The American right is stalked by the suspicion that Trumpism is a phase. Is it?

W hen publishers sought to put a cover on Matthew Continetti’s 100-year history of the American right, they chose an image of Ronald Reagan. It’s an interesting choice because the book seems to show that, within a century, the American right shifted from protectionism and foreign policy restraint in the 1920s to free trade and internationalism in the 1980s and 1990s, only to go back again under Donald Trump.

But the whole of the American right is stalked by the suspicion that Trumpism is a phase — a fad — that depends entirely on Trump’s celebrity and that soon things will go back to normal. At conservative movement fundraisers, the Gipper’s influence is still lauded and celebrated in video montages. When writers try to understand the evolution of the Republican Party, they compare Trumpism to Reaganism. It’s an astonishing thing that a man whose last electoral win was 41 years ago still exercises such a strong hold on the party’s imagination. When Reagan was becoming a political contender for the Republican presidential nomination in the 1970s, there was no giant messaging apparatus arguing on behalf of Hooverism. Continetti and I are now middle-aged figures in a movement that still orients itself around a political legacy that we are too young to remember. And yet, in 2024, figures such as Nikki Haley and Mike Pence openly coveted the Reagan mantle.

Some would say there are superficial reasons for this. But I don’t think that Reagan’s political success alone explains it. I think there are three reasons why Reagan has cast such an unusually long shadow of influence, and all of them may be shifting soon.

1. The conservative movement itself. Institutions like National Review, and the burgeoning think tanks of the new right in the 1970s, largely existed to bring Reaganism into being within the Republican Party and played a real role in bringing him to power. For NR, Eisenhower and, later, Nixon were not enough. The first was perhaps too committed to pre-war conservatism’s anxiety about foreign conflict and not sufficiently mobilized against New Dealism. The latter, though a committed anti-communist, was a compromiser on the domestic market economy. Institutions translate today’s passions into tomorrow’s principles. They are a political necessity, but they can become political museums and mausoleums. An important judge for the health of conservative institutions is whether they foster and celebrate new talent and initiatives with the same ardor with which they memorialize the deceased.
2. The outsized influence of the Baby Boom generation. Because of their size and the way spending patterns and wealth have followed them throughout their lives, Boomers have had the driver’s seat in American culture since their childhood. In the 1980 election, 35 percent of the nation’s population was part of the Baby Boom generation. Older boomers (over 30 in that election) were overwhelmingly for Reagan over Carter. By 1984, Reagan dominated with the oldest Boomer cohort as well as the youngest. This may explain why Boomers, though very supportive of Trump, are not as supportive of him as are Republican men under 45 and especially those under 30. They prefer their halcyon days too.
3. The power, money, and incentives behind cosmopolitan conservatism. If the story Continetti tells is in large part about how Ronald Reagan’s Californian conservatism displaced Robert Taft’s Ohioan version, it is also partly about the triumph of the cities and suburbs over the traditional towns and rural areas. Nation-states link cities back to their native countrysides; without that influence, major cities would naturally tend to trade and network mostly with one another. The media king of Taft conservatism was the Chicago Tribune under the Medill McCormick family, which assailed FDR. The media kind of Reagan conservatism remains the media king today; it’s the Wall Street Journal, and the larger Fox entity beneath Rupert Murdoch.

The Reagan-aligned conservative movement and institutions like the WSJ and Fox, backstopped by the hugely influential Boomer generation, have been able to keep a Reagan-aligned right together. But at some point, the nation’s wealth and its institutions will pass to new generations for whom Ronald Reagan is as distant as was Warren Harding to the original Reaganites. What then?