Both events underscored that differences in the party are defined in large part by competing loyalties to three political yesterdays: First is the one associated with Trump. The second is the tea party rebellion during the Obama years. And the third — glowing in a sacred conservative stratosphere — is the tradition of Ronald Reagan.
If Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign song was “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow),” the GOP’s 2024 anthem might as well be, “These Are the Good Old Days.”
Of course, there is some mixing and matching of the eras. Former vice president Mike Pence, the mixologist in chief, offers a lot of Reagan, a few dashes of tea party and an inevitable bow to the good things he ascribes to the “Trump-Pence” administration. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley is the hardest to place, which is why she did well in last week’s debate: She had some feel of the future about her.
Debate effects can be ephemeral, of course, but the GOP’s wistful longing for a lost age is an ongoing and serious condition. Dispatching Trump and the era he represents is important not only to his GOP rivals but also to the country as a whole. He is a threat to the constitutional order and democracy itself. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson are invaluable voices in a contest they cannot win because they are willing to say so.
But all of the former president’s rivals are struggling to dethrone him because they still have not come to terms with the other side of Trump, which was innovative. He moved past Reaganism. He co-opted the tea party, drawing its supporters in by echoing their nativism on immigration and backing tax cuts, without embracing its anti-government message in full.
Unlike most Republicans, Trump speaks the language of frustration experienced by downscale Republicans who no longer believe the promises of global capitalism and (never mind Trump’s own corruption) don’t trust the cozy relationships between lobbyists and GOP leaders in Congress.
A man who had no business being president secured the GOP nomination in 2016 precisely because he understood, as his opponents didn’t, that many in the rank and file did not want to hear about cuts to Social Security or Medicare, hated NAFTA and other trade agreements, were skeptical about the Iraq War, and longed for an economy in which those who did not attend college could count on a decent living.
Trump’s “again” in his MAGA slogan thus does a lot of work. It certainly speaks to a nostalgia in his largely White constituency for old racial and cultural arrangements. Trump offers racist texts and subtexts, bows to religious traditionalism and tosses in some old-fashioned red-baiting. Channeling his legal hero Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s henchman, he has taken to attacking his opponents as “communists.” Now that’s throwback politics for you.
But “again” also captures a craving in the battered regions of the country for the economic stability associated with the three decades after World War II. Trump has no coherent plan for restoration other than the blunderbuss of higher tariffs, but his supporters cheer him for acknowledging what they yearn for.
Trump’s Republican opponents are handcuffed not only by their reluctance to risk alienating his loyalists by taking him on but also by their ideological fealty to Reagan’s market faith and tea party thinking. What Trump knows instinctively that his internal party foes don’t is that GOP voters are looking for more than just the old stuff.
A cadre of GOP politicians (Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marco Rubio of Florida among them) have begun to challenge market purity, but they are a small minority — and do not want to take Trump on.
Successful parties find a way to honor their traditions while absorbing new realities. Dwight Eisenhower broke the Democrats’ 20-year hold on power in 1952 by broadly accepting the reforms of the New Deal. It’s often forgotten that in 2000, George W. Bush adjusted to Clintonism, ran on “compassion” and spoke of reforming education and immigration.
In 2023, our economic challenges call for reinvention. Like it or not, “Bidenomics” accepts that it’s not the 1980s or 1990s anymore. The GOP’s policy imagination is still stuck in the era of Lee Greenwood, the venerable country singer the party reveres.
The first Republican president had a plan for this. “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present,” Abraham Lincoln said in 1862. “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
Republicans who understand the urgency of preventing a catastrophic Trump second term have a lot of disenthralling to do.
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