“MAGA is ascendant,” crowed Rep. Matt Gaetz (R., FL) on October 25. He had reason to be happy. After weeks of chaos, the House Republicans have settled on the unknown Rep. Mike Johnson (R., LA) to replace Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R., CA). The well-liked Johnson is thoroughly in line with nationalist-populist Republicans such as Gaetz, who engineered McCarthy’s fall. The episode was another sign that the GOP is no longer Ronald Reagan’s party. It is Donald Trump’s.
Since Reagan left office 35 years ago, the GOP has defined itself negatively. The coalition comes together not based on an affirmative program but in protest over someone else’s. The party's greatest moments have been acts of rebuke.
First came the election of 1994. Republicans won control of Congress for the first time in 40 years in a rejection of Bill Clinton’s health care plan, tax hikes, and liberal social views. George W. Bush ran in 2000 to “restore integrity to the White House,” a subtle dig at the character of his otherwise popular predecessor.
Things became more difficult for Republicans as affluent voters and voters with advanced degrees, along with Millennial and eventually Gen Z voters, turned away from social conservatism. The failures of the Bush administration didn’t make things easier. Nor did the lackluster presidential campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney....
...his was not because voters loved the GOP. It was because voters saw the GOP as the way to block Democratic overreach. Obama was a gift to the Republican Party: a limitless source of conservative outrage that powered the party’s candidates to ever greater heights.
Obama and his advisers believed that the right mix of Progressive policies would defeat populist resistance. “My hope is that if the American people send a message” to Republicans, Obama told Rolling Stone in 2012, and “they suffer some losses in this next election, that there’s going to be some self-reflection going on—that it might break the fever.” The message was never sent. The “fever” behind grassroots rejection of Obama’s presidency did not break. It intensified. It assumed the form of Trump....
...Republicans and conservatives must cope with the social and economic conditions of our time, not Reagan’s. They must strengthen the best aspects of our society and culture while ameliorating the worst. That could mean adopting new attitudes toward the global economy and cultural institutions while unraveling the unaccountable bureaucratic structure of the administrative state.
What it cannot mean—what it can never mean—is abandoning the American tradition of liberty under law to satisfy the ego of a single man.