J. D. Vance Pick Represents Another Nail in Coffin of Reagan Republicanism

But it may not be the final one.

L ast week, in a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, J. D. Vance, the senator (and now vice-presidential candidate), argued that he had growing confidence in America’s future because the movement was displacing the old guard of the Republican Party.

A NeverTrumper in 2016, Vance explained that when he became a “convert” to Trumpism by 2019 ahead of his Senate run in Ohio, Donald Trump had not yet fully seized control of the party.

“Even though he was the president of the United States, there were already people who were aggressively pushing back against his influence, who were already planning a return to basically reimplementing the Wall Street Journal editorial page’s preferred positions in 2019,” he said. “I think that’s over now. And the fact that it’s over is a huge, huge win for you guys [i.e. national conservatives], but mostly, it’s a huge, huge win for the American people.”

During his short political career, Vance (who, at 39, was born after The Karate Kid debuted in theaters) has been a leader of a movement aimed at wrestling away the Republican Party from the orthodoxy of free markets and muscular foreign policy. Instead, Vance’s vision is for a Republican Party that embraces large government programs, is more open to taxing corporations, that shows more foreign-policy restraint, and that wields the power of the state in the culture wars.

From 1980 until Trump’s nomination in 2016, the Republican Party was dominated by Reagan’s version of three-legged-stool conservatism. During Trump’s first term, despite his populist rhetoric, Trump was heavily influenced by this tradition. As his running mate, he picked Mike Pence, who started his life as a Democrat until the Reagan era. “His ideals inspired me to leave the party of my youth and become a Republican like he did,” Pence said. Once in office, Trump’s major legislative accomplishment — a tax reform that offered large and permanent tax cuts to corporations and temporary tax reductions to individuals — was a policy that any Republican presidential candidate (from Mitt Romney to Jeb Bush) could have felt comfortable signing into law.

As popular as he was with the party’s voters, first-term Trump still felt the need to pay a certain tribute to those who had run the party before he initiated a hostile takeover. In 2016, Trump won the primaries but faced significant opposition that persisted past the convention. The party adopted a platform that was mostly the same as what had come before. Even those who didn’t directly oppose Trump treated him as somewhat of a temporary intruder.

At this point, however, there isn’t much debate over who is in control of the party. In this election, Trump never faced a serious challenge to the nomination, and there isn’t an effort to try and oust him at the convention. Pence, who ran as a Reaganite conservative, did not even make it to Iowa, while Florida governor Ron DeSantis — an early hope to bridge the gap between the two eras — practically speaking, did not fare much better. The RNC — now packed with Trump loyalists — rubber-stamped a platform that both in style (short, filled with caps and bullet points) and substance (hard language on immigration and tariffs and opposition to entitlement cuts) wholly reflects Trump’s influence.

While other VP short listers offered some salve to the pre-Trump era GOP, the pick of Vance represents a clean break.

If there is any straight line between Vance’s economic views from the time when he hated Trump to his time as a Trump booster, it’s a belief that the party had to move away from limited-government ideology.

In 2017, Vance excoriated the House bill that partially repealed Obamacare for cutting taxes and slashing Medicaid. “People looked at [Trump] and they saw a Republican who sounded reasonable about jobs and economic growth and things that people cared about,” he observed. “Pocketbook issues. But at the same time he wasn’t saying ‘I’m going to take away your Social Security and your Medicaid.’”

While, in a 2010 blog post, Vance was sympathetic to entitlement reform, he opposed it during his bid for the Senate. “I don’t support cuts to Social Security or Medicare and think privatizing Social Security is a bad idea,” he told the Huffington Post.

Vance has also criticized conservatives for being overly attached to free markets in a way that hurts the middle class and unilaterally disarms the Right in the culture war.

“I just don’t care,” he explained on an appearance with Tucker Carlson about regulating private tech companies. “I don’t care that Google is a private company, because it has too much power. And if you want to have a country where people can live their lives freely, you have to be concerned about power, whether it’s concentrated in government or concentrated in big corporations.”

As the Biden administration, under Federal Trade Commission chairwoman Lina Khan, has attempted to use antitrust law more aggressively, Vance has been one of her only Republican fans, arguing, “I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job.”

When corporations in Georgia came out against the state’s voting reforms, Vance argued in favor of using government policy to punish them. “Raise their taxes and do whatever else is necessary to fight these goons,” he posted. Adding his own twist on a famous Reagan line, he wrote, “We can have an American Republic or a global oligarchy, and it’s time for choosing.”

On foreign policy, Vance has not only shown an unease at getting involved in foreign conflicts, but has been reluctant to offer moral support for defending American values abroad even rhetorically. Vance has portrayed his opposition to the Ukraine war as a pragmatic matter of math. But his rhetoric has gone beyond merely arguing that Americans shouldn’t spend money on aid, to a proud lack of interest. “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” Vance told Steve Bannon days before Russia invaded.

Those who want to bury Reaganite conservatism hope that because Trump is limited to one term, Vance would now be set up to be his natural heir in 2028.

But there are two possibilities that could move events in the opposite direction.

One is that the debt crisis, which both parties are intent to ignore, will eventually blow up in their faces. Barring changes, within the next presidential term, accumulated debt will exceed the record levels from World War II, and Medicare and Social Security will be closer to insolvency. During the debate over whether to pursue punishing tax increases or reforms to entitlements, it’s inevitable that there will be a resurgence of interest in limited-government philosophy.

The political reason to bet against Vance being the future of the Republican Party comes down to the limited political life expectancy of those who serve under Trump. Vance may think he is smart enough to avoid the same fate as Trump’s previous vice president (having expressed that instead of allowing the counting of votes on January 6 as Pence did, he would have instructed states to send multiple slates of electors to Congress). But the Republican graveyard is filled with the tombstones of figures who believed they could advance their careers and their policy goals by association with Trump, only to eventually find themselves on the outs for unpredictable reasons.

So, while it would be premature to argue that the Vance selection represents the final nail in the coffin for Reagan Republicanism — it certainly represents another strong nail.