Ohio’s selection of JD Vance — the 37 year old investor and venture capitalist whose future in Washington seems like a 50-year fact — as the Republican nominee for 2022’s US Senate signals a change in how the post-Trump GOP is orienting itself against what the Claremont Institute identifies as the Old Guard Republicans in the mold of Ronald Reagan:
The Old Guard and the Never Trumpers hoped that all that talk of immigration, trade protectionism, and America First would go away. But it hasn’t gone away, and for good reason: the problems Trump identified, the crises he was willing to name when few others would, haven’t gone away either. They have gotten worse, because the Old Guard doesn’t have solutions to them.
The editors point back toward the issues that carried the day for Glenn Youngkin in Virginia as bellwethers against woke capitalism and their putative allies in the corporatist right:
Like Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia, Vance’s win indicates that people of every race and both sexes are justly incensed when they learn about the divisive poison of the new Left’s racial tribalism, and when they see the ravages of transhumanist ideology in their communities. The new Right’s message is simply that Americans will not stand to see their productive capacities eroded, the wealth of their nation leeched away in foreign lands, and their children’s psyches compromised by invasive digital and ideological catechesis. That is the way forward for this country, and that is the path the GOP will chart if it wants to win.
Square in the targets of this critique is the old Reagan-era fusionism of the conservative right with the libertarian left and their championing of globalization in the face of Soviet Communism.
While careful not to condemn Reagan directly, the op-ed does take square aim at Reaganism and its myriad failures, particularly on immigration and job creation back home, though without the perceived benefits of not living under the threat of the Soviet Empire, an incredible rise in American salaries and technology, and the near elimination of poverty in the developing world.
Yet the shift in tone in the post-Trump era — or the second term of the Trump era if prognosticators are correct — is that rather than being “honorable conservatives” Trump has taught the Right that it is OK to fight back. That it is OK to say no to Critical Race Theory (CRT) and a hypersexualized culture. That it is OK to tell the institutions that they are failing us and that conservatives shouldn’t be reduced to simply making the dreams and schemes of socialists affordable.
Claremont is keen to point out that Vance himself was a former Never Trump Republican who found religion, so it seems. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy was never intended to be a magnum opus much less an introduction to Ohio politics, but rather a widespread lament on how the American political system fed the decline of Appalachian communities — in short, what was good for an Excel spreadsheet wasn’t precisely good for small towns and local communities centered around one or two factories.
More to the point, the op-ed goes to lengths to describe the new conservatism as something far different than the old Buckleyite consensus, and what defines that difference is a willingness to fight rather than compromise — or more accurately, a willingness not to be so entirely noble.
Are there dangers to such an approach?
One might argue that by becoming Leftists we are succumbing to the disease of dividing America into opposing camps rather than upholding constitutional order — a bedrock of Jeffersonian pluralism that has defined many a member of the conservative movement from the Whigs to the present day.
One might also argue that globalization — though the key to destroying the Soviet Empire and the despoiler of local communities as jobs are shipped to places with cheaper (or forced) labor — is in sore need of a rethink. As the microchip shortage created in Taiwan and the supply chain crisis in food, fertilizers and energy continues to manifest themselves, redundancy is a national security issue. Maybe it’s better to make these things here in the United States, even at the cost of higher wages?
Yet the Rubicon seems to have been crossed here. So long as the Left continues to seek to fight, Republicans have an obligation to meet them on their terms. Of course, this “fight” is pure Marxist theory of revolutionaries vs. reactionaries, but at some point the realization that the challenge created by decadence and the “dead consensus” needs to be met and not reconciled.
