The Next American Right

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, author Thomas Kuhn argued that science progresses through long periods of stability within a shared paradigm, punctuated by revolutions when that paradigm breaks down. Kuhn devised his theory to explain scientific revolutions, but it explains Republican politics just as well.

Fifty years ago, Ronald Reagan’s paradigm rested on a three-legged stool: free-market economics, social conservatism, and muscular foreign policy. For decades, Republicans practiced Kuhn’s "normal science," operating within Reagan’s framework. But as anomalies accumulated, the Reagan paradigm fractured.

Traditionalism lost ground to progressivism. Fiscal conservatism yielded to bigger government, epitomized by the 2008 bank bailouts. Foreign intervention produced endless wars with diminishing returns. Through George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and Jeb Bush, the Republican establishment kept applying old rules to new realities.

Then came Trump. His rise in 2016 was Kuhn’s "extraordinary science"—a ferocious response to the crisis of the old order. For a decade, Trump fought an entrenched establishment, challenging orthodoxies on culture, trade, foreign intervention, and immigration. Today, the insurgency has won. What remains is not a bold, dramatic second act, but the far more familiar (and mundane) work of routine governance. We have entered the revolution’s mopping-up phase.