"Where Do Republicans Go From Here?/The party looks brain-dead at every spot Trump touches. But off in the corners, there’s a lot of intellectual ferment."

That's just the new David Brooks column, but I'm linking to it because it has a very cool illustration by Tim Enthoven. And I like that it fits so squarely into my tag "what Trump did to the GOP" which you might enjoy clicking on for a trip down memory lane.

Here's some Brooks:

If you came of age with conservative values and around Republican politics in the 1980s and 1990s, you lived within a certain Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher paradigm. It was about limiting government, spreading democracy abroad, building dynamic free markets at home and cultivating people with vigorous virtues — people who are energetic, upright, entrepreneurial, independent-minded, loyal to friends and strong against foes....

But somehow that wasn't enough. Other Republicans offered other "paradigms." First on the list, Brooks himself!

On Sept. 15, 1997, William Kristol and I wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal on what we called National Greatness Conservatism. We argued that the G.O.P. had become too anti-government.

They argued for "ambitious national projects, infrastructure, federal programs to increase social mobility." Brooks thinks John McCain, in 2000, represented their idea. George W. Bush, who won that year, had his own paradigm:  Compassionate Conservatism. That was, per Brooks, "an attempt to meld Catholic social teaching to conservatism." There were more paradigms offered up:

Sam’s Club Republicans, led by Reihan Salam and my Times colleague Ross Douthat, pointed a way to link the G.O.P. to working-class concerns. Front Porch Republicans celebrated small towns and local communities. The Reformicons tried to use government to build strong families and neighborhoods. The Niskanen Center is an entire think tank for people who have leapt from libertarianism.

Needless to say, they didn't get that far in the real world. The only one that sounds familiar to me is "Compassionate Conservatism." But Bush didn't get to do his Compassionate Conservatism. He spent the first summer of his administration cooking up some supposedly thoughtful solution for what was seemingly the biggest problem of the day, stem cell research, and then — before the summer was over — 9/11 happened and he was forced to lead the War on Terror.

Brooks admits that "most actual Republican politicians" just stuck with Reaganism. The smart Republicans were building new "paradigms" but the actual Republican politicians "stuck, mostly through dumb inertia, to an anti-government zombie Reaganism long after Reagan was dead." Oh, why did these dummies stick with Reagan when the smart people were devising National Greatness and Reformiconism?

After all that hard work, Trump barged in and shifted the paradigm. As Brooks tells it, "Donald Trump and Bannon took a low-rent strand of conservatism — class-based ethnic nationalism — that had always been locked away in the basement of the American right" and appealed to Republicans who "felt they were being purged from their own country — by the educated elite, by multiculturalism, by militant secularism."

Brooks sees an opportunity: At least the stubborn paradigm of Reaganism is finally ousted. And Trumpism isn't really "fleshed out," so people like Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton and Ben Sasse will be trying to find a way to be populist but intelligent: "three of them have advanced degrees from Harvard or Yale."*

Behind these public figures there is a posse of policy wonks and commentators supporting a new Working-Class Republicanism.... The Republican Party looks completely brain-dead at every spot Trump directly reaches. Off in the corners, though, there’s a lot of intellectual ferment on the right....

Brooks has quite the fetish for braininess and elite education. I am wary of these people. The left is full of big brains too. Brooks complains about the staying power of Reaganism and predicts it will flourish if Joe Biden wins (because Republicans can just be against "whatever Biden is doing"). But oh, how he longs for a way for his well-educated friends to elbow out the "brain-dead" "zombies" in the party he thinks is his. Amusingly enough, he believes the answer is in a big warm embrace of the working class.
_________________

* The outlier is Rubio, who has an advanced degree, a J.D., but only from the University of Miami. The snooty Mr. Brooks, by the way, does not have an advanced degree, and he "only" went to the University of Chicago. Checking Brooks's biography at Wikipedia for that info, I ran across this morsel:

As an undergraduate, Brooks frequently contributed reviews and satirical pieces to campus publications. His senior year, he wrote a spoof of the lifestyle of wealthy conservative William F. Buckley Jr., who was scheduled to speak at the university: "In the afternoons he is in the habit of going into crowded rooms and making everybody else feel inferior. The evenings are reserved for extended bouts of name-dropping." To his piece, Brooks appended the note: "Some would say I'm envious of Mr. Buckley. But if truth be known, I just want a job and have a peculiar way of asking. So how about it, Billy? Can you spare a dime?" When Buckley arrived to give his talk, he asked whether Brooks was in the lecture audience and offered him a job.