Can the GOP get itself together?

Ryan still had to ask House conservatives, fresh from their success in “sacking” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s bid for the speakership and moving on from John Boehner, not to overthrow him early in his tenure. And he had to repeat his request to outside conservative groups, starting off a speech to Heritage Action’s Conservative Policy Summit in February by urging them to avoid a revolt in 2016.

“The Left would love nothing more, they would love nothing more than for a fragmented conservative movement to stand in a circular firing squad and fire so that progressives can win by default,” he told the activist conservative group. Ryan told them he had opposed many initiatives by Republican leadership and championed a bid by Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Mike Lee, R-Utah, to defund Obamacare even at the cost of temporarily shutting down the federal government.

Ryan said the issue ran deeper than whether he retained the speakership. It was about whether conservatives wanted to retake the White House and begin undoing the damage caused by Barack Obama’s presidency.

“We have to be straight with each other, and more importantly, we have to be straight with the American people,” he said. “When voices in the conservative movement demand things that they know we can’t achieve with a Democrat in the White House, all it does is depress our base, and in turn help Democrats stay in the White House.”

It was an odd request for Ryan to have to make in the first place. He is more clearly a movement conservative than any previous speaker of the House, including Newt Gingrich. He cut his teeth at Empower America, the conservative think tank begun by Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett in the 1990s. He authored a budget blueprint that envisions sweeping free-market entitlement reforms and major reductions in federal discretionary spending, although his conservative detractors quickly point out that early versions took decades to balance the budget.

When Ryan became chairman first of the House Budget Committee and then the Ways and Means Committee, it was seen as a major victory for conservative policy wonks. The Right’s intellectuals and journalists celebrated his nomination for vice president in 2012, and many of these same voices hoped he would run for president in 2016.

But Ryan was a reluctant candidate even for speaker, only partly because he had a young family and had attained the committee chairmanships that would help him advance the policy goals he had first advocated as a House backbencher in the late 1990s. He was running in a climate of conservative anger, where many of the Right’s activists see even someone like Paul Ryan as an enemy to be opposed rather than a leader to be trusted.

Ryan had voted for a lot of the federal spending increases under President George W. Bush, including the $700 billion Wall Street bailout and Medicare Part D, that had given rise to the Tea Party movement. He was far more sympathetic than conservatives liked to immigration reform that both stengthened the border and found a way of dealing with the country’s 11 million illegal immigrants, short of deporting them. And he was taking over as Boehner had bottled up bipartisan immigration legislation for nearly a decade, causing fears that a Ryan speakership would lead to amnesty.

Conservatives have come to view virtually any member of leadership as being nearly as much an obstacle to their goals as the Democrats. Attaining a position of influence in the party comes with ex officio membership in the Republican establishment, a nebulous group seen as more interested in electing people with the letter “R” next to their names than achieving any conservative policy goals.

The list of conservative policy objectives left unaccomplished after two terms of Ronald Reagan, one term of George H.W. Bush, two terms of George W. Bush and on-and-off Republican congressional majorities dating back to 1995 is a long one. Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case legalizing abortion, celebrated its 43rd anniversary in January. It was joined last year by a high court decision similarly wiping out all 50 states’ marriage laws and recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

The major expansions of the federal government under the New Deal and the Great Society remain largely untouched, to the extent that few conservative politicians even talk about undoing them anymore. Supreme Court decisions against school prayer remain in place, no matter how many conservative justices are appointed. Affirmative action remains in effect despite ballot initiatives and court decisions undermining racial preferences.

Even recent changes such as Obamacare quickly acquire the air of permanence, after dozens of repeal votes and two unsuccessful constitutional challenges at the Supreme Court. The first, most important one was defeated with the vote of Chief Justice John Roberts, whose confirmation was considered a major victory by legal conservatives.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, points out that when the 2016 presidential election takes place, Reagan’s election will be as far in the past as the 1944 D-Day invasion was when the Gipper was elected president in 1980. But there’s a reason conservatives still constantly hearken back to the Reagan years. It’s when their efforts most clearly worked.

The Obama years have been difficult for conservatives. Republicans have held the House since 2011 and the Senate since 2015, but their presidential losses have kept them from making major changes. They can hold hearings and file lawsuits against what they view as an overreaching president, but his unilateral executive actions remain intact. They block his legislation, but don’t roll back what has already passed.

For many conservatives who felt that Republicans squandered unified control of the federal government when the GOP held both the White House and Congress from 2005-07 with little activist pressure from the Right, this isn’t good enough. Exhortations for patience from leadership fall on deaf ears.

The Trump Revolution

There is a crisis of legitimacy not only for the Republican leadership, but also major organs of the conservative movement. National Review, a flagship conservative publication founded by William F. Buckley, Jr., published a symposium calling for the defeat of Donald Trump. Trump went on to win three of the first four Republican nominating contests, with plurality support among self-described conservatives.

Trump’s ascent to Republican front-runner status illustrates the conservatives’ dilemma. He has in the recent past, and in some cases currently, disagreed with long-established conservative positions on abortion, judges, healthcare, taxes and government spending. He actively opposes the type of ambitious entitlement reform Ryan has proposed and defends the basic soundness of Social Security and Medicare as they exist.

“There has traditionally (at least post-Goldwater) been a conservative insurgent and an establishment conservative,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist who supports Marco Rubio and has actively worked against Trump. “The delta between them was never as big as it looked from the outside.” Trump, he argues, is different. Wilson described him as an “outside ideologically non-conservative hyper-populist nationalist.”

When Trump floated the idea of temporarily banning non-U.S. Muslims from the United States, the House speaker rebuked him. “This isn’t conservatism,” he said. Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recruited South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley to respond to Obama’s final State of the Union address. She gave a speech that was as hard on Trump as it was on Obama; she subsequently endorsed Rubio, the Florida senator and movement conservative in good standing, for president.

Trump nevertheless won the South Carolina primary. Some 73 percent of Republican primary voters in that state told exit pollsters they agreed with Trump rather than Ryan on the Muslim ban. This result has held constant everywhere else, including New Hampshire, where a higher proportion of moderates and independents voted.

“If he can win the nomination, crazy as it seems, it is conceivable he can win the presidency,” said Republican strategist Liz Mair, who has worked against Trump. “It is very messy, painful, and frightening to a lot of people, and the truth is, in a variety of ways, the GOP, the conservative movement, and a lot of others generally on the right bear responsibility for what’s happened.”

What to do?

All this has raised a question: How do conservatives govern? They have succeeded in mobilizing about half the country, winning Congress, a majority of governorships and an unprecedented number of state legislative seats. At the state level, they pass concealed-carry legislation, right-work laws, tax cuts and abortion restrictions that once seemed unthinkable after the Roe decision.

Yet to many conservatives, this doesn’t feel like enough. Conservative elites, disgusted by the Trump boom, are openly feuding with Tea Party groups and talk radio. One side stands accused of joining the ossified Beltway establishment, the other of giving in to unprincipled grifterism in order to stoke resentment, donations and audience interest. Conservatives in government privately express exasperation at their voters.

All this has helped fuel conservative interest in electing a strongman, a muscular executive who will get things done, despite criticizing that mindset under Obama. Enter Trump, who is no believer in constitutionally limited government. Unlike conservative movement hero Barry Goldwater, his extremism isn’t in defense of liberty.

What Trump does offer is a promise to conservatives that he will “protect” them — “I’ll protect the evangelicals,” he said, for instance — and that he will get things done. He will assert himself on behalf of Republican voters’ interests if not necessarily their ideological concerns. Process and procedure be damned.

By contrast, process has become a big part of even what the most conservative Washington Republicans discuss. Without the White House, congressional Republicans have been reduced to using their chambers’ procedures to try to obstruct the president’s initiatives. Ryan won the speakership by reassuring conservatives that he would address their concerns on process and return to regular order, not so much by defending his conservative voting record.

The result is that much of the country views Republicans as mindlessly obstructionist, picking fights with the president on healthcare, immigration and Planned Parenthood without advancing obvious alternatives, careening from fiscal cliff to government shutdown to 11th-hour debt ceiling extensions passed at the brink of default. Democrats can persuade swing voters that Republican attempts at fiscal responsibility are themselves irresponsible.

Conservative activists see things quite differently. In their view, Republicans haven’t done enough to fight Obama. And when the GOP has fought, it has too often lost. The problem with Cruz’s Obamacare defunding gambit in this telling wasn’t that the government was temporarily shut down; it was that Obamacare was still funded at the end. Obama defies Congress and the voters on everything from healthcare to immigration and nothing much happens. Ryan urges conservatives not to “take the bait” when Obama unveils his latest provocative executive action.

Now on top of all this comes the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the conservatives’ hero on the Supreme Court. The vacancy left by Scalia has created an opportunity for liberals to seize the majority of the court, potentially undoing conservative successes on campaign finance reform, Second Amendment rights and religious liberty.

So far, Republicans have mostly held firm in saying they will not allow Obama to deliver the Supreme Court to the Left. Conservatives demand that there be no hearings and no votes for a liberal Obama nominee. On this, Ryan has stood shoulder-to-shoulder with McConnell.

But it does on some level conflict with each of their visions. McConnell had hoped to prove Republicans could run the Senate ahead of the 2016 presidential election, making an institution work that seldom passed a budget under Harry Reid. Now the Senate could be shut down over the post-Scalia fight. Ryan has consistently wanted to promote a bold conservative policy agenda, but it seems less likely than ever that the Senate will be a partner in this process and the Republican primary process has been anything but policy-focused.

After seven years of Obama, the main surviving Republican presidential candidates include a charismatic leader with no track record of defending conservatism, two freshman senators who have never run a large enterprise and a governor who expanded Medicaid while castigating fiscal conservatives who disagreed with him. The main arguments between them have highlighted personality, not policy.

This isn’t where conservatives envisioned themselves being at this point, even as recently as 2014. Back then they thought they were one presidential election from seeing much of their agenda enacted and the Obama years reversed. Now there is considerable debate over what that agenda even is and a parade of would-be successors who share some of Obama’s characteristics.

Republican insiders are at a loss for solutions, especially if Trump is the nominee. “We can bring Cruz and Rubio voters together, but it’s going to mean a big internal fight,” Wilson said. “Trump has shattered the framework, and he’s invalidating the conservative part of being a Republican. For Trump, the GOP is a flag of convenience only. It means nothing to him or his voters.”

Conservatism has been in a bad place before, however. Liberalism looked triumphant for a large stretch of the post-World War II period, the ideology of America’s permanent governing party. The Right barely had a foothold even in the Republican Party.

There is a core of bright young conservatives in Congress today. At the moment, they have a reputation mostly for filibustering, delaying and derailing, for being in a state of constant rebellion. But the Freedom Caucus has reshaped the leadership picture in the House. The messy process playing out in the presidential primaries has revealed most of all the centrist GOP establishment has little support from the rank-and-file, and even with large sums of money and familiar family names, they cannot control the party’s destiny.

The opportunity for conservatives not just to fight leadership but to lead themselves is coming soon. Will they take it?