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Parties need agendas. But President Trump has so thoroughly trashed his party's brand of free market loyalty, fiscal responsibility, and traditional values that one has to wonder: What will the Grand Old Party stand for after Trump departs from the White House?My prediction: The GOP of the post-Trump future will intensify the culture wars against the liberal "enemy," and throw into the mix a regressive economic agenda that consists of nativist immigrant bashing and mercantilist America First-ism. Essentially, even without Trump, the GOP will fuel itself with Trumpism because it has nowhere else left to go.It is comforting to think that Republicans, after Trump, would return to austerity and traditionalism. After all, conservatives tend to forget about their commitment to fiscal responsibility when they control all the levers of government — and then rediscover it as soon as a Democrat becomes president . . . [W]hat's striking is that conservatives, of all people, have so little faith in the ability of America's impartial—if imperfect—institutions to ferret out some semblance of the truth and deliver some approximation of justice. Indeed, the healthy right-wing disgruntlement at an overweening bureaucracy and red tape has, under Trump, transmogrified into sinister conspiracy theories about a deep state controlled by liberals that is out to get American citizens. This is a new trope in the mainstream American political lexicon that didn't exist a year ago—and it isn't going away anytime soon.
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Topic: Trump Has Exposed the GOP's Shallowness on Fiscal Restraint and Free Markets (Read 169 times)
