MAGA 2.0: THE NEXT GENERATION
Keith Boag
One reason to watch Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate is that the Republican candidate, J. D. Vance, stands a good chance of becoming the 48th president of the United States. Win or lose in November, Republicans will be looking for a new nominee in four years and as Donald Trump's VEEP pick, the gaudy, golden mantle of Trumpism is likely to settle on his shoulders. Vance is MAGA 2.0: The Next Generation.
Vance would bring a more orderly and thoughtful mind to Trumpism. For one thing he is disciplined: He had the patience to write a bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy”, that reflects on his early life growing up poor in an unstable Appalachian family among the “forgotten” people of America. It’s a worthy literary effort, especially as a 31-year-old’s first book, and for a while back in the early days of Trump, coastal elites and confused country club Republicans treated it as the Rosetta Stone for unscrambling the MAGA voter.
Those were also the days when Vance considered that Trump might be “America’s Hitler” and likened Trump’s presidential campaign to “cultural heroin”.
Vance is not the first politician to tailor his principles to fit his ambitions. It’s that skill that might account for how he was able to hopscotch his way from a brief military career, to best-selling author, venture capitalist, United States Senator and onto the Republican ticket with Trump—all before his 40th birthday.
He has close ties to The Heritage Foundation through his friendship with its president, Kevin Roberts. The Heritage Foundation is under the microscope now because it produced The 2025 Project, a 900-page, right wing, social, economic—and by some readings, Christian nationalist—blueprint for the next Trump administration.
But another conservative think tank, American Compass, might have the greater claim on Vance’s thinking. Founded by Oren Cass, who’s spent a lot of time imagining a post-Trump Republican Party, the economic analysis of American Compass reaches far outside the comfort zone of The Heritage Foundation.
In an interview with The New York Times opinion writer Ezra Klein, under the title “The Economic Theory Behind J.D. Vance’s Populism”, Cass offered a view of what it would really mean to Make America Great Again. He boiled it down to an America where an ordinary working-class couple could comfortably raise five children on a single income.
More startling is how Cass thinks America could get to the one-breadwinner-with-a pile-of-kids average family. Among other things, he says it would take strong labour unions to beat back forty plus years of corporate America selling out the working class. It would mean using tariffs, at least temporarily, to create an economic environment where it makes more sense to produce things at home than to consume things from abroad. The long-range priorities in such an economy would favour people and communities over profits.
Remember, Cass is a conservative talking about a new future for the Republican Party. He is not a Marxist. He’s not Bernie Sanders. He’s not even Elizabeth Warren. (He was domestic policy adviser to former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.)
At the heart of economic policy on the right and the left is an argument about two fundamental questions: How do you make a bigger pie and how do you divide up the pie? Cass would put another question ahead of both those: who makes the pie?
Cass points out that among the prominent speakers at the Republican National Convention this summer was the head of the Teamsters Union, Sean O’Brien. When O’Brien spoke about how unions were discovering a new and sympathetic ear in a tiny, noisy corner of the Republican Party, he specifically mentioned three Senators: Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley and J. D. Vance—it would be hard to imagine a trio more reviled by progressives.
Cotton, Hawley and Vance are early-to-mid-forty-something Generation Y conservatives. In 2008 they were newcomers in an economy that was busy churning out, among other things, boatloads of lightly-regulated hedge fund billionaires who didn’t produce anything but money. Soon after, the whole corrupt mess collapsed and had to be cleaned up at public expense. The Vance, Hawley, Cotton demographic cohort, more than most, was left to sort through the debris of a crumbling economic orthodoxy. Despite its flashy promises, deregulated, market-driven economies had not lifted all boats, had not supported working people, had not protected their cities, towns and villages.
Trump is a lying, narcissistic, vulgarian fraud and a felon, but that doesn’t mean everything he says is wrong. He saw the opportunity exposed by the export of high-paying manufacturing jobs to low wage countries and he had the demagogic talent to exploit the consequent anxieties for his own purposes. The question that has always hung in the air, though, is what would Trump’s MAGA movement be like in the hands of someone with more sweeping ambitions, a more dynamic skill set and a higher level of mental fitness.
Vance’s economic analysis might be the most interesting thing about him. Otherwise, he is just another right wing culture warrior, foreign policy isolationist and, on occasion, a bit of a jerk. But the whole package, plus his reserved slot in the catbird seat for 2028, makes him someone to keep an eye on going forward, starting 9 o’clock Tuesday night.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Keith Boag - The US presidential ticket is set: Trump + Vance versus Harris + Waltz. And to cover that election, we're bringing our readers and listeners a brilliant journalistic mind and political correspondent legend, Keith Boag! Keith was with the CBC for more than 30 years, including as Chief Political Correspondent. His career included work for many years in Washington, D.C., and as Ottawa Bureau Chief. Keith covered seven federal elections in Canada, ten party leadership campaigns, as well as several US elections. Keith will regularly offer his written analysis via "QUOTES" at Air Quotes Media.
The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Air Quotes Media. Read more opinion contributions via QUOTES from Air Quotes Media.