Ten years into Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican party, his opponents continue to misunderstand and underestimate him. The defeat of Thomas Massie in his contest for renomination to Congress on Tuesday is yet more proof of this. Trump is doing exactly what his critics a decade ago said needed to be done—he is restoring discipline to a party that had become institutionally weak. Massie was a symptom of that weakness. He arrived in Congress at a time when the GOP was divided and directionless, and at first Massie seemed to be part of the answer to the party’s woes. But the alternative he represented was stillborn, for reasons the Kentucky congressman’s supporters and critics alike should take the time to understand. Doing so will help them appreciate Trump.
During the George W. Bush years, the Republican Party seemed to have a coherent worldview, one derived from a broader consensus among educated Americans. Democrats as well as Republicans had learned to cherish capitalism, though leaders in both parties believed government had a benevolent role to play in making the best of markets. Bush Republicans favored policies to promote home ownership, for example, the cornerstone of the “opportunity society.”
The Bush-era vision was Reaganism without the rough edges: compassionate conservatism. The framing is important. This Republican Party wanted to be loved, even by its enemies.
Some might say that applied to foreign policy as well. After 9/11, President Bush made a point of calling Islam a “religion of peace.” The war he launched in Afghanistan was not retaliatory—it was swiftly revealed to be an open-ended commitment to turning that tribal society into a liberal democracy. The war Bush began in Iraq was the same. Secure in the knowledge that liberal democracy was both right and inevitable for the entire planet—hadn’t Francis Fukuyama said so?—there was no fear that prolonged occupations might prove futile.
Hadn’t we turned Japan and West Germany into good democracies after World War II? In fact, faced with a choice between rebuilding the American way or rebuilding the Soviet way, those peoples had acted according to their own priorities, not ours. Afghanistan in the 1980s also opted for American aid against Soviet tyranny—then promptly succumbed to the Taliban once the Soviets were beaten.
“It couldn’t win the wars it started.”
The Bush Republican ideology was discredited by the Bush Republican Party’s performance. It couldn’t win the wars it started, and the consequence of promoting easy credit for uncreditworthy homebuyers was a housing bubble and catastrophic collapse of major lending institutions. Meanwhile, it turned out that the capitalism enriching the world enriched Communist China along with everyone else, even as it diminished the exceptionalism of American wealth.
Nor did it win its cultural battles at home. Progressives pursued the imposition of same-sex marriage on the entire country through every means possible, and after they got it—which finally happened during the Obama years—they escalated the struggle to a war over the very meaning of “man” and “woman.”
With the failure of Bush Republicanism, what could come next? The pundit class’s answer was a nebulous thing called “reform conservatism.” The GOP’s activist base preferred the Tea Party: a fight against Washington’s crony capitalism and a return to Reaganism’s rough edges. Neither of these post-Bush ideologies had much to say about foreign policy.
But Thomas Massie was aligned with a movement that did have a clear vision for foreign as well as domestic policy. In 2008, the Texas Republican congressman Ron Paul had found a surprising degree of grassroots support when he mounted a presidential campaign explicitly criticizing the Bush-era policy agenda, including the wars no other GOP contender for the White House dared to criticize. The 2008 Republican party looked to figures like John McCain and Rudy Giuliani to supply a post-Bush foreign policy. Yet Paul defied them and propounded an alternative. His strictly non-interventionist views were of a piece with his opposition to virtually all domestic federal activity beyond what the strictest interpretation of the Constitution would allow.
“A strictly oppositionist ideology could find a niche in the GOP.”
Republicans didn’t adopt Paul’s view en masse, but with Democrats in full control of Congress since the 2006 midterms and Barack Obama in the White House, a strictly oppositionist ideology could find a niche in the GOP. The 2010 midterms brought a wave of new Tea Party Republicans into office, and along with them came a handful of more or less explicitly “Ron Paul” Republicans, including the congressman’s son, Rand, who was elected to the US Senate from Kentucky. Two years later, with Obama on his way to re-election and the Republican party at such a loss for leadership that Mitt Romney would be the most its presidential primaries could produce, Thomas Massie won a special election and subsequently a full term in the US House, overlapping only briefly with Ron Paul, who retired in January 2013.
McCain had not supplied any new vision for the Republican party, and Mitt Romney likewise failed to do so. The Tea Party was an exercise in negative partisanship: anti-Obama and anti-Democrat, but a leaderless movement that couldn’t steer a party, only complicate the efforts of anyone else attempting to do so. The House GOP was itself effectively leaderless for a decade, cycling through a series of speakers—John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy—who were despised by, and had good reason to fear, the party’s backbenchers. The House GOP caucus was a riot of factions, none of which possessed enough authority to wield power. The Senate was little better. If Mitch McConnell’s long tenure as Republican leader in the upper chamber was secure, individual senators increasingly became brands unto themselves. The party’s divisions were on full display in the 2016 presidential primaries, clotted with so many candidates the debates had to be broken up into separate tiers based on polling.
Rand Paul was one of that year’s contenders. He diluted his father’s uncompromising libertarianism, and performed worse than his father had in 2008 or 2012. Ron Paul-lite wasn’t what the GOP was looking for, then or now. Ron Paul’s appeal from the beginning had been his unwillingness to compromise—and therefore his freedom to criticize anyone and everyone else in the party. This was a necessary function at a time when the party had to be forced to confront its failures as the party of the Bushes, and when it kept trying to avoid that confrontation by nominating a McCain and a Romney. But most Republican voters, to say nothing of lawmakers, were never going to adopt Paul’s strictly libertarian constitutionalism as their own program.
This left Congress’s handful of hardline liberty Republicans in limbo. If they moved toward the mainstream, as Rand Paul did, they became difficult to distinguish from every other wannabe Ronald Reagan, with foreign policy being the clearest difference, but one few voters cared about in isolation. This worked to Massie’s benefit in the House. He may have been much less interventionist than the typical Republican, including the typical Kentucky GOP voter. But that wasn’t something that mattered much in an ordinary primary or red-state general election.
Conventional wisdom among Trump’s detractors says he only won the 2016 nomination because the Republican field was so divided. But the field was, of course, no more divided for Trump than it was for every other candidate—why shouldn’t someone else have succeeded because of the large field? The most that can be said for this canard is that too many candidates were all trying to be the same thing, while Trump was defiantly alone in being different. Yet even that would not have helped if he hadn’t been different in ways that voters liked. They liked his hardline views on immigration. They liked his willingness to denounce the Bush foreign policy in terms hardly less vivid than Ron Paul had once used, though Trump’s objections were not about whether the wars were unconstitutional but about why they weren’t won.
Trump’s politics is cohesive, though not in the way well-educated ideologues expect. Trump sees the world in terms of winners and losers, and those categories apply to the global economy as well as to real estate deals, television ratings, and political races—and wars. Americans had been turned into losers by their leaders, and Republicans in particular had been played for suckers. Trump promised to change that. He would restrict immigration, conduct foreign policy along different lines, and give up worrying about how to be a kinder, gentler Reaganite. He was prepared to be neither—he would abandon small-government rhetoric as well as claptrap about how diversity is strength. He didn’t care if he gave offense. Neither did the voters.
“This vision was adapted to the dark side of globalism.”
He supplied a new vision for the party, one just as well adapted to the era of globalism as the Bush Republicanism that came before it. Only this vision was adapted to the dark side of globalism, not the hopes and pipe dreams of the late 1990s. The Tea Party and the Ron Paul-inspired liberty Republican movement of the 2010s had been galvanized by the financial crisis, but MAGA was animated by the crisis of globalism itself—the question of what a nation could even mean in a world of mass migration and fully mobile capital. There might well be another financial crisis, but the crisis of globalization is ongoing. Though it may be more salient at some times than others, it never goes away.
The Republican party was a mess when Trump found it, and it resisted his efforts to set it in order. He was unprepared for how disloyal members of his own administration would prove to be. The weakness that had characterized the Republican party since 2008—if not earlier—had given rise to factions, interests, and personalities that all pursued their own agendas. The ghost of Bush Republicanism had not yet been completely exorcised. Failed attempts at replacing Bushism still haunted the party, too, unable to win over the party as a whole, but defiant of any attempt by stronger leadership to bring order to the party’s wilderness. Trump had a very tough time in his first term as a result, and his party suffered staggering losses in the 2018 midterms. (Though Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama had all suffered disastrous midterms of their own.)
Not only was it incumbent on Trump to restore party discipline, it was the duty of factions within the party to help him do so—a duty they owed to themselves as much as to the party’s voters, and the country. The hard work confronting libertarian-leaning Republicans was to find the place where they and their principles could fit in the remade party. That was work that would require compromise in the near term to realize long-term objectives. And nowhere was that more true than in foreign policy, where the path to a less interventionist if not non-interventionist disposition would not be a straight line.
Liberty-minded Republicans would also have to make the voters’ priorities their own. Massie wasn’t an open-borders libertarian, and he wasn’t beaten by Ed Gallrein on Tuesday because he refused to support E-verify. But Massie hadn’t made himself seem indispensable to the immigration restrictionists in the party’s base. He had made himself the poster boy for balancing the budget. That wasn’t what voters cared about most. Nor were the Epstein files, whose release was another cause Massie made himself synonymous with.
As for foreign policy, by antagonizing pro-Israel voters as well as Trump, Massie forfeited the opportunity to help shape his party’s stances on war and peace. There’s more to foreign policy than Israel and Iran, after all, even at a time when the country is embroiled in a Middle East conflict. Trump is changing America’s posture to the world in historic ways. Liberty Republicans could have been part of that process, helping to make peace through strength a reality. Some libertarian-leaning Republicans in the administration are doing that. The representatives who should have been MAGA’s peace wing in Congress chose to treat this moment like 2003 instead.
To change government, including foreign policy, requires more than a single US senator or a couple of House members. It requires a party, led by a president. Anything else is just a protest movement. Libertarian-leaning Republicans like Massie had a golden opportunity to make their case to the party base in the 2010s, and having failed to expand beyond the numbers Ron Paul reached in 2008 and 2012, they had a second chance to be part of a coalition that actually had a mandate to remake the party, thanks to Trump. Instead of being targets for MAGA, they could have played a part in picking MAGA’s targets. Rand Paul and Thomas Massie chose not to. Fair enough: Massie made his choice and has received his judgement from the voters. Rand Paul goes before them in 2028. But how is losing a primary meant to advance the cause of liberty, or restraint in foreign policy? If they couldn’t capitalize on the “libertarian moment,” what do they expect to achieve by themselves in an era of MAGA dominance?
“Anti-Zionism already has a home in Democratic primaries.”
The Republican Party of the future may become less supportive of Israel, if present trends among younger voters continue. But anti-Zionism already has a home in Democratic primaries, where it fits perfectly with the anti-colonialist, anti-Western principles of the left. Although it troubles many friends as well as foes of Israel to say so, Israel itself is part of a much larger question about peoples, homelands, and historical justice in the globalized conditions of the twenty-first century. Americans have to take a side on that question, which has the greatest bearing on domestic as well as foreign policy. MAGA knows where it stands, as does the left. Full-on open-borders libertarians and neoliberal globalists know where they stand, too. The likes of Massie are a lot less certain. The young right, its views on Israel notwithstanding, doesn’t seem to be in much doubt, unless its anti-Zionism overrides its anti-globalism.
Many friends of mine are die-hard Massie supporters. I understand where they’re coming from, but not where they think they’re going. Some appear content to live forever in 2003 or 2013, refighting the battles they lost ten or twenty years ago. They would do more for their cause if they tried to make the best of MAGA. Trump has turned the GOP into a real party again for the first time in decades. That party has a chance to change things—for better or worse. Which it will be depends on who is in the mix. That is true for the country, too, and is the point of self-government. It’s hard work.