Conservatism in the era of Trump

This reaction is telling. Some Republicans want to reserve any alarm-sounding for when Trump clearly oversteps a line — executive overreach will be closely monitored after the GOP allowed Bush to drastically expand the power of the presidency — but avoid disputes over every little perceived breach of conservative orthodoxy. To them, the Carrier deal seems like small potatoes; to others, however, it’s the possible foreshadowing of a party swapping out free-market principles for a nationalistic approach to economics.

David McIntosh, the Club for Growth president and former Indiana congressman who has been Pence’s friend for two decades, says the Carrier deal set “a terrible precedent” and that he was “surprised and disappointed to hear [Pence] say that the marketplace didn’t work in this case.” But McIntosh nevertheless continues to believe Pence is conservatives’ best hope of positively influencing Trump. “What I saw him do during the campaign was kind of reinterpret ‘Make America Great Again’ into a list of conservative initiatives,” McIntosh says. “The Carrier thing was disappointing because he didn’t do that, and it kind of seemed like they were giving up on the free market and talking about tariffs instead.”

McIntosh hopes Carrier is a “one-off thing,” but what if it’s not? Ten days after the election, Bannon put the party on notice in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter. “We’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” he boasted. “The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”

Bannon is correct that traditional conservatives wouldn’t support the agenda he describes. But in the era of Trump, the very definition of conservatism seems up for grabs. “Populism” has become the new buzzword on the right; Jordan, in our interview, made repeated references to “populist-conservative policy,” advocating the suddenly chic notion of a marriage between Trump’s everyman appeal and the tea party’s ideological purity.