The First Republican Since FDR

In the first year of his second term, President Trump began to exorcise from the White House the ghost of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Though technocratic managerialism, the ideology of progress, federal “alphabet agencies,” a foreign policy of policing the globe, and free trade all had antecedents before FDR, and didn’t burst into full bloom until after he was dead, the 32nd president revolutionized government — in effect, he overwrote the Constitution with a new set of norms, goals, procedures, and institutions.

For decades, conservatives complained about what Roosevelt Democrats had done, even as they operated within the rules those Democrats had established. Conservatives dreamt of privatizing Social Security, but they couldn’t even defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that had been set up under Lyndon Johnson. However much the welfare state rankled the Right, most of the other pillars of FDR’s legacy were cherished as much by Republicans as by Democrats. In the 1950s, conservatives who had lived through the New Deal revolution thought Dwight Eisenhower too far to the Left. By the early 2000s, conservative publications meant it as a complement when they compared George W. Bush to Harry Truman.

Donald Trump is a throwback to a time when Republicans were Republicans, not Roosevelt or Truman Democrats. One need not be a “paleoconservative” in the mold of Pat Buchanan to see this. Before the end of Trump’s first term, keen-eyed observers such as Charles Kesler and Matthew Continetti had picked up on Trump’s resemblance to the Republicans and conservatives of the 1920s and earlier. Trump’s actions in his second term — his daring tariff policy; his crackdown on illegal immigration, and restrictions on the legal variety, too; and his rejection of the habits, mindset, and institutions of “postwar liberal international order” — confirm him as the first Republican in a century not to be bound by Roosevelt’s rules.

President Trump doesn’t get credit for this among FDR’s many old-guard conservative and libertarian critics because he isn’t defined by their counter-ideology, either. The libertarian turn of the American Right that began in the mid-20th century was a novelty; earlier Republicans and intellectual conservatives sometimes held laissez-faire views, but those views were more characteristic of Democrats and liberals. Many of the “Old Right” eminences who became intellectual heroes to postwar conservatives and libertarians — figures like John T. Flynn and Albert Jay Nock — had considered themselves progressives or radicals before the New Deal.