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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House
The writer is an FT contributing editor, chief economist at American Compass and writes the Understanding America newsletter
In his speech accepting the Republican party’s nomination for vice-president, Senator JD Vance returned repeatedly to a formulation that at first seemed inapt. “Jobs were sent overseas and our children were sent to war,” he said. Both might be true, but were they related? “From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the financial crisis to the great recession . . . the people who govern this country have failed and failed again.”
Was this the foreign policy part of the speech or the economy part? For Vance’s purposes, they were one and the same. His sort of genuine conservative had controlled neither portion of the Republican Party’s agenda in his lifetime, and he was here to take them back.
No Republican candidate for president has earned 51 per cent of the popular vote since the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the Grand Old Party where Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan once built dominant, conservative coalitions across regions and classes, a new generation of politicians and their consultants has abandoned any pretence of government of, by and for the people. Instead they have sought to secure narrow victories through clever deployment of wedge issues and sophisticated microtargeting, using power gained to pursue a broadly unpopular agenda.
“I earned capital in this campaign, political capital,” said President George W Bush in 2004 after clearing the 50-percent threshold by seven-tenths of a point, “and now I intend to spend it.” He did so on a disastrous push to privatise social security — within a year his approval rating fell below 40 per cent.
The fundamental problem for Republicans was that, with the cold war over, their coalition had outlived its purpose. Reagan’s so-called “three-legged stool” brought together free-market economics, social conservatism, and global interventionism to win the battle against communism. But with no Soviet Union to combat, support for free markets hardened into a rigid market fundamentalism in the party. A recognition that containment required fighting on many battlefields became an eagerness to fight anywhere, anytime.
This was neither conservative, nor popular, nor wise. The junior Bush’s presidency is buried under the resulting ruins on Wall Street and in the Middle East. Mitt Romney tried valiantly but unsuccessfully to resuscitate the coalition. Donald Trump put it out of its misery. But there is no Trumpism, only Trump. Ever since he vanquished 16 conventional 2016 primary candidates, the question has been: What comes next?
In Vance’s remarks, the contours of an answer begin to emerge. The speech sounded unlike anything heard from the podium of a Republican National Convention in a generation — no mention of tax cuts, of shrinking government, of “job creators”. To the contrary, “we’re done catering to Wall Street,” whose “barons crashed the economy,” he said. “We’ll commit to the working man.” On economics and foreign policy, respectively, the libertarian and neoconservative appendages that have so badly disfigured conservatism are being excised. In their place, Vance is proposing the return of actual conservatism.
He described an economics that emphasises the importance of family, community and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity. To this end he has proposed rolling back globalisation, restricting immigration, boosting domestic industry, cracking down on Wall Street, revitalising organised labour, providing better alternatives to traditional college degrees, and helping working families make ends meet.
Unlike party predecessors, Vance’s foreign policy is neither romantically overambitious nor narrow-mindedly isolationist, but hard-headed and realist. Atlantic alliances are vital but they must be reciprocal, and Europeans must take primary responsibility for their own defence. This is necessary because Asia is where the greatest threat to US interests is manifesting, and where the allocation of scarce American resources must focus.
In perhaps his most important line of the night, Vance said, “we have a big tent in this party, on everything from national security to economic policy.” Where the GOP once enforced a strict orthodoxy on issues that alienated broad swaths of the nation, Vance’s heresies create space for working- and middle-class voters who are conservative in outlook but need to see a policy agenda responsive to their concerns. A new conservatism that extends across all issues and welcomes in the common citizen offers the first plausible shot in decades of returning the Republican party to a durable governing majority.
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