The Republican Party in exile

With the rise of Trump, institutions like Hoover—the sole public monument to the 31st president, who famously was blamed for exacerbating the Depression— have come to seem like an alternate universe, created in the vain longing that reality were not so. In today’s political climate, it isn’t only these particular ideas that seem quaint—it’s the very idea of having ideas at all.

And yet the intellectuals persist; what else can they do? Having formulated the Blueprint, there was nothing to do but release it, orphaned, into the world. Shultz recalled fondly a meeting at the Kremlin with then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at which a previous Hoover report came up for discussion. “All of a sudden he attacks me for something in the book,” Shultz recalled. “And I said, ‘Oh, my God, somebody read it!’” A lively discussion of markets ensued.

Chief among the many disturbances to the Republican psyche prompted by Trump is the realization on the part of many of the party’s erstwhile mavens that their voters were not nearly as interested in their agenda as they previously believed. The party based proved, in this year’s primaries, not only willing to go along with a candidate who called many of its dogmas into question, but perhaps actively supportive of his heretical ideas. “So much of what you read, what’s in the political agenda, is just so wrong,” Cochrane sputtered, exasperated. “It’s really frustrating. Immigration is good, and trade is good!”