National Review - 23.03.2020

30 | http://www.nationalreview.com MARCH 23 , 2020

their country’s culture. What they wanted from politics was a

sense that government could be on their side, helping them live

well and relieving some of the burdens they face rather than

adding to them.

T

HEreformocons argued that there is a role for better pub-

lic policy in addressing problems created by bad public

policy—such as cost inflation in health care, housing,

and higher education; unfair burdens placed on parents and

workers by the structure of federal payroll taxes; and oppressive,

illiberal mandates imposed by overreaching bureaucracies in the

service of progressive social policy. And they argued there is a

role for better public policy in empowering Americans to build

stronger families and communities: by supporting child-rearing,

providing some security against the risks of the modern economy,

and protecting the most vulnerable. Conservatives had, for var-

ious reasons, paid too little attention to these concerns, and the

costs to the country—and the political costs to themselves—

were mounting.

Redirecting conservative energies accordingly would have to

mean explicitly prioritizing America’s working and middle-class

families. Republicans would have to return to thinking of those

Americans, rather than only of the small-business owner and the

corporate titan, as their core constituencies. Republican politi-

cians were slow to listen, and the dynamics of the Obama era

made it harder for them to do so. They faced powerful incentives

to run a purely oppositional campaign in 2012 and 2014, and then

fell into the comfortable posture of leaving their eventual 2016

nominee to set the agenda, so most could never see the case for

change. And there was pushback. Before 2016, the populist

energy on the right (channeled through the filter of the tea-party

movement) was understood to demand libertarian purism, and

many self-appointed guardians of conservative dogma (from the

Wall Street Journaleditorial board to leading talk-radio figures)

complained that any hyphenated conservatism was a betrayal of

principle, not a modernization of practice.

Reform conservatives believed that rank-and-file Republican

voters were open to a different agenda and that the electorate as

a whole would reward it. The political case rested on the notion

that Republicans couldn’t hope to win majorities in the long run

if they did not change course along these lines. The 2016 primary

campaign delivered a mixed verdict on these premises. On the

one hand, it showed that reform conservatives had, if anything,

underestimated the political weakness of the old Republican

agenda: Republican voters were not just open to something dif-

ferent; some of them were hostile to the old agenda, and many

more were uninterested in it. But on the other hand, it showed that

what could fill the void effectively within the party was not so

much an alternative agenda—something Trump did not really

supply—as an alternative tone: an aggressive populism disdain-

ful of elites and mistrustful of institutions but not especially con-

cerned with changing what government does.

Because policy has not been at the center of the political

movement that now dominates Republican politics, the modest

amount of policymaking that has happened in the Trump era has

been a mix of the traditional Republican agenda (picking consti-

tutionalist judges, pursuing some deregulation, reducing corpo-

rate taxes), modest versions of some reform-conservative ideas

(expanding the child tax credit, paid-leave proposals), and pop-

ulist priorities (especially on trade and immigration).

Above all, however, the policy agenda in this era has been large-

ly stalled, and the Right has been focused on more-theoretical

debates. Because Trumpism has for the most part not been

embodied in particular policy proposals, different factions on the

right have tried to claim its power for their own, and to insist that

Trump’s success in 2016 is proof of principle for a new direction.

This has meant that the reform-conservative effort itself has

fractured a bit. Some politicians, analysts, and young activists or

staffers who had been part of the reform effort have come to

advocate a more market-skeptical, government-centric approach

or to declare libertarianism the Right’s biggest problem. They

believe the crisis of American life (or at least of the American

working class) was deeper, and the sclerosis of the Republican

coalition more severe, than the earlier reformist diagnosis

allowed. They tend not to worry about how government power

developed with one party in mind might be used or abused by the

other. And while many reformocons (including both of us) were

moderate restrictionists on immigration, and many were China

hawks of various sorts, this group has argued that those issues

deserve much greater emphasis, seeing them as central to the

social crisis reshaping our politics.

For some others once identified as reformists, concerns about

President Trump and the direction in which he has pushed

Republican politics (when it comes to trade or immigration, the

integrity of our system of government, or other issues) have over-

whelmed concerns about the rigidity and inadequacy of the pre-

Trump Republican agenda, and they have been driven back

toward a more libertarian conservatism.

These differences, however, are largely about Trump and

Trumpism—and therefore aren’t exactly ways of thinking about

the future of American politics. Notwithstanding the best efforts

of many on the right, Trumpism has not taken shape as a coherent

political outlook, and it is possible to imagine its moving sharply

in any direction at any time as the president reacts to the events

of the day and Fox News programming priorities. So thinking

through these differences may not be as significant for the future

of the Right as it now appears.

This is not to deny that the last few years have offered many

crucial lessons for students of our politics who wish to help our

Trumpism has not taken shape as a coherent political

outlook, and it is possible to imagine its moving sharply

in any direction at any time as the president reacts to the

events of the day.

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