Is the "three legged stool" relevant in 2025?
Traditional conservatives may still be wary of Donald Trump, but his policies have been stronger than anyone would have expected in 2015.
When Ronald Reagan was President, many conservatives articulated a "three legged stool" of conservative thinking: National security, social conservatism, and economic liberty. Are those three "legs" (or three pillars) relevant today, with the rise of Donald Trump and the New Right? Certainly, there has been pressure to re-align the Republican Party's issue positions since 2015.
Trump and the New Right have attacked fiscal restraint. Unlike Reagan and George W. Bush, Trump has ruled out any reforms to the entitlement programs (Medicare and Social Security) increasingly driving our spending. In fairness to Trump, Republicans at the federal level often talk a big game about spending and then fail to do anything about it, but the fact remains that he has declared entitlement reforms off limits.
But while Trump has been weak on spending, he has been excellent in pursuing deregulation, especially as it relates to consumer choice: Eliminating government regulations that favor paper straws, as well as regulations on dishwashers and washing machines. We need a President pushing back against the bureaucracy's efforts to curtail economic liberty.
So is the economic pillar still relevant? Partially, but that is the one most in need of defending.
By far the most surprising of the three pillars in the Trump age is social conservatism. Trump's judicial appointments gave us the demise of Roe v. Wade and there are a lot of people in Trump's inner circle who want to crack down on pornography. The latter was not even whispered at high levels ten years ago. Trump has moved against transgender theology, including men in women's sports and (much worse) men in women's prisons. It is shocking that a lifelong New York City liberal has been as conservative on policy as Trump has been, and it really does not matter if Trump actually believes in these principles as long as the policy is good. The most important thing here is that Trump's loyal inner circle continue to push him to the Right.
So is the social conservative pillar still relevant? Yes, arguably more now than it has been in decades.
The weakest "leg" of old the Reaganite "stool" is national security conservatism, because Trump is reflexively non-interventionist. Trump has managed to re-orient the Republican Party to opposing military interventions that are not absolutely necessary. While some "neocons" mourn this change, I would argue it is consistent with a limited-government world view. Much of the Republican Party is where I was nearly 30 years ago, when I opposed military intervention in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia and more recently opposed President Obama's military interventions in Libya and Syria. As I wrote last November:
When he was President the first time, Trump famously called off a retaliatory strike on Iran because he decided 150 fatalities was disproportionate to Iran shooting down an unmanned spy drone.
So is that pillar still relevant today? I did say that above that it is the weakest of the three. But it could be stipulated that national security conservatism is actually now the strongest pillar, but it has taken a different form than it did under Reagan and Bush. The Trumpian "New Right" sees protecting American national security as a much stronger border and keeping us out of needless foreign interventions.
I did not vote for Trump in 2016 or 2024, and I do not regret, repent or apologize for either. There are many elements of "MAGA" conservatism pushing against the first two pillars, so traditional conservatives will need to be vigilant about protecting them, but a more "America First" foreign policy has been needed for a long time. I am cautiously optimistic that the three pillars of conservatism will continue to be Republican Party orthodoxy in the future.