Chief among the many disturbances to the Republican psyche prompted by Trump is the realization on the part of many of the party’s erstwhile mavens that their voters were not nearly as interested in their agenda as they previously believed. The party based proved, in this year’s primaries, not only willing to go along with a candidate who called many of its dogmas into question, but perhaps actively supportive of his heretical ideas. “So much of what you read, what’s in the political agenda, is just so wrong,” Cochrane sputtered, exasperated. “It’s really frustrating. Immigration is good, and trade is good!”
But Republicans don’t have anything they agree on anymore, as the conservative columnist Matt Continetti recently noted. There are Republicans who favor more foreign adventurism and those who favor less of it; those who would drastically shrink the government and those who would consider raising taxes; those who favor gay marriage and those who oppose it. (President Hoover’s great-granddaughter, Margaret Hoover, is a pro-gay-marriage activist.) Nonpartisan analyses of Trump’s tax proposals say it would explode the deficit, something of great concern to budget hawks like Cogan. “But, judging by the candidates’ proposals, I’m not sure there’s agreement that a problem exists,” he said mournfully. [...]
But in other quarters, there are heretical whispers. What if Trump has exposed something fundamental—the hollowness of the party’s old agenda, the troubling priorities of its most reliable voters? What if nobody wants the old-time religion of supply-side economics, or the neoconservatism that produced the Iraq war? Can there be any going back once that realization sets in?
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