How the GOP Can Rise Again: The Republican Party needs to adopt Donald Trump's progressive conservative policies--and persuade him not to run again.

• Author: Buckley, F.H.
• Position: POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

THE CONUNDRUM facing the GOP today is how to nudge Donald Trump off the stage while keeping his voters. If the party snaps back to the libertarian pre-Trump party, that will not happen. What instead is wanted is a party that is progressive on economic issues and conservative on social ones. That is the sweet spot in American politics, and if progressive conservativism sounds like an oxymoron, that is because of an imperfect understanding of progressivism, conservatism, the Republican Party, and the U.S.

There is nothing progressive about the people today who have adopted that label. If the self-styled progressive is intolerant, what is progressive about that? He has given up on the liberal's free speech rights and searches out thought crimes with the goal of canceling people and getting them fired. There even is something a little passe about the label. Not so long ago, it meant Enlightenment principles and left-wing economic policies such as Medicare for all, but today's progressive has reverted to the premodern identity politics of tribe against tribe, race against race, that is destructive of democratic dialogue.

By contrast, progressivism meant something very different in the history of the Republican Party, for its leading statesmen were progressive conservatives: Abraham Lincoln for his understanding of the need for social and economic mobility, Theodore Roosevelt for his willingness to tackle corruption, and Dwight Eisenhower for making peace with the New Deal. They knew, with Edmund Burke, that "a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation."

Lincoln invented the American Dream, the idea that, whoever you are, wherever you come from, you should be able to flourish and know that your children will have it better than you did. He ended slavery, of course, but on July 4, 1861, he told Congress that the fight to preserve the Union was about a more encompassing principle. The central idea of the U.S. was the promise of income mobility and the possibility for everyone, black or white, to rise to a higher station in life.

From Lincoln on, progressive conservatives supported policies that would permit free men to rise and knew that the American Dream did not happen by itself, that it required progressive reforms, things like good schools, sensible immigration policies, and the rule of law--but are we still the country of the American Dream? When polled in 2014, a majority of Americans said no, and the evidence bears them out. In First World rankings of intergenerational mobility, we are...