Old-Guard Conservatives Are at a Crossroads

By Henry Olsen

Thursday, July 25, 2024

 

Many traditional movement conservatives are disheartened by the Republican Party’s nominees. They see the Trump-Vance ticket as an explicit rejection of their views and thus feel their historic party has abandoned them.

 

It’s understandable why they might feel this way. That wing of the party has long set the party’s ideological course. Nominees may not have lived up to the activists’ ideals, but they all had to define themselves in relation to those aspirations. That itself gave the movement power far beyond its numerical strength within the GOP.

 

Those days are clearly over. Donald Trump’s renomination, coupled with J. D. Vance’s ascension, confirms what primary elections have been showing for nearly a decade: Supermajorities of Republicans no longer prioritize the old movement’s aims.

 

That doesn’t mean, however, that the movement has been abandoned by the party. It merely shows that the adherents of the old guard are now merely a substantial minority within the party they once seemed to rule. A firm grasp of that new status, coupled with prudential thinking, means the traditional conservative views can continue to wield wide influence within the party.

 

Republicans continue to hold many traditional conservative views. Most still think the government is too big. Roughly two-thirds are pro-life, and larger numbers oppose the spread of progressive woke ideology. Many are opposed to unending aid to Ukraine, but majorities are still supportive of NATO, and supermajorities want to back Israel and confront Communist China. The GOP is not a big-government, secular, isolationist party.

 

What voters have rejected, then, is the ideological application of these principles to today’s problems. The majority doesn’t see tariffs on imported goods as being inconsistent with the general ideal of smaller government. It doesn’t want to cut Social Security benefits to balance the budget, and it doesn’t want to die on the hill of an unobtainable goal to ban abortion nationwide. It wants our NATO allies to pull their fair share of the collective-defense needs and is tired of being played for a sap.

 

The old guard lost its governing status because it has resisted these and other accommodations to public opinion throughout the Trump era. It wanted to pretend that Trump’s rise had everything to do with his theatrics and nothing to do with his policies. Rather than bend, it chose to stand tall as the winds of public opinion grew stronger. Those gales finally toppled the tree.

 

The question now is how to adapt. There are two ways forward, but only one offers promise.

 

The unpromising path continues the obstinate refusal to recognize reality. This view would argue that the Trump-Vance approach is bound to fail, either politically in that they lose or pragmatically in that their policies will be a disaster. Once one of these things happens, this view goes, Republicans will come to their senses. The fever will have broken, and all will return to normal.

 

This way is folly. The old guard has lost a lot of credibility with Republican voters because of their long unwillingness to hear what those voters were saying. It’s as likely that any failure from the newly ascendant populist wing would result in an even stronger expression of radicalism. People who believe, with good reason, that their future as equal American citizens is at stake will not surrender the field so readily.

 

One also has to account for the shrinking share of the party leadership who can be credibly counted upon to lead such a return to power. Just look at who wins GOP primaries for just about any office today. Outsiders who fight are in; calm types who negotiate for results are out. Even traditional conservatives with institutional support and plenty of cash lose handily.

 

Just look at how easily businessman Bernie Moreno defeated state senator Matt Dolan in this year’s Ohio Senate primary. Dolan was a wealthy self-funder who outspent Moreno and sported the endorsements of Governor Mike DeWine and former senator Rob Portman. He was nevertheless walloped by nearly 18 points, losing every county to the political-novice businessman.

 

The way forward is to act like an important but minority faction in a broad coalition. That means picking one’s fights rather than trying to assert broad dominance.

 

There’s good reason to think that will work. Economic conservatives can fight for tax cuts and deregulation and strive to limit tariffs to nations that are clearly security risks for the United States. Social conservatives can push for defense of religious liberty and use of federal purse strings to push public schools to remove woke ideology from curricula. Internationalists can fight for the increase in military spending we desperately need and ensure that Trump understands that any deal to end the Russia–Ukraine war must ensure that Ukraine has the ability and the means to be genuinely independent.

 

Losing power and status is hard, but it need not be fatal to conservative aspirations. Using the power they have rather than trying to regain the power they have lost can end up getting them more than they currently bargain for.