The definition of “conservatism” has been expanded more than it should by the Republican Party for quite some time now.

I’ve said this a few times, but Donald Trump wasn’t, and isn’t, really a conservative. He’s more of a radical centrist, much like Ross Perot was a radical centrist. It’s not an accident that Trump’s first experiment in politics, all the way back at the turn of the century, was a brief flirtation with a third-party candidacy under Perot’s Reform Party banner.

A radical centrist will often look a lot like a conservative because he’ll espouse things “mainstream” conservatives used to espouse before they decided, whether correctly or not, to abandon them.

For example, one of Trump’s most passionate political statements when he ran in 2016 was a rejection of the status quo with respect to trade with China. The “conservative” position, the one that had apparently taken hold as the consensus position, was that we’re for “free” trade with the Chinese. Trump came along and quite accurately noted that this was utterly ridiculous — that China had done nothing but cheat during the full term of the relationship, that America’s business and political interests had sold out our working class by offshoring manufacturing to the Chinese Communist Party, and that the bargain they were reaping in exchange for that cheap labor was to have intellectual property stolen at unacceptable rates of speed.

That wasn’t a “conservative” position. But voters in the Republican Party, and then in the general public, embraced it anyway when they voted for Trump. Why? Because, after a time of putting up with the fast-growing and one-sided trade relationship with China and seeing that it was making America more like China than the promised reverse, they recognized the poisonous nature of that status quo, not to mention that they reexamined what “free trade” actually means when it’s with a totalitarian dictatorship run by a mercantilist oligarchy.

Or, perhaps even more on point, there was Trump’s opposition to open borders.

And something else happened that I’ve not seen described all that often — namely, people began recognizing that “Republicans” have been defining “conservatism” a whole lot more than any conservatives could or would be comfortable with.

That was one of the things Trump exposed when a bunch of “conservative” luminaries — like Bill Kristol, who had for 15 years or more been making the “conservative” case for things that were most certainly not conservative and then defining those things as such to the grumbling of the base — descended from their thrones, funded by left-wing Big Tech oligarchs, to decry his breaking of their rice bowls.

As a sheer collection of résumés, the 2016 GOP field was a breathtaking collection of political achievers. That they would have been thrown off a cliff in such summary fashion by the You’re Fired! guy from The Apprentice is something nobody who wasn’t around to see it could understand. But Trump won that nomination and is still favored by the vast majority of the GOP electorate for the simple reason that Republican voters — who are, overwhelmingly, conservatives — can’t stand the Republican Party’s political class.

And there is a lot more individual talent in the GOP political class than there is on the Democrat side. Why that hasn’t translated into more effective leadership is an important question worth exploring in a future column. Republican voters will tell you that they love a Jim Jordan or a Rand Paul or a Steve Scalise or a Byron Donalds, but then in the same breath they’ll tell you how little use they have for the party.

It’s sort of the opposite relationship that Democrat voters have with their party and its politicians. Poll after poll will show that Democrats don’t think Joe Biden ought to be their nominee. They think he’s too old, too feeble. But ask them who they’d like to see replace Biden, and they will be utterly stumped on the question. Why? Because there are very few Democrat politicians worthy of support from even Democrat voters, and they know it.

And yet they will turn out in droves to throw the bums in. Ask them why, and they’ll issue spittle-flecked invectives against Donald Trump — or whoever else their guys are running against.

If the GOP could ever get that kind of loyalty and disregard for the faults and flaws of its own politicians (it’s true that Republican voters do show some of this, but, more often than not, it manifests more in passionate rejections of Democrat doctrine than in visceral hatred of Democrat politicians), it would almost certainly recapture its former majority status and probably hold it for a while.

I’ve written — in fact, it was one of the central themes in my book The Revivalist Manifesto, which was published last year and is still quite available on Amazon — that having a Republican Party worthy of that kind of adherence is a necessary condition for the cultural, political, economic, and spiritual revival that America so desperately needs. The Democrat Party as currently constituted is utterly incapable of producing that revival. The Democrats are the principal reason it’s needed.

But we’re nowhere near that point with the GOP, and everybody knows it. Why?

I don’t pretend to have all the answers on this one. In fact, this column aims to open a discussion on the subject rather than close it.

But I will say that there are a couple of basic ingredients that must make their way into the soup, and I’ll open with those.

For one thing, the GOP has got to learn to love its voters if it wants them to love it back. Say whatever you want about Trump, but the man doesn’t have contempt for his supporters. That accusation has been thrown at him by the usual Never-Trump suspects, but it simply doesn’t fly. Has he failed his supporters at times? Sure he has. All politicians do. But when Trump has failed the faithful, it’s almost always been through errors and mistakes — not betrayals.

For example, he should have fired Anthony Fauci in the spring of 2020. If he had it to do over again, it’s pretty clear that he would have. But that was a mistake, not an expression of core belief in lockdowns and mandates and the totalitarian Deep State that demanded them.

Trump loves the American people and particularly those of us who vote for him, and that love is obvious at a Trump rally. Contrast that with, say, George W. Bush, who called his brand of big-government corporatism “compassionate conservatism,” not even bothering to hide the obvious implication that conservatism isn’t compassionate in itself. That contempt can be found all over the place within the Republican establishment. It was certainly there in John McCain’s treatment of Sarah Palin, for example, or Mitt Romney’s self-characterization as “severely conservative.”

It’s time for the GOP to unload politicians who disrespect the party’s voters as not good enough. That’s corrosive to the relationship between base and leadership, not least because, if they disrespect you, they’ll trade you out. And with today’s Democrats being the people who hate America and want to radically change it in ways no sane person would attempt, some love for the folks is desperately needed.

Which leads me to my second point, after which I’ll invite additional thoughts in the comments. The GOP had better fall in love with, and get addicted to, winning.

Give the Democrats this much: Winning is all they care about. They’re so obsessed with winning that they’ve made everything else irrelevant. Their arguments are garbage, and so is their governance. They’ve shredded the rule of law, every place they rule is a ruin, and they’ve lost the ability to develop leaders with so much as a modicum of sanity, all because they’re maniacal about victory in whatever’s next — an election cycle, a polling cycle, a news cycle. The legacy corporate media they control is so obsessed with winning nonstop that they’ll drop a new Trump legal woe on the public literally every single day that there’s a new revelation about the bribes Joe Biden has been taking from China, Ukraine, and elsewhere.

It isn’t remotely necessary for Republicans to embrace that kind of monomania. But going to the mattresses about items of importance, and laughing in the faces of the Democrats’ propagandists from time to time when the inevitable gasping and name-calling results from it, is well warranted.

A federal government that refuses to shut the southern border down and substitutes DEI training for military readiness is a federal government that isn’t all that crucial to the lives of Americans. It certainly isn’t all that crucial to the lives of the people who vote Republican. So paring that government back using the leverage of the federal budget is wholly appropriate. In fact, it’s literally Congress’ job.

And that’s why the inevitable cave-in the current budget/shutdown standoff that will generate in the next few days will give us a barometer for how much the GOP is prepared to win. If Kevin McCarthy and the House Republicans are able to extract something of value before they give in to another trillion-dollar budget deficit, it’ll at least be a positive step (however small) — but the point of divided government is that the opposition stands in the way of money being spent on the stupidities of the party in power. And we aren’t getting that, because the GOP doesn’t know how to win.

By now, many of you are likely screaming — while we’re talking about not winning — that I should mention Mitch McConnell’s various sabotages of conservative Senate candidates, which have gone on since the late aughts. OK, so now I’ve mentioned it. I try not to dwell on it because I don’t think or type well with steam coming out of my ears, but yes — it’s a very good example of what I’m talking about.

There are lots more things this party needs if it’s going to rebuild trust with its own base, and I encourage you to deposit your two cents in the comments. But it seems that the most fundamental is that a party that loves its voters and earnestly desires to win for them will do better than a party that does neither, and a reformed, capable GOP geared to kindling an American revival should start by becoming that.