Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

...“My general sense, looking at this election, is that what we’re witnessing here is the end of something much more than the beginning of something,” Yuval Levin, editor of the conservative policy journal National Affairs, told me recently.... John Gerring marks the beginning of the modern Republican Party as Herbert Hoover’s shifting campaign rhetoric in 1928 and 1932, when he talked more about the virtues of the American home and family than hard-tack economics. Hoover’s oratory about the progress of the individual being threatened by an overzealous government bureaucracy stuck around for the next eight decades....

The shock of 2016, though, is just how self-evident the inflection point at which the Republican Party finds itself is; Trump is a one-man crisis for the GOP.... Many... assumed that adherence to a certain conservative purity was the engine of the GOP, and given the party’s demographic homogeneity, this made sense. But... the primary motivator of GOP voters... [seems] closer to the neighborhood of cultural conservatism and racial and economic grievance rather than a passion for small government.... One of the most indicative variables in determining Republican identification this year was agreement with the statement that the “number of immigrants who come to the United States each year” should “decrease.” Trump’s campaign kicked off with a speech last June that labeled Mexican immigrants as the dregs of society--“They’re bringing crime, they’re rapists,” he said--and has hammered on the immigration issue since, adding Muslims to the dragnet of groups deemed undesirable in the United States....

The idea of an electorate motivated more by issues of cultural grievance than by the grand ideas of conservatism is a dispiriting notion to Republicans already frustrated by the party’s particular pattern of positioning itself as ever beholden to the past. To those Republicans, Reagan hagiography has stunted the GOP.... Political parties strive to... enshrine values and ideologies for the ages.... “The underlying unity of Whig-Republican ideology from Whiggism to Reaganisam,” Gerring writes, “can be found in three interrelated values--prosperity, social order and patriotism.”... Somewhere in recent years, the GOP’s engagement with modern America and how to best project those values into a nation of 320 million people became dysfunctional....

“You’re not going to do better than 59 percent,” Stuart Stevens, Mitt Romney’s chief strategist, told me not long ago, citing the percent of the white vote that his candidate got in 2012 while winning 24 states. Ronald Reagan, by comparison, got only 56 percent of the white vote in 1980 but won in a 44-state landslide. “Now, you can talk about these Reagan Republicans”--at his own mention of a conservative subset of voters some say didn’t turn out for Romney, Stevens stopped to guffaw a little--“I can tell you where to find Reagan Republicans: Go to a cemetery in Oakland County, Michigan. That’s where you find ’em.”...

The percentage of whites without a college degree has strong explanatory power in determining where Republicans have gained strength since 2000.... The tea party movement... has significantly altered the way the GOP conducts its business. But the party’s “revolution” was led not by young men and women storming the barricades but by the gray-haired masses sitting down in their Adirondack Chairs and fighting to keep things as they have been.... When looking at the change in the county-by-county vote from 2000 to 2012, one of the most predictive variables for a place becoming more Republican has been the number of people ethnically identifying as “American,” not whether or not a person believes in smaller government or lower taxes....

Howe’s theory for the racial animus of Trump supporters boils down to simple attrition: “Everybody who was reasonable seems to have gone home in 2012,” he said. Romney’s loss in 2012 discouraged many of the once-energized fiscal conservative activists. “This isn’t the most artful way to say it, but it’s like, where do you go when the only people who seem to agree with you on taxes hate black people?” Howe laughed ruefully. “I think what you do is you say, ‘Well, I may lose but I can’t align myself with them.’”

But instead, Howe said, he made moral compromises he regrets. “There are some things that I don’t have core values about, that I can be negotiable on, compromise on. But then there are other things that I can’t budge on,” he said. “I think I thought I had to budge on some things: ‘Yeah, this guy talking to me right now just said he agrees with my taxes and also we need to get that Kenyan out of office.’ Why did I stand there and say, ‘Yeah’? You know? I shouldn’t have done that. I should’ve said, ‘Wait, what? No, that’s stupid. You’re stupid. Don’t be stupid.’”...

The Freedom Caucus reaction to Trump has been closely watched.... “The Gary Johnson thing is fun,” Mulvaney said. But, “if you’re really in the business, there are two choices: Hillary or Trump.” It wasn’t particular policies of the Manhattan businessman’s that attracted him, Mulvaney said, but rather the relatively blank canvas that Trump might bring to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.... Jordan... summed up what might be seen as the broader impetus behind the caucus’s reluctant backing of Trump. “Seventy percent of the country thinks we’re in decline, 60 percent of the country thinks their children will be worse off, and 80 percent,” he said, “think that this town is rigged against them.”... That even the party’s most conservative members are falling in line behind the unorthodox candidate... should perhaps not come as a surprise....

When I asked the Freedom Caucus members how they would respond to Levin’s argument that the party had grown too nostalgic, too Reagan-centric, the room crackled. “We’re supposed to respond to this guy? How many followers does he have?” David Brat asked incredulously. There was silence for a moment; it was difficult to discern whether he meant Twitter followers or policy acolytes. “He’s actually a pretty smart guy,” Labrador finally said. “Well, you can be smart, but does he have any followers?” Brat asked. “A lot of people at Harvard are smart, but they don’t have any followers.”...

The prospect that the GOP leaders wouldn’t even be able to agree on why Trump — arguably the worst crisis the modern party has experienced — was even a crisis to begin with, seemed to say it all. “There is no happy ending to this story,” she said.

Just as Reagan turned what still had been Eisenhower's Republican Party into something else, so Trump has turned the Republican Party into something else as well...