It is difficult, while still dealing with the aftershocks of Donald Trump’s stunning victory in the Republican nomination battle, to see beyond the immediate wreckage to the conservative cause, and consider a longer view beyond this election. But there are a number of reasons to believe that this moment will pass, and that ultimately conservatism will outlive Trumpism.
To be sure, there is no denying the magnitude of what has happened. As a result of Trump’s nomination, Hillary Clinton is likely to be the next president, allowing her to entrench Obamacare and a liberal Supreme Court, and perhaps go even further with a new congressional majority. Even if she is defeated, a potential Trump presidency also means big government policies: he has promised massive infrastructure spending, and doesn’t want to reform unsustainable entitlements (unless one were to count his embrace of the liberal plan to allow Washington to set drug prices).
Beyond this, the fact that Trump rejected limited government conservatism and dominated Republican primaries anyway prompts serious questions about the extent to which actual voters are interested in candidates who are consistent conservatives philosophically.
Having said that, there are a number of reasons why limited government conservatism, which is distinct from the Republican Party and part of a long intellectual tradition, will likely prove more enduring than Trump.
To start with, conservatism offers a coherent ideological framework that can be used as the basis to form policy proposals that address challenges that change with time. Though Ronald Reagan was known as a popular personality, the ideas he championed were passed on to others without his natural charisma. Now, a number of conservative intellectuals and lawmakers have been working on ways to take the underlying beliefs and apply them to 21st century problems.
Trumpism, however, does not offer a consistent ideological framework. He has been both for and against socialized medicine; for and against gun control; for and against raising the minimum wage; pro-legalized partial birth abortion and pro-punishing women who have abortions, and so on. Though there are aspects of his message that can be described as fitting, broadly speaking, in with traditional nationalism or populism, ultimately his success is more about his unique status as a celebrity businessman with a gift for manipulating mass media.
For decades, politicians have mentioned the idea of building a border wall with Mexico — Pat Buchanan talked about it way back during his 1992 presidential campaign, for instance. But Trump was able to gain more traction based on the image he presented as a master builder who, unlike “all talk, no action” politicians, would actually be able to get it built.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., has for a number of years been pushing a populist message on the threat of mass immigration and trade deals to Americans’ wages and jobs. He’d probably be the first to admit that were he to have run for president, he wouldn’t have been able to preform nearly as well as Trump.
Trump’s celebrity status allowed him to send out one tweet to his millions of followers and have it amplified by news outlets around the world; he was able to get away with making controversial statements that would end the career of an ordinary politicians; and because he convinced Republican voters that he was looking out for them, they weren’t as focused on some of the contradictions.
Generic Republican candidates, running for office with low name-ID and a few thousand Twitter followers, won’t be able to drive the news media into a tizzy with a photo of them eating taco salad.
There is also a much more practical reason why conservatism is likely to outlive Trumpism, and that has to do with the biggest long-term challenge facing our nation: the unsustainable national debt.
It’s easy, at this moment in history, to decry national debt on the one hand, while refusing to do anything about the main drivers of the debt — entitlement programs. Right now, it’s more popular to blame “waste, fraud, and abuse” and foreign aid, and promise voters a quick and easy fix.
Not many people want to hear that without serious changes to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, the nation is going to face a fiscal collapse. But as the day of fiscal reckoning approaches, the central argument in U.S. politics will return to being: Do we want a larger government with much higher taxes, or do we want to rein in government so that we can limit the tax burden it places on individuals and businesses?
Trumpism does not have answers for that question. Conservatism does.
