Vice-presidential picks, if political science is to be believed, seldom have a great impact on the outcome of elections. But if they are rarely determinative, they are often revelatory. The choice of veep, and the reaction to the choice, can be clarifying moments for how major players within the party see their coalitions, and how the press and the broader public interpret what the parties stand for.
This year’s veepstakes are especially interesting. Most obviously, because Biden’s late exit left us with one more selection than we had anticipated, and one that provides information—precious because so scarce—of what Harris will prioritize now that she’s been elevated to the top of the ticket. On the other side of the aisle, Trump is the first candidate since Nixon to run with a different number two than on a previous bid. It is thus natural that there would be great attention to Trump’s selection this time around, as a barometer for how his approach may have changed from 2016 and 2020. Notably, the picks seem to point in contrary directions.
A great deal has been made of Vance’s arrival on the Republican ticket. Insofar as the commentary has focused on the pick as evidence from which to interpret recent directions in Donald Trump Thought, this seems foolhardy. For whatever else Trump may be, he is not an ideologue. To think that something called Trumpism has meaningfully been altered by the elevation of Vance rather than, say, Doug Burgum strikes me as a category error. Nor does interpreting the pick through the lens of strategic nous get us very far. For the fact is that Trump is not a genius politician. In 2016 Trump had the outsider’s intuition and indifference to convention to perceive that not only Democrats but also Republicans were still in no mood to forgive the Bush years. Since then, however, his record has been consistently to give power to Democrats.
Nevertheless, the reaction to the Vance pick has been telling. Coverage has overwhelmingly stressed Vance’s connections to the “New Right,” and has seen his ascension as bespeaking a desire for Trump and his inner circle to consolidate the MAGA turn in the party against both the traditional Republican leadership cadre and the policy consensus of foreign interventionism, economic globalization, and a permissive immigration regime. There is much truth to this assessment: Vance is Trumpier than Mike Pence on these fronts. Nevertheless, there is an important respect in which Vance is discontinuous with the Trump turn, and in fact hearkens back to an older Republican dispensation.
Because many of the leading intellectuals associated with Trump-era conservatism have been religious (and often Catholic), and because academic and para-academic discourse is prone to hallucinatory fears about “Christian nationalism,” one of the most evident facts about Trump has still not received sufficient attention: namely, that he has been a secularizing force. This is true in symbolism and rhetoric—not only compared to W. Bush, but also to Obama and Biden, the presence of Christian imagery in his public remarks, and even evidence of basic religious literacy, is less in Trump. This is not merely a matter of vibes or persona. The culture war issues that motivated social conservatism from, roughly, the ’80s to the ’00s are absent from Trump’s priorities. School prayer, concerns about homosexuality, defenses of traditional marriage, and the like do not register with the Donald.
This divergence is most true of all on the issue of abortion. Whereas George Bush senior had to discover pro-life convictions to be the Republican standard-bearer and Trump ’16 had to make overtures in that direction, Trump ’24 excised the cause from the Republican platform in something close to a show of contempt for social conservatives. Even in his achievement most celebrated by religious conservatives—appointing the justices who would form an anti-Roe majority—Trump arguably acted by the cunning of reason to bring Republicans into a secular age. For while some red states have passed abortion restrictions since Dobbs, the basic result in terms of coalitional politics has been to reveal just how little this staple of traditional American social conservatism matters to Republicans themselves: Wherever pro-life legislation has made it to the ballot, even in deep red terrain, it has lost.
One effect of Roe, of course, was to prevent pro-life movements from making any major legislative moves against abortion at the state level. But perhaps the deeper effect it had, as the last couple years have revealed, was to allow many to adopt the pro-life mantle without confronting concretely whether they would be willing to restrict abortion access if the issue were returned to a democratic forum. It turns out that sincere, put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is pro-life sentiment in America is less prevalent than public opinion polls under Roe led us to believe, and that the 1973 ruling had the effect of creating a kind of political asset bubble that popped once the court returned the matter to the states.
Trump’s discussion of the subject in his (one and only, we now know) debate with Biden is indicative of how he regards the signal issue of social conservatism: namely, as simply not an issue of concern for a national party. He can live with a world in which pro-life triumphs in a few states, but also seems frankly pleased that “a very liberal decision” has resulted from the democratic process in many other states. He applauded the Supreme Court for not limiting the availability of the abortion pill. “You’ve got to get elected also and—because that has to do with other things,” he stammered, seemingly wanting to remind pro-lifers that their cause was a brake and not an accelerator on Republican fortunes even amidst his attempted vindication of his role in producing the Dobbs decision. What Trump said of the “exceptions” seems like it could stand for his outlook on the whole pro-life movement: “I believe in the exceptions … And frankly, I think it’s important to believe in the exceptions. Some people—you have to follow your heart . But I believe in the exceptions … I think it’s very important. Some people don’t. Follow your heart.”
Trump’s instinct—entirely in keeping with his indifference or even hostility to social conservatism throughout his life—is to treat Dobbs as marking the end of the era in which abortion was a national political question and instead to turn the pro-life movement into a matter between individuals and their consciences, a lifestyle brand, a principle around which Benedict Option-style communities might organize. The settlement he seems to be gesturing toward is that pro-lifers will recognize their cause as a losing one and keep it off the national Republican stage, and in exchange he will show some respect for the conscientiousness of pro-lifers and refrain from outright insulting their views.
What Trump is aiming for on this front is, needless to say, a remarkable transformation of the party’s ethos, equivalent to that which he has accomplished with regard to trade and relations to China. It marks a reorientation to a quite different kind of conservatism (although of course, as ever, there are continuities). The social conservatism that predominated when I was growing up was largely religious in its energies and orientation. It saw itself as combatting the degradations and excesses—often but not exclusively around sex and sexuality—of liberal culture in the name of Christian (or Judeo-Christian) anthropology and conception of the virtues.
Little of this resonates with Trump. While of course religious people continue to be a considerable portion of the Republican electorate, their share of the coalition has dwindled. And the present culture wars rotate on a different axis. A large part of Trump’s base shares a frankly libertine sensibility that had long been absent from the public face of the American right. More broadly, we might think of Trump as appealing to a strain of what we could call cultural conservatism, to distinguish it from the longstanding religious or social conservatism. It is animated by a sense that immigration is out of control; by frustration with speech codes and an HR mentality seen as making America oversensitive, unfun, insipid, preachy; by opposition to cancel culture; by a dislike of DEI and diversity mandates and (among its literati) a conviction that civil rights legislation needs to be rolled back; by a mistrust of the bureaucratic elements of society and government; by a perception that the epistemic institutions of our society (the media, academia, NGOs, and so forth) are incompetent and biased; and by an antipathy toward the invasive and moralizing tendencies of “woke” social movements.
Perhaps most generally of all, Trump-era cultural conservatism resists what it considers breakneck cultural change driven by the resentments of well-positioned but unproductive sectors of our society. It mistrusts elite professionals who lack respect for American folkways and appear ever inclined to impose new regulations, formal and informal, that make it harder to go about one’s business. Insofar as something like the older concerns around sex and gender persist in this new dispensation, they are most focused on the T in the LGBT formula; and the idiom in which that battle is being waged—that of the trans movement’s “unscientific” character and ignoring of conventional medical and professional guardrails, and the likening of “gender ideology” to a religion—is quite different from the social-conservative vocabulary that prevailed in prior decades. These are, to say the least, not the bread-and-butter issues of the Moral Majority or the Catholic League in the Clinton years.
“Trump has arguably been a force for normalizing the Republican party.”
In all of this, Trump has arguably been a force for normalizing the Republican party, making it more like right-wing parties in Western Europe and elsewhere in the Anglosphere. The religious fervor of the Republican Party, and the saliency of abortion as an issue, was out of kilter with its counterpart parties in more secular nations. The Roe arrangement which Trump’s appointees ended was also an outlier, as most peer nations do not enshrine abortion as a constitutional right but instead permit abortion (with varying degrees of restriction) as a matter of ordinary legislation passed through the democratic process; barring a drastic reversal of popular sentiment, the Dobbs decision is likely to bring the United States close to this outcome.
A thoroughly Trumpian party would be more like a conventional right-wing party in comparable countries. It would be flexible but generally market-friendly on economics, while being motivated deeply by questions of immigration, national identity, demographic change, and threats to state sovereignty. It would question American exceptionalism about being a “creedal nation” and instead insist that the state is best understood as an instrument for the defense of a specific historical people’s interests and traditions. And it would treat Christianity more as a signifier of a civilizational heritage than as the source of an active public theology. Like many European right-wing parties, Trumpian Republicanism would receive the votes of the minority of determined pro-lifers, and more generally of the devout, but no one would really expect the party to change policy in a significantly anti-abortion direction, and few would see the party as a vessel for the installation of a specific religious orientation. Leaving the merits of the issue aside, if Trump were to succeed in taking the abortion issue off the table and leaving only pro-choice parties for voters to choose from, as traditional social conservatives fear, this would from a strictly comparative-politics perspective be a step toward making America a more “normal” developed country.
Vance, I suspect, would concur with most points in my loose description of cultural conservatism a couple paragraphs ago. There is no doubt that he is a committed opponent of wokeism and the cultural Left, and would very likely be, as Chris Rufo argues, an effective implementer of the right’s cultural agenda, capable of “turning Trump’s charismatic vision into a rational-legalistic formula.” But his selection also points back to the older social-conservative dispensation. In this he is an odd fit with Trumpian secularization. A Catholic convert, he is devout, and has made much of his faith. He is ardently and unabashedly pro-life. He has argued for banning pornography. He is firmly convinced that the child-rearing family is the normative social unit and that it is under threat in an irreligious and libertarian culture. Most generally, he believes in a stronger presence for Christianity in American civic life to combat secular liberalism’s perceived atomizing and decadent qualities. For all the talk of a New Right or of an Integralist bogeyman, these are well-worn views that previous generations of Christian conservatives would have no difficulty appreciating. But these are certainly not positions that Trump stakes out himself.
Vance is not, then, just Trump with a Yale law degree, but a blend of the old and the new in the Republican Party. In some respects he is an avatar for what one might have thought a declining element within American conservatism, especially if the current unchurching of America holds. If Vance proves politically successful, the result is unlikely to be a reprisal of Trump but some sort of ideological détente between MAGA and religious conservatism which we’ve not yet fully seen. Perhaps this will be a kind of “religious populism,” perhaps it will be more like early vintages of European Christian Democracy with modern American characteristics. In any case, the reading of Vance’s selection as another blow from Trump against everything the Republican party has traditionally stood for is an extremely partial one.
Where the Vance pick goes both with and against the tide in the shifting GOP coalition, Tim Walz’s ascension looks on the contrary to be fully in keeping with the spirit of the age. For if woke has peaked, Harris seems not to have known it when she selected him. Given that Harris appears now to want to backtrack from and minimize her distinctly far-left messaging in 2019-20—which ranged from the sublime (working to bail out rioters and affirming the righteousness of the disorder of summer 2020, calling to decriminalize illegal border crossings, endorsing a ban on fracking) to the ridiculous (getting sucked in by the Jussie Smollett hoax)—it is curious that she made Walz her running mate. For there is nary an enthusiasm of contemporary cultural progressivism that he has not indulged to the hilt. Reflecting the left’s recent hostility on the subject, he has no affection for—or understanding of—the American tradition of free speech. He was a Covid-maximalist, both in his personal conduct and far more importantly in public policy, having set up a snitch line for reporting transgressions of the state’s innumerable and ineffective NPIs and vigorously defending school closures. In contrast to the trend of European social democracies toward greater caution on the issue, Walz has made Minnesota a spearhead for gender-affirming care for children. And he has passed what is arguably the most extreme pro-choice policy in the country, one far more permissive than even the liberalized post-Dobbs American public supports. This is not the record of Joe Biden in ’08, or Tim Kaine in ’16, but something close to a replay—and perhaps a magnification—of the Harris persona in ’20.
The Harris team no doubt wishes to present a version of itself more palatable to the center. Yet no amount of triangulation at this late date can change the fact that the 2024 Democratic ticket is by far the most leftward on social issues in several decades, and there is only so much the candidates can do now to change their stripes. Nevertheless, if cultural progressivism will undoubtedly be part of the campaign and possible administration, it would behoove them—both morally and strategically—to downplay a few of the most noxious elements of the worldview in favor of a more commonsensical approach. Unfortunately, on both of these fronts Walz’s record makes this pivot more difficult.
“Universal problems must be reframed as particular harms to ‘marginalized’ groups.”
The first is a phenomenon we might call inverse Benthamism. The philosopher Jeremy Bentham, one of the great products of the English Enlightenment, coined the phrase “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” to describe the goal of public policy and social morality. The traditional worry about this utilitarian approach has been that it will sacrifice the rights of minorities, but needless to say the idea that the pleasures of the few must at some point give way to the needs of the many is a bedrock assumption of democracy everywhere. Of late, however, American progressives have tended to turn this thought on its head. To be legible, it seems, universal problems must be reframed as particular harms to “marginalized” groups. This is an extreme form of identity politics. Instead of trying to show how one’s substate identity links one to a larger, more universal good (which we might consider a rather benign kind of identity politics, and in any case an inevitable occurrence in pluralistic societies), progressives have gotten accustomed to transmuting common issues into specific afflictions of minorities. Hence the defense of abortion, strangely enough, can be presented as an issue of minority sexual orientations; support for a nation’s territorial integrity amid a horrible war can be elevated up the issue hierarchy by linking it to key intersectional identities; and even what one would have thought was the most universal of all issues—climate change—is repackaged in the idiom of racial justice.
Contrary to the spirit of Bernie in 2016, progressives consistently portray well-liked proposals on economics and housing in racial terms that diminish their appeal. We will all be able to think of other examples from the recent annals of progressivism that fit the profile. The notion of a people dissolves into a series of discrete and untranscendable minority groups: In the words of political theorist Pierre Rosanvallon, “‘the people’ is now the plural of ‘minority.’” As a form of discourse this is bad enough, for it not only confuses many listeners about the substance of the issue. But it also makes it harder for us to overcome our differences and tackle our common problems, and encourages us to view one another not as fellow-citizens but as avatars of ethnic or racial or gender identities whose interests are incompatible.
Tim Walz has been among the worst embodiments of this tendency. Not merely has his rhetoric been filled with these tropes. But he took the penchant for treating harms to favored minorities as worse than harms more universally suffered when he engaged in racial rationing of Covid therapeutics. Under Walz, Minnesota “adopted an ‘ethical framework’ that prioritizes black 18-year-olds over white 64-year-olds—even though the latter are at much higher risk of severe disease,” in the words of reporter Aaron Sibarium. This was, quite evidently, to accept the logic that a greater overall death toll was a price worth paying to indulge the progressive propensity for racial gerrymandering of social goods. It is rare to see a politician actually enact an ideological reductio ad absurdum in the midst of a crisis, but Tim Walz managed to do it. To Walz, it seems, the only possible way of distinguishing people that doesn’t matter is the very distinction that should be sacrosanct in a nation-state: that between citizen and noncitizen.
Alongside inverse Benthamism, there is another characteristic pathology of the cultural left: the socialism of low expectations, as we might call it. As a result of the Defund the Police movement cheered by left-wing politicians, not to mention the work of progressive prosecutors, violent crime skyrocketed and urban disorder increased. Tim Walz was at the epicenter of this trend, expressing sympathy for riots that did enormous damage in Minnesota, seeing the size and effectiveness of police forces in the state’s metropolis plummet, and simply declining to enforce the law at crucial junctures. Amidst the unmistakable deterioration in quality of life and public safety in many cities, the response of progressives has been to suggest that those concerned about the issue are out-of-touch, alarmist, or even racist (despite the fact that high crime has a devastating effect on minority communities). If you’re bothered by open drug use in public parks, or menacing behavior from those who appear in a state of mental distress on the subways, or the use of important institutions like schools for purposes for which they were not intended, or the general ceding of parts of the city to antisocial behavior, the progressive response has often been that you should adjust your expectations, that this is just the price one pays for the amenities of urban living.
What’s so perplexing and counterproductive about this attitude is that progressives, after all, ask citizens to trust the state with more and more tasks. Harris and Walz are not short on proposals for enlarging the government’s remit. But one of the first things you learn by studying the history of political thought is that the foundation of the social-contract tradition upon which liberalism grew is that the state exists above all for the provision of security and the prevention of crime. Reflexively regarding concern about public safety as a dog-whistle seems to have blinded the left to why the state is there in the first place, and what the reasons for political authority have long been taken to be: the monopolization of violence, the protection of life and liberty, keeping the peace, securing to each of what is his own from force or fraud, and the elimination of that fear about one’s circumstances and surroundings that makes a nuisance of daily life.
It was only once these essentials had been fulfilled, thought many of the greatest philosophers, that government would have credibility to extend its scope. David Hume, for example, thought that it was only after the “civil magistracy” had demonstrated its capacity to guarantee “security against each other’s weakness and passion, as well as against their own” and to “prevent the encroachments of the strong upon the weak, of the violent upon the just and equitable”—that is, had proven able to protect property, put down aggression, and enforce contracts—that government would have sufficient allegiance from the people to “extend farther its beneficial influence” and start fulfilling a wider range of functions. In other words, public safety and legal order were not only morally prior goods, but they were also crucial occasions for proof of concept that government could serve the common interest; the natural order of political operations, as it were, was that these primary interests would be seen to first, and then a credible government might be able to pursue other important ventures.
Contemporary progressives seem precisely to invert the sequence, asking that they be trusted to eradicate prejudice and fix the climate and engineer a juster distribution of economic fruits even as they struggle to provide the basics of law and order. But it is quixotic to think that a more generous left-liberalism or more robust progressivism, or even just a healthier civic-mindedness, will make durable gains while the everyday experience of vital public services and the feeling of security degrades.
Walz has said that “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” This is a cute enough phrase, but what if one’s neighborhood is unsafe? Who would give the government the more complex assignments when it fails the simple ones? People will—and should—only accept a diminution of their private wealth if they feel the public wealth is being well looked after, and not just so that everyone can be equal in misery. The progressive response to those who express frustration with crime and public disorder should not be that they should learn to live with it, or that some other abstract ideal—of defeating structural racism or ending inequity or what have you—is more pressing, but that precisely because they are progressives they will fight to make the public spaces cleaner and safer and more pleasant, the public schools more rigorous and more dependable, than their private counterparts. For after all it is the rich, not the poor, who can pay their way out of such dysfunction.
The most offensive inegalitarianism is softness on crime, toleration of disorder in public spaces and decay in public institutions. If Walz’s governorship is any indication,this inegalitarianism may make it into the White House under the banner of the left.