NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Is the Republican Party on the verge of sidelining its ideological roots by nominating Donald Trump as it’s presidential candidate?
That’s what conservative activists and intellectuals were pondering this week as they gathered for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington. CPAC, as its known, has served as the bulwark of the conservative movement since the Reagan era, keeping the Republican Party ideologically grounded and forcing GOP candidates for office to at least pay lip service the ideas of limited government, fiscal responsibility and a strong national defense.
Mike Turner, 68, a conservative activist from La Plata, Md., who is supporting Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida for the GOP nomination and attended CPAC on Thursday, said he fears that a Republican Party led by Trump will not be a vehicle for conservative governance that can be depended upon to at least try and counter the liberalism of the Democrats.
“It’s scary. It’s scary because what you really need going into this election, we need a conversation between a hardcore conservative and a socialist — we need to have that conversation as a country,” he said.
Trump, 69, historically supported liberal policies and politicians, before evolving late in life on issues like abortion, gun control and health care. He was previously pro-choice, and he’s previously supported some elements of firearms restrictions, but is now a strong defender of the Second Amendment. He recently supported government-run health insurance, but now says it should be left to the free market. Even on his signature issue, immigration, Trump has changed his views.
Still, Trump eschews traditional conservatism. The New York celebrity businessman is a populist and a nationalist who opposes the reform of entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, a conservative holy grail for years that is the stated policy of House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis. Trump opposes free trade, believes in showering favored industries with federal tax breaks and supports a non-interventionist foreign policy that aligns with President Obama’s.
That puts Trump at odds not only with his Republican opponents for president, Rubio, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, but with the conservative movement that has defined the GOP base since President Ronald Reagan. And that base is concerned, because many of the new voters Trump is attracting to the party — at least to vote for him — aren’t conservative converts, but rather share the billionaire’s comfort with heavy-handed populism.
Ken Cuccinelli, the former Virginia attorney general who is backing Cruz’s White House bid and has worked on behalf of insurgent GOP Senate candidates, said a Trump nomination would do more than split the Republican Party. He said it would be a “blow to the conservative movement.”
“The people here, are here for ideas — ideals, things we believe, not to get a majority,” Cuccinelli said, during an interview while making the rounds at CPAC. “Of course you need to get a majority to put in place policies you believe in. But for a lot of the establishment it’s about the power. For us it’s about the principles. But Donald Trump doesn’t represent them.”
“That’s my longest term concern,” Cuccinelli added. “We would be shut out as a movement.”
Conservatives from around the country gather annually for CPAC, a three-day convention held this year at the Gaylord National Resort on the banks of the Potomac River. They come to hear from prominent politicians — usually Republicans but sometimes Libertarians — and to sit for panels and breakout sessions that discuss aspects of conservative thought, ideology and governance.
Panels on Thursday included discussions of religious liberty; the role of Congress in the U.S. constitutional system; and how to apply philosophical conservatism to governing in Washington. Speakers like Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, talked about promoting limited government and free enterprise; former Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton discussed the need for the U.S. to maintain its role as the guarantor of global security abroad.
It was an odd juxtaposition given that the conservative party in American politics, the GOP, stands poised to nominate a standard bearer that embodies almost none of these principles, and doesn’t even try to pretend he does. That stands in stark contrast to most recent nominees, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Sen. John McCain of Arizona. Neither are movement conservatives, but attempted to reassure the base that they would govern with their principles.
Conservatives recognize that the ground is shifting and a political realignment could be at hand, and are trying to figure out how to maintain control of the Republican Party. “The party of Reagan is about those conservative principles — nothing wrong with them being presented in a populist way — but the populist tone has to be rooted in conservative principles,” Jordan said. The Ohioan, a leader in the House Freedom Caucus, a group of ideological conservatives in Congress, is neutral in the 2016 primary.
Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, the group that sponsors CPAC, said that in fact he believes the conservative base is realigning. Schlapp conceded that there’s a danger that the new conservative base becomes diluted, reducing the influence of activists who believe in smaller government and other classic conservative principles. Schlapp said that he worried about that.
But he said that conservatives can’t use adherence to principles as a reason to ignore what voters care about, because it will reduce the movement’s impact on the political discourse and cause it to miss an opportunity to grow in numbers and influence.
“This coalition of conservatives and center-right people, I think we’re watching it realign. I think it’s changing before our eyes and I think that people are trying to figure out what that is. And, some people see the change and it just upsets them,” Schlapp said.
“We’re going to be vigilant of our values. But also, we have to listen to what’s happening out there in the country, and the message they’re sending is that, we care less about these ideological qesitons and more about the fact that we’ve gotta send people into Washington who will change the way things happen there. What I want to do is marry both of them together.”
