Guilty Of The Tectonic Misleading Of Their Subscribers
If you’re not a regular reader of the Wall Street Journal editorial page— universally known (unlike The Journal’s mainstream news coverage) for its zealous embrace and propagation of far right orthodoxy— or the work of right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, you might not be aware of conservative historian Allen Guelzo. The Journal certainly never identifies him as a right-winger when they feature his work, as they did on Friday: Did Trump Just Win A Tectonic Election? by far right in-house propagandist James Taranto.
Taranto and Guelzo have cooked up some cockamamie narrative that places Trump, little more than a historical guttersnipe, into a category with 3 of the most significant presidents: Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and FDR, not policy-wise, but because of their impact on the political direction of the country in their wake.
For instance, ”Guelzo characterizes Lincoln’s GOP, like Trump’s, as a working-class party. ‘People underestimate how deeply threatened workers in the free states felt by the possibility of competition with slave laborers,’ he says. ‘Those weren’t bankers and lawyers. They were 22- and 23-year-olds just trying to get a start— clerking, doing office work, farming. They understood slavery to be a direct threat.’ Our discussion concludes with an appeal to Lincoln, but this one is more an aspiration than a parallel. Guelzo says he hopes Trump’s victory ‘is not something which affords a temptation for retribution and revenge.’ Although Democrats pursued Trump and his supporters with criminal prosecutions and lawsuits, ‘I really think one of the best things that the new administration could do, both for itself and for others, would be a kind of amnesty,’ he says. ‘Somewhere along the line, you have to say, Malice toward none, charity for all.’”
He forgot to mention that the Justice system— not “the Democrats”— “pursued Trump and his supporters with criminal prosecutions and lawsuits” because they are criminals who broke laws. As for Trump’s GOP being a working class party, don’t make me laugh, although this kind of complete nonsense if typical of The Journal’s editorial page. Guelzo's characterization completely glosses over the reality that Trump's policies consistently favor the wealthy and corporate interests at the expense of the working class. From tax cuts benefiting billionaires, attempts to gut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, etc to deregulation that prioritizes profits over worker safety and consumer protection, Trump's economic record contradicts any notion of authentic working-class advocacy. His appeal to working-class voters strictly relies on cultural grievances rather than material benefits, a tactic designed to divide and distract from policies that ultimately harm the very people he claims to champion.
Guelzo told Taranto that he “was at first inclined to think of this election simply as a repudiation election” but now he offers a very different interpretation, “that Trump’s victory might be a ‘tectonic election’— one that marks a permanent structural change in the American electorate and political parties. He characterizes only three past elections as tectonic—1800, when Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams and the Federalist Party quickly withered; 1860, when Lincoln’s victory established the Republicans as a major party that would dominate presidential politics for seven decades; and 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt trounced Herbert Hoover and cemented the modern Democratic coalition.”
Not only is this interpretation for the Princeton historian premature and overly speculative, it flies in the face of demonstrated reality and Trump's puny electoral win is better understood as the result of structural flaws in the electoral system, rather than a wholesale realignment of political coalitions. He and Taranto also fail to address the impact of Democratic complacency and strategic missteps, such as nominating a candidate like Harris without effectively countering GOP narratives.
Guelzo acknowledged that Trump’s narrow non-majority win was no landslide “in terms of numbers,” but he claims “a landslide morally speaking. What I mean by that is that the DNC was running against a presidential candidate that everybody was convinced was unelectable against nearly anyone. They could have put up almost any candidate and the confidence was that the country was simply not going to buy the idea of a return of Donald Trump to the White House.”
“Guelzo sees the plates shifting: ‘It was not just one of these throw-the-bums-out elections. Really big, vital Democratic constituencies shifted, especially among younger voters. And I think if there’s one really big thing which seems to have emerged out of this election, it’s a really decisive shift from race to class.’ Trump’s working-class appeal has shaken the Democrats’ support from ethnic minorities.” Bah… Their framing of Trump's historically narrow win as a “shift from race to class” in political alignment, is deeply flawed. Trump's rhetoric and policies have consistently exploited racial divisions, from demonizing immigrants to supporting voter suppression efforts that disproportionately affect minorities. Any gains among minority voters, particularly younger ones, should be analyzed critically— which neither of these two went near. Are these shifts the result of genuine support for Trump’s policies or a failure of the Democratic Party to deliver on progressive economic and social reforms?
Believe it or not Guelzo, wrote Taranto “thinks the president-elect has changed. In 2016, ‘nobody was less prepared for his election than Donald Trump himself. And his first presidency was just, even before it began, was plagued by all kinds of internal confusion.’ Trump is now ‘sadder but wiser… and I think he is determined that this time the election should be a tectonic one.’ In other words, he wants to govern in a way that ensures the shifts in the electorate are permanent. ‘MAGA won a campaign, but a single campaign is not tectonic,’ Guelzo says. ‘MAGA has to realize that the 2028 election started on Nov. 6, so they’ve got to ask themselves: Is everything that we do— is it producing results? Is it producing results for the constituencies who came our way in 2024?”
He acknowledges that his hypothesis about this having been a tectonic election will be tested over time. And Taranto wrote that “The test consists of two parts: ‘First of all, there have to be repeated losses,’ in this case for the Democrats.” Well, the three special elections in Virginia last week proved the opposite. The two blue districts voted bluer than they had in November and the red district voted considerably less red than it had in November. In other words, all three Republicans did worse than Trump.
For the election to have been tectonic, Señor T will have to deliver results, his weak point. Guelzo thinks he’ll “attempt to deliver them in three broad areas. ‘One is a redirection of the entire economy.’ He sees the debate over immigration through this lens: ‘That’s why the whole business over H-1B visas has blown up the way it has, because we’re not really talking about immigration. We’re talking about the economy and who has access to success and growth in the economy. The second is ‘a major reordering of foreign policy.’ Guelzo sees Trump as following in the footsteps of Robert Taft, who held what is now JD Vance’s Ohio Senate seat from 1939 until his death in 1953. ‘Taft was one of the last major American politicians who really thought that, like [John] Quincy Adams said, going in search of monsters was a big mistake.’ Guelzo reckons that Trump is ‘very serious about disengagement’ and ‘wants to push that clock on foreign policy way, way back, even to before the assumptions and the consensus of the Cold War. That will likely mean ‘an end of the war in Ukraine with some kind of negotiated settlement,’ Guelzo says— but not a surrender to Vladimir Putin. He will claim victory, but ‘everybody knows the Russians failed militarily.’ Guelzo thinks that failure will curb the imperial appetite of the Russian dictator, whom he assigns a Trump-style nickname: ‘I have no respect whatsoever for little Mr. Weasel Face. In my mind, he is almost beneath contempt. But I think that so many embarrassing reverses have occurred on his watch, I don’t think he’s going to be eager to invite that kind of thing happening again anytime soon.’”
Sorry, but in reality, Trump's foreign policy record shows a pattern of chaotic decision-making driven by personal and political calculations rather than principled isolationism. Any “negotiated settlement” in Ukraine under Trump would likely come at a significant cost to global stability and democracy, especially given his history of appeasing autocrats like Putin. And, Putin has shown he knows how to play Trump like a violin and is likely to get the best of him in this.
“Trump’s third major ambition,” wrote Taranto, “is the one he has assigned to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency. Guelzo suggests that’s a bit of a misnomer: ‘DOGE is not so much about the budget. It’s about disempowering the bureaucracy that is fed by the budget, and that’s also a clock-turner.’ It would ‘turn things back to the days of Woodrow Wilson.’ That won’t be easy, Guelzo says, ‘because so much of the modern economy is wrapped up with the federal bureaucracy.’ Agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration and the Food and Drug Administration serve vital functions, even if their performance is lacking. ‘If this disempowerment is not very fine-tuned, it’s going to backfire. And the backfire could undo everything that Trump would like to have done in terms of the election having a tectonic result.’”
The idea of turning back the clock to pre-Cold War or even just pre-New Deal governance, as he’s suggesting, is a dangerous fantasy. The federal bureaucracy, for all its flaws, plays a critical role in regulating industries, protecting public health, and ensuring worker and consumer safety. Trump’s and Musk’s plans to gut agencies under the guise of “efficiency” are a recipe for unchecked corporate power, environmental degradation, and a weaker social safety net.
Taranto also noted that Trump’s revenge jihad could backfire. Guelzo, a bit of a fool, said he’s hoping for Lincolnian charity” and said that Lincoln “asked us to see what we have gone through as a way of understanding our own shortcomings, and it was out of that understanding that he could exhort people to have malice toward none and charity for all.”
This call for amnesty and charity flies in the face of Trump’s entire being and life’s work, certainly since Roy Cohn took him under his wing. There’s no evidence whatsoever to suggest that his governing style has changed even slightly. His administration remains defined by corruption, nepotism, and incompetence. Appointing figures like Matt Gaetz, Kash Patel, Stephen Miller, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Russ Vought, Pam Bondi, Tom Homan, David Sacks… signals a continuation of weaponizing the Justice Department and the entire apparatus of government for partisan retribution, undermining any pretense of the “malice toward none” ethos Guelzo invokes.
The whole piece reflects a conservative effort to elevate Trump's win into a historical watershed, obscuring the anti-democratic methods that helped secure his victory. The reasoning behind it is a mess that may skate by in conservative academic circles and be laughed at by anyone using critical reasoning. Guelzo’s assertions do not hold up to historical contextualization— his own field— let alone the structural analysis of the the systemic factors— economic inequality, racial hierarchies, weakened democratic institutions— that enabled Trump's rise again.
This is the kind of nonsense that will appeal to dumber than shit americans. But all media has been targeting dumber than shit americans, hasn't it, for about 50 years. And it works. Why? Because americans are just plain dumber than shit.
you can't fix stupid... but you sure can use it to your advantage.
This shithole is proof.