Can Trumpist ideas, populist and nationalist, survive the polarizing and thus-far stumbling presidency of Donald Trump? What is Trumpism after Trump, in domestic and foreign policy, and is it possible to imagine a new infrastructure that would champion populist and nationalist ideas within the party and make them something more than just angry anti-elitist gestures? Ross Douthat, a Times columnist, recently hosted a discussion of these questions with Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Daniel McCarthy, the editor of Modern Age and an editor at large of The American Conservative.
Ross Douthat: Henry, Dan, thanks for joining me today. You are both prominent champions of the view that Donald Trump's election represents a chance for the Republican Party to reinvent itself, to shake free of ideological sclerosis, abandon discredited ideas and better serve the common good. For Henry this would mean transforming Trump's campaign-trail economic populism into a conservative agenda genuinely geared toward the middle and lower-middle class. For Dan it would mean following Trump's nationalist instincts away from both liberal interventionism and neoconservatism and toward a recovery of foreign-policy realism.
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