The First Republican Since FDR

In the first year of his second term, President Trump began to exorcise from the White House the ghost of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Though technocratic managerialism, the ideology of progress, federal “alphabet agencies,” a foreign policy of policing the globe, and free trade all had antecedents before FDR, and didn’t burst into full bloom until after he was dead, the 32nd president revolutionized government — in effect, he overwrote the Constitution with a new set of norms, goals, procedures, and institutions.

For decades, conservatives complained about what Roosevelt Democrats had done, even as they operated within the rules those Democrats had established. Conservatives dreamt of privatizing Social Security, but they couldn’t even defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that had been set up under Lyndon Johnson. However much the welfare state rankled the Right, most of the other pillars of FDR’s legacy were cherished as much by Republicans as by Democrats. In the 1950s, conservatives who had lived through the New Deal revolution thought Dwight Eisenhower too far to the Left. By the early 2000s, conservative publications meant it as a complement when they compared George W. Bush to Harry Truman.

Donald Trump is a throwback to a time when Republicans were Republicans, not Roosevelt or Truman Democrats. One need not be a “paleoconservative” in the mold of Pat Buchanan to see this. Before the end of Trump’s first term, keen-eyed observers such as Charles Kesler and Matthew Continetti had picked up on Trump’s resemblance to the Republicans and conservatives of the 1920s and earlier. Trump’s actions in his second term — his daring tariff policy; his crackdown on illegal immigration, and restrictions on the legal variety, too; and his rejection of the habits, mindset, and institutions of “postwar liberal international order” — confirm him as the first Republican in a century not to be bound by Roosevelt’s rules.

President Trump doesn’t get credit for this among FDR’s many old-guard conservative and libertarian critics because he isn’t defined by their counter-ideology, either. The libertarian turn of the American Right that began in the mid-20th century was a novelty; earlier Republicans and intellectual conservatives sometimes held laissez-faire views, but those views were more characteristic of Democrats and liberals. Many of the “Old Right” eminences who became intellectual heroes to postwar conservatives and libertarians — figures like John T. Flynn and Albert Jay Nock — had considered themselves progressives or radicals before the New Deal.

The point here is not to label “true” conservatives, but to note that what became “conservative orthodoxy “after the New Deal was something that hadn’t had a long history on the American Right. When President Trump speaks and acts with little regard for small-goverment ideology, he’s harkening back to a time before the welfare state became the central issue of domestic political contention. Trump is neither a New Dealer nor an anti-New Dealer. This dismays conservatives who still think of Ronald Reagan as the only appropriate model for a Republican president, but it also disappoints those on the 21st century New Right who want a full-on Republican FDR, a leader who will boldly employ welfare-statism in the service of family and social solidarity.

As his actions over this past year have shown, Trump is more interested in acquiring Greenland than he is in either privatizing Social Security or rebuilding the welfare state in conformity with Catholic social teaching. He’s politically pragmatic, rather than ideological — with respect to entitlements and a great deal more, too. So far, President Trump’s thematic approach to social issues in his second term is characterized by the “80-20” distinction: If something appears to have 80 percent support among the American people, whether it’s a socially conservative or socially progressive policy, the president is inclined to favor it.

The pro-life movement, for instance, is appalled that the Trump administration has not restricted the availability of abortion pills; indeed, the administration has made them easier to acquire. On the other hand, social conservatives can be thankful the administration has prioritized restoring a biological definition of male and female and adopting policies across the board that reflect the realities of sex, in opposition to transgender ideology. In fact, the administration has committed more political capital to opposing transgenderism than to supporting popular policies that offend social conservatives, such as expanding access to in-vitro fertilization.

Abraham Lincoln made it the statesman’s task to shape public opinion, not follow it. “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed,” he argued in debate with Stephen Douglas. The lesson wasn’t that the leaders must defer to public opinion, but the opposite: “he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.” President Trump does indeed mold public sentiment, though not on many of the issues that conservatives have traditionally cared most about. Instead, his efforts to mold public opinion are chiefly on the theme of America first. The public should think about trade in terms of American jobs and industry, as well as the revenue that tariffs can bring in; the public should think about foreign policy in terms of America as a nation with interests of its own, not as a perpetual guardian of a global system; and the public should insist that distinctions between citizens and aliens, especially of the illegal variety, be observed.

Economic and social conservatives have an abiding concern with natural rights, but they have neglected the connection between individual rights, a particular people, and the institutions of government. They have unwittingly adopted the mentality behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Eleanor Roosevelt helped devise at the United Nations. Our own Declaration of Independence describes a people acting upon its constituent members’ rights to establish a government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Lincoln later said.

The UN Declaration, on the other hand, envisions rights in separation from the people, as something directly connecting government — of any kind, on any scale, including world government — with individuals. It’s as if the entire world were one “people,” and any institution or gang of activists can exercise governmental authority, not by the consent of the people but by claiming to speak for human rights. Though President Trump may be motivated by a passion for glory, not a love of political philosophy, he instructs Americans in how to reclaim self-government through his total rejection of the principles on which Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt remade the world.

In this, there is something Lincoln-like about Trump. He’s engaged, however unwittingly, in a battle over the basic premises of self-government, just as Lincoln was with Douglas. Lincoln recognized the danger arising from a nihilistic disregard for the moral claims on which popular government depended; Trump, in his own way, is combating the abuse of such moral claims by liberal and globalist elites as a pretext for their assertion of power over the American people. In his first term, Donald Trump had already begun to express the conflict between these fundamentally opposed political philosophies, but in the first year of his second term his actions transformed an argument into a revolution — or counter-revolution, if you will.

Franklin Roosevelt won four consecutive terms in the White House, and Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress throughout this era. FDR was followed in office by his last vice president, who then won a fifth presidential election in a row for the Democratic Party. With just two interruptions of two years apiece in the 1950s, Democrats held the U.S. House of Representatives from 1931 to 1995. The only Republican to win the White House between 1932 and 1964, Dwight Eisenhower, was determined not to reverse the changes FDR and his party had brought to government and America as a whole. Later GOP presidents operated in a Washington that Democrats had made, and the lavish funding that Democrats had awarded to liberal organizations, both at home and abroad, seemed to be a permanent feature of the political landscape. Colleges and universities were on the payroll, and if journalists (at least at home) were not, their careers nonetheless were made or broken by the access Democrats and bureaucrats chose to give media like the New York Times or Washington Post. The New Deal proper lasted only a few years, but the entrenchment of Roosevelt-style liberalism went on much longer, to the point where even its opponents couldn’t imagine politics or government on any other terms.

This was made possible in the first place by the consent of the American people, ratified in all those elections, though as the Democrats and their allies in the media and academy gained more power, the relationship between voters and liberals changed, with liberal elites increasingly in a position to mold the public. Yet such molding couldn’t overcome the public’s ability to perceive certain stark realities — economic, social, and strategic — which gave liberalism’s critics repeated opportunities, which Republicans eventually learned to capitalize upon. But because the Republicans themselves had internalized so much of the liberal establishment’s ideology and norms, the people found that little fundamentally changed when the GOP held power. This created an opening for a more philosophically profound challenge from Donald Trump. The first year of his second term demonstrated just how profound Trump’s challenge to politics and government could be in practice, as well as in potential.

President Trump does not, however, enjoy the advantages that Franklin Roosevelt did, and there is little prospect of the Republican party holding power for anything like the duration that Roosevelt’s Democrats did in the last century. This means that while Donald Trump may be effective in breaking the stranglehold of the old ideology, he faces a harder task in building anew. Public sentiment is unlikely to unify around either party in the foreseeable future, which means that even if Trump is limited in what he can create, there is little chance that liberals will be able to recreate their monopoly. In this, too, President Trump has reinvigorated self-government, which will be as hotly contested for years to come as it was in the earliest days of our republic.