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 don’t get it still. You could see it in their reactions to J.D. Vance getting selected as Donald Trump’s running mate, ranging from muted to disappointed to exasperated.
These are guys who support Trump and the New Right movement only incidentally and reluctantly, as the least bad option currently available to them. They’re not enthusiastic about having to do so, and they’re still hoping — yearning, even — for a return to the Republican Party of old, governed by Reagan’s tripartite coalition of Chamber of Commerce business conservatives, national security hawks, and Falwell-era Christian conservatives.
These people still — after nearly a decade — view Trump and his associated movement as a fad. An unruly teenage period that will one day pass, after which the adults in the party can lead the GOP back to its respectable roots, and modern-day conservatives will learn proper reverence for the ideology of Ronald Reagan (born 1911) and William F. Buckley (born 1925).
Here’s what they either don’t get or refuse to come to terms with: That conservative movement is dead. It died because it simply didn’t work, and it’s a death well deserved.
It died when George W. Bush, the spiritual — and biological — heir of the movement, launched an unnecessary war that left thousands of Americans, most of them from working-class backgrounds, dead or maimed on the streets of Iraq.
It died when conservatives offered no solutions for the economic malaise affecting middle-class families aside from the standard tactic of cutting taxes, largely for those in the top 0.1 percent of households.
It died when the GOP didn’t do anything meaningful to address the crisis at the southern border or the crisis from the opioid epidemic.
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 died for countless reasons like these, and it is never coming back. 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 descendants of the Bush clan, who still get their stale ideas from the yellowed pages of old print copies of National Review. Establishment figures more than happy to return to a platform of foreign entanglement and domestic stagnation.
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 don’t think he minds their disdain.
I welcome J.D. Vance’s ascendance. And hopefully, the rest of the movement soon does as well.
