THE TWILIGHT OF BOOMER REPUBLICANISM:
Foreign policy, particularly as it relates to wars in the Middle East, is the sharpest generational divide in the GOP. The country has been at war in the region for longer than any Republican under the age of 35 has been alive. Young Americans have no idea why this should be the case. Like the national debt, this is simply something that’s been forced on them by older generations.
But for boomer Republicans, a hawkish foreign policy is a minimum requirement for moral seriousness, just as it was in the days of their youth during the Cold War. It’s not that Iran or even China is the new Soviet Union, although some boomers do think that. Rather, it’s that during the Cold War, anyone who qualified as an adult had to take the foreign threat seriously – and everyone understood that possession of nuclear weapons marked a nation as a great power, if not indeed a superpower on par with the United States and the Soviet Union.
Who in their right mind would want to allow Iran to become the next superpower? If that status didn’t come automatically with having nuclear weapons, having them would nonetheless be a running leap down the path to becoming a superpower. That was the lesson of history the baby boomers lived.
Trump may or may not think this way: he’s long viewed Iran as a neighborhood menace that ought to be put down just for insulting America and being bad for regional development. He has reasons for using force against Tehran that go beyond the typical boomer mindset – but he’s surrounded by others who are typical, and the mindset of the older voters who are most active in the Republican party tends to be reflexively hawkish because of the mental world in which boomers grew up.
There is a strong constituency for war in the Republican party, despite the inroads anti-war conservatives have made (thanks largely to Trump, ironically or not). Trump gave in to this boomer side of his party and of himself.
The result has been war with Iran and sky-high fuel prices that doomed Republicans across the country on November 3.
Yesterday may also signify the twilight of the Fox News Republican:
George W Bush and Donald Trump met similar ends because, whatever differences their partisans claim, they were both products of the Fox News Republican Party, which fused conservatism and populism, and acted as the GOP nervous system for more than two decades.
The decline of… https://t.co/FrsRLQTf0N
— Michael Brendan Dougherty (@michaelbd) November 5, 2026
Dougherty’s tweet concludes, “The decline of Fox News rendered that form of the GOP unable to organize its responses or make sense of the world anymore. Consequently this form of the party is ending.”