Jack Kemp was a maverick and, in many ways, the first Republican-Populist—a one-man movement who loved people from all walks of life. He would doubtless be pleased by the 2024 Trump coalition.
It was 1988. My friend from high school, Dave, asked me if I would join him in running for Republican precinct delegate. I asked why I would ever want to do something like that. He explained that he was supporting a candidate for president. At that time—and for the only time—the Michigan GOP was employing a caucus system to determine the nomination. Consequently, if his candidate garnered more precinct delegates, they would then have the numbers to elect state convention delegates. There, these GOP state convention delegates would nominate his candidate for president.
I asked my friend who got him to run for this lowliest of (then) partisan elected positions. He said it was being organized by a young cat not much older than us, Andy, who had unsuccessfully run for state representative in a heavily Democrat district. I vaguely remembered the dude, and, having nothing better to do, I went door to door, collected my petition signatures, and during the primary, was elected.
Ultimately, Dave became my best man at my wedding, and Andy became a chief of staff in my congressional office. The candidate they supported for president, a U.S. Representative from New York, lost the Michigan caucus and the 1988 nomination and, alas, was never elected president.
I thought of the late Jack Kemp as the 2024 presidential election’s results became apparent. Donald Trump’s winning coalition included blue-collar voters, many of the Democrats, and made significant inroads with Hispanics and African-Americans, particularly young men. It was the very type of coalition Jack Kemp’s “progressive conservative” movement sought to create.
Mr. Kemp was elected to the House in a relatively Democratic district near Buffalo, for which he served nine terms. It was not his discourses on returning to the gold standard that were the secret to his success. Describing himself as a “bleeding-heart conservative,” Mr. Kemp once averred that “American society as a whole can never achieve the outer reaches of potential, so long as it tolerates the inner cities of despair.” In stating this case at the time, Mr. Kemp was a maverick and, in many ways, the first Republican-Populist—a one-man movement who loved people from all walks of life; and it was his courage, compassion, and empathy to go places and champion self-empowering policies for the dispossessed and disadvantaged in our urban communities, including African-Americans, Hispanics, and the working poor, that was his most winning attribute. It was an attribute in short supply in that era’s GOP establishment… as it is today.
Not surprisingly, then, Mr. Kemp once lamented how “there really has not been a strong Republican message to either the poor or the African American community at large.” Mr. Kemp would doubtless be pleased by the 2024 Trump coalition. While they may not align on issues such as immigration, Mr. Trump’s consistent outreach and appeal to blue-collar voters, minority communities, and non-traditional GOP voters certainly furthered Mr. Kemp’s vision of a broader “progressive conservative” Republican coalition and eventual political realignment.
Importantly, in the 1980s, “progressive” had not been co-opted by the left as it has been today. In the U.S. House, Rep. Kemp was a true Reaganite, as stout in the defense of his principles on the floor of the House as he was staring down a defense on a gridiron as a quarterback for the Buffalo Bills in the old American Football League. For the young among us, he was the Kemp of the Kemp-Roth tax cuts that spurred the economic renaissance of the Reagan years after the stagflation and malaise of the Carter administration.
Indeed, Mr. Kemp once proclaimed, “I unabashedly, unashamedly, unequivocally support the explosion of entrepreneurs in the capitalist system.” How many of today’s self-proclaimed “progressives” would dare utter the same?
No, the “progressive” aspect of Mr. Kemp’s “progressive conservative” movement was more akin to that of Russell Kirk’s philosophy: conservatives progress civilization by ameliorating those societal ills that are within the power of a flawed humanity to accomplish by utilizing the verities of the ages as a guide and preserving the “permanent things” that comprise a virtuous, felicitous life.
And there it is. The enduring belief undergirding and instructing both today’s MAGA/Republican-Populist movement and the earlier “progressive conservatism.” As Mr. Kemp enunciated and exemplified: “There’s no limit to what free men and free women in a free market with free enterprise can accomplish when people are free to follow their dream.”
Their American Dream.
Thank you, Mr. Kemp.
