For some, Donald Trump’s selection of Ohio Senator J D Vance as his running mate on Monday was just another blip in what has been one of the most dizzying news cycles in living memory.
Others recognized it for what it was: A death knell marking the end of the American conservative movement as it was constituted from the mid-20th century until now.
The movement’s birth date is typically traced back to 1955, when William F Buckley Jr founded National Review, a magazine dedicated to preaching the virtues of the free market and the perils of progressive social theory, as well as waging open ideological war on communism, the great evil of Buckley’s time.
Ronald Reagan would go on to restate these principles by observing that the Republican Party – remade as it had been in Buckley’s image – was held up by a “three-legged stool” of social and fiscal conservatism, as well as anti-communism. After the fall of the Soviet Union, this third tenet was unofficially amended to emphasize the importance of American leadership on the world stage.
Though the GOP has always represented these values to varying degrees, Trump was the first to seriously stress-test the stool during the 2016 Republican presidential primaries. By promising to implement tariffs, leave entitlements untouched, and seek a rapprochement with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Trump threatened to kick at least two of the movement’s legs out from under it.
His decision to make dyed-in-the-wool Reaganite Mike Pence his running mate, however, assuaged many conservatives’ concerns, and rightly so. With some notable exceptions, Trump largely governed as traditional conservatives hoped he might, cutting taxes and regulatory red tape while confronting the United States’ enemies in Beijing, Tehran, and even Moscow.
But if Pence was a reassuring olive branch to traditional American conservatism, Vance is a shot across its bow.
By making Vance his heir apparent, Trump has not only set the tone for what his second term would look like, but what the GOP will stand for in the years that follow.
Vance is not merely an advocate of a more restrained foreign policy, he’s a demagogue plagued by a single minded obsession: rewarding Putin for waging a bloody, unprovoked war on Ukraine. In the Senate, Vance has identified denying Ukraine further military aid as his second biggest priority while smearing those colleagues who don’t share his view.
“There are people who would cut Social Security, throw our grandparents into poverty. Why? So that one of Zelensky’s ministers can buy a bigger yacht,” suggested Vance in one especially dishonest – and frankly incomprehensible – moment.
In another, Vance accused the United States of “sleepwalking into World War 3” by greenlighting Ukrainian strikes on military targets in Russian territory. He may claim to put America first, but Vance can be better understood as a member of the “Blame America First” crowd that conservatives once rightly deplored.
His economic outlook is similarly indistinguishable from the Right’s ancestral opponents.
While Vance once argued that the American working class had to “stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better,” he has resorted to the simpleminded, envy-laden demagoguery of the Left since entering the political fray.
He supports minimum wage hikes and indiscriminate protectionism. He opposes Right-to-Work laws and tax cuts. He is enamoured of Lina Khan, the anti-business Biden appointee wreaking havoc at the Federal Trade Commission, and has suggested that Senators Bernie Sanders (a socialist) and Elizabeth Warren (a quasi-socialist) were his favorite candidates among the 2020 Democratic presidential field.
Moreover, Vance’s prioritization of his own personal ambition over all else throws even his claim to being a committed social conservative into doubt. While Vance insisted on the campaign trail that he was opposed to abortion even in the cases of rape and incest, he has since come out in favor of open access to the abortion drug mifepristone to bring his position in line with Trump’s.
This should come as no surprise. Vance now claims to be proud to be the running mate of a man he once compared to Hitler and agreed was a serial sex predator.
“Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share,” submitted Sir Roger Scruton in How to Be a Conservative. “The sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.”
Buckley, Reagan, and their contemporaries told unpopular truths. As Buckley himself observed back in 1955, the Left ran “just about everything,” including the two major political parties. Over the course of decades, they fought and won an uphill battle to bring much-needed contrast, not to mention wisdom, back to American politics.
By contrast, Vance’s rapid rise has been characterized by his sycophancy toward a single charismatic figure whose coattails he hoped to ride.
With Trump and Vance cemented as American “conservatism’s” frontmen for the foreseeable future, it is no exaggeration to say that the values – and the spirit – of the conservative movement shaped by Buckley and Reagan are functionally dormant, if not dead.
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