The Republican War on the Twentieth Century Reaches its Climax

Why the second Trump presidency represents the culmination of the conservative movement's fight against the last century

An 1896 political cartoon criticizing presidential candidate William McKinley’s protectionist platform by Joseph Keppler and Frederick Opper in Puck magazine.

It’s no secret that Donald Trump considers the 1890s—a decade of high tariffs, high unemployment, and high imperialism—to be America’s golden age. But Trump’s fetish for the 1890s isn’t exactly an anomaly in a contemporary conservative movement and Republican Party that seeks nothing less than to repeal the twentieth century.

Indeed, the second Trump presidency represents nothing less than the culmination of the conservative movement’s war on the twentieth century—a frontal attack on social insurance programs, essential regulations, progressive taxation, professional government, and internationalism put in place and sustained to deal with the realities of life in a world transformed by the industrial revolution.

Conservative Republicans have attempted to roll back certain aspects of twentieth century policy in the past. President George W. Bush, for instance, tried but failed to privatize Social Security after his re-election in 2004, while the conservative-dominated Supreme Court successfully overturned Roe v. Wade and denied American women of what was a fundamental right in 2022. But the wholesale effort to undo the twentieth century Trump seems likely to mount will be unprecedented in scope and scale.

Take foreign affairs, where Trump is a classic isolationist—and worse. It’s important to note here that this term doesn’t denote a hermit-like retreat into America’s own borders the way it’s often caricatured, even by its opponents. Like Charles Lindbergh during the debates over American intervention in World War II, Trump has no problem with autocratic powers establishing spheres of influence. Instead of opposing global bullies and gangsters, Trump wants the United States to focus on domination of the Western Hemisphere. He sees long-time American allies and partners overseas as threats and enemies while embracing long-time American rivals and adversaries as friends, or at least collaborators.

Trump’s loose talk of economic coercion and the use of military force against American allies also reveal the mindset of a late-nineteenth century imperialist. Canada, Denmark, and Panama have all been on the receiving end of Trump’s threats, while the probability Trump launches a “special military operation” in Mexico remains terrifyingly high. This sort of bellicose rhetoric has already damaged American interests by signaling a possible—or indeed likely—return to the world as it was before 1945 or even 1919, a world where armed aggression and territorial acquisition by force were considered legitimate methods and objectives of statecraft.

Then there are Trump’s tariffs, the one policy issue he has been entirely consistent about his entire life. Those proposed and likely to be imposed by Trump—a ten percent duty on all imports, with even higher rates on Canada, Mexico, and China—stand in contrast to successful American-led efforts to reduce tariffs worldwide over the course of the twentieth century.

Just as noteworthy, high-rate and broad-based tariffs allow conservatives to contemplate a return to the political economy of the 1890s—an era, not coincidentally, before the 16th Amendment and the income tax. No wonder, then, that techno-oligarch Elon Musk’s so-called “government efficiency” commission and Trump’s billionaire Silicon Valley backers are chomping at the bit to eviscerate social insurance programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Congressional Republicans are on it as well, proposing to use tariffs as well as raids on Medicaid and other programs to at least partially offset yet another round of tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

What’s more, Trump and his hangers-on clearly want to functionally eliminate necessary federal agencies like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. The FDIC, established in 1933 after the bank collapses of the Great Depression, insures the deposits of ordinary Americans so that when a bank fails they do not lose their savings, while NOAA houses critical agencies like the National Weather Service that many Americans rely upon every day for weather forecasts and emergency weather information. The call to gut the FDIC is particularly ironic given many of Trump’s Silicon Valley backers begged for a federal bailout when their preferred financial institution, Silicon Valley Bank, went bust in early 2023.

Finally, it'd be remiss not to mention the plentiful opportunities for rampant corruption now available. Trump himself has launched a meme cryptocurrency that’s already lined his own pockets at the expense of those gullible enough to buy it. Tech moguls and media barons have rushed to pay off Trump, hopeful of favorable treatment for their business interests if they grease his palms. Companies like rocketmaker Blue Origin—run by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—and media giant Paramount all could see federal contracts dry up and federal regulators deny mergers or selectively enforce regulations against them. Nor will the corruption be limited to Trump: the Musk crony nominated as Trump’s NASA administrator has previously lambasted the agency for refusing to rely almost entirely on Musk’s company, while reports on the plans for Musk’s government-gutting commission indicate it’ll offer its own enormous opportunities for graft—a shining example of oligarchy in action.

Throw in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s anti-vaccine crankery and 1920s-style immigration restrictions, and the picture is complete: a coherent reactionary-cum-fascist platform that aims to repeal the twentieth century.

---

Will it succeed?

I doubt it, at least not in toto. But the odds are nowhere near as long as I’d like or many others might imagine.

Many—or at least enough—Republicans could balk at what Trump, Musk, and their flunkies have in mind. At least one Republican representative from Texas has pushed back on Musk’s proclamations about space policy, for instance. It’s also instructive to look at George W. Bush’s push to privatize Social Security in 2005, which failed despite Bush’s larger margin of victory and much wider Republican margins in both houses of Congress—and mortally wounded his presidency in the process. Thermostatic public opinion may well reassert itself over time as well, though exactly how or when that might occur remains unclear at the moment.

Some parts of this agenda will undoubtedly make it through—tariffs, most likely given Trump’s obsession with them, plus any number of absurd and dangerous foreign policy initiatives. Whether or not it’s fully implemented, the damage this program will do to the United States, its interests, and ordinary Americans will be immense. But Trump, his party, and the conservative movement are ultimately swimming against the fierce tides of reality. As wiser mid-century conservatives like Dwight D. Eisenhower recognized, the deep and profound changes wrought by the industrial revolution won’t go away because a hardened coterie of reactionaries and their chosen political instrument want them to do so.

We’d all do well to keep in mind a crucial insight from small-c conservatism here: the institutions, policies, and agencies established over the course of the twentieth century—and especially in the New Deal era—exist for very good reasons, and it’s foolhardy as well as perilous to demolish them without understanding why they exist. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt argued almost a century ago, these programs were a necessary response to the myriad challenges, problems, and vicissitudes posed by industrial society—both at home and abroad. Social insurance, regulation of critical industries, and progressive taxation sought to update America’s liberal principles to the industrial era at home, while internationalism, open trade, and alliances in Europe and Asia did so abroad.

Unfortunately, we’ll all have to pay the price for whatever success this vainglorious and futile attempt to repeal the twentieth century achieves—and be ready to pick up the pieces when it inevitably does.