In 1977, Ronald Reagan spoke about the future of his party. “The new Republican Party I envision will not be, and cannot be, one limited to the country club, big business image that, for reasons both fair and unfair, it is burdened with today. The new Republican Party I am speaking about is going to have room for the man and woman in the factories, for the farmer, for the cop on the beat and the millions of Americans who may never have thought of joining our party before, but whose interests coincide with those represented by principled Republicanism.”
With that speech, Reagan declared his intention to make the GOP the party of the working man. This gradual change was driven principally by Democrat insensitivity to blue-collar needs rather than by Republican actions. But from 1988 to 2016, the only Republican presidents were members of the ultra-establishment Bush family. The Iraq War and the 2008 bailout of companies that were “too big to fail” briefly drove many working people back to the Democrats.
Candidates like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, whom the opposition could paint plausibly as pushing grandma’s wheelchair off the cliff while reciting Ayn Rand, were no better. In the classic phrase of Democrat-turned-Reagan advisor Jeane Kirkpatrick, such Republicans “seem[ed] more formal, more buttoned up — the kind of people who call a man named James, James.”
Meanwhile, Democrats were losing their love of the working class in “flyover country.” In 2008, before a group of wealthy California supporters, Barack Obama spoke condescendingly of people in small towns in Pennsylvania and the Midwest where “the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them … And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to.”
In 2011, Thomas Edsall wrote in The New York Times that “preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.” Liberals launched the vaunted “Bobby Kennedy Project” to improve Democrat outreach to working class voters, but quickly and quietly abandoned the effort (A political scientist explained that “the tradeoffs they might have to make to attract more working-class white voters may not be worth the cost in irritating the constituencies of their current coalition”).
Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer wasn’t worried, arguing in 2016 that, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
Then came Vance, a populist with a by-the-bootstraps story. Born in Middletown, Ohio, and raised mainly by his grandparents, he joined the Marines, served in Iraq, and graduated from Ohio State University and Yale Law School, where his mentor was Amy Chua of “Tiger Mom” fame. He got rich working in law and the tech industry. His book “Hillbilly Elegy” so indicted the impact of Beltway policies on small-town America that The New York Times called Hillbilly Elegy one of “the six best books to help understand Trump’s win.”
Despite this all-American success story, members of the Republican establishment look down on Vance and the sort of people he represents. Since the days of the Tea Party movement, Mitch McConnell has ridiculed grassroots populists, ignoring the fact that Senators such as Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ron Johnson, Jerry Moran, Mike Lee, and Pat Toomey were candidates of that wing of the party. This year, McConnell, clearly referring to populist-oriented candidates, said some Republicans lacked “candidate quality.” The remark gave credibility to Democratic attacks and likely cost the GOP some seats.
But McConnell’s view is not fringe. Many Beltway conservatives despise populists, seeing them as as naïve, unthinking and even brutish — perhaps because they oppose trade deals with slave-labor countries, open borders, lockdowns, endless wars, and the end of cheap, reliable energy.
In 2016, Kevin Williamson wrote in National Review about the Trump heartland: “The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. To solve their problems, those people don’t need “analgesics, literal or political … they need U-Haul.” In 2018, the American Enterprise Institute, once the flagship conservative think tank, announced a “unique collaboration” to fight populism, in partnership with the Center for American Progress, the think tank tied to Hillary Clinton. A fellow at the free-market Mercatus Center currently hosts a blog called The UnPopulist, dedicated to denigrating populism. In a new history of the conservative movement, Matthew Continetti, founding editor of the Washington Free Beacon, describes populists as “susceptible to demagoguery, scapegoating, and conspiracy theories.”
Intellectual populists like J.D. Vance break the stereotype, making them special threats. They can’t be written off as demagogues playing to the hatreds of ignorant masses. They can argue effectively against establishment policies that have brought disaster to everyday Americans and eviscerate the entrenched D.C. bureaucracy on a constitutional basis. They can articulate historical American ideals to the masses, crossing old political boundaries such as race. As Abigail Shrier wrote, this is “a conservatism that refrains from denigrating and dividing the American people.”
Hopefully Vance is just the first of a unifying populist conservative movement of people of all races, creeds, and colors. This trend will transform the Republican Party, completing Reagan’s envisioned realignment from 45 years ago. And it’s about time.
Dr. Steven J. Allen (JD, PhD) is vice chairman of The Conservative Caucus.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.