Trump's choice: Vance represents the new American right-wing trend
2024-08-13
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A major event in American politics recently is that Trump officially selected Cyrus Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, as his running mate. Regarding Trump's move, some commentators say that it was mainly influenced by Silicon Valley tycoon Peter Thiel, some analysts say that it was mainly because Trump's sons supported Cyrus Vance, some say that Cyrus Vance, like Trump, has a distinctive temperament from the background of "Washington outsiders", and some commentators believe that Trump mainly wants to use Cyrus Vance to further consolidate his support in key swing states in the Rust Belt (especially from the poor white class). These analyses can be said to have their own reasons, but the author believes that the American New Right trend represented by Cyrus Vance and its corresponding ideological discourse system may be the most critical factor that Trump likes and hopes to rely on.
On July 27, 2024, local time, in St. Cloud, Minnesota, the United States, Vance, the Republican vice presidential candidate for the US presidential election, attended Trump's campaign rally.
The American version of the New Right represented by Vance often calls itself "national conservatism", sometimes abbreviated as natcon, to distinguish it from the famous so-called neocon path of the American neoconservative forces. There is also a very direct example that can strongly prove the rise of national conservative forces in the Republican Party. At the opening day of the Republican Milwaukee Convention in July, among the few people sitting in the most prominent position in the first row with Trump, in addition to Vance, there was also Tucker Carlson, a famous American news host and former Fox host. Murdoch, the media tycoon who fired Carlson from Fox in 2023, did not receive similar honorific treatment. The American media exclaimed: "Tucker Carlson rises as Rupert Murdoch 'bends the knee' at RNC." This incident is very telling. Carlson has long been a staunch supporter of the national conservative (Natcon) movement, and several years ago he publicly stated that Vance was even more suitable for the White House than Trump.[1]
The political views of these people are actually quite different from the traditional political positions of the Republican Party. Generally speaking, the latter includes core elements such as (Reagan-style) free-market fundamentalism, small-government libertarianism, and active interventionism in foreign policy, but the American New Right is more inclined to advocate combining some economic populism and nativism elements with extremely traditional (sometimes even strict Catholic paradigm) social conservatism (ultra-traditionalist social conservatism) and a more restrained (or isolationist paradigm) foreign policy. These people believe that it is difficult to reconcile and be compatible between the conservative stance on social issues and the free market stance on economic issues. These people also believe that the US government can directly intervene in the economy when appropriate. For example, in their vision, the government can declare war on free trade, and they also advocate that the government should deport immigrants who have entered the United States illegally on a large scale. For another example, they firmly oppose the globalist orientation. They support the US federal government to use policy tools such as tariffs, taxes and subsidies to "protect and promote" strategic pillar industries in the United States. [2] They also believe that the federal minimum wage baseline should be raised (although this is traditionally a left-leaning position). The core proposition of the American New Right is that the developments that American liberals have long regarded as signs of "progress" - including the ever-expanding global economic system, accelerated technological innovation, and the gradual relaxation of traditional social and sexual customs - are actually the engines that trigger the collapse of civilization. [3] They claim to be very concerned about the threat to moral order posed by liberalism's relativism and the gradual collapse and loss of people's moral positioning caused by it. [4] They often describe today’s America as Rome in the late republic, either allowing it to fall freely or expecting a figure like Caesar to use extraordinary means (extra-constitutional) beyond the daily constitutional order to gather power and lead the United States with political strongman tactics.[5] According to this logic, Trump’s denial of the legitimacy of the 2020 election results and instigation of the Capitol Hill riots were not a big deal at all.
As early as 2010, James W. Ceaser, a well-known American political scientist, pointed out that contemporary Western conservatism has roughly four different branches (heads) and shares the same core (heart). This shared homogeneous core is a deep-rooted hostility to modern liberalism (also known as progressivism), and the four different branches are traditionalism, neo-conservatism, libertarianism, and the religious right. In the view of national conservatives, the United States only needs two of these four branches - traditional culture and religious revelation. Libertarianism's over-reliance on the market and neo-conservatism's attempt to defend and promote its so-called "free" principles by force on a global scale are completely unnecessary. The stupidest thing about the American establishment political conservative forces is that they only emphasize libertarianism and neo-conservatism, but ignore the other two more important branches.
Or to put it another way, we can take the so-called "conservative three-legged stool" theory that dominated the Reagan era as an example. The three legs are social conservatism (including Christian right-wing forces, etc.), war hawks (including active interventionists and neoconservatives, etc.), and fiscal conservatism (including right-wing libertarians and capitalist groups who claim to be free market enthusiasts, etc.). Clearly, the ambition of contemporary American national conservatives is to interrupt and discard the last two legs (of course, this does not mean denying all their policy propositions), leaving only the first leg and using the power of the state to make further additions.
If we go a step further and link it to the "end of history" theory advocated by Fukuyama, it will be even more interesting. When the Cold War ended and the Reagan conservatism and Thatcher conservatism in the United States and Britain won, Fukuyama put old wine in new bottles and wrote the "end of history" of the Hegelian paradigm, arguing that human civilization will most likely follow the path of Western liberal democracy. However, in the West today, the people who are most skeptical and critical of this vision happen to include various national conservatives (natcons) [6].
Some scholars have summarized the core arguments of this national conservatism as: recognizing and supporting the important role of the state in economic affairs, emphasizing traditional values such as religion and hierarchical systems, and taking an active and occasionally confrontational stance in foreign policy.[7] The last point, in its American version, is more similar to the so-called "alliance with Russia to contain China" strategy of Mearsheimer.
From a more political theory perspective, these national conservatives believe that the greatest hope for Western democracy is to return to the American and British traditions of empiricism, religion, and nationalism—they believe that these conservative traditions once brought "glory" to English-speaking countries and became a model of so-called national freedom for the world. They contrast this Anglo-American tradition with three other different traditions that are bankrupt or on the verge of bankruptcy—the old theocratic monarchy, Puritan theocracy, and the paradigm of liberal revolution—and emphasize that only this Anglo-American nationalist conservative tradition (authentic Anglo-American conservatism) is truly worthy of special cherishment and worth the effort to reproduce. In the eyes of these people, Enlightenment liberalism has completely reached a dead end today, and excessive obsession with identity politics, racial issues, and gender issues will only bring endless pain to the United States and Western society; while American neoconservatives are a group of low-IQ warmongers who drag the United States into the quagmire of endless overseas wars. They particularly emphasize the independent nature of the United States as a nation-state and its nature of handling its own affairs with full authority. What’s more interesting is that sometimes they even question the value of the US dollar as an international reserve currency, and believe that a moderate weakening of the US dollar may be more conducive to the growth of the US domestic economy. They also oppose the left-wing’s identity and ethnic political demands for more substantive equality, and the so-called libertarianism that traditionally exists in the right-wing camp, which requires “minimizing government and maximizing the market.” They are clearly pursuing ideological unity. For example, they will link the group of large American companies with the position of supporting women’s abortion rights, claiming that these large companies are standing on the opposite side of those babies who are aborted before they are born, and at the same time claiming that if you want to defend the right to life of these babies, you must clearly oppose these large companies (especially those in a monopoly position).
They claim that they are not just a force in the political conservative camp, but will be the biggest and most powerful spokesperson for the entire Western political conservatism in the 21st century. In their view, the establishment conservatism of McConnell and his allies in the Republican leadership is just a diluted version of liberalism, a part of the inherent elite ruling class of the "Great Swamp", and there is no need to discuss it. The clever and ingenious thing here is that they basically avoid the highly sensitive racial and ethnic issues. Their theoretical packaging seems to be "as long as you choose to believe in us, it doesn't matter what color you are" (this is actually in line with Huntington's teaching that "divide by ideas, not by ethnicity"), but in fact it is clear that the main players of this movement are almost all white men (Ramaswamy is a rare exception), and the entire movement is indeed full of patriarchal colors.
They hope that a large number of people from their faction can enter the government and participate in governance, or in Vance's words, if Trump can come to power again, he should immediately "fire" "every middle-level bureaucrat" in the US government and "replace them with our own people." They often think that the Orban regime in Hungary is very good, and it would be a blessing if the United States could become an Orbanist country. In their eyes, the responsibility of the government is not to protect individual rights and balance the various interpretations of the public good (or "good things"), but to forcibly promote a single concept of "good" by regulating various social relations. At the same time, it is no secret that the ideology and world view of these people have always insisted on regarding the trend of the times of "China's rise" as a thorn in their eyes and a thorn in their flesh. Sometimes they even use the absurd term "imperialism" to describe China today.[8] These people often regard Edmund Burke as their important spiritual symbol. Of course, this is an absurd misreading. In fact, if Burke were born in our time and saw this so-called national conservative movement with his own eyes, he would probably sneer at it.
On July 18, 2024 local time, the Republican National Convention came to an end in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
In the eyes of these people, there is a political movement in the history of American politics in the 20th century that can echo the activities they are committed to today, that is, the so-called "conservative populism of the interwar period" that flourished in the United States between the two world wars. In the historical scene at that time, the most right-wing members of the Republican Party strongly supported the imposition of high tariffs on goods entering the United States, strictly controlled the number of immigrants entering the United States, and actively opposed the United States' involvement in various overseas armed conflicts, including, of course, opposing the United States' participation in World War II.
We can certainly say that this is a very strange (even somewhat distorted and counterintuitive) historical perspective, which is equivalent to regarding the cause left by President Roosevelt's New Deal order's most important domestic opponent as the most valuable resource and wealth in the political history of the United States in the 20th century. Under this historical perspective, not only does the grand historical background of the United States, the Soviet Union, and various anti-fascist forces in the world joining forces to defeat the Nazis become unimportant, but even whether the United States needs to have a direct conflict with the Nazi forces (especially the European Nazi forces) has become a question that can be reflected and re-evaluated. By the same token, the aforementioned narrative of the so-called "Anglo-American nationalist conservative tradition" is also very suspicious, because it almost completely ignores the various crimes of imperialism and colonialism (such as the Atlantic slave trade) committed by Anglo-American nationalism during its modern expansion.
The most interesting thing is that the academic community generally believes that the United States' global hegemonic position was officially established after World War II. Then, according to the logic of the historical view of Vance and others, either this global hegemonic position is not worth contemporary Americans' nostalgia at all, or the United States could eventually obtain and establish this hegemonic position even if it did not join World War II (which is actually very suspicious).
Whether Trump's choice of Vance is a successful strategy or not, this question still needs to be examined in the future. One thing is probably relatively certain, that is, Trump is likely to use people like Vance to theorize, stereotype, systematize, and ideologize his policy legacy, and to promote this new ideology to gradually replace the old form of the Republican Party that is more inclined to the traditional American conservative model. In this process, even if Trump's attempt to regain the presidency of the United States and launch his "revenge" plan fails, it will not prevent the so-called "Trump-style national conservatism" from gradually growing into a new ideology of "common master" in the Republican Party of the United States and even in the broad American political right-wing forces. This is probably a calculation made by Trump when he chose Vance as his deputy. We can see that from the unclear ideological color when Trump first entered the political arena, to his reliance on the right-wing populist line in his first term, to today's support for national conservatism (natcon) thought, this person is step by step carefully creating and building his long-term legacy in political ideas. In this sense, Trump may want to use Vance's power to achieve his ultimate goal of becoming a certain version of the "philosopher king." In addition, the three levels mentioned above are not mutually opposed or negative, but rather are more of a layered and progressive relationship.
Notes:
1、https://harpers.org/archive/2020/02/trumpism-after-trump/
2、https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2024/07/23/g-s1-12513/economic-mind-jd-vance
3、https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/16/jd-vance-new-right-00168383
4、Varga, M., & Buzogány, A. (2022). The Two Faces of the “Global Right”: Revolutionary Conservatives and National Conservatives. Critical Sociology, 48(6), 1089-1107
5、https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets
6、https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/the-sad-path-from-reaganism-to-national-conservatism/606304/
7、Altinors, G., & Chryssogelos, A. (2024). Beyond populism and into the state: The political economy of national-conservatism. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 0(0)
8、Yoram Hazony: Conservatism: A Rediscovery，Regnery Gateway, 2022
Li Haimo (Young Associate Researcher, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University)
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