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The current debates over tariffs are the latest example of the Trump era sending conservatives back to the drawing board to rethink the views of recent generations. Those of us old enough to have voted for both Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump can point to their common appeal on matters like lower taxes and American energy independence.
But the journey from the '80s to today has also featured some noteworthy changes in what Republicans stand for. The supply-side economics of the Reagan era discouraged government intervention into the balance of supply and demand. Trump carries forward that era's libertarian-leaning embrace of free markets, but holds open a door for tariffs to achieve additional goals, such as eliciting desired behavior from our global trading partners while prodding corporations to build and expand in America rather than abroad.
What has compelled many modern conservatives to discard their natural tariff hesitancy? Part of the answer is the sheer force of Trump's will, bolstered by the first presidential track record since Reagan that energetically seeks to achieve what conservative voters want. Call it gratitude if you like, or swoons of relief that Kamala Harris is not at the controls, but Trump is enjoying a wave of good will that has bought him a period of tariff tolerance that will give those policies time to yield their advertised results.
There is no telling how long that leash is. Voters and markets seem to be showing some nervousness that will either subside or swell into a genuine political problem for the Trump economic approach.
If tariffs earn broad Republican approval as a proven success, that change of heart will take its place alongside some other shifts that would make today's Republican Party unrecognizable to the conservative activists of 40 years ago.
Take free speech—the embrace of government policies that expand rather than restrict what we say, write, and artistically express, coupled with a First Amendment purism that invites us to engage or ignore discordant views rather than silence them.
That approach was a hallmark of the liberalism I observed around me as a young conservative, and constituted perhaps the only thing I could admire in it. Today's Left has long since abandoned such tolerance, seeking instead to stem debate and deplatform opposing voices while conservatives have become the relaxed and appreciative advocates of a vigorous exchange of ideas.
Trump did not wave some magic wand to make this happen, but his ascendancy reminded the Right of the precarious nature of unpopular speech. Reagan was met with pushback from his era's media culture, but Trump and his supporters have endured a decade of smears and muzzles unlike any in American history. If conservatives once entertained the restraint of the occasional dissonant cultural or political content, their kids have grown up to recognize that freedom means people are going to say or write things they may not like, and the best path forward is to encourage more speech, not less—a philosophy with particular value amid today's fire hose of social media content.
The most pronounced shift among Republicans along the road from Reagan to Trump involves nothing less than America's role around the world. Before Reagan, Democrats and Republicans cobbled together arguments for sending American troops and money to stem communism on the other side of the world in Vietnam. The sour taste of that defeat peeled off America's Democrats, who needed more than a generation to rediscover wars they could support, however briefly—the Desert Storm initiative of the first President Bush, and the immediate post-9/11 war response of the second.
Many conservatives now look askance at the years we spent pouring blood and money into the loosely defined "War on Terror." In 2011, as Donald Trump floated his first public thoughts about a possible future run for the presidency, he voiced the kind of economic and border policies that seemed a natural fit for the Republican Party. But he included a view that was risky for a Republican even in a war-weary time, scoffing at the cost of toppling Saddam Hussein and the years of war effort that followed.
As recently as the Obama era, Republicans would have bristled at such doubt. Now most of us share it. Not because we have grown cold to the noble intent of taking a war effort to terrorist organizations that were trying to kill us; the bar is simply set differently for where our soldiers and our money should be sent. And that is absolutely a result of the America-first sermons of Donald Trump.
The modern Republican Party stands for avoiding bloody and costly foreign entanglements while Democrats plead for endless funnels of cash for Ukraine. Today's GOP seeks to debate opponents while Democrats seek to suppress them. Now we may see free-market conservatives develop a grudging appreciation for tariffs. But before that conversion can be added to the list of Republican attitude adjustments, there is one necessity: the tariffs have to work.
Mark Davis is a syndicated talk show host for the Salem Media Group on 660AM The Answer in Dallas-Ft. Worth, and a columnist for the Dallas Morning News and Townhall.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
