The return of the old American Right

It’s hard to think of two American presidents with less in common than Calvin Coolidge and Donald Trump. For one thing, Coolidge held a variety of public offices, from Massachusetts governor to vice president, before assuming office on Aug. 2, 1923. Mr. Trump had no government or military experience before his inauguration in 2017. Coolidge, moreover, was a budget hawk who never met a line item he didn’t want to cut. Mr. Trump presided over record peacetime deficits even before federal spending took a quantum leap during the coronavirus pandemic. Coolidge was also a man of few words. Trump is not. Yet these personal differences obscure important political similarities. Both Coolidge and Mr. Trump staked their presidencies on voter satisfaction with broadly shared prosperity. Both supported restricting immigration into the United States. Both wanted to protect American industry from foreign competition. Both sought to avoid overseas entanglements.

Mr. Trump’s views now dominate the Republican Party. For anyone who grew up with the GOP of Ronald Reagan, the two Bushes and John McCain, this can be strange and bewildering. But in many respects, it’s a return to the principles of the 1920s, of Coolidge and his predecessor Warren Harding. Their conservatism was delegitimized by the crises of the 20th century. The Great Depression robbed the right of its claim to promoting prosperity. FDR’s New Deal created a federal government that Republicans did not comprehend or control. 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—known to its critics on the right as “globalism”—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. By the beginning of the 1920s, the American electorate had soured on its experiences with the Progressive movement and the Great War. The influenza pandemic of 1918-20, the Red-hunting of Wilson administration officials A. Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover, and postwar recession all contributed to civil unrest. Change came in the form of a garrulous Republican politician from Ohio named Warren Harding.