The future of the GOP is not what it used to be: analysis

While 'Reaganism' is "still an article of faith for many conservatives," the future of the Republican Party despite it taking a beating at the ballot box last Tuesday, is 'Trumpism,' according to New York Times opinion writer Damon Linker.

"The second Trump administration has given the country 10 months of relentless power grabs, a globally disruptive trade war and, most recently, a demolition project at the White House — all while an inexorably rising cost of living continues to weigh on American workers," Linker writes.

"The result? A presidential approval rating that has plummeted from already middling levels," he adds.

Republicans, Linker says, are now contemplating whether Trump's "distinctive brand of right-wing populism" has any viability. Linker thinks it does.

"Could Mr. Trump prove to be a temporary aberration? Might the Republican Party return to its Reaganite essence once the man who has done so much to trash it finally leaves the Oval Office in a few years?" he asks.

Unfortunately, he writes, Reaganism seems to be over.

"In other words, is the future of the Republican Party Reaganism or Trumpism? The answer, I’m afraid, is most likely Trumpism," Linker says.

President Ronald Reagan, he notes, was a one-off, saying, "Reagan’s election in 1980, through the presidency of George W. Bush and the candidacies of John McCain and Mitt Romney, was an unusual and fleeting moment of moderation and responsibility for the G.O.P."

Reaganism, he writes, "was provoked and inspired by the sense of threat and moral clarity of the Cold War and its immediate aftermath."

Republicans have now returned to what Linker says is "a spirit of furious reaction to modern liberalism, an unwillingness to countenance compromise with the realities of governing a sprawling continentwide commercial nation and a conviction that political wisdom lay in the country’s turning inward and indulging a temptation toward self-absorption."

"Any serious effort to think through what’s likely to follow the Trump presidency needs to grapple with these potent and persistent strands in the right’s political DNA," Linker says.

A rebellious right, Linker says, started to emerge at the end of the Cold War.

"Discontented factions on the right first began to rebel against their marginalization immediately after the end of the Cold War and demise of the Soviet Union," he explains.

George W. Bush's administration, Linker says, rewrote "the Cold War script to portray the global war on terror as a battle for freedom against the enemies of civilization — largely satisfied the most rabid factions of the Republican base."

"Had a Democrat been president when Al Qaeda unleashed its attacks, the furiously reactive antiliberalism of the Old Right might have overwhelmed the G.O.P. more than a decade before it actually did," Linker says.

Republicans in the White House, Linker notes, "kept populist rage submerged — at least until it began to heat up in response to the financial crisis and Great Recession and then to boil over during the Obama administration, leading first to the Tea Party protest movement."

Today, Linker says, "we’ve been living in a world dominated by Mr. Trump and a newly emboldened hard right."

The MAGA movement, he writes, "aspires to take a wrecking ball to the 'administrative state' and career civil service, use extortionist threats to force ideological capitulation across civil society, deploy troops and a masked federal police force to round up and deport millions of immigrants, and bully other countries into submission to the president’s will."

When Trump eventually exits, and he will, Linker says, the stench of "the more personalistic dimensions of his rule — above all, its most breathtaking examples of corruption — will likely recede as well," he notes.

But other stains of Trumpism will linger, Linker says.

"Much of the rest will remain, including a willingness to use sweeping state power to combat anyone who dares to defy the destructive impulses of the rejectionist Republican base," he writes.

Removing this should become the Republican Party's number one issue, he writes.

"What might tame these reactive impulses is unclear, but doing so may be the G.O.P.’s, and the country’s, most pressing priority," Linker says.

"If Republicans receive a drubbing in next year’s midterm elections in proportion to the one they suffered this past week, many in the party will begin to think more anxiously about where it should turn in 2028. Such thoughts (and second thoughts) will need to grapple seriously with the right’s longstanding dark currents that are part of our national character and cannot be willed or wished away," he adds.