Vance Is Not the Reagan of the New Right

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, September 09, 2026

 

In a famous Passover joke, a blind man is given matzah, the famously unleavened bread of the Hebrews, runs his fingers over it, and says, “Who writes this stuff?”

 

In the much older parable of the blind men and an elephant, a bunch of blind men encounter a pachyderm and each thinks they’ve encountered something different. One feels the trunk, and thinks it is a snake. Another puts his hands on the side and believes he’s encountered a wall. A third is sure the leg is a pillar.

 

I really didn’t appreciate until this morning when I started reading up on it that there is a diversity of opinion about what the fable is supposed to mean. There’s a Jain tradition that says the moral of the story is that different perspectives can all be true. I don’t think this is right. The different perspectives can all be honest or sincere. But the elephant is not a snake, or a wall, or a pillar. The elephant is an elephant. And in fairness, that’s closer to the most common interpretation: Be careful of thinking you understand something in full when you only have partial knowledge.

 

The Sufi mystic Rumi has a fun variation. In his version, the men aren’t blind—they’re in a dark room. They make the same mistakes blind men would. But Rumi says, “If there had been a candle in each one’s hand, the difference would have gone out of their words.”

 

Interestingly, the Japanese have a proverb about the blind men and the elephant that idiomatically refers to the inability of ordinary men to grasp the actions of a great man.

 

We’ve seen a lot of people try to explain Donald Trump with reference to this idea, if not the proverb. You establishment hacks can’t see the genius behind his moves, but that’s because you can’t appreciate his greatness. We’ll hear versions of this at the Trump-a-palooza in Dallas this week, I am sure.

 

On Vance and the Vanceguard.

 

But I don’t want to explore this. I’d rather look at how something similar is playing out with J.D. Vance.

 

My friend—and despite our disagreements, he really is a friend—Michael Brendan Dougherty offers something of a blind man and the elephant argument about Vance and Ronald Reagan. He runs through myriad factions of the right and their different interpretations of the Gipper. For some, he was an unwavering limited-government, free-trading, classical liberal. For others, he was a pragmatic statesman who favored protectionist policies when necessary. He was for gun rights. No, he signed a gun control bill as governor. He was an uberhawk who defeated the Soviet Union. No, he was an appeaser who got suckered into pointless summitry with the Soviets. “People pick their own Reagan to admire or abominate — and they can make that image one of a compromiser of principles or a fanatic fool devoted to the wrong ideas,” Michael writes.

 

He implies there’s something similar going on with Vance, a politician he admires greatly. I can hardly disagree, to the extent that people—people I admire and people I don’t—see different things in Vance. And how could they not? I don’t just mean his story arc from harsh critic of the dysfunction of lower-class white culture to defender of a new class of victims. Nor do I mean his transformation from Never Trumper golden boy to Robin to Trump’s Batman. (Holy metamorphoses …!).

 

Michael is very frustrated with the way people use terms like postliberal, nationalist, integralist, etc., in disparaging ways about Vance and his faction of the GOP. I can understand his frustration to some extent. Though louche and invidious terminological promiscuity is hardly exclusively a sin among critics of the new right. I’ve spent 30 years railing against people weaponizing the term “neoconservative,” with exactly zero success. Indeed, Vance himself has a long record of malicious misuse of the term to delegitimize or diminish the supposed  neocon influence on the party.

 

More to the point, it’s not the fault of Vance’s critics that people call him a postliberal. Vance has said he considers himself part of the “postliberal right.” When he was a senator, he told fellow postliberals that he was “explicitly anti-regime.” Now, I will give Vance the benefit of the doubt that he meant the Biden administration. But since we’re dinging the misuse of terms, it’s worth noting that in America the “regime,” as committed postliberals will acknowledge, is not a presidential administration but the constitutional order, or republican system of government. Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, surely knows this. Though his defenses of Donald Trump’s attempt to steal an election  suggest perhaps a more troubling understanding of the American regime. Vance’s association with “nationalism” isn’t as strong, but reasonable people can look at his speeches to Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatives as evidence that he sees himself as a nationalist as well. Hazony himself certainly thinks that’s the case.

 

Never mind that nationalism and (serious) postliberalism have some profoundly irreconcilable propositions at their core. Certainly, Catholic integralist postliberalism is one of the oldest and most coherent forms of “globalism” ever put forward.

 

But that’s okay. Michael’s whole point is that politicians can contain contradictions and people can glom onto the facets they want to see.

 

I think the reason Michael’s comparison of Vance to Reagan largely fails is that, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see a lot more consistency in Reagan than can be gleaned in the career of Vance. Yes, Reagan tactically zigged and zagged in his dealings with the Soviets, but no one doubts that his fundamental strategic goal was “We win, they lose.” Yes, he compromised with political realities on trade, but rhetorically and, again, strategically, he was a free trader. His protections for Harley-Davidson—the Reagan-was-a-protectionist crowd’s favorite example—were temporary by design. “It was like giving a boxer a few extra weeks of training before a fight,” he later explained. Indeed, his tactical concessions to a Democratic-majority Congress laid the “groundwork for a long-term free-trade legacy,” as Colin Grabow and Scott Lincicome explained in National Review.

 

“Contemporaneous critics of Reagan’s trade policies might be excused for failing to see the long game he played, but contemporary observers’ similar bouts of myopia deserve no such forgiveness,” they write.

 

Hindsight is never actually 20/20, but there are things we can see clearly about Reagan now that make a lot of Michael’s blind men and the elephant version of Reagan much less persuasive. And there were things we could see at the time, too. Reagan was a kind and congenial president. His detractors often struggled to see it, but voters saw it fairly plainly. His sunny disposition and fundamental decency played a big part in how he earned the “Teflon president” nickname. Reagan very occasionally had sharp elbows, but he didn’t believe in demonizing enemies or immigrants for political gain.

 

Whether you think Vance is a postliberal, a nationalist, or simply a more mainstream principled conservative political pragmatist, one thing you can’t persuade me—or many others—of is that he’s a Reaganesque politician in this regard. His big tent has a large and welcoming opening for edgelord Twitter addicts, traffickers in antisemitic bilge, and other fever-swampers, not to mention the aforementioned postliberals and nationalists who applaud “anti-regime” red meat. He encouraged the demonization of Haitian immigrants: “don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing.” He rhetorically tilts to a form of nationalism that ranks heritage Americans and descendants of combatants—on either side!—of the Civil War above more recent arrivals. That is not how Reagan talked—or thought—about America.

 

Whether it’s just the need to impress his boss, or a sign of his online addictions, or pure pragmatic surrender to the nastiness of our politics, or the epiphenomena of some deeper phenomenological grievances and resentments, Vance embraces the idea that politics is mean and that meanness is self-justifying. Some of his fans can’t see it because fish don’t know they’re wet. Some do see it, but write it off as the price of politics in pursuit of the noble and necessary goal of purging what Michael describes as “an excess of liberal ideology in our ruling class and their institutions.” And some just love the meanness on its own terms.

 

(Intriguingly, Michael says that “it’s precisely Vance’s commitment to [a Christian] orthodoxy in its appropriate sphere that prevents him from embracing the regnant asphyxiating and false political dogmatism” of our age. Maybe. But, from where I sit, Vance’s orthodoxy has some things to say about bearing false witness, kindness to strangers—including immigrants—and just wars that Vance doesn’t necessarily listen to when inconvenient.)

 

What’s interesting to me is that Marco Rubio doesn’t seem to see politics the same way as Vance does. Some observers have noted that Rubio is a convert to the same policy prescriptions as Vance and yet doesn’t attract nearly the same vitriol. Michael is right when he says that some of Rubio’s “most fervent supporters think he’s lying about all this.” When I took notice that Rubio had hired Nate Hochman, a very smart and talented young man sadly ensorcelled by new right ideas, Hazony commented that people like me were missing the point. “Vance, Rubio, and [Sen. Eric] Schmitt are on the same team. They share a generally nationalist conservative worldview and so draw staffers from the same ecosystem in DC. The big ideological gap is between these NatCons and the Ted Cruz - Nikki Haley wing,” Hazony wrote.

 

More’s the pity. But the interesting thing is that, as far as I can tell, very few people in the nationalist/postliberal world are clamoring for Rubio, but lots of rank-and-file Republicans are. Rubio is preferred by Republicans in head-to-head matchups and he’s generally more popular inside and outside the party. Maybe some of this can be attributed to the fact that Vance is more closely tied to a blisteringly unpopular president. Maybe it’s because Rubio, partly thanks to his portfolio and partly thanks to his manifest competence, has a more obvious record of success, while Vance has to take blame for everything thanks to the thanklessness of the vice presidency itself. And maybe it’s because Rubio doesn’t come across as someone who relishes being mean and doesn’t come across as angry, which may be why he’s not participating in Trump-a-palooza this week.

 

Michael and Hazony’s argument that Rubio is on their team is meaningful, but I’m not entirely sure the full meaning is to their liking. Vance is the chosen candidate of the very online, very angry, and very hostile factions of the right. He’s the choice of Kevin Roberts, Turning Point USA, and, at least until recently, Tucker Carlson—the same Carlson who Vance can’t bring himself to meaningfully criticize, even as Carlson seeps ever deeper into the antisemitic and paranoid swamp.

 

This is the same Carlson who told Donald Trump not to pick Rubio as a running mate because Rubio was a “neocon” and therefore America’s intelligence community would assassinate Trump to get a President Rubio. He also told Trump that Rubio would undermine Trump so that Rubio could navigate us into a nuclear war. Finally, he told Trump he had to pick Vance.

 

It may be true, sadly, that Rubio completely agrees with Vance on trade, industrial policy, and the like. I don’t think they see eye to eye on foreign policy. But I could be wrong about that. My point is that Vance represents a faction and a theory of politics that Rubio does not, and they attract different factions because of it. And that difference matters a lot, however they might fill out some policy questionnaires.

 

We’re all in the dark about what these men actually believe, Michael included. But we don’t need a candle to see that they represent very different approaches to politics—and the regime.

It’s Not Just the Economics, Stupid

By Mark Miller

Tuesday, September 01, 2026

 

In her new book, Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, Stephanie Slade sets out to describe and recover a political philosophy that faded in the years after it succeeded. Fusionism helped shape the movement that Ronald Reagan led. But what it fused — liberty and virtue — came apart over the four decades since he left office, at least in part because its adherents found it easier to talk about economics than virtue. Slade argues that recovering that connection offers a better path for the future than the alternatives that what she calls “the dissident right” offers.

 

So, to start: What is fusionism? According to Slade, fusionism is a philosophical synthesis, developed in the 1950s and ’60s, holding liberty and virtue together. The two sides of that synthesis began from different concerns. Classical liberals emphasized individual freedom, private property, free markets, limited government, and protection against concentrated political power. Traditionalists like Russell Kirk, on the other hand, emphasized religion, family, community, inherited wisdom, and the moral order. Fusionism argued that these commitments were not rivals; virtue supplied the purposes for which freedom should be used.

 

Fusionism’s leading architect, National Review editor Frank Meyer, did not regard freedom as the highest human good. Virtue was higher. But virtue, to be virtue, must be freely chosen. Government can protect life, liberty, and property, preserve public order, and administer justice. It cannot make a person good. Fusionism married what classical liberals and traditionalists were inclined to separate.

 

Slade also describes those who rejected the fusionist synthesis early on, providing an overview of the relevant philosophical disputes of the second half of the 20th century.

 

For example, Kevin Phillips, the political consultant who developed Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” felt that conservative politicians needed to set aside their preoccupation with free markets and embrace wealth distribution — except to distribute the wealth to those the right favored rather than groups who vote for Democrats.

 

Brent Bozell, William F. Buckley Jr.’s brother-in-law and Meyer’s colleague at National Review, presented the most important early challenge to that synthesis. If people repeatedly use freedom to undermine religion, family, and the moral order, Bozell asked, why should law — that is, government force — not “guide” them toward the good?

 

Meanwhile, leading libertarians criticized fusionism because they believed that even the limited government role that fusionism supported granted too much power to those in charge of that limited government.

 

But the most important early critic, especially considering where we are today, was Bozell, and Slade devotes pages to describing his objections and his personal history. Bozell eventually concluded that fusionism gave freedom priority over virtue, and for this reason he rejected it as a proper political philosophy. By his lights, that the government should exist only to protect life, liberty, and property was fatuous. Rather, government should be used “to reduce the occasions for sin,” as Slade describes it.

 

“If the state made it harder to legally obtain a divorce, fewer people would be tempted to abandon their spouses; if the state prohibited business from operating on Sundays, fewer people would be tempted to skip church,” Slade writes. “Too much political freedom enabled vice.”

 

Meyer answered that Bozell’s objection to fusionism confused freedom as the politically necessary condition for virtue with freedom as the end in itself. Once properly understood, Meyer’s point was simple: A Bozell approach to virtue could not create virtue, because government cannot make people virtuous. Virtue requires free choice; if virtue is compelled, then it is nothing more than compliance. To force people to be virtuous invites tyranny. Bozell denied “the difference between the authoritarian imposition of human power and the persuasive authority of truth and good.”

 

After making the best case she can for Bozell’s point of view, Slade sides with Meyer. Yet Bozell’s objection is not easily dispatched. The years since have demonstrated that many Americans, from Pat Buchanan in the 1990s to those of today whom Slade labels “the dissident right,” see the world as Bozell did (more on the “dissident right” below). After all, government plainly must prohibit some acts. The question is where we draw the line.

 

Perhaps the best way to make the case that Meyer’s fusionism had it right and Bozell had it wrong is told through invocation of one person and his era: Ronald Reagan. And indeed, Reagan emerges as Slade’s best case for fusionism in practice. She does not contend that he was a perfect fusionist — on his watch, federal spending grew and the national debt increased. But Reagan possessed an unusual ability to connect economics to a morally intelligible account of ordinary life, and it is in this strength that the best case for fusionism is made.

 

Slade does not mention Reagan’s famous “Morning in America” 1984 campaign commercial, but recalling that commercial makes the fusionist case for her. The commercial begins with economic facts. Employment is up. Inflation is down. Interest rates have fallen.

 

But the argument does not stop after making those economic points. It goes on.

 

Lower interest rates mean that families can buy homes. Lower inflation means that young couples can marry with greater confidence in the future.

 

Reagan completed the fusionist argument — he did not rely only on free market economics. By the commercial’s telling, improved economic conditions gave people greater freedom to work, marry, establish homes, support families, assume responsibilities, and build lives together. Economic freedom did not make people virtuous. But it enlarged their practical freedom to pursue virtue.

 

Many of fusionism’s latter-day heirs retained Reagan’s economic claims but lost his ability to explain their human purposes — in the manner that he explained them in the “Morning in America” ad and more generally. Explaining why government planning and too many regulations are bad is not the same as explaining why economic freedom is good. The modern fusionist argument increasingly stopped too soon. It became less adept at explaining what economic freedom allows people to build.

 

In this failure, the heirs to fusionism opened the door to thinkers that Slade calls, collectively, the “dissident right.” Slade uses the term to describe post-liberals, national conservatives, populists, and others who reject the fusionist settlement. They are willing to use government power to direct economic and social life toward preferred moral ends, just as Bozell articulated.

 

And their diagnosis has force. “Markets work” is not an adequate answer to people who believe that their families and communities have stopped working. That people believe their families and communities have stopped working is well described in JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. By speaking chiefly in economic terms, latter-day fusionists ceded much of the language of virtue and morality to people eager to use government power to force those traits on others for “the common good.”

 

But identifying the latter-day fusionist order’s imperfections does not establish a better alternative. The dissident right’s economic populism concentrates political and economic power in the same hands, placing that power behind the state’s monopoly on the use of lawful force.

 

The contemporary dispute between the heirs to fusionism and the dissident right thus revives the 60-year-old disagreement between Meyer and Bozell. Slade’s answer, as the book’s title telegraphs, is a return to fusionism: Government must preserve the freedom by which virtue can be chosen. Families, churches, communities, and other voluntary institutions must then form individuals capable of using that freedom well.

 

But how do we do this? If the institutions that cultivate virtue have already deteriorated, how are they to be rebuilt without the government coercion that Slade rightly rejects? She shows why the state cannot restore civil society by taking on its functions. She does not quite show what can restore it.

 

Still, Slade has described the central dispute on the American right more clearly than anyone else has. Slade’s Fusionism should remind all of us that an economic argument is not complete until it explains what economic freedom allows human beings to build. Reagan understood it. Reinvigorating the fusionist synthesis will require the heirs of Meyer and Reagan both to understand what it was and learn to make its case again.

The Enduring Relevance of Reaganism

By Dan McLaughlin

Thursday, August 28, 2025

 

Mark offered a response to the question posed by Michael: Why do we still care so much about Ronald Reagan and his ideas? Mark’s answer is that “Reagan is remembered so fondly by Republicans because he was the last unambiguously successful two-term Republican president.” I’d add a few more pieces to the puzzle.

 

First, we’re conservatives. Good ideas don’t become irrelevant just because they’re old. We still care about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, long after their voters died off, because they were right about many things and accomplished a lot for the country. “Reagan is for the Olds” should not be an insult.

 

Second, the scale of Reagan’s political success was immense. Michael notes that nobody in the Seventies was producing Herbert Hoover nostalgia, but the Democrats of that era were still awash in FDR nostalgia, because FDR shattered the ceiling for what was possible for a Democratic leader. Even today’s Democrats pay him periodic lip service, 80 years after his death. As I explained of Reagan’s success in 2015:

 

Reagan unquestionably (though not alone) shifted the nation further to the right than he found it, in some ways temporarily and in other more lasting ways. Victory in the Cold War was the obvious headline – as late as 1979, there were voices throughout the West arguing that we could never defeat the Soviets and that Communism represented a viable alternative model to the American system, whereas today even an open socialist like Bernie Sanders cites the increasingly more free-market Scandinavian model. Reagan revolutionized the politics of taxes – in 1980, the top federal income tax rate was 70%, and married couples making $30,000 a year paid a top rate of 37%; at $35,000 they hit the 43% bracket. Taxpayers over $200,000 in income paid, on average, a total effective tax rate over 40%. These would be unthinkable tax rates today, when we argue over top marginal rates in the 35-39.6% band. Other long-term policy wins that shifted the conversation included ending the Fairness Doctrine, nominating the first explicit originalist to the Supreme Court (Antonin Scalia), breaking the air-traffic controllers union, finishing the (started under Carter) project of airline and trucking deregulation, and starting the free-trade processes that would yield dividends into the 1990s (he promised a NAFTA-like agreement in his 1979 speech announcing his candidacy). And Reagan’s victories laid the groundwork for the welfare reforms of Newt Gingrich (presaged in some of Reagan’s own policies as California Governor) and the law-enforcement revolution spearheaded by his U.S. Attorney in New York, Rudy Giuliani.

 

Or look at the electorate. We talk today about a general electorate dominated by Democrats, because the exit polls showed a D+7 electorate in 2008, D+6 in 2012 (that is, for example, 38% Democrats and 32% Republicans in 2012), and how this gave Barack Obama an unbeatable edge. But the electorate in 1976 and 1980 was D+15, with only 22% of voters in 1976 identifying themselves as Republicans. Yes, many more of the Democrats in those days were fairly conservative-leaning, not just in the South but in the Midwest, but these were still not people you could walk up to and say “I’m a conservative Republican” and have their vote (a March 1979 poll had Reagan trailing Carter 52-38). Even the South had gone heavily Democrat in 1976, with Carter carrying all but one state (Virginia) below the Mason-Dixon Line. Reagan in 1980 carried 27% of Democrats to Carter’s 67, and 56% of independents to Carter’s 31. And Reagan’s success changed the electorate’s view of his party – the electorate was D+3 by 1984, D+2 by 1988.

 

Inheriting a country in which Republicans were distinctly the minority party and conservatives were distinctly their minority faction, Reagan won 44 and 49 states. His coattails helped Republicans in 1980 to gain twelve Senate seats, breaking a majority the Democrats had held continuously for 24 years, often with majorities of 60 or more Senators (they had 61 seats in 1977). Since 1824, only four presidents — Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, FDR, and Reagan — have served two full terms and then handed off the White House to a successor of their own party. It would be strange if Republicans didn’t consider Reagan a permanently monumental figure in the party’s history.

 

Michael is correct that the right’s political and media institutions (including National Review) came of age alongside Reagan’s movement and were intertwined with it, but that, too, is a symptom of the massive success of the Reagan era.

 

Third, it’s a bit of a leap to pin solely onto Reagan how the right went from “protectionism and foreign policy restraint in the 1920s to free trade and internationalism in the 1980s and 1990s.” If Reagan’s foreign policy was more hawkish and internationalist than his predecessors, it was not dramatically out of line with the basic orientation of Republican foreign policy under Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford, and which continued for decades after Reagan. If Reagan looms largest in that conversation, it’s both because he was the best at explaining its ideas and due to the conspicuous success of his policies in defeating the multi-generational menace of Soviet Communism. It is, moreover, a bit artificial (as I’ve observed before) to begin the tale with the post-World War I turn in foreign policy, when more assertive foreign-policy figures such as William Seward and Teddy Roosevelt have been in the GOP since the beginning. On trade, it’s true that Reagan pushed the party much further toward free trade, but that, too, was a turn that begins with the Eisenhower years, not with Reagan. Compared with Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford, what was newer under Reagan — or at least, newly recovered from the past — was the revival of Coolidge-era small-government and low-taxes Republicanism and Grant-era Christian social conservatism.

 

I suppose I should expect by now that any generational analysis will simply ignore the existence of my generation (Gen X, born between 1965-79), who came of age in the Reagan era. It’s not hard to see why the most directly Reagan-influenced generation of Republican politicians is Gen X, including Mike Johnson, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Scott Walker, Nikki Haley, Glenn Youngkin, Ron DeSantis, Chip Roy, Steve Scalise, Paul Ryan, Tim Scott, Mike Lee, Joni Ernst, and Bobby Jindal. When Donald Trump (a textbook Baby Boomer, born 1946) hit the scene, it was easier for Boomer political figures who had lived through the Nixon years (such as Newt Gingrich) to accommodate themselves to his style of politics (marinated as it was in the culture-war assumptions of the late 1960s) than for those of us who had Reagan as a formative model. In that sense, Gen X now has both the Millennial generation that doesn’t remember Reagan and the Gen Z generation that knows only Trump, and that makes it harder to ensure that our patrimony of ideas doesn’t die off with us, but is shown to remain relevant to new settings and situations. But then, that’s always been the challenge for conservatives.

Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Legacy

By Mike Pence

Wednesday, June 05, 2024

 

I remember it like it was yesterday: sitting in the National Cathedral, hearing “Mansions of the Lord” somberly echoing through the rafters. I remember watching the horse-drawn caisson carry the casket to the Capitol, my young children at my side. It is hard to believe it’s been 20 years since President Ronald Reagan “slipped the surly bonds of Earth.”

 

I began my political life in the Democrat Party. But when I heard the voice, the vision, and the optimism of Ronald Reagan, I knew the Republican Party was where I belonged.

 

I came to revere our 40th president. When I first ran for Congress in 1988, I was invited to Washington to meet with President Reagan. I thanked him for all he did to inspire my generation to believe in our country again.

 

And that is exactly what Reagan did. The economic, political, and cultural turmoil of the 1970s caused many to lose faith in our country and in our founding principles. Some even believed that the Soviet Union and communism would outlive the American experiment. But President Reagan knew it was always darkest before the dawn, and he knew that it would soon be morning in America once again.

 

When Reagan took office, inflation rates were double-digit, unemployment was sky-high, and communism was spreading like wildfire. By the time he left office, he had helped create the most powerful economy in recorded history, Soviet communism was on its last legs, and the Cold War would soon end in American victory. He accomplished it all not by compromising conservative principles, but by standing firm on what he knew was right.

 

Some Republicans today view Reagan as a figure best confined to history books: revered, but no longer relevant to our current challenges. I respectfully disagree. While the specific issues we face may differ, the foundational principles of our nation remain unchanged. The principles Reagan championed — limited government, traditional values, the right to life, and a strong national defense — will endure forever as a light to the feet of future generations charting the path of our nation in the years to come.

 

These core American principles are the foundation upon which our nation was built. They have guided America through a civil war, two world wars, and the horrors of 9/11. They will continue to sustain us through future challenges.

 

Some may find it fashionable to question the relevance of Reagan’s wisdom, asking, “Don’t you know what time it is?” Political fads may come and go, but the traditional-conservative principles and ideals Reagan championed are truly timeless. They are hardwired into our American DNA, from the Founding Fathers to the present, and they will endure long after the rest of us have joined our 40th president in the next life to come.

DeSantis Should Use the Reagan Playbook to Regain His Footing against Trump

By Henry Olsen

Wednesday, September 27, 2023

 

Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s attempt to defeat former president Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination is clearly floundering. But so was Ronald Reagan’s primary challenge to then-president Gerald Ford in 1976. DeSantis should study Reagan’s comeback to engineer a similar rapid turnaround.

 

The possibility of a Reagan presidency looked very dim in mid-March 1976. Reagan had lost the Iowa caucus and five straight primaries to the incumbent. Many of those battles were close, but a loss is still a loss. The campaign was running out of money, and many leading Republicans were calling on Reagan to drop out and endorse Ford. Reagan had to win the North Carolina primary or his campaign — and political future — would be over.

 

Reagan won the state, in large part by sharpening his rhetoric against the sitting president. He drew a clear distinction between himself and Ford on a panoply of policy issues. Each had its role in his comeback, but none was as important as Reagan’s opposition to the Panama Canal Treaty.

 

The United States had owned the land on which the Panama Canal would be built, and some surrounding territory, since purchasing it in 1903. Panama’s authoritarian government wanted it back, and Ford’s administration was engaged in negotiations to give it back. Reagan believed this would threaten American control over the vital waterway, especially if Panama came under the sway of the Soviet Union.

 

Reagan increasingly highlighted his difference with Ford on this issue in campaign-trail speeches. Republicans were growing fearful that the United States was losing the Cold War, and they tended to blame the détente strategy that both Ford’s and Richard Nixon’s administrations had pursued. The Canal issue didn’t get Reagan the nomination, but it did keep him in the race until he lost on the convention floor in August. That historically strong performance made Reagan the front-runner in 1980, and the rest is history.

 

DeSantis is in a similar position today as Reagan was then. No votes have been cast, but his showing in national and state polls has steadily declined since he got into the race. In today’s politics, that’s as deadly as losing six early races was for Reagan in 1976. If DeSantis can’t stop the slide and get momentum back soon, he will be hard pressed to make a rapid ascent later.

 

Fortunately, Trump has given DeSantis an equivalent to the Panama Canal Treaty issue: abortion. Trump’s clear disdain for pro-lifers and their ultimate objective — to ban abortions across the board — is as out of step with today’s GOP as Ford’s pro-Treaty stance was then. DeSantis cannot let this gift go to waste.

 

DeSantis should do what Reagan did, and outline a set of differences with Trump on policy — with a strong emphasis on abortion policy in particular. The message should be simple: Trump says he’s fighting for you, but across the board he either gives up the fight (he funded mail balloting, he kept Fauci and criticized early lifting of lockdowns during the pandemic) or doesn’t share our values. DeSantis cannot mince words: He has to force conservatives to choose between him — a conservative fighter who wins — and Trump.

 

Abortion should be front and center because church-going evangelicals, Catholics, and Mormons are the party’s base. They represent the strongest and most loyal voters in today’s Republican Party, and many have made opposition to abortion a litmus test for decades. They need to be made to choose what they care about more: saving unborn children or electing Donald Trump.

 

DeSantis does not need to fall into a media trap and endorse a federal ban. He needs to emphasize that he thinks abortion regulation is primarily a state issue and that he does not favor anything stricter at the federal level than the 15-week ban supported by many pro-life groups. He should instead emphasize the many ways a genuinely pro-life president can act and talk to advance the culture of life.

 

Trump cannot meet him on those grounds. He has already blamed pro-lifers for the party’s disappointing midterm-election results. He has also staked out a clear principle that will govern his abortion policy if reelected: Abortion access should be the subject of negotiations between abortion-rights activists and pro-lifers. That principle is a chimera, something that simply cannot achieve positive results given the vast philosophical gulf between the two sides.

 

Though DeSantis will want to avoid this confrontation, he can’t. He needs a clear rationale for his campaign. Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley have those, but DeSantis’s efforts have thus far fallen flat. Haley is gathering the old Reaganite wing to her banner while Vivek is becoming what DeSantis wanted to be, the younger man MAGA World can back. Wait much longer, and those two will squeeze DeSantis out of the race like toothpaste from a tube.

 

Ronald Reagan met the party establishment head-on and ultimately won. Ron DeSantis needs to show he can do the same thing, or else he’ll be yet another appealing governor who falls flat on the national stage.

DeSantis Summons the Ghost of Reagan

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, August 02, 2023

 

Twice in as many days, Florida governor Ron DeSantis invited the wrath of a thousand Washington, D.C.–based social-media influencers by favorably invoking President Ronald Reagan’s legacy.

 

As Dominic Pino convincingly argued, DeSantis’s set-piece speech on his economic policies (many of which were cultural policies that have incidental economic effects) was replete with the heady rhetoric of the culture wars. But there were some green shoots in that speech. One of them involved the governor’s full-throated endorsement of Reagan’s philosophical approach to the misallocation of taxpayer funds.

 

“We need to rein in Congress’s spending habits,” he told the crowd. Toward that end, DeSantis endorsed the aborted 1982 effort to ratify a new amendment to the Constitution that would have required that total federal outlays be no greater than total receipts — the so-called balanced-budget amendment. He continued to promote his own gubernatorial vetoing of what he deemed “excessive spending,” and he promised to do the same as president, just like the Gipper. “We really haven’t had a president since Ronald Reagan who leaned in against Congress overspending,” DeSantis said. “I will be that president.”

 

That promise might frustrate some of the governor’s more populist supporters, many of whom have embraced deficit spending as long as it is dedicated to their priorities. For them, profligacy in pursuit of the popular is no vice. Distancing himself from that right-wing fashion is worthy of credit and praise.

 

In a slightly more veiled nod to the 40th president, DeSantis promotes his economic agenda in a distinctly Reaganite way. He summarizes his philosophy thusly: “We win. They Lose.”

 

That’s how Reagan described his approach to relations with the Soviet Union. “My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic,” he said in 1977. “It is this: We win, and they lose.” That was a particularly controversial view, not just among Democrats but Republicans, too, when the American Right was still captive to the logic of détente with Moscow.

 

Indeed, that language is likely to trigger anyone who has internalized moral relativism in their assessment of the United States vis-à-vis its competitors abroad. America, the self-described nationalists insist, is just one power among many, and it’s certainly not a uniquely ethical one. DeSantis’s absolutism and self-assuredness is a welcome departure from the sour, insecure subjectivism that masquerades as enlightenment on the populist right.

 

Maybe these gestures are too few and far between to constitute a deliberate feature of the DeSantis campaign’s “reboot.” They are welcome nonetheless.

Ronald Reagan’s Path for American Renewal

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, June 10, 2023

 

On January 5, 1967, Ronald Reagan delivered his first inaugural message as governor of California. To read his speech is to be reminded that some problems recur throughout history. And that lessons of a previous era often apply to our own.

 

The first topic Reagan mentioned was crime. Then he discussed welfare reform and education. He brought up radicalism on campus. He called for lower taxes and fiscal discipline.

 

What strikes the contemporary reader is Reagan’s rhetorical framework. All these individual issues, he said, were aspects of a general relationship between government and the people. As today’s Republicans and conservatives grapple with inflation, crime, illegal immigration, and a culture of repudiation, they might take note of how the most popular and successful GOP president of the last century thought about the social contract.

 

For Reagan, the American government was not omnipotent. The Founders did not mean for government to be fickle or arbitrary. They did not intend for it to lord over subjects. They wanted the law to reflect the consensus of self-governed citizens. Rather than build a “Great Society” engineered by politicians and bureaucrats in Sacramento or Washington, D.C., Reagan evoked a “Creative Society” where “government will lead but not rule, listen but not lecture.”

 

Reagan seems to have dropped the “Creative Society” tagline not long after taking office, but the principles behind the slogan continued to inform his rhetoric and politics. Reagan saw public officials as intermediaries between voters and government. Their job is to keep government in check. They represent taxpayers and must ensure that “no permanent structure of government ever encroaches on freedom.” The tasks of office include fulfilling the basic duties of government — rule of law, administration of justice, and national defense — as well as removing obstacles to human flourishing.

 

Reagan restated these themes in his first presidential inaugural address. He tried to quell voter anxiety by distancing himself from extreme libertarianism. “It’s not my intention to do away with government,” he said on January 20, 1981. “It is rather to make it work — work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.” The Creative Society lived on, though not by that name.

 

When Reagan became president, the country was in the middle of an economic crisis. Stagflation — the combination of recession and inflation — was lowering the standard of living. Rising prices and nominal wages pushed voters into higher tax brackets, draining their discretionary income.

 

During the Republican primary, Reagan had adopted the program of supply-side economics. Following the lead of New York congressman Jack Kemp, he called for price stability, deregulation, tighter social spending, free trade, energy production, and a massive, across-the-board tax cut that included inflation indexing.

 

The supply-side agenda fit comfortably within the structure of the Creative Society. Its goal was to remove barriers to work, savings, and investment and generate economic growth through innovation. It was compatible with Reagan’s mystical belief in the power of technology to improve the material conditions of life and advance the cause of civilization.

 

Such progress was connected, in Reagan’s mind, to a public commitment to human freedom. Government’s purpose was not found in remaking human nature or in divvying up resources and honors among groups. It was found in acts of self-restraint that gave space to individuals to better their condition.

 

“Democracy is less a system of government than it is a system to keep government limited, unintrusive,” Reagan told the students at Moscow State University in 1988, “a system of constraints on power to keep politics and government secondary to the important things in life, the true sources of value found only in family and faith.”

 

An advocate of the Creative Society in the year 2023 would agree with this hierarchy. Family and faith are seedbeds of virtue where government ought not to intrude. Meddling with the home and church is destructive and corrosive. Government should work with the people, not against them, to unlock latent potential in the earth, in schools, in labs, in factories, in cities. And the way to do this is a new supply-side economics aimed at increased productivity and abundance.

 

The progressive Left is not the place for a supply-side revival. Liberal intellectuals don’t understand the economics. Democratic interest groups won’t like the politics. It’s the conservative Right that must map out the topography of the Creative Society in the 21st century. That picture won’t look exactly like Reagan’s, but it will incorporate his insights.

 

Spending restraint and monetary sanity would end inflation and restore price stability. Deregulation would take precedence over further tax cuts. The permitting process would be streamlined. The federal government would open more properties to oil and gas exploration and development. An all-of-government effort would promote nuclear power and enhancements to the electric grid. Research and development on hard sciences and applied engineering would increase, and the grant-making process would be made easier.

 

The federal government would search for ways to copy or to promote state-level workforce initiatives that abolish occupational licensing or incentivize new home construction. Immigration levels must be regularized, by finishing construction of the border wall, normalizing asylum law, privileging high-skilled workers, and creating systems to match low-skilled workers with employers before migrants attempt illegal crossings. Protectionist measures that contribute to inflation and harm our relationships with strategic allies would be repealed. (Trade with adversaries such as China would be handled differently.)

 

A winning Republican or conservative doesn’t need to get lost in the weeds of policy detail. What’s more important is his ability to situate these particulars in a larger concept of the American future. That concept would put hardware over software and national pride over group loyalty. And it would drive home the idea that traditional social practices are the bedrock of prosperity and peace.

 

Look for the candidate who refines Reagan’s vision to meet this moment. Nostalgia or necromancy has nothing to do with it. Gratitude toward the achievements of the past, and a willingness to build upon them, is the essence of conservatism. “The Creative Society is not a retreat into the past,” Reagan said back in 1967. “It is taking the dream that gave birth to this nation, and updating it, and making it practical for the 20th century. It is a good dream. It is a dream that is worthy of your generation.” And ours.

The Reaganite

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, May 01, 2023

 

Ron DeSantis is, by most accounts, not what you would call a “people person.” 

 

DeSantis is prickly. He keeps his advisers at arm’s length, has a reputation for being cold and remote, doesn’t have many close friends, and trusts almost no one other than his wife. 

 

Finally, a Reaganite!

 

Ronald Reagan was famously walled-off, not only from friends and colleagues but even from much of his family, including his children, with his wife, Nancy, being his only real intimate—all of which will sound very familiar to DeSantis watchers. 

 

Like Reagan, DeSantis is a successful governor of a warm, sunny, Republican state. (It is hard to believe that Southern California once was the heartland of postwar Republican conservatism.) In fact, Florida today is very much what California was in its heyday: It is the summery, sun-drenched, affordable place you go to start over when you’ve had enough of Cleveland or Philadelphia or Chicago or wherever, the land of new beginnings for people who can’t handle Texas. 

 

Because the legend—and the cartoon—of Reagan has displaced the historical figure in the popular consciousness, it is easy to forget that Reagan was in many ways not the most obvious standard-bearer of the midcentury conservatism created by William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, and others of that kidney. Reagan was a Hollywood guy who honed his anti-Communist chops in two stints as president of the Screen Actors’ Guild (Reagan was the only union president to win the White House); he idolized Franklin Roosevelt and frequently described himself as a New Deal Democrat estranged from his party by the radicalism of the 1960s; he was a conservative governor, but he also signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law and one of its first laws liberalizing abortion. Because of his commitment to defeat the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics rather than merely to contain it, we think of Reagan as the ultimate hawk, whereas his actual career as a peacenik (sometimes a pretty radical one) is almost forgotten: How many Americans today remember that Reagan planned to develop an anti-missile system and then share the technology with the Soviets in order to render nuclear ICBMs on both sides effectively useless? 

 

Reagan, from a certain point of view, wasn’t much of a Reaganite, and was much more of a libertarian. (Take Reagan at his word: “I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals.”) Whatever the Gipper’s secret sauce was, it wasn’t that “foolish consistency” which is “the hobgoblin of little minds.” 

 

But Reagan also had some tools in his tool box that Ron DeSantis does not. For one thing, he was a movie star, and he could turn on his cinematic powers like flipping a light-switch. For another, the absence of the common touch that did not come naturally to him was partly compensated for by his years of service to General Electric, where he spent night after night giving speeches about free-market economics, the dangers of overambitious government, and the dual threats, one foreign and one domestic, to American liberty. Reagan was not a narrow ideologue in that there was more to his thinking than memorized Hayek passages or National Review pages. What he believed, he knew he believed, knew why he believed it, and could explain why he believed it. 

 

Reagan’s gradual abandonment of his earlier libertarian views on abortion gave the impression that it was difficult, marked by regret, and something other than opportunistic. (The same cannot be said, I am afraid, of Mitt Romney, who at least moved in the right direction when it was politically convenient, or of the generation of Democrats who moved in the opposite direction out of pure cravenness.) DeSantis has gone from being a kind of Paul Ryan guy to the one Trump guy most detested by Trump guys, but his newfound populism feels more opportunistic than born-again. Like Ted Cruz, DeSantis seeks opportunities to demonstrate his combativeness, but he more often comes off prim, bitter, or smarmy. If Ronald Reagan could deploy the political equivalent of Julia Roberts’ megawatt smile, then Ron DeSantis has something more like Rob Schneider’s constipated smirk. 

 

Reagan was a real celebrity, even if a faded one, but the kind of celebrity he had is, in many ways, even more politically potent in our time than it was in his. When the definitive account of Trumpism is written, historians will conclude that there were two factors that made Donald Trump president rather than another forgotten fringe candidate. The first was the failure of the Republican Party to take immigration seriously, particularly illegal immigration but not illegal immigration alone. The second was the fact that Trump was a genuine celebrity—not “Fox News famous,” not an “Oh, he’s still alive?” Scott Baio kind of figure, but a celebrity of the first rank. DeSantis is famous, but he is not a celebrity—the two are not the same thing. 

 

You don’t have to be a celebrity to be elected president, but it helps. You don’t have to be a great one-on-one politician: Reagan could handle voters by the dozen or by the million, which is a pretty good range even if he wasn’t a great single-serving glad-hander, and that worked fine for him. Barack Obama had his limits (rooted in impatience and in his staggering self-importance) with individuals and small non-elite groups. DeSantis can also expect to be dinged quite a bit on the considerable political chasm that yawns between his earlier career and the sort of thing he says and does now. The ongoing Disney matter may play well in the bingo halls, but it brings out his pettiness and his vindictiveness, and it suggests a moral character to which the temptation of tyranny is by no means alien. 

 

A successful president gets one big thing done (e.g.: Barack Obama got his health care law). A very successful president gets two big things done: Reagan won the Cold War and turned the cultural tide against the Great Society-style welfare statism that had been regnant from the mid-1960s. He campaigned on those things, and there was nobody that followed politics who did not understand those were his priorities. 

 

DeSantis seems to want to be president, and, even though he has some real political handicaps, it is not impossible to imagine him achieving that. But what is it he wants to do? I do not think that wokeness, whatever that means this week, is quite the Iron Curtain—or even the malignant detritus of LBJ-ism. 

 

Ron DeSantis is asking for the world’s biggest hammer, and it is by no means clear what he intends to build—or smash—with it. 

 

Furthermore … 

 

There are two kinds of columnists in these United States: columnists who can write about “Mugwumpean fastidiousness” and columnists who are not George Will. 

 

L’Esprit d’Escalier

 

On Friday, I was on the Ricochet podcast with some old friends (Rob Long, James Lileks, and Peter Robinson) when the conversation turned, as it sometimes does, to the subject of drag queens, “drag-queen story hour,” etc. I didn’t quite say what I wanted to say (I’m a writer, not a talker), so, I’m going to give it another shot here. 

 

Let me start with a story that is even more uncomfortable for me to write than it will be for the gentlemen in my audience to read, because I will omit a few details. A few years ago, I wrote a piece (one of my better ones, I think) on the pornography industry and adjacent sex-related businesses, with the annual Adult Video News awards—aka, the “porn Oscars”—as my centerpiece. There’s a lot of troubling stuff in that report, but some of it is worse than I communicated. For example, I omitted—as too unbelievable-sounding—my conversation with two women who were in a technical sense what we would call “sex workers” but who did not (according to their account) perform sex acts as such but rather serviced an extensive menu of paraphilias, both in specially commissioned videos and in person. One of the more lucrative services they offered involved performing what amounts to amateur surgery (with no real anesthesia) on a sensitive bit of male anatomy, working in hotel rooms. Their account sounded too extraordinary to be true, but, according to the women in question, this aspect of their business was driven by a very small number of dedicated repeat customers. 

 

The paraphilia in question seems to me obviously disordered and unhealthy, dangerous, ghastly, and degrading. But if I were making a list of Greatest American Social Problems, that would probably be down around 1,129,844 in the rankings—it is bananas, but it is exceedingly rare. Rarity should matter, but we have a tendency to fixate on threats, possibilities, and social situations that are exotic and extreme, on remote possibilities that command the imagination, however unlikely they may be. I sometimes describe this as the Moose Principle: We worry a great deal about shark attacks, but sharks are way, way down on the list of animals that are likely to kill you, well behind wasps and bees, well behind the mass-murdering global menace that is the mosquito, and, in the realm of megafauna, behind cows and horses, domestic dogs, and that great noble giant of North America, the moose, an enormous, territorial, and sometimes aggressive creature that will stomp you into goo if provoked. But there isn’t any “Moose Week” on Discovery. Jaws gets great ratings, and Bullwinkle J. Moose does not. 

 

(The “J” stands for “Jay,” a middle name he shares with Rocket “Rocky” J. Squirrel, in honor of legendary cartoon producer Jay Ward.)

 

I am not convinced that drag queens are anything like public enemy No. 1. (A much better case could be made for transgender ideology and its application to children, which is a different but not entirely unrelated issue.) I do not think the recent project of mainstreaming drag performances is good for society (for all sorts of reasons, not all of them related to social conservatism), but if you are looking for something that is emblematic of the decline of American family life, RuPaul’s Drag Race is the sexual-mores version of the bubbles that were still coming up to the surface a day or two after the sinking of the Titanic. The Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision was a mess and a mistake for all sorts of reasons, but same-sex marriage was hardly a half a blip on the radar track of marriage’s midwinter crash into the sociopolitical Himalayas of this overegged metaphor. 

 

In fact, the “traditional marriage” and traditional sexual mores that conservatives profess to be in favor of have very, very few real-world partisans and haven’t had any for a long, long time. There has been no serious Republican effort to repeal no-fault divorce laws, to take what is probably the most important example. Nobody in our political life is doing much to bring back adultery as a tort or a crime; any serious press against premarital sex that exists in our time is a matter of marginal religious practice; the number of children born out of wedlock continues to climb across social groups, including among socially conservative groups; advertisements for pornographic book stores and “adult” (grievous misuse of a word) products are ubiquitous in notionally conservative states such as Texas and Oklahoma; prostitution is a common and increasingly open trade; etc. I do not think that each and every one of those is something that should be dealt with via statute (I think prostitution probably should be legal for the same reason I think recreational drugs should be), but if you got all the way from the first no-fault divorce law (Thanks, Gov. Reagan!) to the Great Bud Light Tribulation before you peeped the fact that something is awry, then maybe I have some doubts about the maturity of your social conservatism. Because it seems clear to me that the actual problem in this American life isn’t really the novel and exotic stuff—it is ordinary negligence, indifference, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. 

 

People like Lauren Boebert want you to believe that the country is in the grips of a shadowy cabal of pedophiles, but what the country is in the grip of is 36-year-old grandmothers in the middle of three generations of children born out of wedlock looking for somebody—somebody else—to blame for the sexual anarchy and family dysfunction that characterizes our society. 

 

We invent dramatic sociopolitical supervillains in part because the real-world facts of the case are entirely banal, intensely terrifying, and, above all, unavoidably self-incriminating. 

 

Economics for English Majors

 

Here is something you do not see every day: A regulator admitting error. 

 

From the Wall Street Journal:

 

The Federal Reserve’s banking supervisors failed to take forceful action to address growing problems at Silicon Valley Bank before it collapsed last month, the central bank’s top regulator said, signaling a broad push to toughen rules on the industry.

 

Michael Barr, the Fed’s vice chair for supervision, said supervisors didn’t fully appreciate the extent of the vulnerabilities as SVB grew in size and complexity. When supervisors did find risks, they didn’t take sufficient steps to ensure the firm fixed those problems quickly enough, he said in a report Friday.

 

Regulators took control of Santa Clara, Calif.-based SVB on March 10. The collapse sparked a panic that led to the failure of New York-based Signature Bank and an intervention by financial regulators to protect uninsured depositors at both banks. The Fed supervised SVB and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. supervised Signature.

 

The chaos has since quieted, but some banks still face concerns. San Francisco-based First Republic Bank faces significant challenges, and there are no easy options for stemming the crisis at the bank.

 

An interesting aspect of the SVB story is that the bank was, in a meaningful sense, a victim of its own success. It grew so quickly that it had trouble figuring out what to do with all the deposits on hand, and, because a lot of those deposits were from tech startups and wealthy entrepreneurs, SVB had an unusually large share of uninsured deposits. 

 

From the laughably misnamed Government Accountability Office: 

 

Risky business strategies along with weak liquidity and risk management contributed to the recent failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. In both banks, rapid growth was an indicator of risk. In 2019–2021, the total assets of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank grew by 198 percent and 134 percent respectively—far exceeding growth for a group of 19 peer banks (33 percent growth in median total assets). To support their rapid growth, the two banks relied on uninsured deposits, which can be an unstable source of funding because customers with uninsured deposits may be more likely to withdraw their funds during times of stress. Additionally, Silicon Valley Bank was affected by rising interest rates and Signature Bank had exposure to the digital assets industry. The banks failed to adequately manage the risks from their deposits.

 

Something that I feel like I should keep repeating until people start repeating it back to me: We talk about whether we have “too much regulation” or “too little regulation,” but the real questions are: What kind of regulation? Implemented by whom? What does day-to-day oversight look like? Are we going to be mainly prospective, trying to head off trouble, or retrospective, punishing wrongdoing after the fact? 

 

These are not simple questions, and you should not trust the people who tell you otherwise.

Why Reaganism Can Beat Trumpism in 2024

By John Hart

Tuesday, February 28, 2023

 

While most of the attention in the 2024 GOP primary right now is on Donald Trump vs. Ron DeSantis, the battle worth watching is the shadow primary between Trumpism and Reaganism. A key to understanding this comes from Nikki Haley’s top consultant and former deputy at the United Nations, Jon Lerner, who argues, “the fundamentals of campaigns are more the same than they are different over the years.”

 

It’s no coincidence that at Haley’s campaign launch, South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman introduced her as “America’s version of Margaret Thatcher.” If Lerner is correct, it’s plausible that a “Reaganesque” candidate can catch fire. 

 

Let’s be clear: Reaganism is not misty-eyed nostalgia about a bygone era or mere reflections about the man and his unique attributes. Instead, it’s more of a shorthand expression for a strategy. Reaganism asserts that balancing factions, channeling populist impulses toward productive ends, and maintaining the three-legged stool of fiscal, foreign policy, and social or cultural conservatism gives conservatives the best chance of success. It’s a formula that has been consistently successful for four decades and resolves tensions on the right that existed long before Reagan and will exist long after 2024. 

 

In a sense, Reaganism is code for “normal” but normal does not mean moderate. Instead of the dark nihilism some in the Trump camp seem to espouse, Reaganism embraces the optimistic belief that America is an idea that is still being born, an imperfect country in pursuit of a perfect ideal in which constitutional conservatives view democratic institutions simultaneously in need of constant protection and renovation.  

 

In 2024, Haley and the rest of the field won’t be trying to carve out their own “lanes” along the conventional moderate-to-conservative spectrum as much as they’ll be trying to rebuild the highway system that Trump and previous GOP nominees neglected and damaged.

 

Those arguing that the fundamentals are more different than similar are an odd alliance between Trump’s most ardent supporters and his loudest critics. In the New York Times, former Romney and Bush adviser Stuart Stevens makes this case in a blistering critique of Haley: 

 

No political figure better illustrates the tragic collapse of the modern Republican Party than Nikki Haley … Her rise and fall only highlights what many of us already knew: Mr. Trump didn’t change the Republican Party; he revealed it. Ms. Haley, for all her talents, embodies the moral failure of the party in its drive to win at any cost, a drive so ruthless and insistent that it has transformed the G.O.P. into an autocratic movement.

 

Meanwhile, at The Bulwark, Sarah Longwell writes, “Haley would be the frontrunner in a Republican party that no longer exists. … While many Republican voters may be moving off Trump the man, the forces that he unleashed within the party – economic populism, isolationist foreign policy, election denialism, and above all, an unapologetic and vulgar focus on fighting culture war issues – remain incredibly popular with GOP voters.”

 

The counterargument begins with confronting how unlikely it is that Donald Trump marks the end of conservative history and the dawn of a permanently and irreversibly authoritarian party. As Matthew Continetti explains in The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, the arguments the Republican Party is having today about trade, immigration, foreign policy, and the administrative state have been going on for a long time. Trump is offering nothing new that conservatives haven’t been debating for a century.

 

American conservatives have long confronted, contained, and moved beyond conspiratorial and destructive populist movements and personalities like the John Birch society, George Wallace, and Joseph McCarthy while elevating figures like Reagan and movements like the Tea Party that channeled populism toward productive ends. 

 

The strange irony of the Trump administration is that his agenda was a bit of a magic trick that illustrated the staying power of Reaganism. Trump covered Reagan’s three-legged stool with a MAGA flag but understood that his success depended on his fidelity to conservative orthodoxy. On the economy, Trump bent the knee to Sen. Mitch McConnell, Rep. Paul Ryan, and Reaganites like Larry Kudlow who passed his tax cuts and helped him clear away regulations. On judges, Trump deferred to Leonard Leo, whose Reagan-era Federalist Society shaped Trump’s judicial picks. On foreign policy, Trump talked like Pat Buchanan but governed like Haley, who channeled Reagan’s idealism tempered with realism as U.N. ambassador. Reaganism wasn’t on life support during the Trump era. It was its lifeblood. But after January 6, and his string of losses, voters may never again trust him to steward that coalition. When Trump goes, the so-called “intellectual” movement around him will retreat into the camps that existed long before him. 

 

It’s only a matter of time before today’s “national conservatives” discover they are advancing ideas America’s founders explicitly rejected when they asserted that rights don’t come from nations, states, tribes, or monarchs but from natural law. National conservatives aren’t wrong when they describe this as a “classically liberal” understanding of rights, but they haven’t come to grips with the reality that their fix is to engineer a government takeover of civil society in which conservative cancel culture can protect tradition. Fortunately, our classical liberal tradition of principled pluralism (i.e. constitutional conservatism) gives them space to discover they haven’t stumbled onto something new. And, besides, does anyone seriously believe Trump spends his time meditating on the nature of rights and will swoop in to resolve this argument in favor of the national conservatives?

 

Exhibit A in this wishful thinking comes from a recent piece in the American Conservative on the train derailment in Ohio. Sohrab Ahmari unintentionally illustrates why Reaganism (and “normal” constitutional conservatism) will be more potent than Trumpism in 2024. In a tweet promoting his piece blaming the train derailment on lax regulation, Ahmari writes: 

 

Complex economies require complex regulations and regulators who are empowered to tame market actors whose gargantuan size would otherwise permit terrible abuses, against which the little guy is defenseless.

 

Populism must be FOR the administrative state.

 

Ahmari is channeling President Obama, who was a pyromaniac in a field of “anti-government” strawmen. Small government Reagan conservatives don’t argue for no government, just government that has a light touch and is not incompetent and hostile to little guy entrepreneurs. Top-down, heavy-handed regulations that erect barriers to innovation (such as the antiquated National Environmental Policy Act) enable cronyism and create suffering for the people Ahmari wants to protect. 

 

Again, a political reality check is in order. What candidate in 2024 is going to turn “FOR the administrative state” into a bumper sticker? Who will say, “Vote for me, because, like you, I know that government is too small?” Or “I’ll make regulations more complex.” Or, “I’ll give regulators the power they have lacked.” No one who wants to win in 2024 will heed Ahmari’s dreamy call for a Leviathan whisperer who will bring us a kinder, gentler administrative state. 

 

Instead, we’ll hear more of what we’re already hearing regarding fiscal conservatism from Haley and now Vivek Ramaswamy, who jumped into the race promising to reduce the size of the administrative state. Expect the rest of the field to sound less like Trump and more like Benjamin Franklin who said, “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Or, Thomas Jefferson who said, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.”

 

Neither the Always Trumpers nor the defeatists are reading recent history correctly. The painful truth some Romney and Bush era consultants like Stevens won’t accept is this: Nikki Haley didn’t throw it all away. They did. When Haley says she doesn’t want to go back to the days before Trump, Reagan conservatives know exactly what she means. They hear NOT hypocrisy but insight. Haley is calling out the Bush- and Romney-era Republicans who squandered the Reagan coalition because they were out of touch, especially on spending and immigration. As Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan lamented in 2007: 

 

The White House doesn’t need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don’t even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place. 

 

As a congressional staffer for Sen. Tom Coburn at the time, I can say it’s impossible to overstate the level of frustration, exasperation, and desperation conservatives in Congress felt. The Tea Party didn’t start with Rick Santelli’s rant; it started with members desperately trying to keep the Reagan coalition from flying apart at a time when a Republican president should have been keeping it together. 

 

One instructive episode from this era came in 2007 when a group of members led by Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling, South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, and Coburn formed an organization called “Reagan 21” that aspired to reboot happy warrior constitutional conservatism as Reagan had decades earlier. Among staff, the exercise was met with unanimous eye rolls. The nostalgic appeal to Reagan was way too blatant and on the nose, we thought. Sure enough, the effort was panned and went nowhere. Our allies politely said the members’ hearts were in the right place. In hindsight, their hearts and heads were in the right place even if their words weren’t.  

 

Reagan 21 didn’t take off, but the Tea Party’s focus on the fiscal conservative leg of the Reagan stool produced tangible policy and political wins including a Republican blowout victory in 2010, a ban on earmarks, and the first real spending decreases in 60 years. This progress went sideways with Ted Cruz’s postmodern “defund Obamacare” fight. If we “stood firm” and kept the government shut down, Cruz argued, President Obama would be compelled to defund his signature achievement. Trump watched Cruz’s invent-your-own-reality conservatism in action and the rest is history. 

 

Haley watched this unfold and is applying these lessons in real time. She emphasized fiscal conservatism in her launch video and blasted earmarks in her launch speech. In fact, it would be difficult to find anything Haley is saying that doesn’t fit within the Reagan stool of fiscal, foreign policy, and social/cultural conservatism. The other challengers waiting to jump in will be more like the congressional conservatives in 2007 struggling with how to apply Reaganism to today than Trump post 2020. 

 

Voters will decide the future of the Republican Party, but it is not wishful thinking to argue that Reaganism will defeat Trumpism in 2024. Those who argue that the combined early support for Trump and DeSantis means the case closed in favor of Trumpism are making a very big assumption about DeSantis. The campaign may well show that DeSantis is more of a Reagan conservative pretending to be Trumpy than a less Trumpy version of Trump. Moreover, Reaganite candidates like Haley, Sen. Tim Scott, and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin may argue DeSantis could be this cycle’s Rudy Giuliani or Scott Walker, both of whom who peaked early at this stage (in 2007 and 2015 respectively) then faded. 

 

The deeper trends of voter attitudes and preferences favor a return to normal, but campaigns are about other fundamentals as well. Message and likability matter immensely as does combat. Candidates live under the cruel and unforgiving reality that they must define themselves and their opponents, or be defined. Haley clearly decided that starting a firefight with Trump would be a political Pickett’s Charge, but she’s setting up sustained attacks on his age, competence, and fiscal irresponsibility. Challengers can be forgiven for being shrewd and patient but if they’re too passive for too long, they’ll be doomed. 

 

For Haley, this is especially true. Trump-friendly voters will forgive Haley for reneging on her promise to not run against Trump, just as they forgave Trump for changing parties five times. Haley will have a harder time convincing informed, Reagan-friendly suburban voters she’ll unambiguously confront Trump’s pathologies and is not merely in the race to be his running mate. To his credit, Ramaswamy has called out Trump for creating a culture of victimization on the right by not conceding that he lost in 2020. Haley and any subsequent challengers should co-opt that argument.

 

For the 2024 field, Trump offers countless contrasts that ought to inspire courage. Trump is a weak frontrunner with many flaws for his opponents to exploit. He is obsessed with “loyalty,” and that may be his Achilles heel. Trump’s challengers don’t have a loyalty problem. He does. Trump has habitually betrayed conservatives by desecrating the Constitution and giving Democrats power over their lives by being a loser in 2020 and by backing losers three elections in a row.

 

Rather than focusing on the follies of the progressive left, the former president has introduced new follies into public life like not conceding elections. He has spent his time out of office not criticizing leftist policy proposals or articulating his own vision but waging a fake fight about stolen elections.

 

Haley and other challengers are well positioned to make the case that they’ll be more loyal to the Trump agenda than Trump. And the challengers should understand it’s not about them, but about defending and rescuing the people who are being abused by Trump’s Stockholm Syndrome-like grip on 30 percent of the base. 

 

And maybe history isn’t shaped by deeper trends as much as by dominant leaders. That’s even more reason for 2024 candidates to step up and take risks. Every challenger is going to run against “the establishment.” Yet, today’s Republican establishment isn’t in Washington, D.C., but Mar-a-Lago, the headquarters of the RINOs (the Rebels in Name Only). That’s where the 2024 fight will have to go.