Tim Chapman and John Shelton argue that to understand what President Trump means for the future of the political right, we must look back to 2016:

Voters were not buying a new creed [in 2016]; they were hiring a change agent to deliver an existing one.

The decade preceding Trump’s ascent was marked by a widening gap between conservative promises and conservative governance. Medicare was expanded under President George W. Bush despite conservative objections. Federal spending rose under Republican trifectas rather than falling. Obamacare survived repeated Republican electoral victories and a Supreme Court challenge. By the time of the 2008-2009 bailouts, the base was furious. The party still championed limited government, free markets, social conservatism, and a strong national defense. Yet its actions did not match its words.

Chapman and Shelton — president and vice president of policy, respectively, at Advancing American Freedom — argue that all this gave rise to the Tea Party, which demanded that the GOP “do what it had long promised.” But, in their telling, “even after sweeping the House in 2010, the Tea Party produced little durable policy change.”

Trump’s rise was the logical next step. Republican voters did not abandon fusionism in 2016. On the contrary, they chose a champion who would finally implement it, even if it meant disregarding the GOP’s traditional deference to the media, legislative etiquette, and personnel rituals.

Chapman and Shelton argue that, in 2016:

Then-candidate Trump ultimately received less than 45 percent of the base’s support. Republican voters were anxious about the untested businessman and the potential downside risks of his norm-shattering antics. They therefore required reassurance: a contract of sorts, sometimes tacit but often explicit. Under its terms, the disruptor would disrupt while the contract’s guardrails would keep him faithful to the program the voters had already endorsed.

In their view, Trump honored the contract in his first term. But they argue that his second term has looked very different than his first, with Trump “no longer simply challenging the institutions that had frustrated conservative goals; he was beginning, in key respects, to move away from the traditional conservative agenda those voters had expected him to pursue.”

They argue that, in recent months, “the drift appears to be accelerating.”

Read their whole essay, in Civitas Outlook, which fleshes out all these points with thoughtful arguments and evidence. They substantiate their assertions above, and also argue that the president’s second term has not only seen a drift from traditional conservative principles, but that the policies the administration is pursuing “have been wildly unpredictable and often off base.” They highlight the tariff regime, the push for price controls on credit card interest rates and pharmaceuticals, and Trump’s idea for a 50-year mortgage loan as examples.

They try to answer the question, what comes next for the right?

The reason their essay stood out to me is their focus on the importance of any conservative policy agenda delivering actual, tangible results in the lives of the American people:

If the second-term administration’s policies fail to address the problems Trump correctly identified, the task of a constructive post-Trump conservatism is straightforward: to offer solutions that actually work and to explain them in the same clear, concrete terms the administration has used to propose its own.

Solutions that actually work.

I made a similar point in my latest Financial Times column, which reflected on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and The Wealth of Nations:

So as we celebrate the semiquincentennial, there is plenty to worry about. But we should also remember that America has an amazing capacity for renewal. The further it drifts from the bipartisan consensus in favour of free markets and free people that held sway for decades, the more fertile the ground for that renewal becomes. Why? Because voters care about prosperity, and trade wars or government ownership of semiconductor manufacturers and grocery stores will not deliver it.

Both Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson were cautious optimists. Jefferson believed in the possibility of progress, famously writing to John Adams that he liked “the dreams of the future better than the history of the past”. Smith entertained the possibility of “universal opulence”.

Since a no-growth society is not a political equilibrium, American voters will eventually recommit to the values of free people and free markets. Be (cautiously) optimistic that the United States will have much to celebrate at its tricentennial.