The politics of maximum confrontation

How Trump ended the Republican civil war

The history of the Republican Party in the last two decades is not one of the rise and fall of ideologies but of a quenching of the Right’s thirst for all-out confrontation with the Left. This is a story that doesn’t require you to believe that the Republican voter has done an 180-degree turn on free trade or internationalism, as so many of the rise-of-Trump theories would have you believe. Rather, there’s a clear through-line from Reagan to Trump, despite the recent rehabilitation of the Gipper’s image with Democrats. Both were popular revolts against a worn-out party establishment, largely supported by their party’s ideologues. But while Reaganism truly was an ideological revolution, Trumpism should be understood as a rhetorical and cultural one of unrestricted partisan warfare against the Left.

The central psychodrama of the Republican Party over the last two decades has been the civil war between the base and what it saw as a weak-kneed establishment that eschewed maximalism at ev…