[speculation about GOP moving away from assaults on welfare state towards Euro style right populism]
It would be but....
I just think that such policy shifts run right up against who their largest constituencies are, where their loyalties ultimately lie, which is ultra rich people and their entrenched businesses(that don't want pesky social programs taking their money), and people that really want brown people to suffer.
Which is sort of what happened the first go round with Trump's economic populism(and really every time the GOP gives lip service to protecting popular entitlements) and I don't know how you actually merry those two juxtaposing things into successful governance?
Rich people are their donor base but not their voting base, and even among Republicans there isn't a ton of support for gutting or privatizing the big, popular, old-age programs. That's despite decades of rhetoric on entitlements filtering through the right wing media environment.
I think there's a sweet spot of corporate-friendly policy, protecting existing middle-class bennies (SS, Medicare, mortgage deduction), and then chipping away at programs targeted at the poor with job requirements, drug testing, block granting, etc. where you can placate the donors while picking up more voters. That's usually the Republican equilibrium policy anyways, but they torture themselves to get there cause they commit to all these horribly unpopular white papers from Heritage or AEI or wherever. In retrospect, how insane was it for John McCain to run on voucherizing Medicare?
We've already seen a few states plan to implement work requirements for Medicaid while waiving those requirements in disproportionately white counties. I think people tend to be way less ideological in the way we typically conceive it, and there's a yuuuuuge chunk of voters from the center to the right who just don't want tax dollars being wasted on the "wrong" people.
