When Donald Trump becomes president at noon Friday, it will be the end of an era — the Reagan era.
Since 1980, the Republican Party has been explicitly conservative. It tried, sometimes harder than at other times, to govern conservatively. Republican candidates generally campaigned as conservatives. When GOP lawmakers did unconservative things, they tried to give their actions a conservative gloss, or to excuse them as a rare deviation from conservatism.
Conservatives had fought since the 1940s (they backed Robert Taft over Dwight Eisenhower in the 1952 primary) to take over the GOP. The nomination of Barry Goldwater was a breakthrough, the election of Reagan a triumph. The 1994 election, installing Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House, was the next step.
Then the Bush era and Tea Party seemed to finish the job. Liberal Republicans such as Arlen Specter and Lincoln Chafee became creatures of the past, nearly extinct. Conservatives took all the leadership posts, and the internal squabbles weren’t conservatives-vs-liberals as they were in the 50s through the 90s, because the conservatives had won. Conservatives had taken over the party.
Then 2016 happened.
The past 60 years of the conservative movement looked as though it would reach a climax, with a stacked presidential field of conservatives. Tax-cutting governors, crusading conservative lawmakers, pro-lifers and free-traders all, competed to see who had the best plan to reform entitlements and roll back regulations.
But these ideological offspring of Goldwater and Reagan all lost, big league, to Trump.
The professional conservative movement over the past 40 years has essentially been Reaganite. Smaller and limited government has been the unifying factor, and social conservatism was dominant and crucial. Trump ran on neither of these things. In several ways, he ran against them.
There’s plenty of evidence Trump’s heterodoxy helped him win. A Gallup poll recently asked 1,000 adults what issues they most want addressed immediately. “Keeping U.S. jobs from going overseas,” was top by a substantial margin. “Reducing the influence of lobbyists and big money in politics,” was the runner-up. Funding infrastructure was in third place. The next two priorities were fighting the Islamic State and imposing tariffs.
Trump may not be popular nationally, but his agenda, with its protectionism, big spending and anti-big business talk, certainly is.
So how should conservatives, including the leadership in both chambers of Congress, proceed for the next four years?
Simply going along with Trump’s unconservatism would be a mistake. His tariffs would hurt the people he thinks they would help. His big spending will not only distort the economy and create pressure for tax hikes, but will also legitimize Democrats’ overspending. And the GOP must not go along with any Trump plan that deals away the lives of the unborn.
But having said this, it must also be said that Republicans cannot set forth into the future as though nothing has happened, as some of them seem intent on doing. Trump isn’t Reagan in character — that is obvious — and he isn’t Reaganite in policy either.
Conservatism will sometimes need to resist Trump and often need to persuade him. But it must also learn from Trump.
What Trump saw that so many conservatives missed was that people want a president who fights for them against the bad guys. However misguided Trump’s protectionism is, it was taken as a promise to defend the working guy against the Chinese. Trump’s “drain the swamp” talk has persuaded men in hard-hats that he is on their side against Beltway insiders in tasseled loafers. His immigration and crime rhetoric taps into darker fears about who the bad guys are.
As Nobel-prize winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman explains, people are not persuaded by facts and numbers, statistics and arguments. They are persuaded by people they like. Trump won a big majority of the states because voters in them liked the way he spoke for them.
Conservatism needs to learn from this. Rolling out spreadsheets about Social Security’s path to insolvency may win plaudits in conservative think tanks, but it’s not going to win elections. Conservatives don’t have to give up their principles, but they do have to put a human face on their math, and make ordinary people realize that free market conservatism works for the little guy by giving everyone opportunity.
There is plenty of Trump-style talk that serves conservative ends. Draining the swamp is crucial to conservatism because Beltway bandits are the biggest obstacle to spending cuts. Trump has successfully cast regulatory reform as a way to bring back jobs. Across the board, conservatives need to explain how their policies defend the regular guy against some special interests, as Trump did.
Conservatives can’t merely change their rhetoric, though. Some priorities and even policies need to change. Cutting the top income-tax rate, preserving loopholes for hedge funds, and fighting for Wall Street’s wish list are all worthless, or worse. There’s a new political reality. Conservatives need to adapt to it.
