MAGA + MAHA + MATA: Reagan’s Three-Legged Stool Now Has Six – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

The first person I ever heard describe the three-legged stool of conservatism was Newt Gingrich. Sure, Ronald Reagan may have built the analogy, but, as someone born in 1985, Reagan was long gone from the national scene when I came of age politically.

By 2005, Gingrich was the leading purveyor of the idea that the modern Republican Party was composed of social conservatives, defense hawks, and fiscal conservatives. At that time, the Republican Party still didn’t have local majorities in places like Mississippi, and, though there were always some disgruntled Democrats — I’m thinking especially of Democrat Senator Zell Miller from Georgia — there was not a tectonic shift ideologically.

All that changed with Donald Trump.

A quick glimpse at Trump’s Cabinet picks, especially former Democrats Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., points to a coalition shift that might mean reevaluating the three-legged stool.

Who is included in the new Trump coalition? For starters, the populists.

When I was working in New York City in 2015, I first got the feeling that Trump might actually pull off a victory when one day all the union staff showed up mad. They weren’t just pissed. They were the kind of livid that can only be achieved by guys who work in blue-collar jobs and haven’t had twenty years of white-collar bosses telling them emotional outbursts are unbecoming. It was visceral and authentic and driven by the way the Democrats snubbed their hero, Bernie Sanders.

The Vermont senator’s lifelong attempt to be the voice of working men against the elites was being upended in the name of handing the nomination to Hillary Clinton. The talk of the morning was that if they couldn’t vote for Bernie, they were going to vote for Trump.

Sure enough, they did.

As Salena Zito expertly chronicled in her book The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics, working-class voters jumped ship in 2016 and again in 2024, handing Trump two stunning White House victories. Populism had picked up that old three-legged stool and hurled it directly out the window of the ivory tower.

But that is not the only way Trump expanded the GOP. Next came the Make America Healthy Again crowd.

I’m old enough to remember when shopping at food co-ops, buying local, and preferring organic food nearly guaranteed you were a leftist. Weirdos like me who were happy at both Whole Foods and McDonalds were called crunchy conservatives and South Park Republicans. Some of us loved the dynamic of cities and their modern “land of opportunity” pitch, but somehow always ended up shopping at urban farmers’ markets. Some of us were moving out to the woods to have a bunch of babies and start a homestead. But we were all trying to be healthy, have fun, and embrace our complete weirdness.

Then came gym culture.

Some of gym culture’s values, such as individualism and personal responsibility, are built in — you have to take responsibility to actually get yourself to the gym and endure the strain and pain to build muscle. The idea that the body is a temple is also biblical (1 Corinthians 6:19–20).

Athletic values look even more right-wing in disciplines such as Taekwondo. In every class I took, we started with a group recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by reciting the Five Tenets of Taekwondo.

“Courtesy, Integrity, Perseverance, Self-Control, Indomitable Spirit, SIR!!”

Be part of a group of twenty people pledging that to one another three times a week, and yeah, that’ll shape your personal philosophy.

Then came RFK Jr.

All the gym rats and karate nerds teamed up with the health-food shopper Birkenstock bros to say that maybe there are cultural reasons America’s health is in decline. These people may not agree on everything else, but they all acknowledge that America’s obesity rate is obscene and maybe, just maybe, corporate processed foods and rampant pharmaceutical use are to blame.

The tech bros, such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Vivek Ramaswamy, were next up. They believe in an ever-expanding frontier for innovation to make people’s lives better and that the Democrat-led regulatory state is standing in the way of progress. They are dreamers and thinkers. Let’s call their side Make America Think Again, or MATA.

The MAGA populists and MAHA crunchies and MATA tech bros formed a whole new three-legged stool that wasn’t so much conservatism as it was anti-radicalism and opposition to the Democratic Party. Intellectually, it’s one of the most diverse coalitions I’ve ever seen.

The coalition is so diverse and full of so many people who are single-issue voters — or at best single-movement voters loyal to MAGA, MAHA, or MATA — that conservatism has not achieved status as a sturdy six-legged stool. It’s more like two three-legged stools that politicians must straddle to survive. We’ll call the GOP “the straddling party.”

Mix that in with the voters whose entire reason for supporting the GOP is that the Democratic party is unhinged, and you’re not dealing with a firm, definable voting bloc for future elections.

So far, Republican defectors have not hurt the stability of the straddling party. If anything, the public falling-out with GOP dynasties such as the Cheney and Bush families has helped this new coalition rally around a single enemy. It’s no longer the Republicans versus the Democrats. It’s now Trump versus the uniparty and the deep state.

But with all these competing interests, how will they govern?

That’s where the think tanks come in. The MAGA, MAHA, and MATA teams may know they don’t want to be Democrats, but that certainly doesn’t mean they know what it means to be Republican, let alone Republicans with a majority.

If conservatives want to keep this rag-tag bunch of anti-authoritarian rebels united, it is incumbent upon the Heritage Institute, the Cato Institute, the Institute for Justice, Hillsdale College, and the whole conservative brain trust to actually sell the system of conservatism.

Hey MAGA: Populism is conservative because it rejects federal top-down rule by technocrats, but we should apply those same rules to local governments.

Hey MAHA: Being healthy is a great thing that is conservative because it empowers individuals to chart their own destiny, but we also need to do it in a way that respects the free market.

Hey MATA: Going to space is conservative because it opens a new frontier of imagination and innovation, but it also needs to be done in a way that respects human dignity.

What is needed is for think tanks and leaders to step up and help build a comprehensive ecosystem — a conservative worldview that encompasses all six of these legs and does it in a way that is not condescending beltway gibberish. Bluntly, it’s about welcoming single-issue voters into the fold and then transforming them into people who vote on comprehensive values, not on individual policy.

I want Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., and Elon Musk to see that meddling bureaucrats have mucked up every sector of the economy, not just the ones they are personally passionate about. I want MAGA, MAHA, and MATA to all embrace the truth that free minds and free bodies go hand in hand and that human dignity is bigger than their one issue.

Whether it’s taxes, foreign policy, or red dye in our foods, the answer is government transparency, free markets, and individual liberty.

The Democrats have dropped so many balls that the U.S. government looks like the floor of a Chuck E. Cheese, but it won’t stay this way forever. This is a generational opportunity to have everyone from Birkenstock bros to backwoods bums realize that humanity flourishes when the government protects life, liberty, and property, and keeps the hell out of everything else.

Let’s hope Conservative Inc. capitalizes on that.

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