A DEFENSE OF ZOMBIE CONSERVATISM

Insofar as It represents anything more than a post hoc rationalization for President Donald Trump’s caprice, the postmortem for the pre-2015 Republican Party reads as follows. By the 1980s, a set of serious problems had arrived in the United States. Thankfully, President Ronald Reagan and his fellow travelers had good answers to these problems and, by and large, they managed to solve them. But, having done so, the Republican Party and its friends within the institutionalized conservative movement failed to move on. Instead, they decided that the platform of 1980 was applicable to all places and all times. And so, in 2015, the party rebelled and nominated a politician who saw things differently. That politician, Donald Trump, managed to win the nomination, ascend to the presidency and recast the movement in his image. These changes are likely to be permanent.

It is certainly true that the Republican Party sometimes falls back on gauzy nostalgia. It is true, too, that there seems to be no problem with which the United States can be confronted that does not lead to prominent figures within the GOP calling for a tax cut. But I see no evidence that these habits are on their way out, or that Donald Trump’s election did anything much to limit them.

It would be bizarre to point to Donald Trump as evidence that the GOP has changed meaningfully on policy, given that the standout achievements of his presidency—the ones to which Trump and his defenders themselves point with pride—are a massive tax cut inspired by former House Speaker