Mitt Romney nostalgia is cresting among conservative intellectuals, and for good reason. In 2012, Romney offered an inclusive center-right politics, one with an appeal starkly different from that of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. Trump has a withering disdain for policy specifics; Romney demonstrated comprehensive mastery of the ins and outs of governance. Trump’s moral record is highly questionable; Romney seemed to epitomize personal integrity and virtue. Like many others, I entertained the fantasy of Romney-as-white-knight well into the long, hot summer of 2016.
In this new book, Edward Conard — Romney’s longtime friend, business associate, and high-dollar fundraiser — has produced an extended defense of the economic philosophy that drove the Romney-Ryan campaign. And while the thrust of his argument — that inequality is a necessary condition for and by-product of economic growth in the 21st century — is correct, the book also serves as an inadvertent reminder of the profound flaws in the donor-class economic ideology that was a more significant force in pre-Trump Republican politics than we nostalgists sometimes remember.
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