A couple of months ago a student asked me what it meant to be a liberal or a conservative in the late 1800s and I struggled to answer because politics were just...different back then. Obviously the issues were different but the coalitions were so different too. 1/

I’ve heard people assert, and had students ask, whether the parties “switched” at some point. But this is inaccurate and a woefully incomplete picture. As Hans Noel notes in a book I’m just starting on, ideology is not party. 2/

They can be correlated, as they are now, but they don’t have to be by definition. Noel notes how in the early 1900s it was considered anathema to many progressives to have a strong central government, for the government was a tool to oppress the poor and enrich the wealthy. 3/

Eventually, progressivism evolved into modern liberalism and a new synthesis emerged where a large government was seen as a boon to the poor rather than a threat. So in some ways, before Woodrow Wilson, the Democrats were a small government party and the GOP a big govt one. 4/

Now that’s a MASSIVE oversimplification and it doesn’t mean the GOP was liberal and the Democrats conservative because those words have evolved in their meaning. 5/

Parties are vehicles to win control of the government. They’re by definition coalitions made up of disparate interests that hang together because of some “big” issues. Ideologies are more internally consistent and by definition not as coalitional as parties. 6/

What interests me is what is happening to the modern GOP, where ideology is shifting and changing and unsettled. What does it even mean to be a conservative anymore? To many, the only qualifying standard is loyalty to Donald Trump. 7/

I don’t know where the GOP is going to come down, but it is not by definition a “small government” party and how it shakes out is going to depend on a lot of factors. 8/

The Sohrab Amaris and Josh Hawleys of the world envision a populist working class party. Such a coalition seems plausible. But what holds it together absent Donald Trump? What unifies this new party? I’m unsure. 9/

All of this is to say that I think we are in a period of realignment and that where the parties, particularly the Republicans, end up ideologically is an open question. Ideology changes, Noel argues. What it means to be conservative now may not be what it means in 2030. 10/10