Pitchfork Populism Is Older Than Trump: BUT IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THE FUTURE OF THE GOP OR THE COUNTRY.

• Author: Slade, Stephanie

AS DONALD TRUMP walked into the Mar-a-Lago ballroom where he was about to announce his 2024 run for president, the words "Do you hear the people sing, singing a song of angry men?" boomed over the loudspeakers. Whether or not their politics match those of the protagonists of Les Miserables, the musical from which that song originates, angry men and women have indeed formed the backbone of the Trump political phenomenon over the last seven years.

Today, the question on many minds is whether those still loyal to the former president will be enough to return him to the White House for a second nonconsecutive term--or whether Republican primary voters may finally be ready to try their luck with someone else.

As onlookers try to deduce where the GOP and the country are heading, they may find value in reviewing the journey that led to this point. How did the Republican Party get from Ronald Reagan--a man who read F.A. Hayek and Frederic Bastiat and who spoke of America as a welcoming "city on a hill"--to the nativism, protectionism, and populism of Trump?

From the moment he launched his first campaign in 2015, pundits and politicos were staggered both by Trump's behavior and by voters' enthusiastic response to it. "Conservatives believed in the magic of a free market unconstrained by government interference, while Trump openly tried to pressure and coerce private companies to act as he thought they should," writes Wall Street Journal editor Gerald F. Seib in a recent book. "Conservatives believe in limited executive power; Trump envisioned himself as a president with wide latitude to use executive orders to do as he pleased. Conservatives seek to reduce government spending; Trump proudly proclaimed he had no desire to cut the fastest-growing government programs."

It wasn't just his rejection of economic liberalism and embrace of big government that shocked people. It was his crude insults, his attacks on fellow Republicans, his willingness to transgress norms and to encourage an ugly us-vs.-them mentality among his supporters.

But in 2020's We Should Have Seen It Coming: From Reagan to Trump--A Front-Row Seat to a Political Revolution (Random House), Seib suggests onlookers shouldn't have been shocked. Anger had long been a recurring theme in right-wing politics.

"The signs were there for years," he explains. "The populist presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot; the anti-establishment, anti-intellectual vice presidential campaign of Sarah Palin; the Tea Party revolt; and above all, the rancorous debates over immigration reform were just the most obvious of indicators. Most of us either didn't take them seriously enough or had other explanations."

In 2022's Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in thel 990s (Basic Books), the Vanderbilt historian Nicole Hemmer advances a similar hypothesis: that the real rupture on the right happened almost three decades before Trump burst onto the political scene. "Nearly as soon as Reagan left office," she writes, "the conservative movement he represented began to rapidly evolve, skittering away from the policies, rhetoric, and even ideology" associated with the Gipper. During the '90s, she says, "the sunny optimism of the Reagan era fell away, and grievance politics took over."

CLOSE THE BORDERS AND OWN THE LIBS

SEIB AND HEMMER agree: Before there was Donald Trump, there was Pat Buchanan.

A political commentator and Reagan administration alum, Buchanan eventually adopted a "paleoconservative" worldview: economically protectionist, militarily...