Conservatism at a Crossroads
Which way, Republican man?
The Republican National Convention (RNC) has been taking place this week in Milwaukee, with four nights of raucous politicking and pandering – as has the norm for pretty much every political convention since the turn of the 21st century. What is abnormal about this RNC is far more interesting, however. It is taking place just days after the attempted assassination of the party’s nominee and the former President of the United States, Donald Trump. (If you want to see what I’ve written about that attempt, I had a rapid reaction piece out the following day.) There have been relatively few such unsuccessful attempts in modern history, none occurring so close to such an event. That makes this RNC unique. As does the status of the opponent, incumbent President Joe Biden, who has been facing something like an internal coup since his debate debacle in June and his follow-on age-related gaffes. The pressure has been on for the President to drop out in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris, if not toss it to an open convention with a nomination fight the likes of which we haven’t seen in a very long time. This would truly be a historic occasion.
And yet, this piece is about neither of those epochal issues. Instead, it is about something quite a bit more parochial and inside-baseball: the future of the Republican Party as a vessel for American conservatism. For those who care about the ideological movement that has been the defining feature of the political right in this country since the end of the Second World War, as I do, this may be the convention’s most fascinating and telling aspect.
Two video clips from the first three days of the convention tell the tale terrifically. The first is from the very first day of the RNC, when the formal nomination process occurred. Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, the Minority Leader of the Senate, spoke for his state’s delegation and faced lusty boos from the crowd. The second clip is the speech given by Ohio Senator JD Vance, the party’s nominee for Vice President, to cap off the night on Wednesday. The crowd reaction to the speech – and the broader online reaction to Vance’s candidacy more broadly – was the polar opposite, with loud applause from the assembled Trump-friendly crowd. The contrasts between these two politicians, the GOP base reaction to each, and their policy ideas spell out the enormous and rapid shift away from traditional conservatism and toward populist nationalism within the Republican Party.
Mitch McConnell is undoubtedly the elder statesman of the Republican Party, serving in the Senate since the 1980s. He has led the Republican Senate caucus since 2007 and is the longest-serving congressional party leader in American history. Unlike our current president, McConnell (82-years-old as of writing) is willingly stepping down from his leadership post at the end of this Congress in January 2025. He will do so as the most important GOP legislator of the past half century at least. It is arguable that he has had the most internal influence from a congressional post in Republican history, going back to the earliest days of the party in the 1850s. (Robert Taft is up there, too, of course.) He was crucial in the Citizens United case, protecting political speech by citizens from an overzealous bipartisan effort to restrict it. He led the passage of the biggest tax reform act since the 1980s, drove the reduction of the regulatory bureaucracy, and shepherded legislation on criminal justice reform, environmental protection, and economic relief during the coronavirus pandemic. He has long been a key supporter of a muscular American role abroad, defender of American global primacy, and stalwart opponent of America’s foreign enemies.
Despite dealing with Democrat presidents for most of his leadership term, McConnell was able to advance a conservative agenda and forestall the most radical progressive legislative plans and nominations. His so-called “obstructionism” under the Obama administration was, in reality, a canny playing of political hardball within the rules and norms of the American system. The Senate is not obliged to pass the president’s agenda. Failure to pass partisan laws through a divided government – gridlock – is exactly how our federal system was meant to work. National laws must be accepted by the vast majority of the nation’s voters; McConnell ensured that only bipartisan, broadly popular laws, including among his own coalition, were passed. This obviously infuriated Democrats, leading to the ‘pen and phone’ strategy of executive overreach under Obama and opening the door for Trump to do the same thing, with awful results for Democratic priorities.
His biggest legacy, however, is in judicial confirmations. McConnell, always a master of the parliamentary rules of the Senate, fundamentally reshaped the American judiciary to fit a more originalist, conservative strain of legal thinking. He was never the first to alter the rules of the Senate, but played aggressively by the rules his opponents chose. His opposite number, Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), was the one who eliminated the filibuster for presidential appointments instead of working to find compromise picks; McConnell warned him of this and stated that Democrats would regret the choice. They certainly did a few years later, when Republicans were able to use these new rules to confirm three Justices to the Supreme Court in just four years – as well as blocking Obama’s appointment of Merrick Garland in a controversial, but entirely rational and legal maneuver. Those judicial appointments, both at the highest level and in the lower courts, have already begun to tell. In just the past few years, we have seen major victories for the conservative movement: overturning Roe v. Wade, minimizing deference to bureaucratic agencies, protecting freedom of speech and religion, limiting affirmative action, and much more. And this is just the beginning; the courts will lean in the originalist direction for decades to come.
JD Vance, on the other hand, has a compelling life story paired with minimal experience – not unsurprising for a 39-year-old. (And I’m 34, so this isn’t a dig.) His bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, was a powerful tale of rising to overcome life’s hurdles and achieve the American Dream of prosperity, independence, and personal security. Vance served honorably in the Marine Corps after September 11, 2001, graduated from Yale Law School, and worked successfully in the venture capital field. He won election to the Senate from Ohio in 2022 and served there for less than 2 years before being named Donald Trump’s running mate. I disagree wholeheartedly with his policy positions (more on which soon), but he seems to be a good man outside of politics. He is intelligent, well-spoken, and has a loving family. He also seems to lack political scruples or principles.
Over the course of his brief time in public life, he has dramatically shifted his political views, always seeming to fall in with the rising tide of right-wing opinion in an attempt to climb to the top of the greasy pole of American politics. At first, he was a traditional conservative not all that different from McConnell – promoting a strong America overseas, seeking a reduction in the scope of government, and advocating personal responsibility. Now, he has fully embraced the populism of the MAGA movement, casting himself as its intellectual lodestar. With his selection as the VP nominee, this position has been solidified and endorsed by the movement’s leader himself. Vance is a neo-isolationist, seeking retrenchment and promoting the decline of American power abroad. He is a populist on economics, pushing the warmed-over socialism of ‘conservative’ thinkers like Oren Cass over the Reaganite orthodoxy on trade, markets, and capitalism – an orthodoxy that has dramatically improved America’s economic position since its promulgation. He has repudiated the idea of individual agency – at least for his favored constituencies – in favor of a top-down Big Government model that wouldn’t be out of place in a Democratic convention anytime in the last 75 years.
This is the choice. Not between youth and age; there are plenty of traditionally conservative younger folks (Mike Gallagher rings a bell). Instead, it is between conservatism, properly understood in the American context, and populist nationalism redolent of European-style right-wing politics. Between free market capitalism and government-driven cryptosocialism. Between an assertive America at the center of the world stage and a hobbled, enfeebled America myopically withdrawing from that rostrum. Between confronting our enemies and avoiding them in the hopes they won’t bother us. Between empowering individual Americans to make free choices about their own lives and restricting those choices in the name of some nebulous ‘common good’. Between the reality of past success – both in passing good laws and preventing bad ones – and the fantasy of past failure, paired with the promise of some future success that will likely never materialize. Between traditional Republican policy and mere mimicry of Democrat politics. Between pragmatism and radicalism. Between repudiating decline and embracing it.
The choice couldn’t be starker. Despite the Republican base’s affection for Vance over McConnell and the former’s selection as the party’s VP nominee, the future of conservatism remains contingent. The question poses itself: which way, Republican man?