By Noah Rothman
Thursday,
October 24, 2024
For all
the passionate debate over the disparities between the two presidential
campaigns in this unconventional election cycle, little attention has been
devoted to what was once the fundamental philosophical dividing line between
Democrats and Republicans: the scope and scale of government.
President
Biden’s reelection campaign did its best to cast Donald Trump as a ruthless,
benefit-slashing cost-cutter in the mold of his predecessors, but Trump would
not comport with the caricature. He rejected the idea that America’s
underfunded entitlement programs needed any reform. In fact, he proposed
excluding certain Social Security benefits from taxation. He also courted union
members by promising them a new role in his administration should he win.
Further, Biden and Trump disagreed only on particulars about the supposed magic
of tariffs. Neither seemed to care a whit for America’s rapidly ballooning
federal public debt.
When
Kamala Harris succeeded Biden as her party’s presidential nominee, the campaign
dynamics shifted radically. The candidates’ shared embrace of big government,
however, did not.
Despite
a variety of crippling labor strikes over the course of Biden’s presidency, the
Trump campaign panders to unions and has shed the conservative conviction that
union leaders are poor stewards of their members’ interests. Instead, Trump has
promised union organizers “a seat at the table” in exchange for their support,
and he responded to a brief dockworkers’ strike intended to “cripple” the
country (according to union leader Harold Daggett) by backing some of their
absurd demands — among them, opposition to the continued automation of shipping
terminals. Trump also joined Democrats in insisting that longshoremen must have
a 77 percent pay hike in response to shipping firms’ reliance on “foreign-flag
vessels.”
Kamala
Harris has struggled to establish a contrast with Trump on trade since both
campaigns favor protectionist restrictions on international markets to preserve
the viability of otherwise uncompetitive domestic industries.
When
it comes to the confident projection of American power abroad — both the hard
and soft varieties — Trump can be counted on to issue McGovernite appeals to
American insecurity. Even in relation to Israel’s war with Iran’s terrorist
proxies, he has suggested that the problem is the Jewish state’s vigor in
defense of its citizens and sovereignty. “You have to have that [war] ended one
way or the other,” Trump told reporters in September. “The world isn’t going to
take it” because “the whole thing over there is unacceptable.” And Trump has
said that he would have ordered the pullout from Afghanistan, as Biden did, but
that, under his even tighter time line for withdrawal, the exit would somehow
not have been the disaster it was.
Since
when do we care about what “the world” thinks? Where is the shame over Trump’s
slavish appeals to avaricious union bosses and economic illiterates who labor
under the delusion that free trade is a scheme to keep the proletarian masses
down? And what benefits has Trump accrued from this jettisoning of conservative
principles? Where is the broad coalition of voters the national-populist Right
insists is available to the Republican who is dexterous enough to beat
Democrats at their own game?
***
For the
better part of a decade, conventional conservatives have endured a
relentless bludgeoning from their post-liberal critics on the right over their
attachment to the virtues of limited government. With the ascension of a figure
who declared that he was “not a conservative” and that the GOP was called “‘the
Republican Party,’ not ‘the Conservative Party,’” conservatism had to be
replaced with something. In lieu of that something, Trump’s devotees
committed first to anathematizing conservatism. They dismissed its
prescriptions for free markets, pro-growth tax policies, the promotion of
traditional social values, and a posture of confident extroversion abroad as
unequal to the moment and an electoral albatross.
It’s
paradoxical that this critique of the Republican Party became popular at the
apex of the GOP’s electoral power so far this century. Trump descended his
golden escalator at a time when Republicans held a commanding 247-seat majority
in the House and 54 seats in the Senate, controlled 68 of America’s 99 state
legislative chambers, and claimed 31 governors, 23 of whom presided over a
fully Republican-run state government. That was a time when, according to its
critics, the party was a collection of genial losers whose interests were
increasingly divorced from those of most Americans and who were committed to
“failure theater.” In the years since, the GOP’s political position has eroded
substantially. And yet we’re still subjected to a sneering inquiry: What has
conservatism conserved?
The
question has been asked and answered more than once since Trump’s 2016
election, but it deserves an updated reply. Before Trump, conservatism’s record
of achievements included defeating Soviet communism; expanding protections of
First and Second Amendment freedoms; and blocking the utopian schemes, spending
proposals, and extralegal abuses of the Constitution that the Obama
administration tried to ram through prior to January 2011. Conservatives at the
state level could claim credit for promulgating right-to-work laws,
disempowering teachers’ unions, and promoting a culture of life to a degree
that even the most optimistic 1980s-era Moral Majoritarian would have thought
unlikely. After Trump, conservatism’s victories include saving his party and
the country from his statist instincts.
Donald
Trump entered the White House skeptical of market-based health-care proposals
and tax-code reforms that encouraged across-the-board cuts to spur investment
and savings. He was unmoved by the failures of central planning. He adopted the
leftist conceit that incremental change is inferior to “comprehensive”
legislation. He seemed not to comprehend the importance of failure as an
economic signal, preferring to ward off the forces of creative destruction and
the efficient allocation of capital those forces produce. Republicans in
Congress largely spared Americans from the ravages of Trump’s preferred
policies.
Before
Democrats came roaring back into legislative dominance after the 2018 midterms,
Republicans could recite a litany of conservative achievements. The GOP
reformed the tax code for the first time in 30 years, lowering rates across the
board and eliminating Obamacare’s individual mandate. The congressional GOP
pared back populist regulations targeting private enterprise, liberated
borrowers and lenders from the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer
Protection Act, and allowed veterans to see doctors outside the rigid networks
of the Veterans Affairs Department.
What
Republicans did with the 115th Congress is as impressive as what they didn’t
do. There was no trillion-dollar infrastructure project. The prospect of a
veto-proof majority in the Senate forced Trump to abandon his plan to impose a
5 percent tariff on all imported Mexican goods — a gambit that would have
shattered North America’s supply chains and sent shock waves through the
economy. Even Trump’s attempt to order his border wall built by deeming it an
“emergency” necessity — thereby violating Congress’s appropriations power — was
thwarted by his co-partisans.
When
Republicans in Congress weren’t guiding Trump toward conservative policy
outcomes, institutionalists and establishmentarians inside the administration
went to great lengths to prevent the former president from pursuing a reckless
policy of retrenchment.
In
contrast to Trump’s fawning words about Vladimir Putin, his administration, in
its actions, took the strongest posture against Moscow’s adventurism of any
White House so far this century. It imposed Magnitsky Act sanctions on Kremlin
officials, expelled Russian diplomats and reappropriated Moscow’s consular
property, and provided Ukraine with the lethal weaponry it had sought but never
received from the Obama administration. Although Trump may see NATO as a
vampiric drain on American power, the alliance expanded under his watch.
Trump
also executed retaliatory strikes on the Russian-allied regime in Syria for its
use of chemical weapons against civilians and engaged in battles with Russian
mercenaries. But his defense secretary, James Mattis, resigned in protest
against Trump’s dogged commitment to withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria and
sacrificing America’s partners in the region, a sacrifice that Trump was
eventually persuaded to abandon. And though Trump was deeply averse to direct
military conflict with Iran despite the Islamic Republic’s many attacks,
directly and by proxy, on U.S. assets and personnel in the Middle East, he
belatedly green-lighted the assassination of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps
commander Qasem Soleimani.
We
should not expect to see the likes of that administration again. Trump despises
many of the public servants who helped engineer these victories for his
administration, and the feeling is quite mutual. A staggering number of
Republican lawmakers who crafted the conservative legislation Trump now vaunts
lost their bids for reelection or simply withdrew from politics entirely.
The
in-years for the GOP were a success because they were leavened by a cabal of
conservatives. In the out-years, an effort to root out anti-Trump dissenters
and promote Republicans in Trump’s mold was remarkably effective. Those
victories have only embittered populist Republicans who so detest their
conservative compatriots.
***
Frugality
was not among the numerous hard-won conservative achievements in the Trump era.
When the Democrats argued, however absurdly, that they were now the
“fiscally responsible” party, the GOP did not object. Few GOP aspirants for
high office even tried to argue that the Democratic Party was profligate in its
handouts to favored groups. Rather, Republicans complained that the giveaways
weren’t making it into the right hands. At the state level, the GOP could still
claim the mantle of a party committed to liberty, economic growth, and a
navigable regulatory environment, but the party’s federal office-seekers didn’t
make that case.
The
GOP underperformed in the 2022 midterms. The party didn’t benefit from the
wobbly economy under Biden or the rapidly deteriorating international-security
environment, and why should it have? The party’s loudest voices failed to make
the case against Biden’s vision of America as a spent force. Rather,
Republicans appeared to buy into the notion of American decline.
Trump
and his emulators are quick to blame their electoral misfortunes on the post-Dobbs
political environment. The suddenly unsettled abortion question certainly has
enlivened Democratic voters, but it hasn’t scuttled the careers of state-level
officials who have tightened restrictions on abortion. Rather, what Dobbs
has exposed is how much the GOP’s persuasion muscles have atrophied.
Few
Republican lawmakers have emphasized how Dobbs has augmented individual
liberty. Instead, Republicans have run from their success, preferring to stoke
the paranoia that often typifies populist movements. Rich vs. poor, corporate
America vs. the little guy, the racial or creedal majority vs. minorities, and
on and on: This is the lingua franca of the political class now. But the argot
of the irrationally suspicious is a second language to Republicans, and they
don’t speak it well. Democrats are, by contrast, fluent. It’s hardly a surprise
that they are better communicators of distrust than the erstwhile optimists who
came of age under the legacy of Reaganism.
If
the third consecutive nomination of Donald Trump to the presidency was a signal
that Reaganite policies weren’t making a comeback among Republicans anytime
soon, then Senator J. D. Vance’s nomination to the vice presidency was a
bullhorn.
Vance
shares Democrats’ dim view of America’s capacity to meet its challenges abroad.
The Ohio senator has fully embraced shallow Democratic critiques of the GOP
that anyone over the age of 40 came of age voting against. The Iraq War was a
scheme to line the pockets of the well-connected who “get rich when America
loses wars instead of winning wars,” he alleges. The U.S. just doesn’t have the
wherewithal to support and defend all its embattled allies, he argues. He
retails a revisionist history of the 2008 mortgage crisis in which “Wall Street
barons crashed the economy, and American builders went out of business.” Vance
may be a more fluent expostulator of populism than Trump, but that talent also
reveals the extent to which the former president’s personality cult is
incompatible with our shared reality.
***
Trump
has uprooted conservatism as the GOP’s ideological lodestar, replacing it with
an amorphous persecution complex. Consequently, America now has two parties of
one mind on many acute problems facing the country. Neither party can credibly
claim that it has sought to tame the reactionary panics that come in and out of
fashion among its ranks. Both look down on people’s capacity for rational
decision-making, and they don’t trust people to recognize, much less pursue,
the public good. Neither Democrats nor Republicans can summon any enthusiasm
for a defense of the country’s governing institutions.
The
remaining question is whether the Republican Party will retain its appetite for
declinist paranoia if the ball bounces the wrong way for the GOP on Election
Day. Those who have forecast a post-Trump snapback to the status quo ante have
repeatedly been proven wrong. Still, Republican voters are not nearly as
hostile to free markets as their party’s populist agitators insist.
Polling
consistently shows that most American voters, including Republican voters, are
more worried about governmental interference in private affairs than about the
ravages of the market. Gallup’s polling this year found that, by 55 to 41
percent, voters believe “government is doing too many things that should be
left to individuals and businesses.” A Chamber of Commerce–sponsored survey
published in the spring discovered that the voting public is “more concerned” —
by nine points — “about government micromanaging private business” than about
“allowing business to make decisions they think are best for their customers —
even if they don’t align with the personal views of the respondents.”
Likewise,
“a majority of Americans believe U.S. leaders need to be more involved in
international affairs to protect the interests of the United States and
stability worldwide,” read a Military Times report this year, citing
data from the Reagan Institute’s summer survey. Most voters take a favorable
view of NATO, support arming Ukraine, back Israel’s right to self-defense, and
hope to sufficiently provision Taiwan to weather China’s threats.
Vanishingly
few Americans believe that their neighbors have “too much freedom” or that “the
greater good is more important” than individual liberty, according to a 2024
index compiled by Populace, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit, that measures
“private opinion in America.” And although polling indicates that most
Americans believe that Joe Biden’s immigration policies are unsustainable,
majorities are skeptical of a retributive approach that limits legal migrants,
skilled or otherwise, from contributing to the American economy.
That
formula is the basis for a broad coalition — one big enough to liberate a
clever politician from having to cater to the cranks, charlatans, and
malcontents who now populate the margins of both parties. It might even be a
conservative coalition, too, or at least one that does not think liberty is a
zero-sum game.
After
eight years of Donald Trump, that may seem like a fanciful prospect. And if
Trump wins in November, it’s all but off the table. A generation will have come
of age in the years since the Republican Party could be fairly described as
conservative. Americans will be fully acclimated to presidential candidates who
campaign for office by promising ever more services at little expense and
without trade-offs.
But
conservatives have triumphed over long odds before. Populism is a faddish
phenomenon in the country’s history. It comes and goes. And Americans have a
habit of bringing conservatism into the fight when it is needed most. So long
as men and women are imperfectible and the planners lack the knowledge to see
their great visions through to fruition, there will be a place for conservatism
in American politics. It wants only for champions.
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