After Reagan: In Search of an Ideology and Identity for the Republican Party

The start of what is to be a highly contested and, undoubtedly, vitriolic 2024 Presidential election has begun in earnest now that the first Republican debate is over. Although absent from the stage, the phenomenon of Donald Trump that boiled over in 2016 is part of a long and ongoing transformation within the Republican Party. Since the end of Cold War, the Republican Party’s post-1945 ideological identity of vigorously supporting international democracy and liberty, global free markets, and articulating a conception of the United States as a bastion of freedom in a world besieged by totalitarian empires has all but disintegrated with the international threat of communism and the Soviet Union gone and a return to the intense factionalism of domestic political infighting in its place. Unlike the Democratic Party, which transformed itself in the past century as the party of government-mandated social welfare and civil rights to which its ideological identity remains that, the Republican Party’s post-1945 ideological identity is shattered. Last night’s debate and Donald Trump’s looming presence over the Republican Presidential Primary reflects that reality.

The notion of the Reagan era is well-attested in political science writing and scholarship. Sean Wilentz, a noted Clintonian partisan and Princeton historian, even wrote a history of America spanning 1974-2008 in which he dubbed this period “the Age of Reagan.” No figure, he asserted, dominated American politics more than the Gipper during this near four-decade time span even if he was only president from 1981-1989. But if 2008 marks the end of the Reagan era, coinciding with the election of Barack Obama and the defeat of John McCain, what has followed in the wake of this new realignment in American culture and politics that seemingly began in 2008 and accelerated in 2012, 2016, and 2020?

Prior to World War II, the Republican Party had a strong isolationist core; Republicans, more-so than Democrats (whose 1920 platform endorsed the League of Nations), opposed entry into World War I and the League of Nations. It also had deep populist and anti-government elements typified by Senator Gerald Nye who headed the eponymous Nye Commission which asserted America’s involvement in the First World War was a result of Wall Street and Government ties to British financiers and war profiteering—the “Deep State” of 100 years ago. Go back far enough, the Republican Party is the party of Middle American radicalism and isolationism. It always has been despite propaganda eulogizing it as having been different until recently.

The modern Republican Party’s identity and ideology of supporting international democracy with a muscular foreign policy and promoting global free markets was crafted through its opposition to the New Deal, its struggle with coming to terms with an increasingly globalized and interconnected world with its older isolationist and populist traditions, and the confrontation with the Soviet Union and global communism during the Cold War which served as an existential threat to the United States. The identity that formed out of these struggles culminated in Ronald Reagan: a Republican Party with its image and understanding of the United States as being pro-capitalism and nominally “anti-government” (primarily anti-welfare bureaucracy), the steadfast pillar and indispensable nation in defending global democracy and liberty against communism and totalitarianism (at a time when the commitment of the Democratic Party was growing suspect with its increasingly pro-peace and pro-diplomacy attitudes), and a sense of quasi-divine ordination against secular and atheistic movements that revitalized a sense of Christian patriotism. In short, this new identity was a cobbled reaction to a nation and world transformed from the Great Depression and Second World War.

But the realignment of the Republican Party to international anti-communism and “pro-democracy” was never a seamless transition. The party’s trouble dealing with a new, global, and international reality can be seen in one of its great figureheads prior to 1940: Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh was an American hero in the 1920s and 1930s. He was the man whose solo flight across the Atlantic represented the triumph of American adventurism, spirit, and technology. But Lindbergh was also a noted isolationist and opponent of the New Deal and America’s slow drift into World War II who was subsequently maligned by the propaganda machine of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as a Nazi-sympathizer (there’s nothing new under the sun after all). Lindbergh serves as a microcosm of the internal conflict of the Republican Party that he was a posterchild of, rightly and wrongly, just as Reagan was, and remains, the posterchild of a new Republican Party during the Cold War era. Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight should have revealed the end of isolationism and continentalism in American politics—technology was driving the world closer together even if America remained relatively isolated from the world by two massive oceans. Yet America’s continental supremacy and geographic distance from European political squabbles kept the isolationist mentality strong even when ships and planes crossed the Atlantic and Pacific with great speed. Despite being an international man of fame and renown, Lindbergh steadfastly held to the old republic’s ideals of North American hegemony and isolation from European (global) affairs.

Prior to 1941, Midwestern Republicans were staunch populists and isolationists. Many, like Lindbergh, who hailed from Minnesota, also opposed the supposed parasitic influence of Wall Street and big banks and financiers who were vilified as servants of the British Empire. (The criticism also played on anti-Semitic tropes too, it must be acknowledged.) Isaiah Berlin, when residing in the United States during the war, also spied for the British government and he noted the militant isolationist sentiment from the “prairie populists” in his reports to the British Government. Berlin feared the strain of anti-British sentiment that even George Orwell wrote about when dealing with American GIs in Britain during World War II would be problematic to Britain’s war efforts (this is why Berlin loved FDR and the Democrats who were much more sympathetic to the international conflict). The “Special Relationship” is a largely fictious mythology that emerged during World War II and the Cold War as the center of international economics and nominal democratic politics shifted from Britain to the United States in which the US essentially inherited the responsibility of maintaining the economic and political dominion of the British Empire. This was something that Midwestern Republicans continued to be weary of even after the end of the war: Robert Taft from Ohio is a perfect example. Taft opposed NATO, the UN, and feared the United States was becoming the new global (British) empire after the Allied victory in 1945. His skepticism toward a hardline stance against the Soviet Union also made him subject to anti-Russian propaganda (yet again, nothing new under the sun); he was lambasted as a stooge for the Kremlin.

To say World War II and the Cold War changed things would be cliché, but it is nevertheless true. The horrors of the Second World War and the global threat posed by the Soviet Union and the decline of the British Empire led to a complete reevaluation of American politics and strategy. This reevaluation hit the Republican Party the hardest where stalwart isolationists like Robert Taft battled against the “eastern establishment” of Thomas Dewey as the self-appointed leadership of the Republican Party (exhibited by men like Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of Massachusetts) began to accept the responsibilities of global political management as the world order changed. The nomination of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, dashing Taft’s presidential ambitions, cemented the power of the pro-NATO and pro-internationalist wing of the Republican Party which also now included former isolationists like Arthur Vandenburg of Michigan who didn’t switch his views because his constituents did but because political pressures within the Republican Party’s leadership demanded him to do so.

The “eastern establishment,” or at least the ideology the “eastern establishment” promoted, had secured a victory over the Republican Party’s more isolationist and populist base which was suppressed but never truly expunged. Acceptance of the New Deal bureaucracy and the new global realities of a post-World War II world “moderated” the Republican Party’s image while it retained and continued to advance its pro-business and anti-communist image positioning itself as a better party on economics and more strongly anti-communist than the Democratic Party which was presented by Republicans as the party threatening American business prosperity and that it wasn’t willing to do enough to stop the advance of global communism. Truman lost China and nearly lost Korea as the saying goes, and then the anti-Vietnam War protestors were generally supporters of the Democratic Party.

Just as World War II changed the Republican Party, the Vietnam War changed the Democratic Party. Prior to the Vietnam War, the Democratic Party was at the forefront of American internationalism, communist containment, and projecting the image of American democracy abroad. Woodrow Wilson was the most obvious antecedent to the Rooseveltian internationalist democratism of the Democratic Party. After FDR, subsequent Democratic presidents Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson oversaw America’s involvement in the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the beginning of American military combat in Indochina sparking America’s “hot” involvement in the Vietnam War. Their commitment, despite some foreign policy failures, revealed the Democratic Party’s ideology of preventing the spread of communism and desire to work with other democracies around the world in the face of communist expansionism.

The “traditional Democrat” image of patriotism, labor unions, and anti-communism would come to a bloody end in the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Party Convention. The Democratic Party was split in half and the reorganization of the party as a pro-peace, pro-civil rights, and implicit critic of American foreign policy commenced which harmed the party’s image as being patriotic (patriotism, by the late 1960s, had become synonymous with confronting the Soviet Union and stopping the spread of communism). This transformation also began to change Democratic Party’s religious profile with its lower-class Protestant voters and politicians generally opposing civil rights and slowly migrating into the Republican Party while Catholics, then a bulwark of the Democratic Party, used their experiences of anti-Catholic discrimination as the battle cry for their own civil rights activism which took on a more prominent role in the party’s image though the 1948 Democratic Platform explicitly declared itself the party of civil rights integration (causing the famous Dixiecrat walkout and third party candidacy of Strom Thurmond of South Carolina). In time, the Catholicity of Catholic Democrats faded but the consciousness and conceptualization of the Catholic Democrat as civil rights champion remained; the legacy of this transformation is still seen today with the ghosts of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Gavin Newsom. This transformation of the Democratic Party after 1968 has stuck, with an increasing secularization of the party as evangelicals and lower-class Protestants became Republican and the Catholicity of Catholic Democrats having become but cultural identity. Insofar that Democrats still talk Christianity, it’s as a vehicle for civil rights activism and inclusion: Jesus as a civil rights prophet and faith as an inspiration for social reform. Christianity (or its more rhetorically neutral term: faith) is merely supplementary to the civil rights ideology that the Democratic Party is now entirely married to.

What 1968 achieved for Democrats, however, was a cohesive and generally coherent ideological identity that reinforced its 1932 transformation with Roosevelt’s New Deal. Democrats were now the party of civil rights activism, peaceful diplomatic internationalism, and defender and promoter of the welfare state since the New Deal and Great Society welfare programs were aimed at “disenfranchised” Americans. By and large, this ideology has grown more militant in the twenty-first century with the inclusion of a strong environmentalist ethos (the environment is, itself, “disenfranchised” and “oppressed”). No one is confused as to what the Democratic Party stands for: global “civil rights,” global “environmentalism,” global “internationalism.” The Democratic Party makeover that it went through in 1968 and afterward remains firmly entrenched as its primary ideological identity.

But as the Democratic Party began to transform itself, Ronald Reagan enters the scene in the Republican Party.

Once a Democrat, Reagan and other anti-communist liberals who made confrontation with the Soviet Union and the protection of global democracy their main political goal began to migrate into the Republican Party which retained a more vigorous anti-communist stance throughout the upheaval that came from the Vietnam War. Reagan’s political apotheosis continued further as he slowly shed his blue-collar pro-union mentality and embraced a more business and market-friendly, anti-New Deal, economic ideology. He was elected Governor of California in 1966 when the state was a Republican bastion of free enterprise and American ideals thanks to its media and cultural environment (despite the internal ruptures already occurring inside Hollywood) which propagated and promoted America as a land of liberty, religiosity, and economic opportunity in its newspapers, magazines, and films. California was America writ large, or at least California represented the America that Reagan seemed to embody: opportunity, freedom, and cowboy machoism.

From the governorship of California, Reagan’s profile grew as he waded into the debates over the Vietnam War. He ran for President in 1968 and 1976, losing both times, before securing the Republican nomination in 1980. His losses in 1968 and 1976, however, kept him in the national spotlight and proved instrumental for his eventual primary victory in 1980. Republican activists and media elites who gravitated to his ideology of free enterprise, deregulation, and a muscular foreign policy became instrumental in remaking the Republican Party’s image during the wilderness years under Nixon and Ford.

Reagan’s ascendancy in 1980 came at the heels of a decade of disappointment and malaise in American culture and politics. The Watergate scandal shook Americans’ belief in the goodness of its government and began the long road to conspiracy and distrust of federal institutions which is now rampant in 2023. Although, on paper, Richard Nixon had accomplished a lot as President, his resignation shattered American trust at the highest levels of American politics. This was followed by the unexceptional presidency of Gerald Ford and the debacle of American retreat and Soviet expansion under Jimmy Carter with the disastrous Iranian Hostage crisis gut-punching American prestige and the initially successful Soviet invasion of Afghanistan adding a sense of impending defeat in the Cold War.

In that same decade Reagan continuously inserted himself into national debates, arguing for American renewal and optimism. He called for increased military funding, a combative stance against global communism, and sought to liberate the American taxpayer and family from the shackles of the Great Society bureaucracy enacted by Johnson and maintained, by and large, by Nixon and Ford. The increasing threat of global communism spurred by the fall of Saigon all but vanished lingering isolationist sentiment in the Republican Party; Reagan’s vigorous advocacy of rebuilding America’s military and reaffirming its sense of divine democracy against atheistic totalitarianism—however sincere it was is beside the point—helped transform the Republican Party into the party of internationalism and global democracy as the Democrats retreated into the party of negotiated compromise and criticism of American foreign policy. From 1980 until 2012, this image of the Republican Party dominated. Despite internal factionalism espoused by the old populism in a new form under Pat Buchanan, no one was confused about what the Republican Party stood for after the Reagan Revolution: free enterprise, free markets, deregulation, a strong military, military intervention abroad whenever it was deemed in the national interest, and an overtly Christian identity and religiosity fused with America’s democratic traditions.

The cracking of the Reagan image began in 2008 with the defeat of John McCain by Barack Obama. It further cracked in Mitt Romney’s trouncing in 2012 despite the Tea Party revolution of 2010 and Romney’s messaging as a torchbearer of Reaganism. The breakup of the Reagan image of the Republican Party exploded in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump, not because Trump was different than Reagan on policies, but because Trump projected an image very different than Reagan.

The fatigue over the War on Terror and the landslide defeats of McCain and Romney caused a crisis in the Republican Party’s ideological image of muscular democratism and foreign policy interventionism epitomized by Reagan (even if not entirely accurate) which is still the image promoted by anti-Trump Republicans like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney. Part of Trump’s victory was his appeal to ending the “Forever Wars,” putting “America First,” and voicing concern over whether the United States was being fleeced by its NATO allies. Trump’s victory in 2016 brought a sense of rupture and discontinuity with the Republican Party’s image and identity formed in the “Age of Reagan.” In many ways, Trump tapped into the suppressed Midwestern and Mountain West Republicanism that existed before the Cold War even if that same Republicanism spurred Reagan to victory; a certain Republican brand that was skeptical of American big business and Wall Street (the east coast establishment), desired isolation and minding our own business in global affairs, coupled with resentment over the New Deal-Great Society bureaucracy, has always existed within the Republican Party. The perception of incongruency and discontinuity with the Republican Party’s Cold War transformation runs deep and continues to fracture with the ongoing fights inside the Republican Party in how to handle Donald Trump and those who support him with the older Cold War and War on Terror Republican elite having lost control of the ideological identity of the party while openly (and privately) opposing him and his supporters in their bid to repair that shattered ideological image and identity.

Republican critiques of Trump, contrary the Democratic critiques of Obama and Biden (often amounting to them not going far enough in their reforms), concern themselves with this rupture and discontinuity that is currently unfolding at the heart of the Republican Party. Trump is not a Republican. Trump is not a conservative. Trump is not Ronald Reagan. The internal Republican critiques of Trump emphasize the differences between him and the party’s older image. But, as I’ve shown, that is a misleading picture since the populist, isolationist, “America-First” mentality had a long and historic home in the Republican Party that was merely suppressed because of the Second World War and the transformation of the Republican Party’s image and governing ideology during the Cold War. Last night’s Republican debate and Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign highlights the continuing struggle for an identity and ideology for the Republican Party after Reagan. Despite us not knowing the future, what is clear in this ongoing struggle is the energy for a new identity and ideology for the Republican Party is in the ascendant. Those clinging to the old identity and ideology are clasped to a dead corpse being passed over by the winds of change. There is a certain irony in that.

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