Outside the Beltway

The Nationalist Movement and the Transformation of the Republican Party

Thinking about the evolution (or is it devolution) of the GOP since the 1990s.

Steven L. Taylor · Sunday, August 10, 2025 · 11 comments

Let me start with some explicit notions that I often assume are understood because they suffuse my thinking on these topics so much that maybe I forget to put them front and center. When I talk about whether political parties are strong or weak, one of the key things (although certainly not the only thing) that I am referring to is who controls the party label.

By “party label,” I simply mean the name of the party (e.g., The Republican Party).

By “control,” I mean who gets to call themselves by that label in an official context.

By “official context,” I mean two things. First and foremost, who gets to use the label on the ballot (i.e., to be the official nominee of the party).? Second, once in office, who gets to officially claim to be a representative of the party? There are also “how” questions embedded here. How does a candidate get to use that label? And, how do I get to claim and keep that official label (and can it be taken away? And if so, how can it be taken away)?

This is something I have been interested in for pretty much my entire professional life, but not initially as it pertained to the United States. Back in my twenties, I thought the US too boring to study,* and hence turned my eyes to the wide world. My gaze landed upon Colombia, and a huge segment of my scholarly work was about the ways in which loose control of party labels in response to existing electoral rules shaped the Colombian party system.**

In the US, party labels are not controlled by the party institutions. This is a key way in which they are weak as organizations.

Nominations are granted via primary elections, and neither the RNC nor the DNC controls who can participate in primaries. This means, among other things, that there is no way to control what the candidates of the parties believe. There is no way to make them adhere to a party platform nor any way to guarantee they behave as you wish (i.e., to instill party discipline).

The gateway to being a Democrat or a Republican is wide open. There is nothing to keep, say, someone who describes themselves as a Democratic Socialist out of the Democratic Party (see, e.g., AOC or Zohan Mamdani), nor to keep a QAnon type (e.g., Marjoria Taylor Greene) or libertarian (pick a Paul) out of the GOP.

How, for example, did right-wing Evangelicals gain substantial sway over the Republican Party in the 1970s and 1980s? Via primaries. Likewise, Tea Party/Freedom Caucus types in the 2010s onward.

All of this means that the parties are shaped by their nominees over time, not the other way around. A “strong” party would use its control over label to pick members who adhere to the platform.

In simple terms, a strong party shapes and replicates itself by whom it picks to run using its label. And the weak party is shaped by who is able to take control of its label. In the US case, it was via party primaries. In the Colombian case, for many decades, it was via essentially self-nomination.***

I cannot stress enough that the open door to using the Republican or Democratic labels is that the US means that it is far more attractive and less costly to operate within the primaries of the parties than it is to form a new party. See my Protect Democracy white paper, Trapped in a Two-Party System for more on that subject.

A key aspect of all of this is that party discipline within a legislative body is linked to how much centralized control party leaders have over the rank-and-file members of the legislature. In most democracies, party leaders have a great deal of influence (the mechanisms vary) over how a sitting member of the legislature will be able to run for reelection relative to the party label, including often the power to strip a given politician of that label. Doing so typically means the end of a political career.

We have seen that in the US, threats to fund challengers in primaries can result in some level of compliance, but I would note that that is a gamble that does not always work, and moreover it is still less efficacious and direct than a system wherein a party can simply pull the rug out from under a politician.

All of this is a lot of preface, but it serves the purpose of setting out some specifics and allowing me to talk about the evolution of the Republican Party over the last couple of decades.

Let me start with a historical observation that people often make: that back in the late 1850s and into the 1860s, the Whig Party was replaced by the Republican Party. Therefore, some will say that while we may always have two parties, maybe one of the two current parties will die and be replaced by a new one. However, as per the basics outlined above, I do not think this is likely at all. Instead, the more likely outcome is that the two labels will persist as vessels while the contents change over time.

Indeed, I think this is exactly what has happened since the mid-19th Century. I could detail that as well, but I will just leave it as a statement of fact for this post.

We are currently seeing the GOP vessel being filled mostly by a specific kind of nationalism, which has existed within US politics for some time.

This all brings me to the current evolution of the Republican Party and brings me back to an essay by Thomas Zimmer (Why the Extremists Took Over on the Right) that I noted yesterday.

While I know many readers will claim that the current GOP is no different than the GOP of, say, Reagan, I think this is at least in part incorrect. I will agree, for example, that the whole “law and order” rhetoric of the Republican Party, going back to at least Nixon, is racist-coded as was Reagan’s “welfare queen.” There are certain strands that have always existed, but Reagan was also, to pick a counter-example, not a xenophobe (he was pro-immigration in anything because, in the Cold War having people wanting to be Americans was a rhetorical and ideological plus) and was far, far more likely to talk about the US in creedal terms, not ethno-cultural ones, which is far more prevelant today.

There are other strains of relevance that persist, like trickle-down tax policies.

This matters, not to try and make any comprehensive points about the Reagan administration, or anybody else for that matter. To be clear, because I don’t want the main point to be missed, yes, there is plenty to criticize about the Reagan administration, but his America as a “City on the Hill” was a far more benevolent one that the way the current GOP seeks to define real “Americans” in terms of ethnicity, religion, and the like.

I am not romanticizing the past. I am pointing out that there is a substantive difference in some areas of policy and rhetoric between the past and the present.****

What we a currently living with is the result of a slow (and then rapid) takeover of the GOP by one of its sub-groups, the nationalists.

Zimmer recalls the early 1990s.

The Republican Party’s increasingly open embrace of aggressive nativism had been coming for a long time, of course. It’s what the self-described paleo-conservatives had been demanding for decades. In 1992, they came close to toppling the party establishment when their standard-bearer Pat Buchanan challenged President George H. W. Bush in the Republican primaries. A wave of white anger, resentment, and despair allowed these ethno-nationalist forces to advance significantly after the end of the Cold War – even if it wasn’t quite enough yet to take over the party. While the rightwing base was almost certainly with Buchanan on issues of national identity and immigration in the 90s, the conservative power centers and the Republican establishment were strong enough still to hold on. They never really denounced the openly anti-democratic forces in their midst, however, and instead decided they would try to harness the extremist, far-right popular energies on the base. As a result, the whole party kept being pulled to the right, with almost every election cycle bringing in a new cohort of people more radical than the last.

It should be noted that part of the reason the Republicans at the time tried to harness these forces was because our system incentivizes the need to keep a large bloc of voters in your coalition.

By the way, before we get too focused on the failure of the early ’90s GOP for not calling Buchanan out, he was a regular on PBS’s The McLaughlin Group, CNN’s Crossfire, and even briefly had a show on MSNBC in the early 2000s. These examples are only some noteworthy TV gigs. Over the years, he also had a syndicated column and a radio show to boot. This is simply to note that there is both a lot of general complicity in promoting people like Buchanan, as well as to illustrate that, obviously, there has been a long-term appetite for what he used to sell.

I will note that I have been concerned about Buchanan’s white nationalism for about two decades now (see here, for example).

Zimmer’s observation about Buchanan, however, and the GOP’s behavior regarding him, is illustrative of party dynamics in the US. First, it is important to remember that Buchanan challenged the sitting president, George H. W. Bush, in the party’s primary in 1992. In so doing, Buchanan has a clear shot across the bow against Bush by winning 37.5% of the vote in New Hampshire. He would go on to win roughly 23% of the primary vote and just over 19% of the delegates.

On the one hand, those are loser numbers; he was never a serious threat to Bush’s nomination. But it did signal some serious discontent over Bush within the GOP coalition and signalled a rough November to come. At a minimum, it is what earned Buchanan his prime time slot at the Republican National Convention, where he gave his culture war speech.

While the speech is a lot of praise of Reagan and of Bush, there is also stuff like the following.

The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America – abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units – that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.

[…]

My friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe, and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side. And so, to the Buchanan Brigades out there, we have to come home and stand beside George Bush.

This all sounds rather familiar in the present moment.

To my point about weak parties above, I would note that a party that had more control over its label would not have had to allow Buchanan to run the primary at all, and therefore might not have had to have given as much ground to Buchananism at the 1992 convention (although, maybe those forces were sufficient to force such concessions in any event). Or, maybe, the Buchananite nationalists would have broken off to form their own party a la the Farages and the Le Pens of the world.

Of course, Buchanan did go the third-party route, but was not able to generate much in the way of support in that venue, proving again that in the US, it is better to try and work within the two large parties. (I could say more about this, but this is already a very long post.). It is noteworthy that he only did so as a presidential candidate, rather than trying to actually form a real third party that contended for power at multiple levels of government.

At a minimum, we can see the nativist, white nationalist current in the GOP in the early 1990s is represented by Buchanan. This strain existed before that time, of course, but had not had as powerful a voice. The Birchers come to mind. It is also the case that prior to the full sorting of the parties that was heralded by the 1994 midterms, the white nationalist currents in the US were split into sections of both the GOP and the Democratic Party.

Zimmer goes on to note several other salient events that help stoke the spark that Buchanan represented in 1992.

He notes 9/11.

9/11 worked as an accelerant for the xenophobia, nativism, and white fear that increasingly defined rightwing political culture well into the political mainstream. Conservative icon Phylis Schlafly, for instance, who had risen to fame in the 1970s as the leader of the grassroots protest against the Equal Rights Amendment, regularly used her monthly newsletters to rage against “invading” Mexicans and “foreign diseases” attacking America. She also fully embraced what is today called Great Replacement Theory, propagating the conspiratorial idea that Democrats were actively trying to bring in “illegals” and dangerous foreigners in order to “change the make-up of the nation.”

And the election of Obama.

Against this backdrop of an already riled-up rightwing base, Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008. In the rightwing imagination, Obama – a moderate liberal politician by any reasonable standard – epitomized the threat from brown foreigners, the dangers of Black radicalism, and the triumph of extreme leftism. His presidency dramatically heightened the white reactionary fear of demographic change, it supercharged the perception of a loss of political and cultural dominance.

I would add, also, the Great Recession, which helped inflame frustrations about neoliberalism and global trade, and helped spark the Tea Party Movement. I would add in, also, the COVID-19 pandemic, which stoked anti-China xenophobia and also played into some right-wing narratives about government.

The Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder are part of the reaction we are seeing.

Granted, the pandemic and BLM happened after the nationalist wing had taken over the GOP in the form of Trump, but I think it helps us understand why he was able to get re-elected in 2024 and why he has been able to pursue more overtly white nationalist policies since his return to the White House.

I am pointing out that he permissive structure of US parties helped one segment of the coalition of one of those parties the opportunity to take over that party. American white nationalists didn’t have to form their version of UKIP or the National Front; they were able to walk into the front door by winning the 2016 presidential primary after things like 9/11, the Great Recession, the election of Obama, etc. empowered that faction. And the binary nature of our politics meant that a lot of voters would stay in the coalition.

This is not, as I am sure many readers will jump to want to say, a defense of GOP voters who voted for Trump. It isn’t. It also isn’t an attempt to say that Trump doesn’t represent a real current in American politics. He does.

I am saying that there is a clear segment of America that is white nationalist. Just like there are significant nationalist movements in the UK, in France, and in Germany (to pick just three examples). But the structure of our parties and institutions made it easier for this nationalist urge to take control of first a major political party, and then the government of the United States.

Our weak parties made it possible to amplify one segment of the coalition. And then our institutions (first the Electoral College, but also the too small House and its minimal competition, as well as the unrepresentative Senate and its ability to shape the judiciary) have brought us where we are.

Note that Trump did force an exodus of some segments of the GOP coalition (the “never Trumpers”) and also was able to draw in some remnants with the Democratic coalition of white nationalists (and many who are simply dissatisfied and don’t even know exactly why). But it is also important to understand that capturing the label means having a lot of voters who will either ignore the things they don’t like about you, or worse, cause those voters to start to accept things that they would have otherwise not been all that interested in.

If we ever get a chance to create a different set of institutions, we must have one that does not force all politics into two vessels. More parties would create a different dynamic in terms of both negotiations over public policy, but also make isolating extremes easier. We also need institutions that do a far better job of representing the public than we currently have.

Put another way: I do not think that an overtly white nationalist party could win control of the US government in a multi-party America. I continue to estimate that the actual nationalist are probably closer to 20-25% of the population, but their power is amplified once you narrow the parties to only two.

Or, alternatively, maybe the GOP would have gone full white nationalist anyway, but the non-white nationalist conservatives would have broken away under different institutional parameters. As it stands, doing so means losing.

At any rate, all of which has led us to this point, as per Zimmer.

What unites all factions on the Trumpist Right is the belief that a “leftist” revolution has already taken place, that the radical “Left” has taken over all the major institutions of American life. In this view, the civil service, the universities, the “liberal media” – they are the power centers from which a leftist subversion is quickly spreading. As the Left now has command of America, all that is noble has been destroyed, there is nothing left to conserve; nothing short of a radical “counter-revolution” can now save the nation. When Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts infamously declared that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be” a little over a year ago, he was merely expressing what is now the defining sensibility on the Right. A brazen threat of violence, fully in line with the logic that dominates rightwing politics. As Roberts wrote in his Foreword to Project 2025’s policy report: “With enemies at home and abroad, there is no margin for error. Time is running short. If we fail, the fight for the very idea of America may be lost.”

So little time left. The Right’s political and intellectual leaders believe they are engaged in a noble war for the “soul,” the identity, the very existence of the nation. If the stakes are so high, if the other side is out to destroy all that is good about America and not only tear the nation’s moral fabric apart, but erase the natural order in the process, moderation, restraint, and patience are not an option. There is therefore no line they don’t feel justified to cross.

This is, of course, quite depressing.

Zimmer then concludes

Where does America go from here? “Normal” politics is not an adequate response to the kind of challenge the country now faces. In fact, a return to pre-Trump “normalcy” is not even desirable, as it would merely restore a deeply dysfunctional, deficient system that gave rise to this mess in the first place. America needs transformative change. But as we are locked into an existential struggle, is it even remotely realistic to hope for a democratic leap? What are the actual chances of transformational progress in a society so fundamentally divided?

This is the question. I do not have an answer, but I have thoughts for later.

But it does underscore why the response to things like aggressive gerrymandering in Texas may well need to be aggressive gerrymandering in other states. And why the next president will also try to govern by Executive Order.

But that also means that we are taking steps more and more away from representative democracy (as well as raising the question of how much of one we ever had), which is more than a little concerning.

*And so I have come to learn the true meaning of the likely apocryphal Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”

**In fact, the last conference paper I presented (and maybe the last one I will ever present) was a comparison of the US and Colombia on this count: “Candidate Selection Processes and Party System Dynamics: Lessons from Colombia and the United States.” Presented at the 2023 Meeting of the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies, Antigua, Guatemala.

***A set of electoral reforms in the early 2000s changed the rules and incentives in Colombian politics, which had the predicted effect of changing its party system.

****I would much prefer a GOP that sounded like this, for example. And don’t forget it was Reagan who signed the so-called “amnesty” for the undoucment into law.