What’s Left of Reagan Republicanism After the Demise of Nikki Haley’s Campaign?

On Wednesday, Nikki Haley ended her 2024 Presidential campaign in the same poised, deliberate manner with which she began it, in February of last year. Speaking on Daniel Island, in Charleston, South Carolina, she expressed gratitude to her supporters and said she had no regrets. She noted that, as a “conservative Republican,” she had always supported the Party’s nominee. But, rather than going on to endorse Donald Trump, she said he would have to earn the votes of “those in our party and beyond it who did not support him,” adding, “and I hope he does that.”

Haley didn’t rule out endorsing Trump. If she wants to have a future in the G.O.P., it’s likely that she’ll reluctantly line up behind him at some point, much as Paul Ryan, another representative of the Reaganite wing of the Party, did in June, 2016. But, in failing to issue an endorsement immediately after Super Tuesday, Haley distinguished herself from other Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who both bent the knee before Trump on Wednesday. Apart from politicians heading for retirement, such as Mitt Romney, about the only prominent Republicans in Washington who haven’t endorsed the former President are the senators Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, and Susan Collins, of Maine, both of whom supported Haley.

For a long time in her campaign, Haley was so guarded in her stump speeches and interviews that it was difficult to figure out what she represented. On cultural issues, she aligned herself with the MAGA crowd, calling for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, demagoguing the participation of transgender athletes in high-school sports, and suggesting she would have supported a ban on abortion after six weeks as governor of South Carolina. Her criticisms of Trump were so muted as to be almost indecipherable. Eventually, though, she changed tack, arguing—if not entirely explicitly—that the country couldn’t afford four more years of Trump’s chaos and narcissism. In policy terms, she identified herself as a traditional conservative who supported fiscal retrenchment at home and U.S. engagement abroad. Speaking to a group of journalists in Washington last week, she said, “I get why Republicans are leaving the Republican Party, because we were just always about small government and freedom—economic freedom and personal freedom.” After Trump claimed to have told NATO allies that he wouldn’t honor the U.S. pledge to protect them from a Russian attack unless they raised their financial commitments to their own defense budgets, Haley described his statement as “bone-chilling.”

Of course, Haley’s description of Republican history was somewhat misleading and self-serving. Although the Party has long portrayed itself as a guardian of fiscal responsibility, in practice it has delivered humongous tax cuts for the corporations and the rich, along with large budget deficits—the most recent example being the Paul Ryan-G.O.P. tax bill of 2017. But, in any case, many old-school conservative politicians and intellectuals associated with the G.O.P. like to view themselves as upholders of classical liberalism, clutching a copy of Thomas Jefferson’s first Inaugural Address in one hand and Milton and Rose Friedmans’ “Free to Choose” in the other. In Trump’s Republican Party, is there any place for this tradition?

Even if it isn’t exactly thriving, it does still exist—at Never Trump publications like The Bulwark and The Dispatch, and at conservative think tanks like the Hoover Institution and the American Enterprise Institute (A.E.I.). A representative recent example is a book by James Pethokoukis, a senior fellow at the A.E.I.: “The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised.” To promote higher levels of innovation, productivity, growth, and social mobility, Pethokoukis argues for a combination of economic openness, free trade, more government support for basic scientific research, and high levels of immigration. But he also suggests that, given the current political constellation, it might take a new party of (classically) liberal conservatives and centrists to enact this sort of agenda—an “Up Wing Party.”

When I e-mailed with Pethokoukis on Thursday, he said he didn’t hold out much hope for such a party emerging: “I guess my goal is for the more up wing, economic openness elements of each party to gain strength over time.” He did note that some Reaganite policies remain popular in the G.O.P., including low taxes on business, energy abundance, and deregulation. He also pointed to the warm welcome that conservatives gave to a recent speech by Javier Milei, the newly elected President of Argentina, who is an unalloyed (and often unhinged) free-market conservative, at the annual CPAC conference. “I can’t help but think someone who can make that sort of argument, in a similarly persuasive and passionate way would do well in the Republican party,” Pethokoukis wrote. “But they have to be as totally unapologetic in their belief in the power of entrepreneurial market capitalism as someone like Trump is in his belief in protectionism and anti-immigration. Bold colors, not pastels.”

At some point, perhaps, a G.O.P. politician will emerge to test this theory. For now, though, Trump’s grip on the Party is viselike, and support for the Reagan-Ryan brand of Republicanism seems to be largely confined to the Party’s big donors, such as the Koch brothers, whose network supported Haley. Her decision to end her campaign in the wake of Trump’s string of victories on Super Tuesday wasn’t the only indicator of the difficulties faced by any Republican who challenges the MAGA movement. In an article at The Bulwark, Tim Miller, a G.O.P. strategist who was previously the political director of Republican Voters Against Trump and the communications director for Jeb Bush’s 2016 Presidential campaign, pointed to five contested G.O.P. congressional primaries in North Carolina, Texas, and Alabama, where wealthy donors took on ultra-MAGA candidates, spending more than six million dollars in the process, but succeeding in defeating only one of them. “Takeaway for donors thinking of trying this again: Spend as much as you want running normie candidates, but they probably won’t win unless you can find yourself some normie Republican voters,” Miller wrote on Thursday. “Good luck with that.” ♦