No, Jonah Goldberg Won’t Take Back the Post-Trump GOP
The “Bourbon Republicans” have no viable path back to power.
Thom Tillis is literally counting down the days until his party suffers an apparent “whoop-ass” in the midterms. The retiring North Carolina senator believes defeat will convince the GOP to return to its pre-Trump self. He told Politico that “bull— becomes policy” under President Trump and Republicans need to face a reckoning.
Tillis claims the MAGA coalition and agenda won’t survive Trump. He predicts that the party will return to “traditional Republican platform priorities,” which he outlines as support for limited government and the free market. The North Carolinian insists Trumpism doesn’t make sense to “traditional conservative Republicans,” a group he implies will easily take back the party once the 47th president leaves the White House.
This is a widely-shared feeling among the conservative old guard. Jonah Goldberg, who once detected fascism in Hillary Clinton’s brand of liberalism, is another prominent conservative who sees his side taking power after Trump’s departure. He recently wrote a typically arrogant post about how the New Right has no hope of sustaining itself. “I find the idea that these guys—the self-styled intellectuals, the jabroni remora apparatchiks, and the get-rich-while-the-getting-is-good grifters, alike—will be well situated to win arguments on the right or anywhere else in the post-Trump era very implausible,” Goldberg wrote for the Dispatch.
The post overlooks how the conservative intellectuals who carried water for the George W. Bush administration in the most embarrassing fashion possible (including by portraying Donald Rumsfeld as a sex icon) were able to transition to the Obama era without any issue. Goldberg assumes his readers think the pre-Trump era was full of serious debates and ideas rather than bad propaganda for the Iraq War and pretending the Tea Party only cared about tax cuts.
It’s ridiculous to expect that things will just go back to the way they were before Trump. The Republican establishment had assumed that would happen after Trump left office in 2021. He instead returned to the White House with an even more Trumpified GOP in his corner. It’s hard to grasp how Tillis and Goldberg plan to erase over a decade of history.
They typify the Bourbon Republican mindset. When the Bourbons were finally restored to power in France after the revolution and Napoleon, it was famously quipped that they had “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” The exact same applies to America’s own Bourbon Republicans, who hope to be restored to their former status while learning no lessons and forgetting no slight.
For Tillis to make this claim is particularly rich. He is leaving office at the end of the year, having declined to run for re-election over worries he’d face a Trump-backed challenger in the primary. It was a legitimate concern; Republican candidates John Cornyn and Bill Cassidy were bested by Trump-backed challengers in their respective primaries this year. Vocal Trump critics are effectively gone from the party. If the party liked what the Thom Tillises of the world were selling, they would keep their seats. GOP voters would be thrilled to vote for these guys who supposedly support their real interests, regardless of what Trump says. But Republican voters prefer Trumpism. And those whose political careers couldn’t survive Trumpism are unlikely to inherit the post-Trump GOP.
The future of the party doesn’t look like Tillis’s vision at all. Scanning for future “stars” in the party, one notices they are strongly aligned with Trumpism rather than with what one might call Paul Ryanism (the technocratic, small-government mindset of the former Speaker of the House). Most 2028 hopefuls have adapted to the Trump moment and sound little like the “traditional conservatives” Tillis favors. They’re less obsessed with limited government and free market worship. They’re more skeptical of foreign intervention and far more eager to denounce mass migration. Vice President J.D. Vance isn’t alone in this. Senator Josh Hawley, Governor Ron DeSantis, and even Secretary of State Marco Rubio exhibit these characteristics to a degree. Regardless of who the 2028 nominee turns out to be, these are the figures who will lead the GOP after Trump leaves the White House.
The next generation of Republicans look to follow this path rather than the one preferred by Tillis. Thirty-two-year-old congressman Brandon Gill is often touted as the “future of the Republican Party,” including by Trump himself. Gill made his name not through fiscal conservatism but through fervent support of immigration restriction and other America First priorities. Gill looks to have a promising political career ahead because of these stands, not in spite of them.
Goldberg contends that the New Right has no real arguments, so its adherents will be dispensed with easily once Trump departs. This ignores several aspects of reality. For one, we’ve already experienced a time when Trump left power and the old guard were free to retake the GOP. After Trump left office in 2021, he wasn’t even allowed to tweet. He was impeached a second time and faced several criminal prosecutions. But, as I document in my recently-published book Whitepill, the right moved even further away from Goldberg’s brand of conservatism during this time. Ambitious politicians, such as DeSantis, adopted New Right positions, knowing full-well this would do more to advance their career than droning on about limited government and free markets. Meanwhile, old-guard stalwarts such as former Vice President Mike Pence found themselves despised by the right.
After years of being in the political wilderness, members of the GOP old guard should recognize there isn’t a strong desire for their return. Most conservative media outlets reflect Trumpism, as do important conservative institutions like the Heritage Foundation. We’re not living in the era when Bill O’Reilly held sway. Independent content creators, such as Tucker Carlson, now pull in large audiences and shape what much of the base thinks. Goldberg, on the other hand, primarily reaches liberal and centrists through his columns and CNN appearances. He has no ability to shape the base’s opinions, nor does anyone who shares his worldview.
The biggest obstacle to a Bourbon Republican restoration is every conservative under the age of 40. The Tillis demographic is rather old. In contrast, the New Right faction is defined by its youthful character and the large influence of its older members over young conservatives. It’s why Senator Ted Cruz now complains about how he can’t find pro-Israel applicants to work in his office. Most outfits centered around the youth, such as Turning Point USA and American Moment, lean to the New Right rather than to the old guard. If Goldberg’s wish came true, conservatism would have to purge anyone who was too young to vote for George W. Bush.
One can’t rewind history. Trump permanently changed politics. There isn’t a “normal” to return to once he leaves office. The Republican Party and the conservative movement are not going to suddenly revert to factory settings and pretend nothing has happened since Barack Obama. What Goldberg and company are selling isn’t what the base wants, nor does it sate the demands of young conservatives. It only appeals to those donors, pundits, and retiring politicians who wish Trump never came down the escalator.
Bourbon Republican sentiment will grow louder from the screens and pages of the mainstream media, especially if the GOP does poorly in next week’s midterm elections, but it will prove a dead end. There’s no army to restore these failures to power once more.
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