You might have gotten the feeling that—putting aside the legal cheating through mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting—the real enemy of the red wave in 2022 wasn’t Democrats but was, instead, Republicans. According to Sundance, writing at The Conservative Treehouse, if you had that feeling, you’re right on the money. According to him, we’re witnessing an all-out civil war in the Republican party that’s going to escalate as we near the 2024 presidential election. The fight is over money: Is there an American economy that benefits the American people or is the future economy purely transnational for the benefit of the leadership class and power players in a world without economic borders?

Sundance’s post is here, and I strongly recommend you read the whole thing. However, to the extent that it’s a long essay, I’ll try to summarize some of the high points. Sundance begins by explaining that the political parties are corporations that exist, not for the voter’s benefit, but for the corporations’ benefit—and the core issue, always, is money.

Currently, the MAGA and RINO factions are fighting it out within the Republican corporation. This is an existential battle for the RINOs, who currently control the party. They didn’t care about the red wave in 2022 because they were focused on driving the MAGA wing out of the party. When they occasionally bow towards the MAGA crowd, “every move they make on an operational level is exactly in line with their previous outlook toward cocktail class republicanism.  The MAGA base of support cannot trust this corporate group and we must not be blind or unguarded about the Machiavellian schemes they construct.”

Image: Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell (cropped) by Senate Democrats. CC BY 2.0.

The ultimate issue in the civil war, of course, isn’t cocktail parties—it’s money: For whose benefit is America’s economic policy? The People or the parties? Sundance sums it up this way:

Well, at a national level there is a unique policy priority that almost every politician, on both sides, will avoid discussing.  At a national level a single policy priority determines all other national policy outlooks.  That policy is the national economic policy.

The national economic policy of a presidential candidate determines all other national policies that flow from the presidential candidate.  The national economic policy impacts the obvious policies like energy and trade, and also determines the lesser obvious policies like regulation and even foreign policy.

It is specifically because a candidate’s national economic outlook impacts all other issues, that most national politicians never talk about it.

We’ve already seen the president’s power over economic policy with Biden’s attack on fossil fuels, which is steadily destroying America’s economy, bankrupting the American people, decreasing our standing in the world, and weakening our national security. These are all leftist ends, and they’re using fossil fuels as the means (with climate change madness meant to force Americans to acquiesce to their destruction).

What Trump did was something no American politician had ever done; namely, he put his economic policy at the center of his presidency, something that affected national security, border security, energy policies, etc. Writes Sundance,

President Trump broke the rule and even went so far as to campaign on an America First economic policy agenda.  That core outlook forms the Make America Great Again foundation.  MAGA is based on a national economic policy outlook that determines every other national policy as carried by President Trump.

[snip]

President Trump was the first presidential candidate who campaigned on a domestic national economic policy.  He even went one step further and stated the T-word, tariffs.  Yes, the commerce department holds tools to support a national economic policy.

[snip]

Making America Great Again, was an outcome of national economic policy.  At its core, MAGA is a national economic dynamic within a political movement that is represented by President Donald J Trump.

It is critical to understand, the MAGA economic policy is essentially a national policy completely, and uniquely, under the control of the office of the President.  The impact to the lives of Americans is a direct outcome from national economic policy.  If a president wants to lead an independently wealthy country, he/she applies a very specific economic outlook to all other policy areas including energy, regulation and foreign policy.

While it’s obvious that Democrats fundamentally oppose a prosperous America what flies under the radar is that the Republican party when under RINO control does too. For America’s connected, powerful, and political, true wealth, on a scale most of us can imagine, doesn’t exist anymore with a purely “America first” economic policy. Instead, only transnationalism brings the wealth and power they crave.

There’s lots more in Sundance’s article. It has an Occam’s Razor quality, explaining in relatively simple terms a lot of Republican actions that make no sense if you naively believe the GOP is the pro-American, liberty-oriented party.