How Trump Killed the Reagan Mystique
3rd March 2016
What Trump has discovered by accident is that many conservatives aren’t as attached to conservative policies as they seemed; that labels don’t mean much to voters; that you can bring new people into the Republican coalition instead of playing by the old rules; and that at least a significant plurality of Republican primary voters don’t care whether you bend your knee to the memory of Ronald Reagan or not.
We may be seeing proof that the era during which the Republican party was explicitly ‘conservative’ (1964-?) is now over, and it may be reverting to what it was at the beginning of the 20th century, when Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican President who proudly carried the Progressive banner into the White House.