There is a tendency among critics, and even some supporters, of Donald Trump to view the protectionist and isolationist ideology on which he campaigned as if it were a radical departure from established Republican Party norms. While his views are unlike those that have dominated the Republican Party since the Eisenhower administration, there is an older political tradition in the Grand Old Party, with roots pre-dating the party itself, that is remarkably aligned with the ideas President Trump and his policy advisors espouse. Protectionism and isolationism, as well as resistance to immigration, are all positions that thrived in the Republican Party prior to World War II, though they gradually receded from view in the post-war years and virtually disappeared after the Reagan revolution. Placing President Trump in this historical context helps explain his remarkable and unexpected ascendancy, and suggests that his agenda could have staying power regardless of his personal trajectory.

Before the rise of the modern conservative movement, the dominant Republican figure of the first half of the Twentieth Century was Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, son of President William Howard Taft. Though he served as Senate Majority Leader and was often called “Mr. Republican,” for most Americans, his name is now lost in the mists of time. Taft was a leading voice for the America First Committee in the 1930s. He fiercely opposed U.S. entry into World War II and attempted to block Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program to aid Great Britain. Taft advocated for an inward looking Fortress America and remained wary of foreign entanglements even after Pearl Harbor.

Following World War II, he opposed the establishment of NATO, resisted the Marshall Plan, and was at times skeptical of the Soviet threat. He was not alone in holding these isolationist views. Taft spoke for masses of Midwestern Republicans, who even then had not absorbed the internationalist ethos of the coastal elites. His views stood in sharp contrast to those of Eisenhower, who favored American leadership around the globe. Democrats even ran television ads in the 1952 general election trying to saddle Eisenhower with Taft’s isolationist statements. Taft was also a critic of free trade, which he saw as a threat to Middle America. He favored using tariffs to level the playing field with other countries, a position he inherited from his father.

Domestically, Taft strongly opposed the New Deal and remained committed to small government and a balanced budget. In fact, when supply siders came to power during the Reagan years, they would sometimes use Taft as a foil, criticizing his and the Republican Party’s past obsession with fiscal restraint at the expense of tax cuts. He was no shill for Wall Street or big business, however. Taft favored breaking up monopolies, reflecting his lifelong wariness of the Eastern financial establishment, a position that sometimes aligned him with old time Progressives like his friend, Senator Robert La Follette, Jr. of Wisconsin.

The proto-Trumpian Tea Party movement that emerged during the Obama years bore a much greater resemblance to the Republican Party of Robert Taft than to that of Ronald Reagan. And Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency shared many of the hallmarks of Taft’s inward looking, pre-globalist Republican Party. But even before that, during the Reagan-Bush years, a close observer could see that the older Republican worldview was merely in hibernation and not extinct. Isolationist and protectionist views percolated in obscurity, in the pages of fringe conservative publications like Human Events. Its devotees came to be known derisively among neo-conservatives as “paleo-conservatives.” Their views occasionally re-emerged on the periphery of the party, as when Pat Buchanan challenged George H. W. Bush in the 1992 Republican primaries. But for many decades after Eisenhower won the presidency in 1952, defeating Taft and others for the Republican nomination, the paleo-conservative forces receded far from public view.

Why have these forces re-emerged now with a vengeance and become the central drivers of the Trump phenomenon? Most pundits point to the economic dislocation in the American heartland unleashed by globalization. But an important piece of the puzzle is that these underlying forces have a far longer, and in some respects much deeper, place in our political tradition than the globalism that dominated American conservative thought after World War II. Taft’s worldview was not a novel departure from, but rather a continuation of, ideological strains in American politics that trace back to the origins of the Republican Party and of the nation itself.

Alexander Hamilton famously favored protectionist policies. In the early 19th Century, the Whig Party, from which today’s Republican Party ultimately emerged, advocated the “American System” of internal improvements (“infrastructure,” in today’s parlance) and Hamiltonian tariffs to protect American manufactures. Some Whigs, many of whom later became Know Nothings, also were strongly anti-immigrant. The Whigs’ bete noire, Andrew Jackson, opposed the American System.

Apart from his “man of the people” appeal, Jackson’s policies actually looked like the mirror image of those the Trump Administration promises to adopt, notwithstanding Stephen Bannon’s attempt to appropriate the Jacksonian legacy for President Trump from a Democratic Party that no longer claims it. Jackson favored lower tariffs on imported goods and less federal involvement in the economy, vetoing various internal improvement projects. He viewed high tariffs on imports as measures that Eastern businessmen used to shield their wealth from the rigors of competition while average Americans paid the price.

After the breakup of the Whig Party, the Whigs’ commitment to protectionist policies carried over into the early Republican Party. Lincoln generally favored a high tariff on imported goods. Republican sympathies for protectionist policies persisted even after the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariff adopted by the Hoover administration, at the dawn of the Great Depression. Libertarian free trade dogma did not begin to take hold in the Grand Old Party until the post-war Bretton Woods system was established, and even then not consistently until the Reagan-Bush period. And nativist resistance to immigration led Republican presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover to support quotas and other restrictions on immigration and asylum.

Against this historical backdrop, the worldview that carried Donald Trump to the Republican presidential nomination looks more like a reversion to the mean than something radically new. There is a sense in which the globalist focus of the Republican Party, and indeed the nation as a whole, during the latter half of the Twentieth Century was a departure from deep underlying trend lines in American political culture. Whether or not a return to the Republican Party’s traditional inward looking focus is good policy in a very dangerous world, it is not an especially surprising development.

That Donald Trump was the only major candidate offering this reversion to the politics of the Taft era and before goes a long way toward explaining the strength of his candidacy. And if his election does reflect the re-emergence of an older worldview that once prevailed within the Republican Party, for reasons that transcend Donald Trump, then it may persist for some time to come regardless of the outcome of his presidency, absent the kind of profound external shock — Pearl Harbor — that caused it to wither in the first place.

January 2017

Over the last decade, operatives in both political parties have quietly agitated to change state laws in order to permit early voting.  These efforts gained traction, and many states now allow citizens to cast their vote days or weeks early.  In a few states, voting in the general election will begin this year a full six weeks before election day.  A small coterie of critics have warned that early voting is a threat to our political system.  This year may be the year that the threat materializes, revealing the serious unintended consequences of early voting laws.

Originally, Democrats were the ones who pushed for early voting, thinking it would help them mobilize working class and lower income voters who might be less likely to turn out to vote on a single Tuesday.  After initial opposition, Republicans came around to the view that they too could exploit early voting by spreading their get-out-the-vote activities over time, compensating for the perceived advantage held by Democratic urban machines in turning out masses of voters on election day.  As a result, this year, millions of voters will cast their ballots early.  This may make it easier for Donald Trump to seize power.  And it will make it more difficult for a lesser known, independent or third party candidate to gain traction in time to challenge the deeply flawed candidates expected to be nominated by both major political parties.

Early voting works to Trump’s advantage by giving Hillary Clinton and others less time to confront him on substantive issues.  In fact, in some states early voting may begin this year before any of the presidential or vice presidential debates have taken place.  If Trump were to make a significant error or gaffe late in the general election period (that is possible, even for Trump), the impact on the election would be diluted by the fact that millions would already have voted.  Trump’s political consultants understand this.  Expect them to focus significant resources on encouraging early voting.  If new information were to come to light about either candidate late in the campaign (say an indictment in the Hillary Clinton email scandal or a significant disclosure regarding Trump’s tax returns), an October Surprise would be less consequential to the outcome of the election than ever before in modern history because of early voting.  This would also undermine the legitimacy of the electoral outcome in the minds of many voters because so many voters would have voted based on stale information.

Like many changes to election laws that occur with support from both major parties, early voting significantly increases the barriers to entry for candidates who do not win the major parties’ nominations.  It is not yet too late for a significant independent or third party candidate to threaten the inevitability of a Trump or Clinton presidency.  But early voting gives the national party nominees a major advantage, leaving the independent challenger with less time to educate voters before ballots are cast.  This, of course, is only one of many ways in which the current system favors the two major political parties.  But it is a particularly insidious hurdle for a non-major party candidate because it means the candidate will have lost countless voters before even getting a chance to make his or her case.

The tradition of going to the polls as a nation on a single election day served many purposes.  The essentially simultaneous act of decision left all Americans equally invested in, and responsible for, the outcome.  It meant that virtually all voters made their choice based on a common set of facts.  And it allowed maximum time for a major party candidate, or even a third party or independent candidate, to challenge the evasions and deceits of a demagogue.  Early voting weakens the integrity and resiliency of our political system.  The spread of early voting laws has occurred largely under the radar, with minimal scrutiny or debate.  But this year the consequences may be difficult to ignore.