There have been roughly two sorts of Democratic presidents over the last century. A few were revolutionaries who sought to take the country leftward with them. They were masters of “never letting a serious crisis go to waste” transformations and came to power after the chaos of national crises and near collapse.
Franklin Roosevelt created the modern notion of intrusive, redistributive government during the panic of the Depression. Lyndon Johnson, following the trauma of the John F. Kennedy assassination, pushed through the Great Society, which institutionalized the idea that it was the duty of government to use its power and money to seek an equality of result among the citizenry.
Barack Obama, following the economic crisis of 2008, sought to implant “lead from behind” foreign policy and an update of the Great Society, and to “fundamentally transform” the country, usually by focusing on identity politics as the core of the culture (in which the color of our skin rather than the content of our character would brand us for who we are).
In contrast, Democratic presidents such as Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton acted more as caretakers. They more or less administered what they had inherited but lacked the ideological fervor (or perhaps the political savvy or desire) to take the state further leftward.
The immediate Republican antidotes to Democratic revolutionaries were rarely themselves counter-revolutionaries. Dwight Eisenhower modestly tried to pull the country back to the center after 20 years of the New Deal — but nonetheless was hounded unmercifully for trying to do so. The supposedly dark and evil Richard Nixon instituted wage and price controls, created the EPA, and went to China. He did not dismantle the Great Society.
A true conservative revolutionary has been rare — Goldwater failed to get elected, and Reagan, without both houses of Congress, ended up more moderate than he expected and was followed in office by a Republican centrist.
Nonetheless, the media and the Left, in their respective arenas, howled that these modest corrections back to the center by Eisenhower, Nixon, and now Trump were nihilistic and extreme.
True to form, we are now hearing those same end-of-days accusations — even as Trump seeks to bring the U.S. back to about where it was between 1980 and 1992. Note that this endless cycle of change and counter-change is not a static phenomenon but incrementally (and over time radically) takes government and the culture ever more leftward.
So far, Trump has adopted the old Bill Clinton approach to illegal immigration, a formerly centrist but now strangely unorthodox position: He favors law enforcement rather than politically inspired amnesties calibrated to give him electoral and demographic political advantage.
His appeals to the white working classes are right out of the Clinton-Gore appeals in 1992, and they’re a rehash of Reagan’s courting of Democrats.