From 40 to 47

Reagan to Trump: Continuity and Revolution

Once again Republicans can be thankful for the political incompetence and ideological rigidity of the Democratic Party. Democrats are going to have a hard time coming to grips with the fact that Donald Trump was the Republican they most wanted to run against in 2024, which explains why they deliberately stirred up MAGA voters and boosted Trump’s chances through their lawfare campaign and other exertions.

Now cast your mind all the way back to 1979-1980: Jimmy Carter’s campaign looked out at the Republican presidential field taking shape, and decided that the Republican they most wanted to run against was . . . Ronald Reagan.

Democrats know how that turned out. The 40th President of the United States consigned Democrats on the presidential level at least to 12 years in the wilderness. Will Trump, now the 47th President, do the same?

It has now been 44 years since that first Reagan landslide, and many observers are comparing this election to the election of 1980, when Reagan snuck up on the entire political world by winning even as all the pre-election polls said the race was tied, which sounds familiar just now. While Trump’s overall margin both in the popular vote and in the electoral college does not appear on the surface to be a landslide of Reagan proportions, a look underneath the top line numbers shows startling gains Trump made in blue states like New York, New Jersey, and California, and among key voting groups such as Hispanics, that ought to terrify Democrats who pay attention.

In this regard, Trump’s result does begin to look like a landslide that portends a new era in American politics, in which the 50/50 partisan stalemate of the last 30 years may have broken out in slight but potentially durable favor of Republicans. The election this week was the first R+ election (it was R+4, that is, where Republican self-identified voters outnumbered Democrats by four points) since 1932.

A reader pointed me back to an essay our great teacher Harry Jaffa (the author of Goldwater’s famous line, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. . .”) wrote immediately after Reagan’s 1980 victory, entitled “A Watershed in the Making?”  It is not available online, but I reprint some relevant passages here along with my commentary. As you read along, just swap out “Trump” for “Reagan” and you’ll see the continuities and differences.

The lede:

Ronald Reagan’s election as the 40th President of the United States is a beginning and not an end. The liberal commentators may say all that they want to say about Reagan abandoning his “extreme conservatism” during the campaign, and his movement to the “middle” in which all presidential elections are won or lost. But anyone who watched the Democratic Convention, and heard the acceptance speeches of both Mr. Mondale and Mr. Carter, will recall that the Democrats were unrelenting in reminding the electorate of Mr. Reagan’s conservative opinions, expressed consistently over the years. The results of the election suggest that the voters reacted in a manner exactly opposite to what the Democrats (and liberal commentators) expected and wished. They likedwhat they heard of Mr. Reagan’s opinions, past as well as present. Certainly Mr. Reagan expressed himself somewhat differently when he was speaking to country-club Republicans, than when he spoke more recently to national television audiences. But the main thrust and purport of his speeches has not changed. We will have a conservative Republican administration. Perhaps even more important will be the public realization that conservative Republicanism is not right-wing extremism. Conservative Republicanism is the “middle of the road.”

Comment: As was the case in 1980, the election result certifies that the constellation of “populist” positions Trump championed starting nearly 10 years ago have broad public support, and reveal that it is the Democrats, once again, who are out of step with the public.

This subsequent paragraph is full of very suggestive parallels to the political impact of Trump:

Looking at the Republican Party today, we can see that Mr. Reagan is the political successor of Barry Goldwater, in much the same way that FDR was of William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson. Strange to say, Mr. Reagan is also the political heir of the Democratic Party whose symbolic hero—once upon a time—was Al Smith. It was that party, as much as the party of Herbert Hoover, that was driven into the political wilderness by the New Deal. Smith was a reformer, but he was also a product of the old big city machine, the machine that was the primary political instrumentality for the assimilation and upward mobility of the post-Civil War immigrant groups. Although the original New Deal counted the big city political machines as among its pillars, the later New Deal, and the still later welfare state, systematically destroyed these vital political structures. The death of Mayor Daley of Chicago probably marks the final passing of the old boss. For the essence of the policy inaugurated by FDR under the aegis of Harry Hopkins (“spend, spend, tax, tax, elect, elect”) was to centralize political patronage in the federal bureaucracy, making the local political organizations mere dependents upon the largess of the Great Machine of the Imperial Presidency. The rhetoric of ideological liberalism has glossed and painted over the brute fact of political power snatched and torn from its local roots and centralized in Washington.

Comment: First, Trump is Reagan’s successor much more than either Bush was, or more than either McCain or Romney would have been. Does this even need saying?

Second, one reason we need Trump is that as successful as Reagan was in many ways, in one respect he failed. Reagan slowed, but did not halt or reverse, the trend of  centralized government and the increasing power of the administrative state. As I put it in the closing paragraph of my Age of Reagan, volume 2:

Why didn’t Reagan succeed in reducing the size and influence of the federal government in domestic affairs? Reagan was more successful rolling back the Soviet empire than he was in rolling back the domestic government empire chiefly because this is a harder problem. . .  Reagan successfully curbed the excesses of liberalism; he did not curb liberalism itself.  The inexorable logic of modern American government is to expand by degrees—the intended legacy of the Progressive and New Deal revolutions, which were constitutional in purpose and effect. . .

If the Reagan Revolution is finally to be consummated, the movement that cherishes his name will need to return to this mode of constitutional thinking, and press to achieve the reforms Reagan could only dream of.  Reagan’s would-be successors would do well to recall Machiavelli’s counsel “that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”

I took a lot of heat for this argument from triumphant Reaganites when the book appeared in 2009, but it looks a bit better in the 15 years since then.

And so another moment has arrived—a moment of  “punctuated equilibrium,” to borrow a phrase from evolutionary biology—in which the cause of restoring limited government may prosper.

Let’s keep going with Jaffa from 1980:

The nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964 was not—contrary to everything that has been written—a victory of the “Right” over the Left or Middle of the Republican Party. Rather was it a defining of the ground upon which the Party’s mainstream would fight the political battles of the next generation. Right, Left, and Center are always relative terms. The victories of the New Deal transferred the wild-eyed radicalism of the thirties into the mainstream—and center—of American politics. Viewed from that center, Senator Goldwater’s older liberalism was called a newer conservatism.

Comment: Everyone says Trump has distorted or changed the Republican Party. This is true, but rather than lamenting this transformation, we should celebrate it. Never-Trumpers can rage against the populist “MAGA-fication” of the GOP, but once you set aside Trump’s abrasive personal characteristics and get down to the underlying substrate of the issues he elevated to the fore, and the scene looks different. The GOP has adapted; the Democratic Party has not adapted at all. It is still based solely on “tax, tax, spend, spend, elect, elect.” The last part isn’t working out so well anymore.

On that last point that Democrats haven’t adapted, let’s have one more look at Jaffa’s conclusion in 1980, where you can again spot the parallels:

The Democratic National Convention in New York proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the controlling wing of the Democratic Party was indeed Senator Kennedy’s, along with his cohorts, such as Senators McGovern, Bayh, Church, Magnuson. For them, the motto of the Democratic Party might well be, “Extremism is no vice, if it is in defense of an ever-larger federal bureaucracy, affirmative action, busing, homosexual rights, federally funded abortions, and aid to Third World countries that burn the American flag.” . . . With such slogans, and the party dominated by them, the American people are sick unto death. The silent majority—whom the pollsters certainly missed in 1980—has finally emerged. Let us hope that the Republican Party, reconstituted to become their spokesman for the next generation, will comprehend and fulfill its responsibilities, “as in the olden times.”

Change the names and issues as needed, and you’ll see everything clearly. Let’s begin. . .