Throughout the Republican National Convention, I struggled with one big question: What is the Republican Party for?
The same cannot be said nearly for former President Donald Trump. See the way that solidarity becomes an ear bandage The RNC is a must have fashion accessoryOr how long the audience managed to cheer during his historically long and astonishing acceptance speech Thursday night.
Beyond Trump worship, the RNC has been billed as proof that the populist takeover of the Republican Party is complete. This analysis is certainly correct on issues such as trade, immigration and foreign alliances; The Trumpian insurgency has gone head-to-head with the party’s old guard and defeated them.
Yet elements of the old Republican Party remained intact.
Unlike far-right populist parties in Europe, the GOP is staunchly opposed to the welfare state and progressive taxation. It remains Committed to banning abortion, an issue where its actions at the state level speak for themselves It remains deeply hostile to unions; Sen. J.D. Vance, the vice presidential nominee, is alleged to be the personification of the party’s pro-worker populism. 0 percent score from the AFL-CIO. In foreign policy, it is by no means strictly isolationist: it wants to increase military spending and aggressively counter China even as it dismantles both military alliances and the American-led global trade system.
Ideologically, the GOP is a mess, a political party built less on a cohesive worldview than an assembly of disparate parts, a zombie given life by Donald John Trump’s thunderbolt. It’s Frankenstein’s team. And while Trump and his loyalists are clearly the head of our Shellian monster, they don’t (yet) have complete control over all the limbs.
The Trump coalition is so new that it has yet to develop a balance, a stable set of policy commitments that will endure as long as it is aligned. It’s largely Trump’s dealing with the issues he really cares about — like democracy, trade and immigration — while others claim they can do what they can when they demand it. The monied class is still calling the shots on taxes and regulations; Social conservatives are still in the driver’s seat when it comes to issues like abortion and LGBT rights.
You can see this at work in documents like the RNC platform and Project 2025, which together help us understand the GOP’s ambitions going forward.
Some of their most notable policies, such as Project 2025’s proposal to end judicial independence or the platform’s call for “the largest deportation program in history,” are pure Trump (to the right of random capitalization).
But in problem areas where other elements of the right prevail, things sound a little more old Republican. About EPA’s chapter on Project 2025 As old school business friendly as it gets; The GOP platform promises to “cut regulations” and “cut excess taxes.” Project 2025 calls on the next president to “repeal regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and gender characteristics.”
When there is tension between Trump’s instincts and the old Republican agenda, the results are not always clear.
On trade, Trump simply won; The issue is central enough to his political identity that his protectionism has become party bigotry. But on abortion, where Trump wants to moderate the party, the signals are more mixed. He succeeded, for example, in Outside of the GOP platform is calling for a national abortion ban But banning abortion remains central to the party’s identity. Both Vance and Project 2025 support using an obscure 1873 law to ban distribution of mifepristone, the abortion pill, by mail.
In part, this state of confusion is a product of Trump’s own personality. Conservative writer Ramesh Pannu’s argumentsPrecisely, he lacks the character necessary to run a rigid and dogmatic ideological movement.
“It’s not that he lacks discipline and focus to carry out an objective, though he lacks both, or that he is easily manipulated by flatterers, though they do. It is also flexible to begin with its objectives,” argues Ponnoor.
But in part, it’s the result of coalition politics—as is the American right always is working
Post-World War II American conservatism was a “three-legged stool” consisting of three parties: free market libertarians, social conservatives, and foreign policy hawks. These groups often disagree with each other on both policy and policy. Hence the clash of ideologies: a “small government” conservatism that aimed to have the world’s largest army and police consenting adults in their homes.
There was nothing natural about this alliance, no reflection of an enduring and transhistorical American tradition. “Movement Conservatism,” as it was called, was one the movement – Built like any other political party by people molded by a specific time and place (Cold War America) in response to a specific challenge.
Furthermore, movement conservatism was not the entirety of the American right. In his recent book Take back America, historian David Austin Walsh argues that respectable conservatives actually depended on the radical fringe for their success. Extremist groups such as the John Birch Society, which saw a communist plot behind every bush, teamed up with mainstream conservatives to fight the liberals—what Walsh called the right-wing “Popular Front.”
The American right was thus an alliance at the apex of an alliance: a three-legged stool, unruly on its own, acting in concert with the right willing to go into dark places where mainstream conservatism dare not tread.
Today, the power relations are reversed: the right now has the senior partner setting the tone in Washington, the fusionists following his lead. But the alliance remains allianceAnd it will act accordingly.
