>>508531210(part 2) While Trump deserves credit for his 2016 campaign - especially his willingness to defy political taboos around immigration - he didnโt invent the core ideas of the America First movement. Many of them are positions which were orthodox before the 1970s, i.e. before the party became kiked by free-market absolutism and (((neoconservatism))), and some principles even predate the existence of the US as a country.
Restricting immigration? That was the Republican norm from Coolidge through Eisenhower.
Protecting domestic industry? That was the policy of McKinley and Taft.
Skepticism of foreign entanglements? That was standard among conservatives before the Cold War militarized everything.
Opposition to the Israeli lobby? An acceptable position before the 1970s in older, WASP-dominated segments of the party.
You can trace these principles back to the Old Tory movement in England, Renaissance realism and even Aristotle, who taught that the polis must regulate who enters its community, that a nationโs economic life should be ordered toward self-sufficiency, and that the good life requires peace and internal order more than imperial expansion. Even oikonomia (household management) - from which we get โeconomicsโ - was about ordering production and consumption for the sake of the family and the city, not profit for its own sake.
What Trump did was resurrect these positions, give them a populist voice, and reveal just how much of a golem the GOP had become. But the ideology itself - economic nationalism, demographic realism, and strategic restraint - long predates him.
Therefore, the current movement is not about Trump as a man but about restoring continuity with an older Western political tradition that valued sovereignty, industry, and rootedness over empire, markets, and abstract ideology.