If there’s one political story that never
gets as much attention as it deserves, it’s the choice of a
vice-presidential nominee. And it could turn out that former President
Donald Trump’s decision to pick Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) as his running
mate may have an impact on American politics and policies for many years
to come.
This is why the loud and angry debate
about Vance, his background, political philosophy, foreign-policy views
and journey from “Never Trump” critic to ardent supporter of the 45th president goes far beyond the usual analysis of such a nomination.
It’s true that very few people vote based
on who is on the bottom of the ticket. The vice presidency is also a
position without formal power, even if it is only a heartbeat from the
presidency. But eight out of America’s last 22 presidents were vice
presidents first.
Four of them rose to the role as a result
of the death of the president (Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge,
Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson); one due to the resignation of the
president (Gerald Ford); and three won on their own after serving time
as the second banana (Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush and Joe Biden).
Such a promotion is by no means guaranteed
for Vance. If Biden mounts a miraculous comeback in November and the
Republicans lose, he may only become someone who is the answer to a
trivia question, along with Tim Kaine, Paul Ryan, Sarah Palin, John
Edwards and Joe Lieberman, rather than a future president.
A consequential choice
But more than is typical of those who are tapped as running mates, Vance is set up for bigger things.
Most vice presidents—including those, like
the elder George Bush and Biden, who eventually won the presidency—were
picked because they were thought to give the ticket some marginal
political advantage or represented a compromise between the nominee and
factions of his party that hadn’t supported him.
Vance was not chosen because he “balances”
the ticket in any way. He shares Trump’s views on major issues and is
considered among the most articulate advocates for those views. That
makes him a credible successor to Trump as leader of a Republican Party
that has undergone a remarkable transformation in the last eight years.
Just as important, he could be in a
stronger position to succeed to the presidency than most veep nominees
simply because Trump is limited to a single term. Which means that,
assuming Trump wins, and perhaps even if he doesn’t, Vance will, at the
very least, enter the 2028 presidential race as one of the
frontrunners.
This is precisely why the arguments about him matter.
At its heart, the debate about Vance concerns a political philosophy that has come to be known as national conservatism.
The core of the polemic is a willingness to rethink what it means to be
both a conservative and a political leader in the 21st century.
It rejects a lot of conventional wisdom
about economics and foreign policy that was largely accepted by most
Republicans two decades ago when George W. Bush was president. And that
means it is rooted in pushback against the political establishment and
the credentialed elites who have largely controlled not only the party
and the government, but big business and mainstream culture, as well.
It may be ironic that this sea change in
conservative thinking is led by a man like Trump who was born into
wealth and whose lifestyle and behavior largely epitomize what it means
to be rich, influential and have an outsized footprint in pop culture.
Nevertheless, the so-called MAGA (from the Trump slogan “Make America
Great Again”) movement, is a conscious attempt to change the orientation
of Republican politics from a concern about what’s good for Wall Street
to one that takes into account the needs of the working class.
The ‘deplorables’ take over
That’s shocking for those who led the GOP
only a few years ago. Though they welcomed the votes of Americans from
lower economic strata, they had little direct interest in their welfare
or what mattered to them. And, though they were reluctant to admit it
publicly, they shared the sneering contempt for the working class that
was expressed by Democrats like President Barack Obama, when he
disparaged those who “clung to guns or religion,” or were, as Hillary
Clinton memorably put it, “deplorables.”
Establishment GOP leaders and pundits
supported economic policies and international trade agreements that
essentially impoverished many Americans by hollowing out the country’s
manufacturing base and outsourcing jobs abroad. They also ardently
opposed worker-friendly policies that might soften the blow.
In addition, they also dismissed the
impact of illegal immigration on the working class, something that was
very much in sync with the desires of big business, which welcomed the
influx of people who would depress wages for workers.
They did so in the name of the free market
and the sort of doctrinaire economic liberalism that was very much at
the center of the conservative agenda of iconic figures like President
Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
The above was, in essence, the definition
of conservatism that ruled the GOP until the advent of Trump. And it was
popular not just with Wall Street, but also with college-educated
voters, a demographic slice of the electorate that was reliably
Republican. Liberal economics and global trade made a lot of Americans
wealthier and reduced the costs of many consumer items.
But it also left many Americans behind,
destroyed communities and robbed the United States of the manufacturing
capacity to produce the arms that traditional conservative
foreign-policy hawks required to fund both American wars and new causes
like Ukraine’s fight against Russia.
Trump was no ideologue. But his instincts
were populist and among the issues on which he had really strong beliefs
when he entered politics in 2015 were trade and illegal immigration.
Speaking to those issues resonated with lower-income voters whom
Republicans had failed to win over in the past and who were more likely
to vote for the Democrats.
On foreign policy, Trump also was a critic
of the post 9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that began during the
presidency of George W. Bush. But Trump was willing to start discussing
the NATO alliance in the same way he talked about trade agreements like
NAFTA, by questioning whether it was outdated or if it was fair to ask
American taxpayers to pay for the defense of wealthy European countries
that were spending very little on their own militaries.
All that was anathema to the Republicans
who dominated their party under Reagan and the Bushes, and then
nominated John McCain and Mitt Romney in failed bids to defeat Obama.
They viewed the sort of populist common-good conservatism that was
oriented more to working class concerns and needs as “socialism.”
And since most of them were guided by the
anti-Communist assumptions about the world that were embraced by
conservatives during the Cold War, they viewed any reluctance to
exercise American power abroad as akin to the way Democrats had often
sought to appease the Soviet Union or as a betrayal of the obligation to
fight Islamist terror after 9/11. In this way, they came to label any
second thoughts about disasters like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
let alone a sacred cow like NATO, as “isolationism” and a betrayal of
the legacy of Reagan.
But now positions that were seen as heresy
to conservatives are applause lines at Republican conventions. To
liberals and conservatives who oppose this shift, this is evidence that
the GOP has simply surrendered to the Trump populist cult.
But while the devotion to Trump—reinforced
by the attempt to assassinate him and his pose of defiance after being
wounded—goes far beyond the good feelings evoked by most politicians
among their supporters, there’s more to it than that. Trump’s success
lies in his ability to tap into the resentments of working-class voters
and simultaneously to a desire to create a political movement that
embodies traditional conservative values of liberty and patriotism. But
the “populist” aspect of this shift scares some people.
Populism and antisemitism
The word “populist” has always scared
Jews. The populist movement in the United States in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries began as an agrarian splinter party and then, to a
large extent, took over the Democratic Party in the 1890s under the
banner of three-time loser William Jennings Bryan.
That form of populism embraced some
nonsensical economic theories like “bimetallism” and the desire of poor
farmers to have their debts canceled. But because it looked to bankers
and capitalists as the root of all evil, it was also connected to
antisemitism, a sentiment that some populist leaders like Georgia’s Tom
Watson—who helped whip up the hatred behind the infamous lynching of Leo
Frank, an Atlanta Jew who was falsely accused of murder—exploited.
That same fear of populist sentiment was
never far below the surface throughout the 20th century, with demagogic
radio preachers like Father Coughlin, who mixed in antisemitism and
pseudo-fascism with his advocacy for workers’ rights. The appeal of such
figures and their ability to foment hate reinforced the notion that
uneducated people who have been displaced by modern economic
developments are not so much to be helped by society as feared.
But the antisemitism that was so much a
part of American populism in the past is noticeably absent in a MAGA
world that is, with only a few exceptions, reflexively pro-Israel and
philosemitic. While Jews are disproportionately members of the
credentialed elites who benefited from the current system, neither the
rhetoric nor the substance of this critique of the old GOP establishment
is linked to attacks on Israel as is now common on the left.
To speak now of the problems engendered by
the globalist policies championed by the elites who flock to Davos,
Switzerland for the World Economic Forum, is not a dog whistle to
extremists. It is a rallying cry to resist corrupt forces that are
genuinely harming Americans and empowering antisemites.
Conversion to Trumpism
Vance’s rise is based on his ability to
explain the complaints of Americans who were left behind by decisions
made by both Republican and Democratic presidents. He first became known
because of his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which
placed his own experiences in the context of the socioeconomic
challenges faced by poor whites living in Appalachia and the rust belt.
The enthusiastic reception it received
from the chattering classes was rooted in their eagerness for an
explanation for why this demographic group was open to voting for Trump,
though he wasn’t mentioned in the book. But some on the left hated it,
because it correctly sought to shift the focus from the alleged racism
of poor whites to the struggles of the working class, regardless of
their color or ethnicity.
Vance’s own life story was an inspiring
rags-to-riches tale. He survived a difficult childhood with a mother who
was an addict, to go on to service in the Marines and then college and
Yale Law School before a successful career as a venture capitalist
before winning an Ohio Senate seat in 2022.
In 2016, Vance was a strong critic of
Trump but, like a lot of other conservatives, he changed his mind about
him. That was due to his performance as president and to the way the
left and the D.C. establishment showed that they would do virtually
anything to destroy someone who was neither part of their elite clique
nor one of the “experts” in the governing class.
This is now put forward by his critics as a
sign of his insincerity and ruthless ambition. Though, as is true for
anyone in politics, ambition may have played some role in his conversion
(interestingly, he underwent a religious conversion during this same
period, becoming a Catholic in 2017), it seems primarily rooted in a
recognition that the policies of those who purported to lead the
conservative movement were not actually conservative. If they were, they
wouldn’t be indifferent to the way global economics and illegal
immigration destroys lives and communities and undermines traditional
American values.
Nor would he, as the Bush-era Republicans
did, stand by and allow the collapse of the manufacturing sector and the
enrichment of China that undermined America’s national security.
More to the point, and unlike other
leading politicians, Trump seemed to get it. Imperfect and inconsistent
though he may be, he cared about those who were hurt by globalist
policies and his economic, trade and foreign-policy positions were
essentially sensible. And he was opposed to the woke ideological
policies that sought to divert Americans from the real economic problems
faced by working people to divisive fake concerns about racism.
At 39 (he turns 40 on Aug. 2) and with
less than 2 years’ service in the Senate, Vance has yet to be tested on
the national stage. But he is an articulate spokesman for a movement
that is putting forth a version of conservatism that is more in tune
with the needs of ordinary voters.
It is also in stark opposition to the
leftist ideology and its woke catechism of diversity, equity and
inclusion (DEI) that has taken over our education system, culture, the
media and, thanks to Biden,
the federal bureaucracy, which is in desperate need of reform. This
leftist orthodoxy is the animating force behind the current surge in
antisemitism. And far from abetting Jew hatred, the new conservative
populism is the only force that stands a chance of resisting and rolling
it back.
Vance’s opposition to continuing the
funding of an endless war in Ukraine which is eating up resources that
might better be spent on aiding Israel, stopping Iran and deterring
China is disqualifying for some on the right who are still obsessed with
Russia. They wrongly believe that putting all of our resources into
Ukraine will magically strengthen Israel and Taiwan. But his critics
have no answer to his arguments about the need for America to pick and
choose its fights carefully in an era when its capacity to produce arms
is no longer unlimited.
Assuming Trump wins in November, we don’t
know how Vance will fare in the second slot, as there will be plenty of
opportunities for him to stumble or to displease the president. But what
makes him both interesting and dangerous to the D.C. establishment is
that he provides the intellectual muscle for a new conservative vision
for the country.
It isn’t the same conservatism of Reagan
and Thatcher, and that’s hard for an older generation of Republicans to
absorb. But the challenges America, Israel and the world must now deal
with are not the same as those that faced the West in the 1980s, when
the “evil empire” in Moscow still threatened the world with Communism.
Yet with his nomination, Vance is now
poised to ensure that this turn toward national conservatism is no
passing phase that will be erased by a comeback of Never-Trump Bush-era
Republicans who still dream of taking the GOP back from the
“deplorables.” If he succeeds, the decision to tap him for the vice
presidency may turn out to be among the most consequential of Trump’s
decisions.
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