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Donald Trump’s Republican Party may seem strange for some, but in many ways, his views are a throwback to the 1920s and the presidency of Calvin Coolidge. Both supported restricting immigration into the United States, protecting American industry from foreign competition, and avoiding overseas entanglements. Straight Arrow News contributor Matthew Continetti looks at the lessons that date back over 100 years.
To Coolidge, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution offered the last words in a centuries-long argument over popular sovereignty. Coolidge argued that success in self-government was related to religious faith. Political freedom depended on traditional morality and self-control. He called on Americans to preserve the inheritance of the Founders.
[President Warren] Harding and Coolidge’s conservatism was delegitimized by the crises that followed their presidencies. The Great Depression robbed the right of its claim to promoting prosperity. Then World War II discredited the right’s noninterventionist foreign policy. What emerged from the rubble was a postwar conservative movement that embraced alliances, military intervention, forward defense, free trade and open immigration to defeat communism and fuel economic growth. This postwar conservative internationalism may have been an aberration.
Today, the GOP is reverting to its pre-World War II identity as the party of low taxes, economic protection, restricted immigration, wariness of foreign intervention and religious piety. This retro-Republicanism could turn out to be a popular mix, but history shows that it is also a combustible one. In its protectionism, resistance to immigration, religiosity, and antipathy to foreign entanglements, Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement resembles the conservatism of the 1920s—with one significant difference.
In the 1920s, the right was in charge. A century later, in the early 2020s, the right has been driven from power at the federal level. It has been locked out of the commanding heights of American culture. Its rhetoric has often veered into conspiracy theory.
As the GOP has returned to its early 20th-century roots, it has struggled to persuade Americans that its agenda and spokesmen are within the mainstream. The right has benefited more from the false steps of its opponents than the popularity of its own ideas and leading figures…all of which might give Republicans pause as they embrace the changes brought about by Donald Trump and look forward to the midterm election this November.
