It’s amazing how many “legacy” conservatives — writers and old-school bloggers who came to prominence 20 years ago, during the Bush II era — simply do n’t get it still. Their reactions to J. D. Vance’s selection as Donald Trump’s working mate ranged from muted to upset to irritated.
These are men who merely ironically and reluctantly back Trump and the New Right movements as the least bad solution they have now. They’re not enthusiastic about having to do so, and they’re also hoping — passion, yet — for a profit to the Republican Party of old, guided by Reagan’s bilateral coalition of Chamber of Commerce company liberals, national security hawks, and Falwell-era Christian liberals.
After nearly ten years, these people still believe in Trump and his underlying activity as a fad. An unruly adolescent phase that will one day pass, when the adults in the party can restore the party’s respectable roots, and when modern conservatives learn proper respect for the ideologies of Ronald Reagan ( born 1911 ) and William F. Buckley ( born 1925 ).
Here’s what they either do n’t get or refuse to come to terms with: That conservative movement is dead. It died because it simply did n’t work, and it’s a death well deserved.
It died when George W. Bush, the moral — and natural — heir of the action, launched an unnecessary war that placed thousands of Americans, most of them from working-class background, dead or maimed on the streets of Iraq.
It died when liberals, in addition to the common strategy of cutting taxes, primarily for those in the top 0.1 percent of households, offered no answers to the financial lethargy affecting middle-class people.
It died when the GOP failed to take any action to address the opioid epidemic or the crisis at the southern border.
It died when the GOP happily supported an agenda of offshoring and deindustrialization, to free up capital to return to the likes of Charles Koch, Mitt Romney, and private equity investors.
It passed away for reasons similar to these, and it is never going to return. Ever.
Despite this reality, evident to all but the most oblivious D. C. think-tank staffers, there remains a faction of the conservative movement that still blithely believes the future lies with the likes of Nikki Haley, Marco Rubio, or Ted Cruz. Intellectual Bush clan ancestors still draw their outdated ideas from National Review’s stale pages, which are still dated. Establishment figures are more than happy to go back to a domestic stagnation and foreign entanglement.
J. D. Vance, a working-class, 39-year-old Iraq veteran, represents the long-term entrenchment of the New Right within the Republican Party, and he heralds the final demise of the legacy Reaganite movement. With Vance as vice president and heir to the GOP throne, a conservative agenda authentically focused on strengthening working-class families, middle-class communities, and an American economy that works for all stakeholders, not just capital providers, would become permanently enshrined. What the establishment hopes is a fad would become a decades-long agenda.
Because of Vance’s youth, eloquence, and disregard for their failed ideology, this establishment may view him as an even larger threat than they view Trump. I do n’t think he minds their disdain.
I welcome J. D. Vance’s ascendance. And hopefully, the rest of the movement soon does as well.
