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

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.

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