Make the 1920s Great Again? A Superficially Appealing Story of The Republican Party

President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump greet former President George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2018, outside the Blair House in Washington, D.C. (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks) via Wikimedia Commons [public domain]

Matthew Continetti, an AEI scholar and author of a history of the conservative movement I hope to read, made a fairly provocative argument in the Wall Street Journal that the success of Donald Trump and his possible successor Ron DeSantis marks a break with Republican and rightwing policies and ideas as identified with the conservative movement, or “Reagan and the two Bushes,” if you will.

From a party that “embraced alliances, military intervention, forward defense, free trade and open immigration to defeat communism and fuel economic growth,” the GOP is now “reverting to its pre-World War II identity as the party of low taxes, economic protection, restricted immigration, wariness of foreign intervention and religious piety.”

It’s a superficially appealing story, and there are *some* similarities. Warren Harding was a compromise candidate who rode a wave of deep discontent after two decades of efforts to reshape the country, moralizing hectoring from the elites of the time, and economic fallout and disillusionment with involvement in the world after a horribly bloody world war and controversial peace treaties. He promised to restore “normalcy” and let Americans get on with their lives. Harding was also far from being a moral avatar for anyone, being known for multiple affairs.

Donald Trump was also effectively a compromise choice; his victory in a crowded primary field came thanks to a perfect storm of voter discontent, a divided field, exhaustion with ostensible “neocon” hyper-intervention abroad and the typical American love for the outsider. Like Harding, Trump promised to “make America great again,” especially by increasing tariffs to bring back manufacturing (like Harding) and end binding alliances with perceived freeloaders around the world.

But the devil, as the saying goes, is in the details. And the historical record shows that Continetti’s description of a great break with rightwing tradition after WWII that is now being restored is far from accurate.

Contingency

Let’s start with that bane of historical inevitability: contingency. Specifically, the fact that things could have easily gone very differently due to this or that historical event, not just trends on a graph. As British Prime Minister Harold McMillan is said to have said: “Events, dear boy, events!”

In Harding’s case, the event was the death of the presumptive nominee for the Republican ticket in 1920: Theodore Roosevelt. Still immensely popular despite splitting the party in 1912 and giving the White House to the Democrats for two terms, Roosevelt was seriously considering a comeback and many thought he would win. Most important for our purposes, Roosevelt was as far from Harding’s views as it gets, supporting a muscular (albeit not naively idealistic) foreign policy abroad and a strongly progressive domestic policy at home.

It’s very easy to imagine a scenario where it was Roosevelt who rode the wave of discontent in 1920 and led the country in a very different direction. People follow winners, not necessarily because of policy.

And contingency continued to follow the GOP during the Depression and WWII. Robert Taft may have been something of an isolationist, but it was moderate internationalists Wendell Willkie and Thomas Dewey who won the party nominations against FDR before the post-WWII era, not Taft. Clearly, the Republican Party and its voters were not all Harding clones, and things could and did shift even before WWII.

Continuity

Continetti argued that the conservative movement was a clean break with the old right of the GOP and Trump is a clean break with the conservative movement. I am deeply skeptical. At the very least when it comes to presidential policies as actually practiced, there’s a lot more in common between the eras than might appear at first glance.

Take religious piety.

Calvin Coolidge was a firm believer in the importance of religion and emphasized its importance in public life. So was Dwight Eisenhower, who put “under God” on the pledge of allegiance and introduced the National Prayer Breakfast. Richard Nixon worked with Evangelical leaders, at least for instrumental purposes, and Reagan was big on talking faith. W’s adherence to a strong religiosity in government, including support for federal funding for faith-based institutions and a bioethics council which gave faith leaders a say in the morality of scientific activities rather than just letting scientists do what they want.

Low taxes?

Even the squishiest of Republican governors and presidents worked to bring down taxes either through changes in how the rates were calculated or by increasing ways of being exempt. Even Ike brought down the effective tax rate, even if the formal rate remained very high. Reagan and W both cut the rates down strongly.

Foreign Policy

Well, what about “wariness of foreign intervention”? Surely that’s a big change?

It is true that most of the old hardcore “never intervene anywhere outside the mainland and its near abroad” Republican isolationists were voted out in primaries or general elections in the decades following WWII. But that’s not the same thing as the idea that all GOP presidents were W in 2003. Far from.

Eisenhower wound down the war in Korea. His direct interventions, when they happened, were cautious and pinpoint. Richard Nixon’s Vietnam policy greatly reduced the number of US soldiers fighting in Vietnam and was generally based on a hardnosed realism that has as much to do with W’s neoconnery as Warren Harding has with marital fidelity. Ronald Reagan fought the Cold War hard – through allies and proxies, with few direct interventions worthy of note. George HW Bush was well-known as a stone-cold realist who only liberated Kuwait and not Iraq, and whose advisor Brent Scowcroft even missed the Cold War because it meant “peace.”

Which leaves us, really, with George W Bush, the lens through whom everyone seems to view the entire GOP’s history on everything and on which Continetti seems to be basing his argument. Once again, we must account for contingency: 9/11. It is impossible for me to imagine that W, who ran on – bear with me here – skepticism of nation-building and American involvement abroad, would change his tune without something earthshattering like that event.

Indeed, I find it hard and maybe impossible to believe that even Harding or Coolidge would not have become far more hawkish had Japan or Great Britain or the Soviet Union launched or been responsible for such attack on the homeland. Harding the isolationist did, after all, vote for entry into WWI due to German submarines killing Americans, even if he did not support the subsequent Versailles Treaty. W’s decision to become uberhawkish might have been mistaken – there are legitimate debates on this – but it was a break coming from events, not some continuation of a long-standing Republican approach to foreign affairs.

Speaking of W, it never ceases to surprise me that people forget just how much international elites despised the man for being a unilateralist “cowboy” thinking only about fighting for Americans rather than listening to the smug tones of the cognoscenti. It was, after all, W’s admin that first spoke of Eastern European countries as more reliable allies in the robust fight for liberty compared to Western Europe, long before Trump or the current Ukraine dustup.

Donald Trump’s disdain for allies and penchant for unilateral efforts “for the country” may be to the chagrin of many, but it’s not that great a departure from general GOP post-WWII policy than many think. It certainly is not the kind of “return to normalcy” envisioned by Harding (even if Republicans in this decade were more involved in Europe than is commonly realized, especially when it comes to managing war debts and financial reconstruction).

Even setting that aside, it’s not even clear to me that Republicans are anywhere close to the views of 1920s America, let alone 1930s America on foreign policy. Polling, especially in the latter decade, pretty consistently showed a broad and sometimes crushing majority of Americans in favor of staying the hell out. By contrast, regarding the latest crisis in Ukraine, the majority of Republican voters are consistently for Ukraine and for helping them indirectly without US boots on the ground in any way possible – very reminiscent of the policy of one Ronald Reagan in places like Afghanistan.

Free Trade and Movement

Aha! You say. What about the Reaganite (and Bushite) support for freer trade and much more liberal attitudes on immigration? Surely that’s a break from GOP tradition?

Well…yes and no. It’s true that those presidents were much more enthusiastic about immigration than others, but there was always a wing of the GOP that was more skeptical, especially when it came to border enforcement. It’s not an accident that part of Clinton’s triangulation to the right in 1996 included promising to enforce immigration laws. GOP Governor of California Pete Wilson passed a measure aimed at illegal immigrants, as well.

But even taking this and Trumpism into account, the differences between now and 1921 or 1924 are stark. Then, there was such sweeping support for restricting immigration into the US that both laws, which imposed very strict quotas, were passed by a massive bipartisan majority. Tom Cotton’s RAISE act, by contrast, didn’t even get the majority of the GOP Senate caucus. While R attitudes towards illegal, uncontrolled immigration remain quite negative, there’s nuance in their view on legal immigration and certainly not widespread support for a return to 1924. Even Trump emphasizes the distinction between legal and illegal and far less any notion of restoring the demographic balance of, say, 1984.

Even the free trade question needs qualification. While generally supporters of free trade, Reagan and W both imposed selective tariffs for various reasons, and for all his bluster, Donald Trump did not go anywhere near 1920 tariff levels, let alone those of 1890, preferring instead to “negotiate better deals.” And opinion polling does not show R opposition to free trade higher than normal levels.

Government Regulation

OK, OK. So Trump wasn’t that big a difference in terms of all that. But what about intervention in the economy? Surely that’s new?

Still, no. We need to be accurate when talking about “intervention in the economy.” Very consistently, at least since Ike and likely before, Republican voters as a whole since 1932 have had a fairly consistent approach on the question: no to taxes and regulations, yes to existing entitlements.

Remember Robert Taft? His hatred of regulation unapproved by Congress was genuine. So was his support for Social Security and employee compensation. Ike? Expanded Social Security. Richard Nixon’s healthcare plan was to the left of Obamacare. Reagan was a New Deal man who worked to reform entitlements within the constraints of a Dem House, not abolish them. Even W and Paul Ryan aimed more to partially privatize entitlements with the aim of making them more efficient and remunerative for citizens. Trump’s ending even talk of the subject may be stark, but it’s not entirely out of line with actual Republican policy.

What does it all mean?

The Republican Party, in short, has not shifted drastically. Like every coalition in American politics, there were specific shifts in response to specific crises, peppered with the contingency of unforeseen events. They can and will shift again in the future, in directions we may not even see now. Whether or not the GOP is actually going to try for a restoration of old glory remains to be seen, there’s little evidence of that happening, and even less national consensus for it to be pushed through.

The lesson here, more than anything, is to look at what parties and leaders do in practice, not just what they say they will or wish to do. Ideologues and elites are important in providing ideas, policies, and the intellectual justification for both, but in the end – hard to believe as it is – it is the voters who have the last word in a democracy.