Vance the Convert
Trump’s vice presidential pick is forging a potent right-populist ideology.
It can be a comfort and consolation to believe one’s political opponents don’t really mean what they say. They’re liars. Hypocrites. Shameless opportunists who will say and do anything to gain power. It’s impossible to take them seriously.
So it’s been with the reaction of Democrats to news that the Republican nominee Donald Trump has chosen Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate. Because Vance was once a ferocious Trump critic and changed his views around the time he launched his Senate campaign in 2021, it’s easy to conclude that everything he’s said and done since then has been a cynical ruse. He’s just saying what he thinks he must in order to get ahead in a Trumpified GOP. None of it’s real. He’s faking it from top to bottom.
I think that’s wrong—and Democrats affirm it at their peril.
Means and Ends
Of course, opportunism—self-interest—is always a big factor in politics. Politicians want to win approval and elections, and through them power and public honors. But politics can also be about ideas and ideology—the ends for which power is wielded. I don’t doubt that Vance made a self-interested calculation as he was contemplating a Senate run in Ohio. But he didn’t follow the path of so many Republicans who have reluctantly bent the knee to Trump after a half-hearted attempt to resist him. He didn’t just mouth empty pieties to flatter the voters and the Orange Man they love. He didn’t put his head down and slink away into the shadows while secretly hoping Trump will disappear, allowing the pre-Trump normalcy of Reaganite conservatism to return.
Rather, Vance set about building something—an ideological palace in which he could find a new home on the far side of the Rubicon his opportunism prompted him to cross. The Vance that emerged after 2021 is an aspirational right-populist who blends together staunch and unapologetic social conservatism, support for the kinds of economic regulations more often associated with progressives like Elizabeth Warren, and a desire for retrenchment in foreign policy, including the withdrawal of support for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.
The Road to Revolution
Donald Trump is a man of instincts and impulses, not ideas. He had a hunch back in 2015—that the Republican Party was hollow and weak, an easy target for an insurgency. He’d appeal directly to the masses on a short list of issues: immigration; trade; foreign policy. And he’d combine that with a somewhat softer line on entitlement cuts and promises of a more ferocious prosecution of the culture war. That would be the mix. Why? Because he intuited it would work. And, when wedded to Trump’s own fame, charisma, and pugilistic persona, it did—much more than even Trump himself expected it to.
But Trump didn’t know the first thing about governing, and there was next to no one in Republican circles interested in transforming Trump’s ad hoc mix of promises and positions into a policy agenda, let alone anyone who knew how to use the levers of power in Washington to get them enacted. Which is why the Trump administration was so hapless, with its main policy accomplishments things any old Republican would have attempted to do.
The intellectuals noticed. Despite building comfortable careers in the ideological universe of Reaganite conservatism, many of them responded to Trump’s uncanny electoral success by setting out to forge a new right-populist ideology and policy agenda from scratch. There was the new quarterly journal American Affairs, and the new think tank American Compass, and a revamped postliberal First Things magazine, and a series of conferences devoted to National Conservatism, and a more rabidly antiliberal Claremont Institute—all of them trying to develop a constellation of ideas for After Trump.
They were joined by a small number of elected officials, mostly in the Senate—Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and a handful of others—who began doing their own work of ideological and policy construction.
I don’t want to suggest that Vance has done more than these other figures over the 18 months since he joined the Senate. But I do think his way of talking about right-populist ideas and ideology is more cogent and coherent than what one hears from other officeholders. Vance cares about ideas, and he has a mind capable of synthesizing them in a compelling way. There’s a reason Trump tapped him instead of Rubio, Hawley, or Utah Senator Mike Lee—because Vance thinks and talks like a true believer eager to preach a gospel and quote from a catechism he’s writing in real time.
You’ll see this if you read his very informative recent interview with Ross Douthat of the New York Times. What one finds there is an effort to cash out what right-populism can and should be across the full range of what the government does, from economic to social to foreign policy. Vance argues that economic policy over the past few decades has been focused on the drive for cheap labor, and says he wants “the inversion of that,” with restrictions on immigration, the imposition of tariffs, and a sharp increase in the minimum wage (he mentions $20/hour) in order to apply “as much upward pressure on wages … as possible.” He’s eager to find a language in which Republicans can talk about issues like this to an electorate hungry for a change of direction.
It’s therefore entirely fitting that the opening evening of the Republican convention culminated in a lengthy speech by the head of the Teamsters union, as the Trump/Vance ticket looked on and listened respectfully. The right-populist ideology emerging from that ticket aspires to be a party of workers that puts their interests first. Will that ever be more than rhetoric? We don’t yet know. But with Vance lined up to serve as Trump’s vice president, the achievement of that revolution over the coming years has now become vastly more likely.
Trump’s Ideological Heir
Trump is the present-day avatar of and vehicle for this nascent right-populist ideology and agenda. But he won’t be around forever. Until the announcement of his choice of Vance, it made sense to assume Trump’s eventual passing from the scene might issue in at least a partial reversal of the slowly building changes in the GOP over the past eight years. The Reaganite-libertarian center-right would attempt to reassert control and turn back the clock to the years when Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan were the (half-hearted) choice of Republican voters.
With Vance now elevated to Trump’s anointed successor, such a reversal has become all but inconceivable (assuming, as seems likely, the Republican ticket defeats the Democrats in November). Trumpism now has an ideological heir, leaving the Reaganism that’s been shunted to the side for the past eight years well and truly dead.
Does Vance really believe it? Or is he just an opportunist? It’s probably a mix of both. But in the end, the precise proportions don’t matter. What counts is that he’s converted to a new faith and is eager to share the good news.
Damon Linker writes the Substack newsletter “Notes from the Middleground.” He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.
This article was cross-posted at Notes from the Middleground.
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A very perceptive article by Damon. When I read the NYT interview with Ross Douthat I was struck by how articulate and thoughtful Vance was. Here is someone that can’t be written off as a blowhard whose primary talent is incendiary provocations, but a man who can formulate a real political philosophy. Two things I felt Vance failed to address in the interview: 1. the real inflationary effect of tariffs and who would be affected by those (surely it is the working class people he wants to help), and 2. his rationalization of election denials (2020) is a weak argument in view of the fact that every attempt to leverage whatever irregularities they could dig up failed in courts, including in front of friendly judges. One senses he knows to avoid too much discussion of this as he is on thin ice.
There are other things I disagree with him about — his views on the Ukraine war are wildly oversimplified imo — but he does a good job of making his case. There’s no way around it, Vance is a smart cookie. Probably opportunistic, but hey, it’s politics, let’s get real.
The other takeaway from the whole article for me is that the Republican Party has now fully reinvented itself and is no longer merely a personality cult. Meanwhile the Democratic Party is dying a slow death with an uninspiring senile leader who refuses to let new blood rise.
An ideological construction that synthesizes social conservatism, economic regulation addressing the standard of living, and retrenchment in foreign policy is exactly what is needed to forge constructive national consensus, taking the nation beyond myopic Reaganism and toxic woke leftism. But policies to raise wages must be combined with decisive governmental steps to increase production in strategic areas, in order to avoid inflation. And retrenchment in foreign policy must be in the form of comprehensive anti-imperialism, leaving behind the imperialist mentality that is the trapdoor for endless wars.
https://charlesmckelvey.substack.com/