. Look at Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban refugees who is now the chief enforcer of the administration’s arbitrary detention of foreigners.
"Compared to that, I have been an island of stability. ... [W]hile my background would have been described as being 'on the right—back when that meant something different—I was never a conservative and not even quite a libertarian. For the general reader, I usually described myself as a 'secular free-marketer,' and that’s still true. But the context of the times has changed, and the main fault line in American politics is very different from what it was ten or fifteen years ago. ...
"I’ve been talking for a while about how I suspect we’re in the middle of a vast new political realignment, and that has now crystallised. The new political spectrum isn’t left versus right. It’s liberalism versus authoritarianism."
~ Robert Tracinski from his post 'How I Changed, Or: How I Became a Mugwump'
English (US) ·