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Politicians are not known for decency or decorum, but typically they wait for a leader’s defeat before diving into the scrum for a successor. Not this time. Even before US President Donald Trump gets his chance at a second term, a battle has begun over where the Republican Party may turn after.
The reason for this pre-emptive conflict is the inevitable expiration of Trumpism itself. The president will sit atop the party so long as he remains in office, but he is building no intellectual foundation, no institutional infrastructure and no policy agenda to provide the basis for a political coalition once his singular personality eventually departs. As with an heirless monarch, all sides foresee the vacuum and vie to fill it.
In another era, a stable party apparatus that predated Mr Trump might be waiting in the wings. But of course, if that existed, the party would not have been levelled by the Trumpian earthquake. Instead, its strains and infirmities, so well exploited by Mr Trump, define the contours of arguments about how to rebuild. The fundamental question is this: what happens to a party beholden to free-market dogma when the market fails to deliver?
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Oren Cass: “Trump is an inherently time-limited phenomenon”
The pro-worker policy wonk who wants to save the Republican Party from itself.
What a Post-Trump Republican Party Might Look Like
Ezra Klein interviews American Compass’s Oren Cass about challenging the right-wing economic orthodoxy and its quasi-religious veneration of markets, and focusing instead on clear social goals that put families first, eschew economic growth as the be-all-end-all of policymaking, and recognize the inescapability of government intervention in the economy.
Oren Cass and J.D. Vance on the Future of the Republican Party
Oren Cass joins J.D. Vance and Gerald F. Seib for a conversation about the future of conservatism and the GOP at the WSJ Future of Everything conference.
