Despite Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election, his political coalition was already expanding in consequential ways. Not only did he make notable gains among Hispanic and African-American voters — gains that only increased this year — but he also attracted the support of a loose grouping of mostly young, male voters whom I described around that time as “Barstool conservatives.” This year, as I had predicted, they appeared to swing hard for Mr. Trump.
“Barstool conservatism” was a reference to the media company Barstool Sports and its founder, Dave Portnoy, who became a folk hero of sorts in 2020 after raising millions of dollars on behalf of bars and restaurants whose existence had been threatened by Covid lockdowns. Apart from Mr. Portnoy, Barstool conservatism’s most representative figures today are the podcast host Joe Rogan, the retired N.F.L. punter turned ESPN personality Pat McAfee and various mixed martial arts fighters.
Barstool conservatism is libertarian in the sense that it values autonomy and ambition but not doctrinaire about it in a way that would be recognizable to, say, the editors of Reason magazine. It is a world of fantasy football podcasts, betting apps, diet trends (keto, paleo, carnivore) and more nebulous “lifestyle” questions about the nuances of alcohol and cannabis use. The outlook is culturally rather than socially conservative, skeptical of racial and gender politics for reasons that have more to do with the stridency of their proponents than with any deep-seated convictions about the issues themselves.
As a social conservative with an antipathy to libertarianism in all its forms, I viewed the rise of Barstool conservatism in 2020 with foreboding. And rightly so. This year Mr. Trump ran what was, in effect, a pro-choice campaign. He signaled support for legalized cannabis but not for a traditional conception of marriage. He may have selected JD Vance as his running mate, but otherwise he took social conservatives for granted. Barstool conservatives had the upper hand throughout the campaign, as underscored by the emphasis Mr. Trump’s team placed on Mr. Rogan’s endorsement.
I have long been inclined to make certain hard and fast distinctions between Barstool conservatism and Trumpism of the sort that Mr. Vance represents, which I associate with opposition to abortion, pornography and cannabis, and support for traditional families, shoring up the power of organized labor and protecting religious freedom. In theory these two conservative tendencies are diametrically opposed. Until recently I would have suggested that only Mr. Trump could possibly unite them, by sheer force of personality.
But since this year’s election I have been on an informal listening tour of young men in the part of rural Michigan where I live, which is a nice way of saying that I have spent a lot of time talking to people in bars. What I heard from mechanics, waiters, high school teachers and others often surprised me. The future of American conservatism now strikes me as more complex and less ideologically predictable — and less dependent on Mr. Trump — than I had thought.
My longest conversation was with a 25-year-old garbageman named Collin Tone. Collin is an enthusiastic Trump voter. He enjoys listening to Mr. Portnoy and Mr. Rogan as well as the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. (Our conversation began with a discussion of Alp, a brand of nicotine pouch recently backed by Mr. Carlson.) He seemed to me at first a Barstool type.
But Collin is also a nondenominational Christian. Unlike most of his friends, he is married. On social and economic issues, his views do not line up neatly with either the “don’t tread on me” bro-ism of the Barstool set or the government-backed traditionalism envisioned by Mr. Vance.
Collin told me that while he and his wife have saved about $20,000 for a down payment on a house, he expressed frustration that very few Americans his age will be able to accumulate this kind of money. Unlike a Barstool type, he thinks the government should help young home buyers by lowering interest rates. But while he is open, like Mr. Vance, to the possibility of more generous European-style family policy, he also thinks that the expenses associated with child rearing are often overstated.
When I asked him about the president-elect’s personal life, Collin said that Mr. Trump seemed to have grown in virtue, and that before condemning him for his affairs and his two failed marriages, as a social conservative might, one should consider the temptations to which a man of his wealth would find himself exposed. At the same time, Collin said that divorce has had disastrous consequences for American family life. He has even stronger views about pornography, which he wishes were subject to legal restrictions. (He said that several of his former high school classmates were producing content for OnlyFans.)
If Collin’s hard-to-categorize views are in any sense representative of the Trump coalition — and anecdotally, I gather they are, at least in their unpredictability — I will need to do some rethinking. From my perspective Trumpism looks incoherent: an indifferent assemblage of oligarchic rent-seeking, misguided Fordist nostalgia, mawkish sentimentality and techno-optimism, with the detritus of the George W. Bush-era left (especially its antiwar sentiment and skepticism of public health authorities) thrown in for good measure. What my conversation with Collin brought home to me was that for him and perhaps millions of others, these things somehow hang together.
And why shouldn’t they? Most voters do not think like political analysts. For them the relationship between the seemingly disparate visions represented by figures such as Mr. Portnoy and Mr. Vance might be more like a conversation than an argument. The same young man who might nod along with Mr. Portnoy’s encomiums to self-indulgence might also find in Mr. Vance a voice who can speak credibly — with the force of personal experience — about the consequences of a world shorn of traditional cultural and social restraints. The same young man who might agree with Mr. Vance that low birthrates pose a dire threat to civilization might be more interested in Elon Musk’s suggestion that part of the solution is to colonize Mars.
To me, this vision of the coalition, in which the insights of competing factions subtly influence and refine one another while competing for mastery, looks suspiciously like the Republican Party before Mr. Trump supposedly remade it in his image. That was a time when godless libertarians looking to shrink government vied for dominance with Moral Majority types worried about premarital sex. I now think there are good reasons for believing that Mr. Trump’s coalition will look more or less the same as it does now in four years, when he is gone.
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