How Reagan was more FDR than Trump — and why that matters for the GOP's future

The Week

Reagan and Trump. Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock

The story is that liberalism dominated American politics without serious challenge from the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt's election in 1932 through 1980, when Ronald Reagan led an ascendant conservative movement on a successful drive to wrest power away from the center-left. After 36 years, conservatives set the boundaries of the possible in Washington, forcing one Democratic president to consolidate the Reagan Revolution and another to champion an ambitious health-care reform bill during the first two of his eight years in office.

It gets a lot of things right. Reagan was a liberal.

Yes, a right-leaning liberal. A liberal is the same. The GOP has been turning itself into an antiliberal party over the past 14 years, and we can see that now.

Donald Trump is a big part of that story, but the transformation began before him, and it is still going on now that he is out of office. The GOP has left liberalism behind, even if Trump runs and wins the Republican nomination again in 2024.

The left-leaning liberal consensus and the ideological differences between the parties made Reagan's liberalism hard to see at the time. In addition to launching and expanding the American welfare state, Democrats waged World War II and the Cold War, and sometimes, the case of John F. Kennedy, cut taxes. Republicans consolidated the liberal expansion of the federal government, and sometimes, in the case of Richard Nixon, expanded it further, while also opening diplomatic relations with China and the Soviet Union.

Reagan's policy priorities seemed to be like extreme conservatism. In the 1960s, the former actor began his engagement with politics as a Goldwater Republican. He was a reactionary warmonger by the time he arrived in the White House, after the demoralizing aftermath of America's defeat in Vietnam. Reagan was firmly in a tradition that traced back to the Democratic presidencies of Harry Truman and Kennedy, and it anticipated the enthusiasm for humanitarian military intervention that swept the international center-left during the 1990s.

Reagan was opposed to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society social programs when he entered California politics. He oversaw cuts in income tax rates in the White House. The rate of expansion of the welfare state slowed over the course of the 1980s. It wasn't turned back.

Reagan took the foot off the gas of government growth, not slamming on the brakes, but throwing it into reverse. Immigration and free trade were championed by the administration. It did so to spur economic growth and to show its commitment to openness and moral universalism. Reagan believed that once freed from tyranny, they would choose to embrace democratic self-government and modestly regulated free-market capitalism as the best of all possible political and economic arrangements.

Reagan was a liberal because of that. Not a progressive, and also not someone who embraced the counterculture of the 60s. Reagan championed bourgeois standards. As the first divorced and remarried president in American history, the story was more complicated in his personal life. He welcomed into his electoral coalition the religious right and even more extreme reactionary dissenters from mainstream politics and culture. These groups were junior partners in the coalition. The center-right had an idealistic liberalism.

This was true through the Bush 41 and Bush 43 administrations, even as elements within the party began to express more strident views after Republicans took control of the House in 1994. After John McCain tapped Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, the grassroots of the party began to crave a more culturally populist and combative style of politics.

Republican voters ate it up because of the trash-talking, down-market, alternative to the high-minded ideals that had dominated the party since 1980. That started a transformation which continues today.

The Tea Party was an angry, anti-establishment protest of the Obama administration&s push to pass theAffordable Care Act and its wave of electoral success in the 2010 midterms. In 2012 the GOP primary voters showed surprising enthusiasm for a series of populist protest candidates, before finally choosing the consensus nomination of Romney.

The grassroots anger grew after Romney failed to defeat Obama in the election. From the moment he launched his candidacy in the summer of 2015, Trump captured that anger and began augmenting it. After more than three decades of being junior partners in the electoral coalition, Republicans, as well as disaffected Democrats and independents, who dissented from liberalism in all of its political and cultural aspects, have left the party.

More than a dozen alternatives to Trump in the 2016 primaries tried to meld Reaganite themes with expressions of antiestablishment resentment, but a plurality of the voters opted for the purer expression of populist antiliberalism that spewed from the mouth of the demagogic billionaire conman. The Republican Party had been irrevocably altered by the time Trump had beaten back every attempt by the old center-right liberal establishment to deny him the GOP nomination.

In a recent speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton tried to downplay the differences between the 40th and 45th presidents. Efforts that amount to obfuscation.

The differences between Reagan and Trump are stark. Reagan spoke of America as a beacon of liberty and self-government for all people, and Trump often portrays the country as beset by a plethora of potentially disastrous problems that he alone can fix. Reagan took pride in America's ability to attract immigrants from all over the world, but Trump views outsiders as a threat to the nation who must be kept out with walls and brutalizing policies. Reagan had faith in the power of free markets to benefit people everywhere, but Trump views them with suspicion and treats interactions among nations as zero-sum contests.

Setting up one-to-one contrasts doesn't capture the magnitude of the change in how Trump and his peers differ from Reaganite liberalism. Trump is contemptuous of the rule of law. He spreads civically corrosive lies, even when they cause violence against core institutions of American democracy. He demonizes the free press, calling journalists "enemies of the people," and some of his closest advisers aim to "deconstruct the administrative state."

We are left with a form of politics that breaks from the liberalism practiced by every American president since at least FDR. The Reagan era needs to be reexamined because of the longstanding tendency to separate it from the one preceding it. The disjunct comes in 2016 not 1980.

There is a provision attached to several abortion-related bills in the Missouri legislature by state Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, a tenaciously pro-life Republican. The provision of Texas' six-week abortion ban encourages private enforcement of the law by empowering civilians to file lawsuits against anyone thought to violate it.

It is true that every Republican president since Reagan has supported reversing the Supreme Court decision in favor of abortion rights. Now that the high court appears to be on the verge of doing that, some in the post-Reagan GOP aim to push even further to gut the jurisprudence of federalism, which denies the legitimacy of extraterritorial criminal law. Only federal law can apply to other states.

What will the courts do about an assault on individual freedom? The Texas law has survived legal challenge. Coleman and her cheerleaders in Missouri and around the country will be disappointed. We don't know. She is taking a bold and chilling approach if the Supreme Court overturns the decision, so we don't know what their fate will be.

Something has changed in American politics and specifically in the Republican Party. Donald Trump and his imitators have become the antiliberal right-wing populist party of Ronald Reagan. All liberty-loving Americans, of any ideological variety, have cause to worry about that.