The docent said that about a quarter of the visitors to the Nixon Library are from China. The Chinese remember Nixon as the president whose visit helped to open up China to the rest of the world; Nixon visited China in the early 1970s and by the end of the 1970s, Deng Xiaoping had become China’s leader. Deng would begin the economic changes that began China’s amazing economic growth and opened it up to the rest of the world.
From the time of Lincoln – their first president – to about WWII, Republicans were focused on a domestic policy of making ours an industrial rather than agricultural economy. After WWII, Republicans were focused on a foreign policy of spreading capitalism to the rest of the world.
Eisenhower’s Marshall Plan helped to rebuild Europe and Japan after WII. Nixon visited China. Reagan stood in Berlin and told Gorbachev “Bring down this wall.” Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq, promising to make it a beacon of democracy and capitalism.
But a curious thing happened.
As Republicans were busily exporting policies for an industrial economy to the rest of the world, that industrial economy was – like the agricultural economy before it – being eclipsed by a new economy.
Trump’s policy seems weird but has an odd kind of logic seen from this perspective. It is quite possible that in his mind, seeing that the industrial economy has been successfully exported around the world (particularly in China), it is now his job to revive the domestic policy of creating an industrial economy here. This shift in focus to foreign countries has caused us to lose the industrial economy that made us great, made us a world power. It is his mission to recreate it.
But of course, the Republicans are where the Democratic Party was at the time of Lincoln: promoting policies for an economy already eclipsed. At the time of Lincoln, the agricultural economy had been eclipsed by the industrial economy At the time of Trump, the industrial economy has been eclipsed by the information economy.
Republican identity is so bound with capitalism (which I would say is a crude synonym for industrial economy), that it is not clear that they can shift to a new identity now that their mission is done. In any case, reviving the past has never seemed a particularly effective way to create the future.
