“I think we are going to address spending at some point,” White House acting budget director Russ Vought told us late in 2019.
It’s a familiar refrain to conservatives, and we’re used to hearing this promise on all sorts of issues. Wait till next year. The leadership gets what it wants this time and says that next time they’ll really fight for conservative priorities.
As we look ahead to 2020, we hope, against experience, that this will be the year. Nobody is going to take on overspending if not the Republican Party. Nobody is going to take on corporate welfare if not the drain-the-swamp president. Nobody is going to reform entitlements if not the GOP.
This first wish we have for 2020 is the same we have every year: that this year, Republicans govern the way Republicans have long spoken.
But we also have a much bigger wish for the GOP, and it’s a new one: We hope 2020 is the year it figures out what, in the Trump era, it stands for.
We know that plenty of the GOP crowd here inside the Beltway are holding their breath and waiting for President Trump to leave so that they can get the gang back together. This is foolish. The Reagan-era GOP made sense in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union loomed large, as did international communism. The Contract with America made sense as a response to the specific maladies of the Clinton era. The Tea Party, too, was grounded in a specific time with specific threats.
Conservatives know that there are unchanging truths and that there is such thing as human nature, which doesn’t fluctuate with trends or with the years. But politics are further downstream than human nature, and politics ought to change as times change. Trump’s election surprised most of us in conservative Washington, and some of us tried to learn something from it.
There was a hunger in much of the country for something that neither party’s establishment was offering. Critics on the Left claim it was pure bigotry. Some analysts simplify it to merely populism. We think Trump’s key ingredient was nationalism.
Amid all of their disagreements, both parties in 2015 agreed on a few things: They were for free trade, they were for increased immigration, and they were for an aggressive foreign policy calibrated more to an ideological vision for the world than to concrete American interests. Trump was the reaction to that.
There are perils of nationalism, of course: Protectionism can suffocate an economy, nativism is tied up with racism, and isolationism can make the world less safe.
But at the foundation of nationalism is a simple notion that the job of the federal government is to serve its people rather than some other people or some abstract idea — like “the economy.” This seems selfish and offensive to some. It seems almost self-evident to us.
Our greatest wish for the Republican Party of 2020 and the entire decade is that the GOP formulates a coherent, inclusive, forward-looking nationalism. National sovereignty and American exceptionalism are unpopular ideas in academic and industry circles. Conservatism and the Republican Party need to launch a robust defense of them.
The last few years have seen one of the most stunning victories for nationalism, and it ought to be educational for us all. Brexit passed in 2016 and won a follow-up victory in the 2019 general election. To the Brits, it was clear that the alternative to nationalism was subservience to a foreign, unaccountable government. The only way to restore self-rule was to restore nationalism.
The nation-state, throughout history, has been the most reliable fortress for democracy and individual liberty. Multinational corporations won’t say that, and neither will the Left. It’s up to the Republican Party and the conservative movement to hold that line.
The intellectuals of conservatism and the leaders of the Republican Party need to spend 2020 working toward an intelligent, coherent understanding of nationalism that steers clear of the rocky shoals. Not isolationist, a smart nationalist conservatism will see the virtue of alliances. Not protectionist or nativist, nationalist conservatism must see that trade and immigration can help the people who are already here.
But fiercely dedicated to sovereignty and grounded in the good of the American people, a thoughtful conservative nationalism could be a new guiding star for the GOP.
