Copyright The New York Times
Republicans took a beating pretty much everywhere this week. President Trump was not on the ballot, but a good part of the blame can and should be laid at his feet. The second Trump administration has given the country 10 months of relentless power grabs, a globally disruptive trade war and, most recently, a demolition project at the White House — all while an inexorably rising cost of living continues to weigh on American workers. The result? A presidential approval rating that has plummeted from already middling levels. It would not be unreasonable for Republicans contemplating the midterms and beyond to wonder about the long-term viability of Mr. Trump’s distinctive brand of right-wing populism. The previous former celebrity to hold the presidency — Ronald Reagan — remains a revered figure in the party. Reaganism is still an article of faith for many conservatives. We actually got a glimpse of this vision recently in an odd place — in a Canadian anti-tariff ad. It offered Reagan’s sunny vision of the country: a shining city on a hill that welcomed immigrants, defended democracy (and free trade) around the world and cut taxes and streamlined regulations without gutting the federal government. Republicans may very well find themselves reconsidering that vision as a path forward. It raises a big question for the G.O.P.: Could Mr. Trump prove to be a temporary aberration? Might the Republican Party return to its Reaganite essence once the man who has done so much to trash it finally leaves the Oval Office in a few years? In other words, is the future of the Republican Party Reaganism or Trumpism? The answer, I’m afraid, is most likely Trumpism. Viewed in the long arc of American political history, it’s the Reaganite dispensation that appears to be an aberration. The period stretching from the Cold War, and especially Reagan’s election in 1980, through the presidency of George W. Bush and the candidacies of John McCain and Mitt Romney, was an unusual and fleeting moment of moderation and responsibility for the G.O.P. It was provoked and inspired by the sense of threat and moral clarity of the Cold War and its immediate aftermath. Before (and occasionally during) this period, the American right was animated by something much darker — a spirit of furious reaction to modern liberalism, an unwillingness to countenance compromise with the realities of governing a sprawling continentwide commercial nation and a conviction that political wisdom lay in the country’s turning inward and indulging a temptation toward self-absorption. That’s where the Republican Party — and the sizable portion of the country that supports it — have now returned. Any serious effort to think through what’s likely to follow the Trump presidency needs to grapple with these potent and persistent strands in the right’s political DNA. In 1952, the Republican Party faced a stark and fateful choice. Senator Robert Taft of Ohio ran for president advocating an agenda that rejected much of what had happened in the country over the previous two decades. His campaign was the last gasp of the Old Right that had risen during the 1930s in angry defiance of the New Deal. The Democrats, led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, vastly expanded the size and scope of the federal government in response to the Great Depression, then went on to defeat the Axis powers in World War II and begin the Cold War. Mr. Taft disdained it all. His campaign came out strongly against labor unions, the welfare state that emerged from the New Deal, the newly initiated Cold War and the freshly founded NATO alliance. Mr. Taft promised a return to the pro-business, laissez-faire, go-it-alone unilateralism of the pre-F.D.R. Harding, Coolidge and Hoover administrations. In making his case to his party and the electorate, Mr. Taft drew on arguments forged by writers like Garet Garrett, a prominent columnist for the Saturday Evening Post, who accused F.D.R. of creating a “vast, dictatorial bureaucracy” that “crippled the free competitive system that was working in this country.” Mr. Garrett likewise opposed American involvement in the Second World War on the grounds that doing so would lead us to lose “our sense of separate destiny” as a country. Ultimately, the G.O.P. decided to turn its back on Mr. Taft’s Old Right rejectionism in favor of nominating Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike made peace with and consolidated the New Deal and accepted the legitimacy of the Cold War and waged it with relative restraint. The president also used federal troops to enforce school desegregation after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, in part to give the free world and its Communist rivals a lesson in what it meant to abide by the rule of law. The historian Samuel Moyn has argued that liberal postwar opposition to Communism had the effect of undermining the left — it encouraged liberals to hew to the ideological center so they could preside over a broad-based national consensus against the threat. But something very similar took place on the American right, opening it to the ideological center, reconciling it to the existence of the welfare state and encouraging it to embrace the internationalism of military alliances, free markets and trade, and the free movement of people across borders. The Old Right furies didn’t ever disappear entirely. They were a significant presence in the New Right that William F. Buckley Jr. helped to forge at National Review beginning in the mid-1950s, just as they played a (mostly rhetorical) role in shaping the presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. But when it came to governance and policymaking, the harder, rejectionist right was usually relegated to the role of fringy junior partners in a predominantly center-right electoral coalition. Discontented factions on the right first began to rebel against their marginalization immediately after the end of the Cold War and demise of the Soviet Union, gathering in 1992 around Patrick Buchanan’s surprisingly potent primary challenge to Mr. Bush’s bid for re-election. As the writer John Ganz explains, Mr. Buchanan channeled ideas formulated by Samuel Francis, an irascible “paleoconservative” critic of the Reagan-Bush years who denounced both presidents and their cheerleaders for compromising far too much with the liberal drift of the country over the previous decades. Democrats, Mr. Francis claimed, had set up a spoils system for minorities and professional-managerial elites in the form of an administrative state that screwed over ordinary Americans. A fitting response by the right would involve seizing parts of the federal bureaucracy and dissolving others in order to advance the interests of “Middle American radicals” — Mr. Francis’s preferred moniker for members of the white working class — through a potent blend of nativism and nationalism. The next Republican to hold the White House — George W. Bush — held the fractious right together during the 2000 election by promising tax cuts, policy gains for conservative religious voters and a moratorium on “nation building” around the world. Sept. 11 scrambled this mix of priorities. But the administration’s bellicose response to that day’s shocking events — which included updating the Cold War script to portray the global war on terror as a battle for freedom against the enemies of civilization — largely satisfied the most rabid factions of the Republican base. Had a Democrat been president when Al Qaeda unleashed its attacks, the furiously reactive antiliberalism of the Old Right might have overwhelmed the G.O.P. more than a decade before it actually did. The kinds of voters with whom Mr. Buchanan’s message in 1992 resonated might have mobilized to denounce as treason anything short of much harsher measures against Muslim Americans and an even more strident turn against all forms of immigration. As it was, the presence of a Republican at the helm kept populist rage submerged — at least until it began to heat up in response to the financial crisis and Great Recession and then to boil over during the Obama administration, leading first to the Tea Party protest movement, then to surges of support for a series of outsider candidates during the 2012 Republican primaries, and then finally to wild-eyed enthusiasm for Donald Trump’s revival of Mr. Buchanan’s furious anti-system message a few years later. Ever since, we’ve been living in a world dominated by Mr. Trump and a newly emboldened hard right. The MAGA movement doesn’t just criticize regulatory overreach, so-called woke excesses on campuses and in the corporate sector, and the Democratic Party’s handling of immigration policy. It aspires to take a wrecking ball to the “administrative state” and career civil service, use extortionist threats to force ideological capitulation across civil society, deploy troops and a masked federal police force to round up and deport millions of immigrants, and bully other countries into submission to the president’s will. What unites the libertarian absolutists of the 1930s, the pugnacious paleoconservatives of the 1990s and today’s rage-and-sleaze-driven right-wing populists is the politics of reactive rejectionism. The president and his team despise everything associated with “the left,” display overt hostility to rules-based administrative regulation and favor a foreign policy of self-absorbed American unilateralism. When Mr. Trump eventually exits the stage, the more personalistic dimensions of his rule — above all, its most breathtaking examples of corruption — will likely recede as well. But much of the rest will remain, including a willingness to use sweeping state power to combat anyone who dares to defy the destructive impulses of the rejectionist Republican base. That, and not the Cold War-era ambition to reform the welfare state and construct an internationalist foreign policy, reveals the enduring nature and preoccupations of the American right. What might tame these reactive impulses is unclear, but doing so may be the G.O.P.’s, and the country’s, most pressing priority. If Republicans receive a drubbing in next year’s midterm elections in proportion to the one they suffered this past week, many in the party will begin to think more anxiously about where it should turn in 2028. Such thoughts (and second thoughts) will need to grapple seriously with the right’s longstanding dark currents that are part of our national character and cannot be willed or wished away.
