Don’t Mourn the ‘Old’ Republican Party
There’s a rearguard motion afoot in some conservative quarters grousing about the Republican National Convention underway in Milwaukee. The objection: the 2024 Republican Party is failing conservatism.
What?
National Review carries a piece by Natan Ehrenreich about how some conservatives are in a tizzy because of the Vance vice presidential nomination. As these Chicken Littles put it, “fusionism, Reaganism, conservatism — whatever you want to call it — is dead.”
To his credit, Ehrenreich admits that many of these simplifications are straw men. But let’s dig deeper into the claims.
The fact that these “conservatives” can’t figure out what has died — “fusionism, Reaganism, conservatism” — suggests they really can’t identify the content of any of them...but that whatever passed away was what they liked.
What they want is “fusionism.” Fusionism was the term Bill Buckley and the National Review crowd gave to their marriage of convenience between social and fiscal conservatives. In the name of cobbling together a critical mass of potential winners, social and fiscal conservatives were supposed to cooperate to gain power.
Let’s be honest. In that arrangement, fiscal conservatives usually came out on top, and social conservatives often came away with nothing. There was always time to legislate another capital gains tax cut. There was never time to legislate pro-family policies.
While social conservatives were faithful to the arranged marriage, often acting like old-style spouses deferring to their fiscal conservative partners, those fiscal conservatives were not the most faithful. Truth be told, once the fiscal conservatives got what they wanted, like a tax cut, they usually rolled over and were snoring faster than you could say “no flag-burning amendment.”
Social conservatives always went to the back of the bus. What worries fiscal conservatives about today’s Republican party is that they’re going to find out what it feels like riding on the rumble seat.
Donald Trump’s refashioning of the Republican party finally brought middle- and working-class Americans in without consigning them to the back of the bus. Trump and J.D. Vance envision a Republican party that works for American workers and the American middle class that is the bulk of social and economic stabilization. It’s about time. In fact, it’s more than 50 years overdue.
Why do I say that? Because it finishes a process begun half a century ago by Richard Nixon. In 1968, Nixon appealed to the “Silent Majority.” He recognized that middle- and working-class Americans were increasingly alienated from the politics of LBJ. As they watched American cities like Detroit and Newark burn, saw Democrats at their own convention fighting with police, and suffered with inflation, they recognized that America needed a course change. They recognized that the Democrat party, whose policies under FDR they believed — correctly or not — was responsible for giving working-class Americans a leg up was no longer the party of 1968. And if you have any doubt about the tone-deafness of the Democrat party, after losing in ’68, they chose to track even farther left with George McGovern, the 1972 version of the “Squad.” Of course, they then had to coin a new slogan: “As goes D.C., so goes Massachusetts.”
Nixon detached working- and middle-class Americans from the Democrats. But he didn’t attach them to the Republicans. Sure, establishment Republicans came for their votes every few years, but — except for Ronald Reagan — that establishment really didn’t connect with working- and middle-class Americans.
Donald Trump won in 2016 because he reassembled that “Silent Majority,” allowing him to blow through the “blue wall” of the Rust Belt. Donald Trump did what I long believed conservatives should have done fifty years ago. If Nixon had bonded with urban ethnics, traditional blacks and Latinos, Catholics, Jews, and Orthodox in 1968–73, the Northeast might not be a solid blue wall it is today — at least because not every Democrat would take his political cues from the far left. Conservatives blew half a century.
In 2016, the hillbillies, the rednecks, the white trash, the deplorables, the bitters clinging to their guns and Bibles, the Christian nationalists...all found somebody who at least sounded as though he got their concerns. Who didn’t ask for their votes while promising, in the name of “free trade,” to export their jobs to China. Who didn’t campaign on “I know you want controlled immigration, but we really need an expanded guest worker program, more foreign H-1B computer programmers, and even more immigration.” Who are fed up with protecting and coddling criminals. Who didn’t tell them that inflation was “transitory” and they shouldn’t be so bothered about deciding whether to buy a house, gasoline, or eggs.
Republicans will become the majority party only when they represent the majority of working Americans, Americans who want to live safe and secure lives, who want a better life for their kids than they had for themselves. Americans saw that in the Trump administration. And they see it in J.D. Vance.
J.D. Vance was not my first choice for vice president. I don’t agree with him on everything. That said, a man who coped with adversity to reach prosperity and a seat in the United States Senate is a man who is connected to Americans outside, not inside the D.C. Beltway. And that’s whom America needs.
That’s the America speaking at the convention. The America speaking is Arizona ranchers who watch 3,000 “asylum seekers” walk across their land.
So if the fusionists still think social conservatives should go to the back of the bus, if they think Republicans need to go back to talking about “free trade” while mumbling “fair trade” under their noses, if they want to pretend America benefits from a globalist agenda, if they think prioritizing the social interests of people rather than capital (which should serve people) is the way the GOP should go...well, wake up and smell the coffee. That’s not the Republican party gathered in Milwaukee.
And not the Republican party of the future.
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