For many conservatives of the classical liberal stripe, former President Donald Trump’s selection of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) as his running mate was somewhat of a watershed moment.
Vance went from being a vocal Trump critic to being one of the first Republicans to endorse his 2024 run in an op-ed in January 2023. Not only that, but Vance also embraced Trump’s brand of populism, decrying free trade and foreign intervention and supporting a more significant role for the federal government in matters related to the economy. Dan McLaughlin of National Review tweeted, “Trump picking Vance is a giant middle finger to conservatives, but we’re used to that by now.”
For many, it was the final nail in the coffin of Reagan conservatism: free market economics, strong national defense, and limited government. For example, Vance praised the head of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, saying she’s doing a “very good job.” Khan, a far-left progressive, has yet to meet a corporate merger she doesn’t want to block and uses her role as a political cudgel more than anything else.
Is Reagan conservatism dead? No, but it has been put out to pasture for now. Parties shift over time. The Democratic Party of 2000, also known as the era of the “New Democrats,” is virtually unrecognizable today. The same could be said of the Republican Party. Many younger people on the “New Right” act as if what’s happening within the GOP is something new, fresh, and unlike anything else we’ve seen before.
History, of course, is a guide. Taking policies and ideology, wrapping them in new names, and elevating people otherwise shut out 20 years ago, the current landscape of the Republican Party is a retread. The current iteration of the party as a whole, as it relates to immigration, foreign intervention, and trade, is not all that different from the GOP in the 1920s and 1930s.
It was former President George W. Bush who, in 2011, saw the path on which the GOP was headed and hoped it wouldn’t. During a C-SPAN Q&A, Bush said: “What’s interesting about our country, if you study history, is that there are some ‘isms’ that occasionally pop up. One is isolationism and its evil twin protectionism and its evil triplet nativism.”
Bush described policies embraced by the Republican Party that limited immigration, such as the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. At that time, the concern over immigration had nothing to do with Mexico but Southern and Eastern Europe and the significant influx of Jewish people and Italians. Republican Sen. David Reed of Pennsylvania penned an op-ed in the New York Times after the bill’s passage. He said, “The racial composition of America at the present time thus is made permanent.”
The Neutrality Acts of the 1930s were designed to limit U.S. intervention in foreign conflicts. What drove them was a movement that proclaimed World War I was driven primarily by bankers and munitions traders with business interests in Europe.
The Tariff Act of 1930, also known as Smoot-Hawley, implemented a series of tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods as a measure to protect jobs and farmers. The response from other countries, of course, was protest and retaliation. As a result, exports to countries protesting fell 18% and those to countries that retaliated fell 31%.
Does all of that sound familiar? The rationalization, the supposed urgency, and the proclaimed necessity are all part and parcel of the Republican Party’s message today, especially with Trump as its leader.
Jonathan Swift said, “Everything old is new again.”
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It will take some time for those hoping the Republican Party makes a U-turn and reverts to the Reagan model. Contrary to what people say, Trump’s ability to shift the party’s direction did not happen overnight. It found its roots 10 years earlier with diminished support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it was exacerbated by the 2008 financial crisis in which the public suffered while banks, insurance companies, the auto industry, and the financial sector received bailouts to keep them afloat.
For those claiming the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan is “dead,” they’re forgetting that political movements within parties come and go. At some point down the road, they’ll once again be on the outside looking in.
Andrea Ruth is a contributor to the Washington Examiner magazine.
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