OPINION:
Republicans shocked Democrats in recent off-year elections, taking control of the Virginia governor’s mansion and state legislature and almost winning in New Jersey. The conventional wisdom now suggests Republicans have a good shot at flipping both houses of Congress next year and maybe even a better shot at the White House in 2024.
But if Republicans are going to pull that off, they’re going to need to do more than simply run against whatever President Biden, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats are doing. That may work for the die-hard GOP base, but if they’re going to persuade diverse voters and independents whom they need in order to take back Congress and the White House, they’ll need a compelling platform.
Democrats claim that the Republican platform is all about one person: former President Donald Trump. But that’s a simplistic view. No party can run a campaign or governing strategy based on one man. To win and govern, Republicans will need original ideas and a positive vision of what they’d do if returned to power.
But what would that positive vision look like? It could make sense for Republicans to look to Mr. Trump to bring that vision into focus. Trump’s stunning win in 2016 brought new voters into the GOP coalition and changed the paradigm of conservative thought.
In addition to traditional Republican positions, including tax cuts, a conservative judiciary and protections for the unborn, Mr. Trump emphasized border security (“build the wall”), economic protections from predatory foreign countries like China and an assertive but strikingly modest foreign policy. While Mr. Trump approved a lethal attack on Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, he was also the first president in over three decades not to start a new war.
But the Trump agenda has limits to its appeal. Most notably, it failed to win over enough voters in 2020. Furthermore, America is becoming an increasingly urban, diverse and educated society with the highest-ever percentages of citizens living in cities and suburbs, identifying as non-white, and holding a college degree. An agenda targeted chiefly at a group that’s shrinking as a share of the population — the white working-class — can’t sustain the party on its own forever.
Trump might dominate the conversation now, but it wasn’t long ago that Republicans looked back to Ronald Reagan for inspiration. Could the Reagan agenda hold some lessons for future GOP success? Mr. Reagan won the Cold War, jumpstarted a decades-long economic surge and energized the conservative movement in America. Still, voters will need more than promises of tax cuts and a strong military to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
Republicans have a golden opportunity to chart an original path in the upcoming election cycles — and they may not need to be so “original” to do it. The key is rediscovering the core principles and ideas that underlaid the founding of this nation, a natural source of inspiration for America’s conservative party.
I know what you’re thinking — a conservative businessman says we should pay attention to the vision of the Founding Fathers — big surprise, right? But consider: The U.S. government today would be unrecognizable to the men who laid its foundations.
The size and scope of government has expanded so dramatically that it now touches parts of peoples’ lives in a way founders like Jefferson and Madison would have found unimaginable. And even though the government has taken on more responsibilities, it hasn’t gotten better at delivering on them. We continue to borrow money to fund well-intentioned but ineffective social welfare programs, with our poverty rate still above the all-time low achieved in 1973, more than 40 years.
Scaling back the federal government to a more manageable size and returning power to our state governments, individual citizens and civil society is a bold and long-overdue idea. Republicans should make a serious commitment, not just pay lip service to turning powers now centered in Washington back to the 50 state governments and American citizens.
In this original American model, each state government can experiment with different approaches to see what works, turning our state governments into what former Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis called the “laboratories of democracy.” U.S. citizens can take on more responsibility for their retirement income and needs by getting to own a portion of what they pay into Social Security.
Returning to our most foundational American values offers Republicans a path to a sustainable and winning political vision and platform, but only if they recommit to the values that motivated and guided our country’s founding in the first place.
• John Nantz is a management consultant based in Austin, Texas. He is a graduate of Stanford University. This essay is adapted from his book, “Rediscovering Republicanism: Renewing America with our Founding Vision and Values,” published by Rowman & Littlefield on Nov. 15, 2021.
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