Early Wednesday morning, the new Republican coalition was confirmed as a winner in American politics. Donald Trump’s Republicans had secured Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes, sending the 45th president back to the White House to become the 47th.
Trump’s return to the White House not only ended the era of Barack Obama’s Democratic Party, it stomped out the dream of a return to the country club sensibilities of the old Republican Party led by George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.
Whatever happened to the old Republicans, often called neoconservatives, and when will they return? This question has been asked throughout the Trump era, but the hoped-for Kamala Harris victory that never came was those neoconservatives’ last hope for a comeback.
After Tuesday, any notion that the Republican Party must return to the staid, predictable centre-right and base its politics on free trade and cuts to the capital gains tax should be firmly kiboshed. Many of those same Bush Republicans who espoused these politics, such as Dick Cheney and Nicolle Wallace, threw in their lot with Kamala Harris and the Obama Democrats, and they still lost, reflecting the collapse of their influence on American politics.
The Atlantic, a high-minded and excellent magazine, no matter how you feel about its editorial stances, featured an opening essay in its pre-election print issue that lamented Trump’s dominance of the GOP. According to the writers, Trump was impeding the return of principled, moderate conservatives who once had an ironclad grip on the party.
George W. Bush is certainly a good man, but his administration presided over a rolling snowball of disasters that left a bad taste in the mouths of most Americans. The 9/11 attacks, two quagmire-like wars in the Middle East, Hurricane Katrina, and the start of the 2008 financial crisis permanently poisoned the Bush-Reagan brand as an inspiring force.
The Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq for the wrong reasons, and the fact that its media surrogates insisted there was no chance of an incoming economic catastrophe in 2007, were mistakes that lost the trust of the American majority.
Before then, America’s political map was a collection of dark blue cities surrounded by blood-red suburbs. This map helped secure Republican dominance for all but 12 years between 1968 and 2008, when the Bush administration’s failures disillusioned middle-class, college-educated voters, leaving them open to the youthful, liberal dynamism of Barack Obama.
Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential run failed to revive the success of the Reagan-Bush coalition, leading to more disillusionment among conservatives, and leaving the door open for Donald Trump to move in and take over the party.
Donald Trump’s pulverization of Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican primaries was proof enough that the party’s base wanted to get behind Trump’s fresh, populist approach to politics. When the shocking results of that year’s presidential election came in, it turned out that a decisive number of working-class voters liked it too.
After Trump went on to lose the 2020 presidential election amidst a brutal pandemic and the country’s worst racial violence of the 21st century, some wishful pundits pondered a return to Reagan-Bush family politics and rhetoric in the aftermath of his defeat, only for Trump to once again sweep aside his neoconservative challengers in the 2024 Republican primaries.
Had Donald Trump lost Tuesday’s presidential election, it would have truly been the end of the 78-year-old’s political career. There would have been renewed calls to emulate the style of Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of Virginia.
In 2021, Youngkin flipped the blueing state after a campaign that balanced aspects of Trump’s populism with a sense of old-school conservative rhetoric and tone.
Youngkin’s style has value, and should be analyzed when Trump leaves politics, but what works in Virginia is unproven at the national level, where Trump’s unique brand of populism has made a triumphant comeback.
Rather than being a stubbornly middle-class party, Trump’s GOP is a broad coalition that crosses class and racial lines, filled with young Americans recoiling at the inflated price of ground beef while being weighed down by credit card debt and the thought of never owning a home.
It is a remarkable transition. You can see the difference by observing the crowds celebrating Trump’s victory speech on Tuesday with the McAllister family of Home Alone, one of the all-time great Christmas movies.
Released in 1990, the movie was set in an affluent suburb of Chicago, a neighbourhood that, while fictional, was the prototypical Republican stronghold for generations. You can easily imagine the McAllister family having a Reagan-Bush sign on their lawn, content with their lot in life and wanting to preserve it for future generations.
Such white-collar, successful families headed by soccer moms and golf-playing dads were the steel-reinforced backbone of both the Republican base and party apparatus, who cherished normality and disdained “weirdness.”
In 2024, the appearances of Hulk Hogan and Amber Rose at the Republican National Convention, along with the support of eccentric internet personalities like Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, offended the soccer moms, but they appealed to the new, winning Republican coalition.
The Republican Party now controls the White House and the Senate, and its appointees hold a majority on the Supreme Court. Furthermore, the Democratic Party has likely lost the popular vote for the first time since 2004 and has questionable odds of winning a majority in the House of Representatives.
After this presidential election, the political and electoral strength of Trump’s comeback coalition cannot be questioned by either Democrats or wistful neoconservatives.
The professionalism of those old Republicans was not what was wrong with them. There is tremendous appeal in having leaders who present themselves well and can speak to a white-collar audience, as well as a broader one that includes the working-class.
However, the failures of the George W. Bush presidency has haunted the neoconservative Republicans to their grave. For conservatives in America, Trump’s Republicans are the new normal, and there is no going back.
National Post