Donald Trump and Paul Ryan are about to “begin a discussion about the kind of Republican principles and ideas that can win the support of the American people,” according to the House speaker.
We know what kind of Republican principles Ryan espouses. He came of age politically under Ronald Reagan, worked for Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett and is otherwise a product of modern American conservative movement.
Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, represents something different. Exactly what is a matter of some dispute, though it is clear that it resonated with a higher percentage of GOP primary voters than the more familiar forms of Republican politics.
Conservative complaints about Trump notwithstanding, he is no left-winger. He has more in common with the nationalists and populist parties of the right gaining a foothold in other Western democracies, reacting to immigration, transnational bureaucracies and cultural conflicts engulfing Europe.
But in other ways, Trump is also a throwback to pre-Reagan Republicanism — if not Richard Nixon, then Spiro Agnew. His supporters wave signs identifying themselves as part of the “silent majority.” They are pro-American but not ideological, traditionalist but not always Christian right-style social conservatives, pro-business not consistently for free markets or limited government.
Nixon didn’t just go to China. He imposed wage and price controls. When William Buckley, Jr. and other conservative elites suspended their support for Nixon, it didn’t stop him from winning re-nomination or re-election in a 49-state landslide.
Not a lot of government-cutting, but some hippie-punching.
“Agnew really tapped into the alienation of Middle America,” former Nixon speechwriter and veteran conservative columnist Patrick Buchanan told the Washington Examiner, calling him the “Robespierre of the great silent majority.”
Both Agnew and Nixon “picked up on feedback from their audiences,” Buchanan added,” saying it helped them identify issues like the “radicalization of campuses” that other Republicans missed, and Trump has that ability too.
Trump has already donned a hard hat. Could the college “safe space” activists and Black Lives Matter be like the protesters of 1968?
Others see a stronger resemblance to the old Nixon-Agnew scribe himself.
“Intellectually, Trumpism bears a striking resemblance to the anti-interventionist, anti-globalist, immigration-restrictionist, America First worldview propounded by various paleoconservatives during the 1990s and ever since,” wrote George Nash, historian of the conservative movement, in National Review.
Nash went on to argue that “Trumpism is deliberately breaking with the conservative internationalism of the Cold War era and with the pro-free-trade, supply-side-economics orthodoxy that has dominated Republican policymaking since 1980.”
That, as much as Trump’s rhetoric and the more troubling company he attracts, may be what has Ryan so concerned about the likely Republican standard-bearer. But not everyone thinks there is much of an “ism” to Trumpism.
“We need to stop looking at Trump as either a product of something structured or based on a more organized philosophy,” Republican strategist Kevin Madden told the Examiner. “He is a political amorphous who will take whatever shape he needs to take, ungoverned by policy principles. It’s a mistake to try and classify Trump by labeling his ideas because he really doesn’t have any. It’s probably better to instead assess it through a study of selling. He is a salesman. He sells attitude, not ideas.”
Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist who has emerged as an interesting if unconventional pro-Trump polemicist during this campaign, says much the same thing. “Trump literally takes both sides of the issues whenever he can,” he wrote on his website. “As a candidate, he’s a human Rorschach test.”
Even so, Adams connects Trump and Nixon through Norman Vincent Peale, a pastor and friend to both men’s families who wrote the book The Power of Positive Thinking. There might not be much Road to Serfdom in Trump’s thinking, but maybe there’s more than The Art of the Deal.
While Trump’s personality and celebrity are unique, they do raise questions about whether “the kind of Republican principles and ideas” Ryan is talking about can win majority support among even GOP primary voters when sold by a candidate less compelling than Reagan himself.
That doesn’t necessarily mean Trump can successfully reshape the party in his own image.
“Trump has a touch for the common man,” Buchanan said, noting that when other Republicans try to imitate the billionaire reality TV star “they aren’t very good at it.”
“Conservatives have worked hard for 50 years to turn the Republican Party into the Conservative Party. The roots are deep,” Lee Edwards, Heritage Foundation distinguished fellow in conservative thought, told the Examiner. “Pre-Reagan Republicanism depended upon the dominance of the Eastern Liberal Establishment which no longer exists — the balance of power shifted south and west and still rests there.”
Trump was weakest in the Great Plains States, losing close to two-fifths of the vote in Nebraska Tuesday even after his Republican opponents dropped out of the race, while putting together an unlikely coalition in the South and the Northeast.
Newt Gingrich, a Ryan predecessor and one of the GOP insiders friendliest to Trump, came to Reagan conservatism by way of being a Rockefeller Republican.
Yet it takes more than that to make a realignment, much less a movement.
“Conservatives can point to political victories in 1980, 1984, 1988, 1994, 2010 and 2014 — an impressive record. Reagan remains the most popular president of the last half century,” said Edwards. “I think too many analysts overlook the significance of the 2014 GOP tsunami.”
“Pre-Reagan Republicans can point to Ike in 52 and 56, and to Nixon in 68 and 72 who had a very mixed record,” he added. “How many Republicans run as Nixonites?”
In November, there may only need to be one.
