During the age of Trump, conservative thinkers have had a recurring tendency to daydream about what might be possible now that the old verities of the right have been unsettled.
After Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, two intellectuals hoped for “a conservative politics that stresses the national interest abroad and national solidarity at home.” They went on to outline how Republicans could synthesize the best of pre-Trump conservatism with Trump’s most defensible impulses.
I’ve advocated a similar version of nationalism and so find this vision appealing. But as Trump enters the second year of his second term, it is fair to say that it is still only a vision — and not one that has gotten much closer to materializing. Though the old conservatism is frequently declared dead, Trump’s administration has not embodied or implemented a coherent alternative, and few influential Republicans have even been calling for one.
U.S. foreign policy under Trump has, thankfully, not turned isolationist or reflexively anti-interventionist. But neither has it adopted realism that pursues relatively concrete interests with an eye toward keeping America’s goals in line with its means. Though Trump’s policies have included important successes, overall they have looked more impulsive than considered — a point underlined by the president’s mad dash to grab Greenland. The Republican Party’s loudest self-proclaimed nationalists have been coming up with far-fetched defenses of this campaign rather than asking whether it really serves U.S. interests to alienate our allies to secure defense arrangements we could get without threats of force and tariffs.
Nor has the United States adopted a sober policy toward its main geopolitical rival. Trump’s approach to China is fixated more on getting Beijing to buy U.S. soybeans than on keeping it from acquiring sensitive technology.
Some social conservatives have treated the eclipse of pre-Trump conservatism as a chance to put forth ambitious new agendas, from banning surrogacy to cracking down on obscenity. (And others have fantasized about integrating church and state, although they disagree about which church.) The Trump administration has shown no interest in any of this. It is not even willing to reinstate the rules governing abortion pills that it maintained during the first term. Tax policy is less pro-family than it was when Paul D. Ryan was speaker of the House, with the child credit worth less in inflation-adjusted terms and little effort by Republicans to augment it.
Speaking of Ryan, just how defeated is yesterday’s Reaganite conservatism? A debt-and-inflation crisis could bring back some of the right’s old worries about government spending. But it’s also worth remembering that the pre-Trump right was never as absolutist in defense of free markets as it is sometimes caricatured as being.
It’s easy to imagine that if artificial intelligence had developed during George W. Bush’s presidency, his aides would have produced a policy that tried to balance regulatory freedom to achieve its potential with safeguards to guarantee, among other things, the safety of children. The Trump administration has instead, in the biggest growth sector of the U.S. economy, embraced laissez faire and the preferences of key CEOs.
At the state level, meanwhile, Republican governors are presiding over what previous generations of Reaganites might have considered paradise, with taxes being flattened, educational choice expanded and union membership declining. Those states are also, to the extent that federal law allows, restricting abortion.
Immigration might seem to be the one exception to the rule that “Trumpism,” far from triumphing, hardly exists. Even on that issue, though, whether Trump is achieving anything lasting remains open to question. The administration is notably, if somewhat mysteriously, averse to doing anything to hold large employers accountable for hiring people who are not eligible to work here.
It remains the case, as in Trump’s first term, that this presidency’s most durable policy achievements are old-line Republican ones, including tax cuts and the confirmation of conservative judges, usually made possible by old-line Republicans.
This may, however, be the wrong focus. Political writers, this one included, often dwell on questions of ideology and policy. But the most striking changes in the Republican Party, conservatism and our political culture in general over the past decade do not directly concern such questions. Conspiracy theories circulate more widely than ever. The search for factual truth is less practiced and less respected. Corruption raises fewer eyebrows. Our debates are dumber and more thuggish.
Trump and those who excuse his worst behavior are not solely responsible for these trends, but they have contributed greatly to them. And these changes to the U.S. may prove harder to reverse than any philosophical shift.
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