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Notes -
The future of the GoP is now.
The post 2020 GoP is essentially a center-right populist party with mercantilist tendencies, and is only remarkable insofar as our intellectual class has strayed so far out into the weeds that moderate center-right politics appear incomprehensible to them.
If anything MAGA can be understood in part as Republicans re-embracing their mid-century role as the big-tent party after spending much of the 90s and early 2000s/GWoT era in the wilderness.
The East-coast populists and Sothern Tea-party coalition allied to wrest control of the party from the old Rockefeller-style corporatists, the Evangelicals started out defending their long-time allies on the corporatist right but their support had been wavering due to perceived betrayals on abortion and LGBTQ issues. 2020 and the lockdowns killed that alliance for good leaving the corporatist isolated from the wider party and they simply didn't have the votes to maintain position on their own. Cheney died and his heirs (both intellectual and biological) found themselves getting primaried. Now the populists are setting the agenda, and while the Evangelicals might grumble about Trump's lack of couth, they appreciate having the populists' support on issues like abortion and school choice.
The Newt Gingrich surge in Congress in 1994 followed by the GWB presidency from 2001-2009 is "in the wilderness?" That's a lot of power for, literally, "most of' the 1990s and 2000s.
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