But the Republican factional divide differs in key respects from the Democrats’. On the Democratic side, most of the party’s technocrats align firmly with the centrist faction. When it comes to the unglamorous business of governing and staffing bureaucracies, this gives centrist Democrats a significant advantage over both their progressive and Republican rivals. Centrist liberals still tend to think of themselves — and are still often perceived as — the adults in the room. Agree with their policy positions or not, they typically emphasize pragmatism and responsibility over progressives’ moral and ideological purity, and policy rigor over populist bluster.
Among Republicans, by contrast, there are not many competent technocrats in either faction. To be sure, there are more intellectuals and organizations on the populist right than there were eight years ago, and the staffing of a second Trump administration would almost certainly be better organized than in 2017. But populist Republicans still lack institutional depth.
Legacy conservative institutions remain well endowed, but their number of serious policy scholars with credibility among both Republican officeholders and the wider intellectual elite is vanishingly small.
This problem is visible in the party platform, perhaps the clearest indication to date of Mr. Trump’s own policy preferences and the G.O.P.’s center of gravity.
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