Q: Since Trump is not a conservative, won’t that mean that the GOP ceases to be a conservative party?

A: Well, it’s complicated. Trump is certainly not a conservative and never has been. That has been confirmed in the primaries by his support for eminent domain and nationalized health care. On the other hand, many members of Republican administrations since 1981 have not been conservatives in the “movement” sense of the term either. In two-party systems, the main parties are large ideological coalitions. Trump or any other leader would have to remember the convictions of his conservative majority when making policy.

Most Republicans, of course, are conservative in other senses; for instance, they have a preference for a quiet life without too much upheaval, or more politically they often want to conserve existing institutions such as Social Security even when they opposed their original establishment. They have changed their minds because they now think of these new institutions as part of the existing political landscape (see Samuel Huntington’s 1956 article for a highly sophisticated version of this theory), and they accept that voters don’t want to lose benefits to which they have become accustomed. Sure, they could remain steadfast and lose elections, but somehow they don’t. Conservatives in practice accept that their realism about human nature shouldn’t (or can’t) stop at the door of the voting booth.

What there is of Trump’s conservatism seems to be of that kind. And that seems also to be true of “ordinary” conservatives outside Washington, as several writers such as Rod Dreher have pointed out. They tend not to have highly consistent ideologies but to tolerate contradictions within a broadly conservative outlook. One very likely effect of a GOP conservatism influenced by Trumpery, therefore, is that it will remain conservative but in a less consistently ideological way. It is likely to be more spasmodically interventionist in economic policy, more concerned with directly protecting the interests of Americans (and especially the voting groups who have surged up to back Trump), more anxious about how to solve the problems identified by Charles Murray in Fishtown without spending too much more on them, more protective of entitlements, and more loudly patriotic in general. As a fully paid-up Thatcherite, I will find a lot of this irksome and mistaken. It will remind me of the pre-Thatcher Tory party and its bumbling resistance to economic rationality. And I’m beginning to feel grouchily that I want to hear a little less about American exceptionalism until the U.S. manages not to lose a war.