"We’re ... seeing ... a shift in the intellectual energy of American politics. This is the lesson of the disarray in the Republican Party.... Trump’s decision to close the government in the vain pursuit of an essentially meaningless goal showed a party and ideological movement lost in the wilderness.
Trump’s rise itself was a symptom of this. Traditional conservative nostrums of tax cuts for the best-off and business-friendly deregulation were not answering the needs of less affluent Republicans…. Trump has asked his blue-collar loyalists to live on a diet of rhetoric and empty symbols — the border wall being Symbol No. 1.
The Reagan presidency, which Dionne describes as "an intellectual revolution that left liberals gasping for breath," was not the only major, postwar transformation in Republican ideology; in fact, it was less a transformation in party thinking than a return to the prewar, ideological status quo.
Since 1933, in response to New Dealism, Republican pols had belched a steady doctrinaire diet of fiscal restraint and smaller government. All it got them were three more FDR electoral victories, and then President Truman. Faced with beating the dead nags of smaller government and all that comes with it , which American voters, understandably, found tedious and uninspiring, the GOP opted for the fresh sound of vehement and often bellicose anticommunism. This was the ideological glue that wedded the party's disparate camps of social conservatism and economic libertarianism — and Americans in general, like frightened children, were just as glued to the party's refocused message of strident anticommunism, fear of Russkies, the Bomb, and the Yellow Peril (which also infiltrated Democrats' messaging).
Hence, aside from his own staunch anticommunism, Reagan essentially resurrected that which had been central to conservative thinking throughout the Roosevelt Era: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." And again, in general, American voters liked what they heard (even though they opposed many of Reagan's smaller-government policies in practice, or attempted practice).
Today, however, "the real wall is between conservatism and [sort of] fresh ideas," observes Dionne. Furthermore, "Trump is doing all he can to become the latest one-term president [here, Dionne compares him to Jimmy Carter] to empower a philosophical and policy rebirth among his opponents." By this, Dionne means "liberals and the left have absorbed key lessons from the Trump insurgency" — that "speaking primarily for affluent metropolitan areas will never command a durable majority," and "that there is room for bolder political thinking given the discontent in the country with unevenly shared economic growth." What Democrats, liberals and the left actually do with these lessons in mind — and do with success — is pretty much anyone's guess.
While it's true that the Dems face exhilarating challenges and opportunities, the key takeaway from Dionne's column is the grim stagnation in Republican thinking — that, as an "ideological movement," it is "lost in the wilderness." The GOP has learned nothing from its recent failures, and even less than nothing from the abominable "Trump insurgency." The party is an ad-hoc, shadow-boxing, disoriented muddle of whatever idiocy springs from Trump's inattentive, and likely diseased, mind; it's a shamble that only undertaxed plutocrats could love.
The speculative takeaway from Dionne's column is a question far more easily asked than answered: How well will Democrats do in the absence of a competent, coherent opposition? I confess I tremble a bit when, for instance, I read of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's 70 percent, marginal tax-rate proposal, but not because it's a crazy idea (it isn't). I tremble because it's the very kind of idealistic overreach, Republicans will say and are saying, that could refocus their party, allow it to demagogue with re-energized abandon, and terrify the living crap out of the average, ill-informed American voter.
It is House Democrats' and presidential candidates' overreach that Republicans are counting on for 2020, and I just about break out in hives when I contemplate what Republicans could do with it. As with its decades-long anticommunism, fear is the one constant the GOP sells with hysterical professionalism — and is Democrats' greatest danger.