President Donald Trump waves to the audience after speaking at a campaign rally. Photo / AP
COMMENT:
Jonathan V. Last thinks President Donald Trump is here forever. Last, the editor of The Bulwark, a conservative website that's been hostile to Trump, argues that if Trump loses in November, he'll claim he was cheated out of the election. He'll force other Republicans to back up his claim. He'll get a TV show, hold rallies, be coy about running again in 2024.
He'll still be the centre of everything Republican. Ambitious Republicans will have to lash themselves to the husk of the dying czar if they want any future in the party. The whole party will go Trump-crazed and brain dead for another four years.
My guess is that if Trump gets crushed in the election, millions of Republicans will decide they never liked that loser and jerk anyway. He'll get relegated to whatever basement they are using to hold Sarah Palin. But something will remain: Trumpism.
The basic Trump worldview will shape the GOP for decades, the way the Reagan worldview did for decades. A thousand smarter conservatives will be building a new party after 2020, but one that builds from the framework Trump established. Trumpism will survive Trump because the history of the modern Republican Party is the history of paradigm shifts.
If you came of age with conservative values and around Republican politics in the 1980s and 1990s, you lived within a Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher paradigm. It was about limiting government, spreading democracy abroad, building dynamic free markets at home and cultivating people who are energetic, upright, entrepreneurial, independent-minded, loyal to friends and strong against foes.
For decades conservatives were happy to live in that paradigm. But as years went by many came to see its limits. It was so anti-government that it had no way to use government to solve common problems. It was so focused on cultivating strong individuals that it had no language to cultivate a sense of community and belonging. So, if you were right of centre, you leapt. You broke from the Reagan paradigm and tried to create a new conservative paradigm.
My own leap came early. On September 15, 1997, William Kristol and I wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal on what we called National Greatness Conservatism. We argued that the GOP had become too anti-government. "How can Americans love their nation if they hate its government?" we asked. Only a return to the robust American nationalism of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay and Theodore Roosevelt would do: ambitious national projects, infrastructure, federal programs to increase social mobility.
The closest National Greatness Conservatism came to influencing the party was John McCain's 2000 presidential bid. He was defeated by George W. Bush, who made his own leap to Compassionate Conservatism. This was an attempt to meld Catholic social teaching to conservatism.
There were many other leaps over the decades. Sam's Club Republicans, led by Reihan Salam and my Times colleague Ross Douthat, pointed a way to link the GOP to working-class concerns. Front Porch Republicans celebrated small towns and local communities. The Reformicons tried to use government to build strong families and neighbourhoods. The Niskanen Centre is an entire think tank for people who have leapt from libertarianism.
Most actual Republican politicians rejected all of this. They stuck, mostly through dumb inertia, to an anti-government zombie-Reaganism even though the nation's problems were utterly different from what they were when Reagan was alive. Year after year, GOP politicians clung to a dead paradigm, ran the same anti-Washington campaigns and had no positive governing philosophy once they got there.
Steve Bannon's leap finally did what none of us could do. Donald Trump and Bannon took a low-rent strand of conservatism — class-based ethnic nationalism — that had always been locked away in the basement of the American right, and overturned the Reagan paradigm.
Bannon and Trump got the emotions right. They understood Republican voters were no longer motivated by a sense of hope and opportunity; they were motivated by a sense of menace, resentment and fear. At base, many Republicans felt they were being purged from their own country — by the educated elite, by multiculturalism, by militant secularism.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump and Bannon discarded the Republican orthodoxy — entitlement reform, fiscal restraint, free trade, comprehensive immigration reform. They embraced a European-style blood-and-soil conservatism. Close off immigration. Close trade. We have nothing to offer the world and should protect ourselves from its dangers.
It would have been interesting if Trump had governed as a big-government populist. But he tossed Bannon out and handed power to Jared Kushner and a bunch of old men locked in the Reagan paradigm. We got bigotry, incompetence and tax cuts for the wealthy.
But by defeating the Reagan paradigm, Trump and Bannon gave permission to a lot of Republican politicians to make their own leaps. Over the past three years, it's been interesting to watch Republican officeholders break free from old orthodoxies and begin to think afresh. You could see their eyes get wider: suddenly I can think for myself. The range of possibilities is wider than I thought it was.
Their newfound liberation didn't extend to crossing Trump, but because the president's political vision isn't exactly what you'd call fleshed out, there's a lot of running room within his paradigm.
The post-2020, post-Trump Republican future is contained in those leaps. And that future is embodied by a small group of Republican senators in their 40s, including Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton and Ben Sasse. They all came of age when Reaganism was already in the rearview mirror. Though populist, three of them have advanced degrees from Harvard or Yale.
Each has a different vision of where the country should go, but they start with certain common Trumpian premises:
Everything is not okay. The free market is not working well. Wages are stagnant. Too much power is in the hands of the corporate elites. Middle America is getting screwed. Finance capitalism is unbalanced. American society is in abject decline. If Reaganism was "Let's be free," the new mood is "Take control".
Economic libertarianism is not the answer. Free markets alone won't solve our problems. GDP growth alone is not the be-all and end-all of politics. We need policies to shore up the conservative units of society — family, neighbourhood, faith, nation. We need policies that build solidarity, not just liberty.
The working class is the heart of the Republican Party. Once, businesspeople and entrepreneurs were at the centre of the Republican imagination. Now it's clear the party needs to stop catering to the corporate class and start focusing on the shop owners, the plumbers, the salaried workers. It needs to emphasise the dignity of work and honour those who are not trying to make millions, not looking for handouts, but just want to build middle-class lives in a stable social order. In Britain, the Conservative Party has built a majority around the working class, and that's what Republicans need to do here.
China changes everything. The rise of a 1.4-billion-person authoritarian superpower means that free trade no longer works because the Chinese are not playing by the same rules. The US government cannot just stand back and let China control the new technologies. "Republicans are going to have to get used to the idea of industrial policy to counter China, at least in a few key industries," Mike Gallagher, a rising star among House Republicans, told me.
Many of the post-Reagan positions seem like steps to the left. But these Republicans combine a greater willingness to use government with a greater hostility to the managerial class. The solution to too much corporate power is not handing power to Elizabeth Warren and a cloud of federal regulators. There's a difference between empowering workers and empowering the Washington elite.
From these common premises the four senators go off in different directions.
Rubio bases his vision in Catholic social teaching. A year ago, he wrote an essay for First Things titled, What Economics Is For, arguing that the purpose of markets is not growth but allowing each person to find dignity in work.
He followed that up with a speech at Catholic University calling for "common-good capitalism" (remember what I said about modifying phrases) in which he criticised contemporary capitalism for its obsessive focus on maximising shareholder value.
His basic position is that American capitalism has become too much about finance. It needs to be balanced toward manufacturing. He, too, supports a "pro-American industrial policy" to meet the Chinese challenge.
Hawley is the most populist of the group. His core belief is that middle-class Americans have been betrayed by elites on every level — political elites, cultural elites, financial elites. The modern leadership class has one set of values — globalisation, cosmopolitanism — and the Middle Americans have another set — family, home, rootedness, nation. Corporate elites have concentrated so much power that they now crush the yeomen masses.
Last November, Hawley gave a speech in which he sought to overturn the past 70 years of Republican foreign policy. He contended the right had erred in trying to spread American values abroad. "Imperial domination violates our principles and it threatens our character. Our aim must be to prevent imperialism, not to exercise it; to stop domination, not foster it," he said.
Cotton has a less developed political vision but a more developed attitude: hawkishness. Whether it's China, the left, immigration or Big Tech, Cotton is hawkish. He is the most vocal foe of the Chinese "pariah state". He wants sharp reductions in legal immigration.
Sasse is the most sociological of the crew. He is a Tocquevillian localist, who notes that most normal Americans go days without thinking of national politics. His vision is centred on the small associations — neighbourhood groups, high school football teams, churches and community centers — where people find their greatest joys, satisfactions and supports. Government's job, he says, is to "create a framework of ordered liberty" so that people can make their family and neighbourhood the centre of their lives.
He is the most suspicious of government and politics today. "I think politicians are arsonists," he told me over the phone last month. "The main thing the GOP does is try to light the Democrats on fire, and the main thing the Democrats do is light the Republicans on fire. That's why there's so little trust in politics."
Behind these public figures there is a posse of policy wonks and commentators supporting a new Working-Class Republicanism, including Oren Cass, Henry Olsen, JD Vance, Michael Brendan Dougherty, Saagar Enjeti, Samuel Hammond and, in his own way, Tucker Carlson.
Cass, for example, has created a new think tank, the American Compass, to push the GOP in a post-Trump direction. Cass, a former adviser to Mitt Romney, argues that free-market economists pay too much attention to GDP growth. What matters is the kind of growth and whether it allows people to lead stable lives. He says there's too much emphasis on consumption. People should be seen as producers, and government should create the kind of jobs that allow people to earn dignity through work.
He says the core of the economy is the industrial economy: manufacturing, transportation, infrastructure — making things in the physical world. Government needs to engage in "predistribution", to steer investment to manufacturing, and also to those middle American parts of the country that are currently left out.
"The American labour force cannot be changed into what the economy wants," Cass says. "We have to change the economy to what the American labour force can be successful in."
The Republican Party looks completely brain dead at every spot Trump directly reaches. Off in the corners, though, there's a lot of intellectual ferment on the right. But if there is one thing I've learned over the decades, it is never to underestimate the staying power of the dead Reagan paradigm.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page stands as a vigilant guardian of the corpse, eager to rebut all dissenters. Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador, and Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania are staunch defenders of Minimal-Government Conservatism. Senator Ted Cruz seems to be positioning himself for a 2024 presidential run that seeks to triangulate all the pre-Trump and pro-Trump versions of the party into one stew.
And if Joe Biden defeats Trump and begins legislating, as seems more and more likely, there's also the possibility that Republicans will abandon any positive vision and revert to being a simple anti-government party — a party of opposition to whatever Biden is doing.
But over the long term, some version of Working-Class Republicanism will redefine the GOP In the first place, that's where Republican voters are. When push comes to shove, Republican politicians are going to choose their voters over their donor class.
Second, the working-class emphasis is the only way out of the demographic doom loop. If the party sticks with its old white high school-educated base, it will die. They just aren't making enough old white men. To have any shot of surviving as a major party, the GOP has to build a cross-racial alliance among working-class whites, working-class Hispanics and some working-class blacks.
None of this works unless Republicans can deracialise their appeal — by which I mean they must stop pandering to the racists in the party and stop presenting themselves and seeing themselves as the party of white people — and wage a class struggle between diverse workers in their coalition and the highly educated coastal manager and professional class in the Democratic coalition.
Rubio, Hawley, Sasse and Cotton are inching toward a GOP future. What are the odds they'll succeed? They've got to be way under 50:50.
Written by: David Brooks
© 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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