A decade ago, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign broke the back of the so-called globalist-Chamber of Commerce Republican establishment that for decades had dominated policymaking and candidate selection.
Now, as Vice President JD Vance gears up to campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028, a central element of his strategy is to win over what is fast becoming a nascent MAGA establishment.
Which raises two questions:
First, can a MAGA movement that coalesced around Trump — based on a shared hatred of the left — continue without Trump?
Second, can Trumpism be institutionalized in a way that makes it a sustained, if not permanent, political force dominating the Republican Party and the right more broadly?
Vance is determined to prove that the answers to both questions is yes.
In fact, Vance began the process of constructing a new right establishment in 2019, five years before Trump picked him as his running mate. Vance joined forces with Christopher Buskirk, Rebekah Mercer and Peter Thiel — megadonors and mega-fund-raisers for the right — to form Rockbridge Network, a secretive organization with an ambitious plan:
We aim to build a political coalition that will win national elections with 55 percent of the vote. We can only do this by building infrastructure and pursuing projects that produce outsized returns on investment. One way to think of Rockbridge is as an investment manager, a kind of political venture capital firm. It is our job to leverage our investors’ capital with the right political expertise to ensure results. We are pursuing political alpha.
Because most of its activities are not publicly reported, it’s hard to determine whether Rockbridge has achieved anything approaching that goal. Vance’s role in its founding, however, illuminates the scope — and the grandiosity — of his thinking early on, when he was still a political neophyte, two years before he announced his Senate campaign.
While the role of Rockridge remains murky, one thing is clear: A group of political and intellectual movements are in the ascendancy on the right, and they have the potential to become an alternative Republican establishment.
Three students of the right — Laura K. Field, the author of “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right”; Shikha Dalmia, president of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism and editor of the The UnPopulist; and Damon Linker. a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a prolific essayist at his Notes From the Middleground Substack, have each written about the topology of the MAGA right.
I asked Linker about the changing character of Republican elites, and he emailed back:
There is a new MAGA establishment in control of the Republican Party, but it is badly fractured.
The MAGA successors to the Reaganites include people motivated by religious faith and people whose outlook is entirely secular; people who believe in economic and technological dynamism and those who are maximally skeptical of so-called medical advances (like vaccines) and the public-health bureaucracy; policymakers who would like to deconstruct the administrative state, sending power back to the states and individuals, and others who want to seize the administrative state for right-wing ends; groups that want the U.S. to play an active role in global leadership, others who would like us to step back from Europe and NATO in favor of checking China’s rise in East Asia, and still others who would prefer us to focus our attention on reviving the Monroe Doctrine of hemispheric dominance while ceding control of Europe and Asia so that Russia and China, respectively, can dominate those regions.
The driving force uniting these interests, Linker argued, “was fear of and anger at the left, which was embodied in the Biden administration, the efforts of law enforcement at the federal and state levels to charge Trump with crimes, and its institutional power in universities, media organizations and the corporate sector.”
The task of uniting the MAGA establishment after Trump, in Linker’s view, “will fall to his presumptive successor as head of the movement, Vice President JD Vance. I don’t see him possessing the same level of charisma as Trump. On the other hand, Vance has worked hard to cultivate ties with most of the factions.”
Linker, citing Field’s book, described four key MAGA groups:
National Conservatives (Yoram Hazony, Josh Hammer, Christopher Rufo, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, R.R. Reno of First Things magazine, Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, and Vance himself). They “tend to lead with a nationalist vision of politics, one modeled on Israeli Zionism, and to view liberalism as a form of ‘imperialism’ out to conquer dissenters at home and abroad.”
Postliberals (Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin and, once again, Vance). They “have a much more jaundiced view of the U.S. and its history, which they treat as fundamentally liberal and therefore in need of serious reform to bring the country into alignment with the Highest Good. Basically, they loathe liberalism and all its works, at home as well as abroad.”
The “Claremonsters” (Michael Anton, Thomas Klingenstein, John Eastman and Charles Kesler, who are affiliated with the Claremont Institute; Larry Arnn of Hillsdale College, and, yes, Vance). “These figures insist on a vision of the American founding and statesmanship that makes much of what has happened in and to the country since the presidency of Woodrow Wilson more than a century ago appear to be a moral and political abomination. The progressives, the New Deal, the Great Society, political correctness, wokeness — it’s one damn anti-American heresy after another.”
The “Hard Right Underbelly” (Curtis Yarvin; Costin Alamariu, better known by his online name, Bronze Age Pervert; Charles Cornish-Dale, the Raw Egg Nationalist; Darren Beattie). “They are united by demagogic, reactionary extremism and delight in playing with outright fascism or worse, all with an ironic twinkle in their eyes. I’d therefore also put Nick Fuentes here, as well as Steve Bannon, and maybe even the latter-day Tucker Carlson.”
Field, who replied to my queries by email, believes these four wings of conservatism are relatively cohesive and willing to join forces: “I argue that these new groups come together to form a network that now dominates the party and so has replaced the old establishment.”
Despite some internal conflicts, Field continued,
What I call the MAGA New Right stood explicitly against the old G.O.P. establishment from the outset, and their rise to dominance was signaled clearly at some crucial moments over the last five or so years — for example, with Kevin Roberts’s rise to the presidency of the Heritage Foundation, with the creation and implementation of Project 2025, with the radical shifts in the culture of the G.O.P., and of course with the rise of JD Vance.
The MAGA establishment, Field wrote, carries some clear liabilities for the Republican Party:
My sense is that these groups are far more radical than much of the voting public, including within the G.O.P. The G.O.P. base is loyal to Trump, but I do not think they are loyal to these background intellectuals and activists.
In 2024, much of the public refused to believe that Project 2025 was real because it sounded so radical. Now everyone can see the radicalism and they don’t like it. The president is polling very badly. The people I write about are largely responsible for the extreme policies of this second administration.
Liability or not, this new establishment has generally welcomed Vance with open arms, Field contended:
Across all the main groups — from the Claremont group who have honored him repeatedly, to the National Conservatives who have welcomed him to their conferences, to Peter Thiel who assisted his rise, to the Postliberal camp with which he is closest — they are stalwart supporters who were extremely gratified when he gained the nomination.
My sense is that their allegiance to Vance is far more secure than their allegiance to President Trump. I have seen almost zero criticism of Vance coming from anyone with influence in the MAGA New Right. Even Curtis Yarvin is on the record as having said that “In almost every way, JD is perfect.”
I asked Field whether the major constituencies of the MAGA establishment can form a united front. She replied:
Absolutely they can and have formed allegiances. The factions I write about have all kinds of theoretical disagreements — about the history of the country, the nature of the Constitution and the proper role for government — but they are very happy to cooperate in their support of the Trump/Vance administration.
One example that comes to mind is an article that University of Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen wrote early in this second administration where he explained why the MAGA-DOGE divide (between Bannon and Musk) did not matter as much as people tended to think it did, and he also explained how Vance would be able to carry forward both dimensions — populist and tech-futurist — of the Trump agenda into the future.
Vance, in turn, has adopted a strategy to win the Republican nomination that in certain respects is the antithesis of Trump’s approach in 2015-16 — the people versus the powers that be — and more reminiscent of George W. Bush’s top-down campaign in 2000, when he first won over what were then the major conservative interest groups, governors and senators, members of the Republican National Committee, major donors and Christian evangelical leaders.
Vance’s strategy, however, carries with it the same potential risks and dangers that faced progressive Democrats such as George McGovern in 1972. After winning the nomination, McGovern struggled to defend his commitments to left orthodoxy, a canonical case of a problem that has bedeviled both parties, in which a committed core of activists helps win the primaries and hurts the party in general elections.
If he wins the 2028 nomination, Vance will not only have to defend his alliances with MAGA groups well to the right of the American electorate, the so-called median voter, but he will also inevitably be pressured to renounce some of the more contentious stands adopted by his supporters.
These problems have already begun to emerge as Vance has been accused of equivocating on the question of antisemitism on the right after he dismissed the anti-Black, anti-Jewish remarks by leaders of the Young Republicans: “The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys.”
But looking toward 2028, how would Vance articulate his thoughts on some of Yarvin’s most provocative statements? For example, Yarvin wrote,
The liquidation of democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law, and the transfer of absolute power to a mysterious figure known only as the Receiver, who in the process of converting Washington into a heavily armed, ultra-profitable corporation will abolish the press, smash the universities, sell the public schools and transfer “decivilized populations” to “secure relocation facilities” where they will be assigned to “mandatory apprenticeships.”
Would Vance as presidential nominee rise to the defense of Thiel’s assertion that he “no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible,” that “the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy’” or that “there are no truly free places left in our world” — meaning that it is crucial or even necessary for true believers in freedom to establish new, autonomous communities in cyberspace, outer space or on the open seas.
When I asked Dalmia, the author of a prescient 2022 essay “A Typology of the New Right,” about Vance and a MAGA establishment, she was far more skeptical than Field or Linker about the viability of both the man and the movement.
In a phone conversation, Dalmia argued that Trump’s lack of ideological commitment and his transactional approach to governing are essential to his ability to hold together seemingly incompatible MAGA factions:
Trump’s genius was that he gave every faction of the right its signature issue, and because he was giving each its signature issue, each group forgot about the other things that they didn’t like that were part of his agenda. Libertarians got tax cuts and deregulation in his first term. Catholics got Supreme Court justices who were going to overturn Roe v. Wade. The paleoconservatives got isolationism in some form. And the America First wing and the neoconservatives got building up America’s defenses in a hawkish sort of way.
None of the contenders who are likely to replace him have this cult of personality. JD Vance doesn’t have that. And so they are going to be left with one thing, essentially hatred of the leftist enemy.
In Dalmia’s view, Vance’s deep ideological commitments, encompassing moral conservatism, protectionism, distrust of free markets, state intervention in the nation’s culture, nationalism and antiglobalism, are politically debilitating.
In Trump’s case, Dalmia said:
Nobody expected any consistency from him. He could put together a very, very contradictory coalition, give them their top issues and call it a day.
Vance can’t do that. He’s an ideologue. He’s trying to craft this idea of a certain kind of America that’s a desirable America which is rooted not in constitutional traditions, but some preconstitutional framework, which just doesn’t make any sense in our framework. In the process, he’s going to alienate portions of the MAGA right. And he can’t make up the deficit with his own persona.
Vance, Dalmia said, “talks in extremely self-righteous terms. Trump is a bully with a certain charm, and Vance is a scold without charm. That’s not appealing.”
Another danger for Vance is that the MAGA establishment he is courting may turn out to be less than meets the eye, that the ability of the professoriate at the Claremont Institute — or the angry bloggers and social media stars who make up the hard-right underbelly — to influence major blocs of Republican primary voters is a mirage masking real political weakness.
“There really is no MAGA establishment,” wrote Don Kettl, a professor of public policy at the University of Texas and the author of the forthcoming book “The Right-Wing Idea Factory: From Traditionalism to Trumpism.”
Unlike traditional conservatism, Kettl noted by email, the right has been reduced to “a bald fight for political power, with different ideas used to reinforce different strategies,” with the result that “the next generation of kingmakers will be the ones with deep pockets, not deep ideas. I don’t sense a huge appetite for ideology on the right. There’s an appetite, instead, for winning.”
Another critique of the notion of a MAGA establishment is that there is only one superordinate force on the right, and his name is Trump.
Sheri Berman, a political scientist at Barnard, contended in an email that Trump “has managed over the past eight years to remake the party into a loyal, indeed sycophantic, vehicle for himself.”
If Trump holds the Republican Party together through the end of his presidency, Berman continued, “The $64,000 question is what happens when he is gone. It will be difficult for any successor to reproduce his quasi-Leninist control over the party or to forge a new dominant ‘establishment’ around any single faction.”
Instead, Berman argued, the post-Trump Republican Party will be torn by a conflict between what she believes are the two dominant wings: “those who want the party to embrace a far-right, illiberal, white or Christian nationalist identity, satisfying the Tucker Carlson-Viktor Orban wing, perhaps with JD Vance as its champion,” and “those pushing for a more mildly nationalist, economically populist, noninterventionist but not fully isolationist, and not openly anti-democratic posture, where the Oren Cass, Sohrab Ahmari and Quincy Institute types would be comfortable, and perhaps with Marco Rubio as the leading figure.”
There is considerable skepticism among the political scientists I spoke to about the viability of a MAGA establishment once Trump leaves the White House.
William Marble, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, wrote in an email that the Republican Party has become so entwined with Trump that there is little room for the emergence of a separate power center or establishment.
“The Republican Party has largely become a personalist party defined by its charismatic leader,” Marble contended. “The personalism of Trump’s governance undermines the consolidation of an ‘establishment’ that can operate independently from him.”
Rachel Blum, a political scientist at the University of Oklahoma, wrote by email that she agreed that “Trump/MAGA are the new Republican establishment in that they control most levers of power and influence within the party,” but she quickly cautioned:
They are also a thin-centered establishment compared to previous instantiations of the party establishment. Many of the Trump-world power brokers are new to politics/rose to power through Trump. Many don’t have a firm ideology beyond loyalty to Trump.
In addition, Blum went on to say, “many of these figures are not in the position to act as kingmakers (it’s hard for me to imagine Pat Deneen crowning the next nominee).” But also you have to “add to this the complication that the right has faced since the Tea Party: They are suspicious of insiders, but they also want power.”
There is, of course, another alternative altogether that would put to rest all the ins and outs of Vance’s machinations and the emergence of a new Republican establishment: that over the next three years, Trump and the MAGA movement implode, pushed to the margin by economic incompetence, corruption and the abuse of power.
That, however, may be too much to hope for.
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