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The Republicans’ weird problem predates Vance The party should reclaim its historical role

Democrats have labelled Donald Trump's VP Pick J.D. Vance 'weird' (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

Democrats have labelled Donald Trump's VP Pick J.D. Vance 'weird' (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)


August 16, 2024   5 mins

Politics has taken an unexpected turn. For decades, weirdness was associated with the Democrats. Excessively concerned with a culture war most Americans don’t care about while remaining captive to parochial subcultures — this used to be the purview of the Left. With Democrats now mocking Republicans for being “weird”, it is worth asking: how did this reversal of roles take place?

It would be easy to look at the flailing state of Trump’s campaign and pin the blame on an erratic candidate, or bad advisers, or, as so many have done, single out J.D. Vance as the source of the misfortune. But the fault lies neither with Trump nor Vance, nor any single individual. Instead, we must look back to the foundations of the modern conservative movement, for it is arguably the persistence of a distinct political culture rooted in those formative years that holds back the growth of the Republican coalition.

Since its emergence in the industrialising America of the 19th century, the Republicans had been the party of the buttoned-down business and professional classes, embodying hegemonic political capital. The Democrats encompassed those opposed to this hegemony, be they populist farmers and organised labour, rival blocs of provincial capital, and after the Sixties, the new social movements with their subaltern identities and subversive lifestyles. By 1972, they were the party of “acid, amnesty, and abortion”. Yet even as the party coalitions rested on these coordinates, the first signs of a realignment began to take place — blue-collar workers started to show a propensity to vote for Republicans such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

There was a time, therefore, between the Seventies and the Nineties, when both the ascendant yuppies of America and working-class hardhats could be kept together in the Republican coalition. As long as they could be focused on a common enemy. In those years, thinkers on the Right found such an enemy in “the New Class”, not dissimilar from its conceptual counterpart in leftist discourse, the “professional managerial class” (PMCs).

The New Class trope has ever since played a central role in conservative demonology; they are defined by their college educations (usually in some airy liberal arts field) and extremely liberal (or “weird”) social views, but above all, by their perch as administrators and functionaries in bloated, non-competitive bureaucracies like government, academia, legacy media, and NGOs. These “verbalist elites” were a self-perpetuating caste of privileged mandarins; unlike the yuppies and the hardhats, they were insulated from risk and never got their hands dirty, residing instead in an immaterial realm of symbols and abstractions. The idea of the New Class was thus a convenient foil for conservative rhetoric on both free markets and social conservatism.

The American Right sought to organise itself around fighting this mandarin-dominated liberal establishment, whose control over public-sector and cultural institutions had to be overturned before the liberation of the still-virtuous private sector could be accomplished. Enter the rise of aggressive new conservative institutions meant to take back power in Washington: multimillion-dollar think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute looked not just to crafting policy but to credentialing whole cadres of conservative appointees who could fill executive and legislative offices; while journals like National Review set the moral tone of conservatism.

For a time, it worked: the movement succeeded in shifting the policy agenda to the Right from the Reagan years onward. But it also came at a cost: hitherto, conservatism had largely relied on businessmen who got into activism to oppose measures they did not like. In the postwar era, businesses started to outsource this work to full-time activists. Where there had once been conservative professionals, there were now professional conservatives, represented by the likes of National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr. This shift had profound effects on the character of conservative politics, which would become intellectualised as never before. This left the movement vulnerable to real-world shocks which its theoreticians could not comprehend.

The first of at least two shocks took place in the Nineties: Democrats started to syphon private sector professionals from the GOP under Bill Clinton and the “New Democrats” who enthusiastically embraced the financial industry while remaining socially liberal; this jumpstarted the trend of educational polarisation. The next generation of yuppies thus had less reason to stick with Republicans when they could join the newly dynamic and glamorous Democrats. The Right was losing the battle for cultural prestige, thanks in no small part to the very same free market forces they unleashed, which greatly incentivised female labour market force participation and downgraded the social importance of families; hyper-financialised capitalism’s destabilising effect on culture had been wilfully overlooked. Around this time, the Republican Vice President Dan Quayle’s attack on sitcom character Murphy Brown prefigured Vance’s war on “cat ladies”, and for a time Quayle, too, seemed “weird” in light of that decade’s changing sensibilities.

A radically deregulated financial sector along with an over-hyped tech sector supercharged America’s transformation into a post-industrial and post-material simulacrum, precisely the kind of environment in which New Class-type functionaries thrive. Indeed, the line between the old New Class and the private sector PMCs of the new frictionless economy would become increasingly blurred. The sclerotic financial and tech sectors at the heart of the system ceased to be competitive in any classically capitalist sense and had come to resemble the same immovable Leviathan conservatives saw in the public sector, with an abundance of make-work “bullshit jobs”, overseen by authoritarian HR departments.

The failures of this status quo helped to put Trump in power, the second major shock. But the Trump administration suddenly veered away from its populist promise of 2016 and instead doubled down on free market fundamentalism, enacting policies that disproportionately benefitted the same corporate sectors responsible for the dysfunction. On top of this, it leaned heavily into social conservative causes, like abortion, even as popular attitudes have moved considerably towards a new centre-ground. What happened? The answer lies with the same professional conservatives, who staffed that administration and the Congressional GOP.

The Right’s apparatchiks had been frozen in the unchanging logic of their own stultified institutions, which upheld the inviolability of both free markets and social conservatism (while refusing to seriously acknowledge the tensions between them), independent of any changes in the larger social context. In effect, they became “Right-PMCs”. For the sprawling conservative think tank ecosystem in which they are bred is now no different from the rest of the New Class-dominated economy: NGO-like bureaucracies that live off donor generosity merely issue credentials and manage a vast symbolic economy of abstract ideas and officially sanctioned moral virtues. Conservatism Inc. became functionally identical to the same progressive academic establishment its polemicists routinely attack, only with one set of cultural and ideological signifiers swapped in for another.

“Conservatism Inc. became functionally identical to the same progressive academic establishment its polemicists routinely attack.”

And while these failures have de-legitimised many of the old think tanks in the eyes of younger intellectual conservatives, being college educated Right-PMCs themselves, their only response has been to come up with an alternative underground symbolic economy based on the circulation of edgy memes and reactionary ideologies. This so-called “dissident Right” merely wishes to reproduce the existing Right-PMC ecosystem but outfitted with Nietzschean and “based” dogmas instead of traditional conservative ones. But it is no less stamped by the same conceited intellectual culture that marked postwar conservatism: its advocates, like Buckley, tend to be effete, elitist, and eccentric; and many of the colourful “alternative lifestyles” (to use a euphemism) associated with the New Right arise from these reactionary online currents.

America’s cultural politics may thus be reduced to a struggle between two sets of symbol-worshipping PMCs: the overwhelming progressive majority of PMCs who coalesce around the Democrats and the Right-PMC minority who influence the Republican side. Both have beliefs that regular Americans would consider weird, but like competing sects of Brahmins in Vedic Age India, their battle is to settle whose religious doctrines and deities can appeal most to the masses of normies who toil in the fields; and the winner gets to call the other side weird. However, conservative attempts to beat progressive PMCs at this game of ruling through the maintenance of cultural-symbolic hegemony, while letting the material world decay, have come up short time and again. Probably because their rivals in the liberal establishment are far more disciplined, astute, and well-resourced.

Republicans ought to play a different game entirely. They should reclaim their historic role as the vanguard of entrepreneurial capitalism by cobbling together a coalition of economic self-interest between the two classes who are least vulnerable to ideological capture by college-educated elites: small-business elites (who tend to be very wealthy but uncultured) and the working class. In other words, an unlikely alliance who could help to reground the economy in the material realm, away from the rule of Brahmins. But this would require the Right-PMCs to restrain their own Brahmanical impulses: shifting their focus from waging endless culture war to forging a political economy that can serve this coalition’s practical interests, something they have so far proven incapable of doing. For the problem of the Brahmins on either side of the ideological divide is a classic one. As Right-PMC icon Reagan once said, it’s not that they’re ignorant, they know so much that isn’t so.


Michael Cuenco is a writer on policy and politics. He is Associate Editor at American Affairs.
1TrueCuencoism

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Right-Wing Hippie
Right-Wing Hippie
3 months ago

Keep America Weird.

Brett H
Brett H
3 months ago

“They should reclaim their historic role as the vanguard of entrepreneurial capitalism by cobbling together a coalition of economic self-interest between the two classes who are least vulnerable to ideological capture by college-educated elites: small-business elites (who tend to be very wealthy but uncultured) and the working class.”
From the perspective of this article the Republicans do seem to have lost their way, and for some time now. I was never a fan of the Republicans, though I always enjoyed Buckley in my later years. They seemed to be a dirty, scurrilous lot. It’s the craziness of the left that pushed me to the right, and it’s the left I want to see defeated.
What Cuenco says makes sense. But it seems to me that the Republicans, and similar parties around the world, feel that there’s no time to build policies and coalitions, that they must stop the left now. Consequently they represent nothing except an opposition. Of course if they began to think seriously years ago there wouldn’t be a problem now. Instead what we have are hacks who are good for nothing but badmouthing the opposition in the hope that some of the mud sticks. Consequently the fight will always be the same and always end up the same way.

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
3 months ago
Reply to  Brett H

Great comment. Well said..

Robert
Robert
3 months ago
Reply to  Brett H

“Consequently they represent nothing except an opposition. Of course if they began to think seriously years ago there wouldn’t be a problem now.”
They did think seriously years ago and it gave us the 2008 financial crash, China’s entry into the WTO and the Iraq war. Free trade and open markets (when in fact only the American market is actually ‘open’), financial deregulation and spreading democracy to the Middle East were fundamental ideas of the right, including the think tank types coming out of the Cold War. I think someone like Jonah Goldberg is a good exemplar of this as well as the people at National Review. The problem is, the results of these ideas has been a disaster in many ways as I listed. So, I see it more as the republicans thought seriously of the world they wanted to shape and they acted on those ideas (along with Clinton and Obama who were definitely pulled ‘right’ when it came to financialization of the economy and economic globalism) and the results are in.
To me, they’re a party who, as you said, mostly represent opposition now. Their ideas were ascendant for about three decades, they were embraced by the center left (Clinton/Obama) and here we are. What do you do when your ‘big ideas’ fail so miserably?

j watson
j watson
3 months ago
Reply to  Brett H

Not sure this is right. I think the underlying funding means they protect some pretty big vested interests who may be fairly happy with the status quo. Some sort of narrative about defending against a woke-ist Left useful camouflage.

David Yetter
David Yetter
3 months ago
Reply to  Brett H

But it has always been about stopping the Left (cf. Buckley’s famous “Stand athwart history shouting, ‘Stop!'”). The Republicans and similar parties world-wide are the parties of those who want the state to leave them alone to live their lives, or make gobs of money, or simply do anything other than politics. The whole point is to not be subject to grand programs, hence no grand programs are forthcoming.

Brett H
Brett H
3 months ago
Reply to  David Yetter

That’s true what you say about those who want the state to leave them alone. But it misses the point, and maybe this is the problem, about building a broader or more effective base or coalition. Conservatives parties seem to have lost their way all over the world. Finding that they represent the working class in values and big business at the same time may be a bit confusing. The very idea of staying out of peoples lives could be the very thing that marginalises them,

Michael McElwee
Michael McElwee
3 months ago

I like this man’s writing, but Plato made his point in a better way. Politics tends not toward ascent, but toward decay. Speaking very generally, and therefore crudely, the “left” stands for decay, for decadence, the right for ascent, for virtue, and as a consequence, the left has a distinct advantage. It’s easier to go to Hell than to get heaven.

Victor James
Victor James
3 months ago

Democrats calling others weird is like a morbidly obese person calling someone “a bit fat”
The last 8 years, since Trump was elected, has been full on clown freak melt down show from the ‘woke’ left.

j watson
j watson
3 months ago
Reply to  Victor James

Ah but the question is will it ‘stick’? Thus far it is.

Victor James
Victor James
3 months ago
Reply to  j watson

Stick with who? Leftists who already hate Republicans?

J Bryant
J Bryant
3 months ago
Reply to  Victor James

Stick with enough swing voters to tilt the election toward Harris. This election is all about a relatively tiny number of voters in key states.
And the Dems do seem to be relying heavily on a gaslighting strategy: the Dems are obviously the party of weird but somehow they’ve managed to attach that label to Republicans; Harris was undoubtedly the border czar, but now the Dems are flatly denying that fact.

Victor James
Victor James
3 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Trump is Hitler was the leftist platform in 2016 – these are leftist talking points. Swing voters are swing for a reason, they aren’t exclusively reading leftist news sources.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
3 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

But they HAVE quite effectively managed it, and JD Vance’s ill thought through assault on millions of childless Americans rather backs them up, as well as being politically idiotic.

Terry M
Terry M
3 months ago

If dragging yourself up from a very poor, dysfunctional background, getting a college degree, serving in the Marines, getting a Law degree from Yale, writing a bestselling autobiography, succeeding in business, getting elected to the US Senate, and being chosen to run for VP is weird, then I say:
we need millions more weird people.

Graham Cunningham
Graham Cunningham
3 months ago

Good essay. Yes Republican thinking does indeed need an economic makeover. It is not that any economically literate thinker should be questioning Adam Smith’s fundamental truth that the wealth of Western nations could not have happened without free-market competition as its driving force. But certain aspects of the global economy in the early 21st century have led some to question whether a tipping point has now been reached where downsides are starting to outweigh upsides. I myself am one of many old-school conservatives who have had to rethink some long held assumptions about the economic facts of life. The biggest shocker, for me, has been the emergence of Woke Capitalism – something I never saw coming…..https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/globalism-vs-national-conservatism

David Yetter
David Yetter
3 months ago

But “woke capitalism” is not a species of capitalism. We now live under managerialism, in which the professional managerial class (PMC), not the capitalists (those whose claim on profits derives from their material or financial resources being at risk in the enterprise) are in control of “the means of production” to use Marx’s terminology. James Burnham was a bit too early in thinking it had arrived in 1949, but by the time the professional managers in government saved the professional managers in finance from the consequences of their dishonesty in the 2008 financial crisis, managerialism had clearly arrived. The PMC floats between government, the corporate and the non-profit sector and really prefers fascism (the union of corporate and state power, as defined by its founder, Mussolini) to free-market economics. Wokery is simply a handy excuse for imposing fascism without objection from what passes for a Left these days.
The PMC is the Western version of Djilas’s “New Class”, the commissars (also professional managers in the old Communist bloc), whom he saw as the next stage in Marx’s material dialectic (the idea that a “proletarian revolution” would short-circuit the dialect was always a delusion if one really believed in the material dialectic).

RA Znayder
RA Znayder
3 months ago
Reply to  David Yetter

I like the interpretation op Joel Kotkin for this. The capitalist class still exists, they are the oligarchs who still own most of the capital and therefore the means of production. In fact they have grown much stronger in the past decades. Although means of production is abstract in a postindusrial society. However, between oligarchs and the middle class you have the managerial class. They are not real elites but identify with them and their ideology and morals. They do their bidding and vice versa. They are like the clergy of the ancien regime between the aristocracy and the peasants.

Richard Ross
Richard Ross
3 months ago

The Republicans must return to their traditional role…… as election-losers?
kamala and Co are enjoying a brief honeymoon. If the GOP sticks to its guns, the Dems will shoot themselves in both feet come November.

RA Znayder
RA Znayder
3 months ago

Looking at the discrepancy between rhetoric and policies one should wonder if the republican intentions were ever genuine. Did it just not work out or were they fully aware they had to sell the neoliberal project to the very people it was going to hurt the most?
Whether it was discontent with the “New Class” or the current culture war, it feels like a distraction from the only thing that was achieved beyond any doubt the past 40 years: restoring the relative wealth of the upper echelons and big capital – who had lost quite a bit during the postwar period. The center-left essentially started doing the same thing around the 90s: endless progressive discussions while leaving the neoliberal consensus untouched under the guise of third way policies. In fact, as the author correctly observes, many progressive issues can be readily commodified in our hyper-financialized world. And now we can do the same with conservative issues. The end result is that very little ever really changes, just a lot of debates.
If I understand correctly the author suggests to go back to the ‘common sense’ rhetoric under the banner of “this time it will be different”. So this time the free market and deregulation does not mean more restrictions for small business and more cronyism for big business? And this time the wealth will finally trickle down after 40 years?

John Galt
John Galt
3 months ago

The author is taking a lot of words to try and avoid an obvious truth. The fact is we are undergoing an electoral realignment across both parties and things are going to change in the meantime everything is muddy and unclear on what each party stands for as the old parts of the party find themselves in conflict with the new, and no one knows precisely what they want.

Further I’m going to point out that the conservatives are not responsible for the destruction of the family and I hate the historical rewriting that’s happened here. Which side advocated for the welfare expansion that allowed fathers to abandon families without guilt, which side pushed for the second wave feminism where a woman could find fulfillment in the workplace and find a new them through divorce, which side pushed the idea that family was outdated and outmoded and that your personal self fulfillment was the most important thing? Not the conservatives that’s for sure, who meanwhile is trying to fight to defend traditional institutions and push the ideas of duty responsibility hard work and commitment?

j watson
j watson
3 months ago

Author misses entirely the impact of PAC growth and unlimited funding on US politics. The 2010 Supreme Ct ruling has much to answer for and pulls US politics increasingly away from the common man and woman. Remarkable really the Article never mentions this.
But much like in the UK he hits the nail on the head in identifying the inherent clash between free market enterprise and social conservatism that the Right struggles to square both sides of the Atlantic.

Norfolk Sceptic
Norfolk Sceptic
3 months ago
Reply to  j watson

When Blair let free market enterprise lose, without the social conservatism, it confused the Left and the Right, especially those in Parliament.

j watson
j watson
3 months ago

You mean the ‘Third Way’? Slight difference is public services were much better. That’s what the Right has melted down and then blamed immigrants.

Benedict Waterson
Benedict Waterson
3 months ago

Well the article is just meta-intellectualizing the intellectuallizing elites then.
Judging by Vance’s interviews, he is not locked into the pure realm of Platonic forms, but is interested in reindustrializing the economy and already proposing to serve the contingents the article suggests.
Granted, there is a RW donor fuelled ecosystem with its own blind spots & competing interests, but the real symbol obsessed brahims might just be the mainstream progressive ones that even contrive to see Man and Woman as purely symbolic.

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
3 months ago

Haha! You idiots think that Donald Trump is suitable to be president of the United States. Ain’t nothing weirder than that!!!!

David Yetter
David Yetter
3 months ago

Not weird, just the natural workings of democracy as predicted by the inimitable H.L. Menken:

As democracy is perfected, the office of President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Which should make us wonder at all the agita about “threats to our democracy”.

Dave Canuck
Dave Canuck
3 months ago

Weird is a complement for Trump, I suspect his sociopathy runs much deeper than weird

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
3 months ago

Brilliant analysis. It sums up much of my somewhat inchoate ideas about the very self conscious reactionary (and incoherent!) anti woke Right.