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After the Republicans took a shellacking this month, President Donald Trump pointed out that the GOP tends to lose when he’s not on the ballot. But that’s not exactly right: MAGA candidates tend to lose when Trump isn’t on the ballot. That’s going to happen when a political party is transformed into a personality cult. Just ask Democrats, who lost over 1,000 seats during Barack Obama’s presidency.
Republicans get upset when you point out that the GOP is Trump’s personal party. But let’s face it, MAGA is whatever the president says it is. Good or bad. Loyalty to the president is the price of admission. There are few places his ardent fans wouldn’t follow him. And many of those fans are low-propensity, working-class voters, enticed by Trump’s bombastic personality and his promise to fight for their concerns. A significant number of those voters have no philosophical or historic connection to the GOP. Many, indeed, detest it.
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What happens when he’s gone?
The notion that a presidential candidate such as Vice President JD Vance, the favored prospect of the “post-liberal” wing of the GOP, is going to be afforded the same level of loyalty from voters, much less from Congress or governors, is a fantasy. Politicians are rarely successful in aping their predecessors, even in the best of circumstances. Following Trump will be virtually impossible.
One of the difficulties in recreating Trump’s success is that there’s no coherent agenda to copy. This isn’t to say that Trump hasn’t done positive things. It’s to say there is no blueprint. In many ways, MAGA is about attitude. Outside of immigration and trade, Trump doesn’t have much of a tangible policy outlook.
A group of think tankers and media personalities has created “national conservativism” to backfill MAGA’s non-ideological brand. And listening to them, you’d think they hatched an original and electrifying governing philosophy when they’ve merely reanimated the failed paleo-conservativism of Patrick Buchanan. Insular. Small. Nannyistic. Fatalistic.
The so-called “New Right” comports itself with an unearned arrogance that’s difficult to comprehend. National conservatism is an odd political movement in that it relies on an ad populum case but isn’t, by any standard, very popular. Buchanan had nowhere near the charisma or political ability to connect with voters as Trump, a man who had been a celebrity long before he became a politician. And Trump isn’t particularly popular, either, despite the adoration of his supporters.
Paleo-conservatism failed to take hold 30 years ago, when the environment was far friendlier toward 19th-century mercantilism and isolationism and there were far more working-class voters to draw on. Today, it is somewhat redundant. If voters want class-obsessed statists intervening in the economy and whining about Wall Street “barons,” they already have a party to quench that thirst. Maybe victimhood sells in the short term. But conservatives can never outpromise progressives.
Then again, it’s highly debatable that Trump governed as much of a paleo-conservative, anyway.
Most of Trump’s most fruitful policies over his two noncontiguous terms aligned with boring Reagan-era conservatism that many natcons like to disparage: Deregulation spurred economic growth in the first term. As did tax cuts, including corporate ones. It is more likely that happy memories of the first-term economy drew voters back to Trump the second time, not trade wars with Canada.
Trump has embraced an active foreign policy that sometimes means exerting deadly force against our enemies. There is approximately one real “neocon” left in Washington, yet Buchanan’s flagship, Israel-obsessed paleocon magazine, American Conservative, is still having a meltdown over the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Even Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court, which on most days is the only institution upholding any semblance of constitutional order, were products of conservative fusionism, not a reactionary populism.
One of Trump’s least popular policies, on the other hand, has been protectionism. The president has been easing away from tariffs — and hopefully the Supreme Court will strike down his unconstitutional ability to tax Americans without Congress. Economic growth would be a boon for any GOP nominee. But if the future is natcon, Republicans will be perpetually defending inflationary policies that dampen economic dynamism, because the populist case is predicated on nostalgia and not reality for most people.
Natcons like to ask what conservatism conserved over the past 40 years. Well, one answer is unprecedented prosperity for the largest group of people ever. The white-collar worker living in the suburbs, like most people today, isn’t preoccupied with bringing back widget factories from Malaysia and banning drag queen library story hour — though social corrosion isn’t unimportant. Without affordability and jobs, you’re not winning elections. If you’re not winning elections, you’re not conserving anything.
What about the great Trump “realignment?”
Well, the president’s populism has certainly allowed the GOP to make gains in places such as Pennsylvania and Michigan. Is that going to outlast Trump? Because, at the same time, Republicans have been losing ground in suburban-heavy states such as Virginia, Arizona, and Georgia. The American population has been moving north to south, not from the affordable suburbs to hollowed-out factory towns. The middle class, despite perceptions, continues to grow in the Sun Belt. The natcons want to remake the economy to help the shrinking working-class voter who may not keep turning out for them.
Right now, for instance, boring conservative candidates are just as likely to win without Trump on the ballot. Govs. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Brian Kemp (R-FL), and Glenn Youngkin (R-FL) come to mind — politicians who embody the background, aesthetic, and rhetoric that turns off many populists. Two of those candidates ran in highly competitive states. One of them helped turn their state deep red. None of them would be considered MAGA by disposition, much less the natcons’ first choice. All of them concentrated on the grievances of middle-class voters.
That said, many Republicans have learned the lesson of Trump’s rise and become aggressive wagers of political war. All of them are critics of lawlessness and illegal immigration and supported heartbeat bills and other socially conservative policies, and election integrity laws. Above all, they are competent administrators of the government.
To be fair, there is an array of New Right brands. Some of its most vocal proponents sound like FDR Democrats or Rockefeller Republicans. But the movement has also been a Trojan horse for authoritarian, “post-liberal” and theocratic ideas that clash with any conception of the founding. That’s what happens when you don’t have limiting principles. Those who defend fusionism, the melding of individual freedom and limited government with social order and virtue, have been systemically purged from leadership positions within the conservative movement over the past 10 years.
The obvious example is the deterioration of the Heritage Foundation, which had long brought together all factions of fusionism. There are still good people at the think tank, of course, but its leadership has decided that the vile podcaster class is more valued within the right-wing coalition than Reaganites.
For decades, people have defended conservatives from spurious charges of “fascism,” “antisemitism,” and “racism.” It’s difficult to do so when major conservative institutions are white-knighting paranoid bigots such as Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. How popular will those associations be when Vance is running around the suburbs of Atlanta, Philadelphia, or Phoenix trying to win a close election?
None of that is to mention the growing anti-immigrant tenor to the Right — and not merely regarding illegal immigrants but legal newcomers. Increasingly, the GOP has embraced a zero-sum, Malthusian outlook of the economy. There are too many people, they say. Mostly, too many people with funny names. Well, a historically high 79% consider immigration good for the country in Gallup’s rolling poll on the issue. There’s obviously plenty of room to debate and reform immigration policy to comport with the nation’s needs. But good luck building a wide-ranging coalition with reflexive anti-immigrant sentiment.
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There is, of course, a huge caveat to all of this: the American Left. Perhaps Trump’s greatest ally throughout his political career has been the Democrats, whose endless histrionics, embrace of quackery, and hard-left turn have left them susceptible to losing to any nominally normie candidate.
Trump is a generational talent who had been a celebrity long before he undertook a political career. Indeed, without his celebrity, there would have been no presidency. And without him, there is no MAGA, even if activists pretend his personal victories are an endorsement of their own ideological preferences.