Although Ronald Reagan gets most of the credit, it was Ike, not Reagan, who transformed the Republican Party from an anxious, inward-looking party to a confident, outward-looking party. He and his internationalist successors believed that the only way to prevent further world wars was to create a multilateral, democratic world order. They had the confidence to believe that America could lead such an order. Political theorist James Burnham argued in 1941 that the key to success in any political conflict is spirit and willpower. That’s boundless confidence. ”
Ike’s confidence set in motion six decades of Republican internationalism, gradually defeating communism and creating a party that would bring more global prosperity. President Reagan amplified his confidence and sense of possibility. “Emerson was right,” Reagan said at the 1992 Republican National Convention. “We are the nation of tomorrow.” Reagan was confident enough to believe that America could welcome immigrants, benefit from their abilities, and still remain distinctly American. More than any other nation, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our ability to welcome people from other lands. ”
In his excellent history of conservatism, The Right, Matthew Continetti describes the duel between conservative commentators Charles Krauthammer and Pat Buchanan, published in the National Interest in 1989. Explaining the essay. Krauthammer argued that the United States should steer the world away from an unstable multipolar order and toward a more stable “unipolar world centered on the Western Union.” Mr. Buchanan, one of the few spokesmen for the isolationist Old Republican Party, titled his essay “America First, Then Second, and Third.”
At the time, the party accepted Krauthammer’s vision and rejected Buchanan’s. Within a decade, Pat Buchanan had left the Republican Party and was completely marginalized. In 1999, the editors of the conservative weekly Standard, where I worked, celebrated Buchanan’s departure from the party. In the same issue, I wrote a humorous article that tried to imagine the most hilariously unlikely versions of the Republican Party’s future. The article had the headline “Donald Trump takes office.”
It turns out that some political trends actually never go away. They have been dormant for decades, just waiting for the emotional mood to change. It is customary to say that Trump destroyed the postwar Republican establishment. That’s not correct. By 2009, the Tea Party’s extreme distaste for American life was already flowing. Pew Research Center found in 2013 that America’s isolationism is on the rise. In 2004, only 8% of Republicans thought America’s power in world affairs was declining. By 2013, after Iraq and Afghanistan, 74% of Republicans thought America was in decline. By 2021, nearly one-third of Republicans thought violence might be necessary to save America.