Americans had reason to fear for the future even before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. One hopes this enormity, together with respect for its innocent victims, will urge elected leaders to keep the risk of instability and political violence front of mind. In particular, campaigns need to talk less about the evil of their opponents and think harder about policy.
Policy did indeed come up at the Republican Party’s national convention this week, but not in a good way. Energized by the weekend’s outrage, Republicans celebrated both a new policy platform and the choice of Senator JD Vance as the former president’s running mate.
The choices go together all too well. Republicans are shifting toward a new kind of inward-looking big-government conservatism — “national conservatism,” as its advocates prefer. Unless something changes, this benighted program’s electoral prospects look good.
Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party stood for market liberalism and strong national defense. The Trump administration lacked such guiding principles, and relied instead on the president’s certainty that he knew best. He settled on protectionism, unfunded tax cuts with enormous deficits, chauvinistic strutting and a carelessly transactional approach to U.S. alliances. To its shame, the old Republican Party looked on impotently, hoping this would pass.
It didn’t, and the emerging new party has no reservations. The choice of Vance for vice president underlines the point. Some plausible deputies might’ve tried to restrain Trump’s illiberal and narrowly nationalist instincts. Vance, henceforth Trump’s presumed successor, seems more likely to fuel them.
He agrees with Trump that US aid to Ukraine should be scaled down and NATO has been allowed to lean too heavily on US support: “No, I don’t think that we should pull out of NATO, and no, I don’t think that we should abandon Europe,” he has said. “But yes, I think that we should pivot.” This undermines the alliance that the old Republican Party recognized as vital for national security.
Trump, Vance and the new platform are also aligned on domestic policy: Seal the border and undertake the largest deportation program in American history. Stop outsourcing and make the US a manufacturing superpower. Build infrastructure. Rebuild US cities (“making them safe, clean and beautiful again”). Rule out entitlement reform and cut workers’ taxes. Whether Trump sees the contradictions is debatable. Vance does, and he embraces them nonetheless.
A former Never Trumper, Vance has moved to and fro on policy as electoral math has dictated, but he seems genuinely suspicious of commerce and private enterprise. He has blamed worsening fiscal shortfalls on trade (“we shipped millions of good jobs to China and other countries”) and favors higher taxes on the companies responsible. He says immigration suppresses wages. (It doesn’t.)
No fan of big tech, he commends the Federal Trade Commission’s aggressive new approach to antitrust enforcement. Sean O’Brien, head of the Teamsters union, was granted a prime-time speaking slot at the convention; he praised Vance and a “growing group” of GOP officials for “listening to unions and standing up to corporations.”
When it comes to market forces versus government intervention, of course, the populist right often agrees with the populist left. Thanks to the Republican realignment, voters lose twice over. The absence of small-government conservatives shifts economic policy unopposed toward ill-conceived interventions, and cultural friction between social liberals and social conservatives, which is hard to assuage, comes to dominate the country’s politics.
America’s political system requires a willingness to tolerate disagreement. Its prosperity requires close attention to the defects of populist economics. The new Republicans have other priorities.
