How Reagan's Three-Legged Stool Is Still Relevant
The past may be prologue for the GOP after all
This past Saturday was the 110th birthday of the greatest president of my lifetime (I was born in 1984), Ronald Reagan. It just so happens to be that the Republican Party is in the political wilderness after the insanity of the Trump years.
There are many calls for the Republican Party to be a working-class party. The left-wing website New Republic even featured an article yesterday that explored that possibility.
The problem with making the Republican Party a working-class party is this is a misread of who working-class Republicans are. Working-class Republicans are generally people who either work with their hands and/or own a small business. There is also increasing evidence that these working-class Republicans are more motivated by cultural issues that Republicans, being traditionalists/social conservatives, would champion anyway.
Since the national populist and certainly not the Trumpist path is probably not the way forward, what is? I would argue we should return to what has worked in the past to create a conservatism that is relevant to the 2020s.
When President Reagan took office in the 1980s, America and the world was a much different place than it is today. The Soviet Union was on the march, taxes and inflation were high, crime was out of control, and Americans thought the country’s best days were behind us.
When Reagan-Bush left office in 1992, America was a changed nation for the better. The Soviet Union was in the ash heap of history, taxes and inflation were much lower, crime was finally getting under control, and Americans had pride in their country once again.
The biggest problem the conservative movement and the GOP has is that it believes it is still 1980 and it has not adjusted its policy prescriptions accordingly. It has led to the trap of “Zombie Reaganism.”
But even now, there is much to learn from Reagan. There is even much we can take from “Zombie Reaganism” itself.
Reagan believed his conservative coalition was a three-legged stool of libertarian/economic conservatives, traditionalist/social conservatives, and nationalist/national security conservatives. The biggest change Donald Trump made to the stool was displacing the neoconservatives from the national security leg and replacing them with nationalists.
If conservatism and the Republican Party are to return to power in the 2020s, it must return to that three-legged stool AND update its policies for the realities of today. A predominately nationalist GOP has no chance at getting the 50%+1 needed to win a national election. A predominately libertarian/fiscal conservative GOP would only win what Sean Trende calls the “three guys in a think tank cubicle.” The coalition needs each other to survive.
What does this coalition look like in reality? For starters, there is no room for extremists in any faction. It has to be multi-racial because that is the reality of an increasingly non-white America. It also to be culturally conservative because that is what motivates most Republican voters, regardless of their membership in other intraparty factions.
How would it brand itself? I think this tweet from conservative pundit Avi Woolf is a good start.
What would some of these policies look like? Yes, I know Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) is not exactly popular with the Republican base, but his child tax credit plan is very good. It’s revenue and deficit-neutral, paid for by eliminating some existing welfare programs, and could help address the problem of declining birth rates.
Another thing conservative Republicans should do is defend the gig economy from terrible union-backed legislation like the PRO Act. This video from podcaster/vlogger/columnist Gabriella Hoffman explains why the gig economy and its workers are essential.
These are just a couple of the issues how a modern conservative movement could become relevant to the problems of the 2020s.
The conservative movement and the GOP have three choices. It could embody the worst aspects of the Trump era, remain infected by a stagnant “Zombie Reaganism”, or it could innovate and respond to the challenges of modern America.