To everything there is a season. During his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan declared, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Almost nobody remembers the first part of that clause — “in this present crisis” — but it’s an important caveat.
Reagan came along at a time when the economy was stagnant and tax rates were high. His solution was to scale back government, stimulate free markets and restore individual liberty. And it worked. As a result, Reagan served as the beau ideal for the Republican Party for a generation after he left office.
Then Donald Trump came along and tried to set himself up as the GOP’s new hero. For those of us who are Never Trump Republicans, it has always been tempting to respond by simply re-elevating the ghost of Reagan. The problem is that the world has changed. While there are some similarities between the challenges Reagan faced and the ones we face today (inflation, Iran, acid-washed jeans), the “present crisis” in 2026 is fundamentally different — and calls for a new historical model for the GOP.
Great presidents — Washington, Lincoln, FDR, et al. — have almost always been elected to solve some central problem. And so, to discern the right hero for contemporary Republicans requires answering this question: What is today’s central problem?
Those who care about preserving liberal democracy might point to Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. Others might say it’s China, the cost of groceries or staggering inequality. But while these are legitimate problems, I think there is a bigger one that no politician seems willing to fully address: the prospect that we are losing our freedom and humanity to our technological overlords.
To explain: There are two main entities that can take away our liberty. The first is the state, which George Orwell described as “a boot stamping on a human face.” The second is the private sector: corporations, criminals or some combination of both.
Conservative tax crusader Grover Norquist famously said he wanted a government so small it could be drowned in a bathtub, but I’d say we need a government just big enough to protect us against any private institution becoming so powerful that it effectively functions like its own oppressive government.
If you don’t think that is happening, then you’re not paying attention. Big tech companies have, in a matter of years, established alarming levels of control over our lives. Tech billionaires control the algorithms that decide which news we see, the 24/7 surveillance conducted via our devices, and the social media platforms that have the potential to feed us propaganda and effectively censor us from the marketplace of ideas. They preset the “default settings,” leverage the “network effects,” and generally have way more power over our daily lives than the state.
What’s more, have you considered how many formerly governmental functions — from prisons to space exploration to providing satellite internet to our allies — are now being run by billionaires? The reality is that we have outsourced a lot of functions of democratically elected officials and public servants to, for lack of a better phrase, weird tech bros.
Consider this Reuters report from last year: “During a pivotal push by Ukraine to retake territory from Russia in late September 2022, Elon Musk gave an order that disrupted the counteroffensive and dented Kyiv’s trust in Starlink, the satellite internet service the billionaire provided early in the war to help Ukraine’s military maintain battlefield connectivity.”
Now, throw in the game-changing power of AI, and we are essentially living in a panopticon that threatens not only our privacy, but also free market competition and the democratic system itself.
The greatest untapped opportunity for political heroism lies here. Whoever takes on this challenge is going to have to summon innovative thinking, because the technological component makes this situation unprecedented. But in the search for models, all we have is the past. And Republicans could do a lot worse than a traitor to his class who prosecuted corporate monopolies, fought for consumer protection and campaign finance laws, spoke softly and carried a big stick, and wasn’t afraid to get “in the arena” and use his “bully pulpit” to bring about change.
I’m speaking, of course, about Teddy Roosevelt.
What might a modern TR-esque leader do? Break up big tech? Put the “malefactors of great wealth” back in line? Determine that some apps are now actually utilities? Rein in Elon Musk? Yes, yes, yes, and a thousand times yes.
By now, you’re probably thinking that TR and Trump have a lot in common. And they do, including the fact that both were born on third base, both survived assassination attempts, and both always wanted to be — as Alice Roosevelt Longworth described her father — “the bride in every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.” Ideologically, both were also populists who favored a strong government role in the economy. And yes, Trump, like TR, has the energy, audacity and outsider status to be a disruptor.
But there are lots of differences, including one key distinction: TR was an idealist; he had a strong worldview and he cared about principles. He was always reading and learning. He and Trump may both be egomaniacs, but TR was an egomaniac for a set of beliefs, whereas Trump is just an egomaniac for self-glorification and self-enrichment.
Fundamentally, Trump lacks character. His past threats against tech billionaires, such as they existed, were meant to exact some personal gain, not to advance the cause of the American people. Once co-opted, these oligarchs become partners, not adversaries to be held accountable.
Just as divided government is meant to pit ambition against ambition, our freedom is best served when the two primary domains of American life — public and private — serve as a check on one another. Today, unfortunately, the two sides are in bed together.
So the job of hero will have to fall to someone other than Trump. But at this point, you might ask: What distinguishes TR’s vision from the vision of today’s Democrats, who also favor strong government to counter the power of big corporations?
For one thing, unlike a growing number of Democrats, TR strongly believed in capitalism. He advocated a “living wage” and a “square deal,” but also railed against socialism. Moreover, on the topic of identity politics, which is now a bipartisan scourge, TR criticized hyphenated-Americanism, stating that immigrants must become “in every facet an American, and nothing but an American. … There can be no divided allegiance here.” These are ideas we desperately need today.
My friend James Strock, a longtime member of the board of the Theodore Roosevelt Association and author of the book “Theodore Roosevelt on Leadership,” says there were three American foundings. The first two were the Revolutionary Era and the Civil War. TR, his antagonist Woodrow Wilson, and his distant cousin FDR, Strock argues, collectively constituted a third founding.
Now, it seems we have potentially arrived at a fourth founding — a moment when technological innovations like AI are steering us into a new era. In the past, great leaders have always emerged during moments of rapid change and crisis. Will that pattern continue?
Reagan was a great conservative model for decades, but the problems he was elected to fix are dramatically different from today’s problems. To find a comparable period in American history, the next generation of leaders will have to go back a lot further than 1980 — back to a time that was less like the malaise of the late 1970s, and more like the explosive growth, ubiquitous corruption and gaping inequality of the Gilded Age.
In 2028, if someone can take on the big tech “broligarchs” in a convincing manner, without turning it into an anti-capitalist crusade — or a grab for even more executive power — they would have a real shot at winning my vote (and probably yours). This may be the challenge of our time. And Teddy Roosevelt shows the way.
Matt K. Lewis is a NOTUS Perspectives columnist.
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