The G.O.P. Returns to Its Bad Old Self

I’ve recently been reading about Warren Buffett’s father, Howard Buffett, a four-term Republican congressman from Nebraska. He seems to have been a very good father, but his political worldview was predicated on a deep pessimism. He was so convinced that federal spending was ruining the country that he bought a farm so that his family could feed itself while everyone else starved. He predicted that all government bonds would soon be worthless and bought his daughters gold jewelry so that they would have something of value after the dollar became worthless.

His pessimism manifested itself politically in several ways. First, an intense distrust of elites and a penchant for conspiratorial thinking. He believed that Franklin Roosevelt and George Marshall had secretly maneuvered the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor in order to drag the United States into war. Second, intense isolationism. A nation on the road to ruin could not afford to be active internationally. Third, political rigidity. He refused to compromise or negotiate with the Democrats, who he thought were destroying the country. He was more willing to lose in Congress in order to make a point than to cut a deal.

Buffett was not alone in thinking this way. The Republican Party in the 1920s, ’30s and early ’40s was steeped in pessimism, and that pessimism showed up as it often does: as nativism, isolationism and protectionism. In 1924, Republicans set strict immigration quotas with the Johnson-Reed Act. As World War II loomed, Senator Gerald Nye urged the passage of several neutrality acts to keep us from exporting arms to warring nations and opposed Lend-Lease to Britain. Senator Robert Taft supported the America First movement before the United States joined the war, and after the war he opposed the Marshall Plan, NATO, the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which was designed to lower trade barriers.

That version of the Republican Party ended in 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower defeated Taft for the Republican presidential nomination. Howard Buffett was so dismayed by the outcome that he refused to endorse Ike, his party leader. That decision effectively ended Buffett’s political career. He ended up joining the John Birch Society, the notorious nativist group.

Ronald Reagan gets most of the credit, but it was Ike, not Reagan, who transformed the G.O.P. from an anxious, inward-looking party into a confident, outward-facing one. He and his internationalist successors believed that the only way to prevent more world wars was to build a multilateral democratic world order. They had the confidence to believe America could lead such an order. The key to success in any political conflict, the political theorist James Burnham argued in 1941, is spirit and willpower: “All history makes clear that an indispensable quality of any man or class that wishes to lead, to hold power and privilege in society, is boundless self-confidence.”

Ike’s confidence launched 60 years of Republican internationalism, gradually creating a party that helped defeat Communism and ushered in more global prosperity. Reagan amplified that sense of confidence and possibility. “Emerson was right,” Reagan told the 1992 Republican convention. “We are the country of tomorrow.” Reagan was confident enough to believe that America could welcome immigrants, benefit from their abilities and still remain distinctly America: “Our nation is a nation of immigrants. More than any other country, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands.”