JD Vance and the future of the GOP

Alex Shepard makes some good points here.

First, a lot of Trump’s popularity is connected to the fact that he reflects a kind of knee-jerk anti-government, anti-expertise, pro-stupidity viewpoint:

To a large extent, his political project is built on his failure to stay on message, which only reifies the fact that he is not like other politicians. His authenticity—the core of his appeal—is built on ill-discipline. Trump tells voters he represents a break from politics as usual. He proves it by saying things—often crazy, extreme, and/or deeply stupid things—that other politicians, very much including his fiercest and most loyal backers, won’t. . .

All of which leads forces us to reckon with another one of those pesky, persistent inquiries of the Trump era: What is Trumpism without Trump? Is such a thing even possible? Trumpism is highly dependent on its leader’s charisma and his outsider status. Aside from its vehement xenophobia and old-fashioned devotion to tariffs, the appeal of Trumpism is rooted in his lack of expertise—and often interest—in most areas of policy. Governance requires doing many things that bore Donald Trump, and this translates: His base is bored with governing too!

JD Vance is a different animal:

Tonight was a good reminder that Vance—arguably more than any other Republican—embodies the future of the Republican Party. A Yale-educated lawyer, he has deep ties to both Silicon Valley oligarchs and the think tank brahmins on the right. Although he has attempted to obscure—and at times literally suppress—his deep ties to the Heritage Foundation’s radical Project 2025, he has done as much as anyone to both intellectually backfill Trumpism’s many holes with the pages of that manifesto. Regardless of what happens in November, Vance’s debate performance should leave no doubt about where his party is headed: Somewhere deeply dark and authoritarian. . .

Since his late-stage conversion to the Trumpian faith, Vance has done as much to flesh out his political program as anyone on the political right. On Tuesday, we saw the result: A remarkably extreme future of forced births and the military being deployed on American streets to deport people who have been living here for decades and who, in many instances, are legal citizens who are entitled to be here. This is Donald Trump’s political project, yes. But it is now J.D. Vance’s.

The electoral appeal of Trumpism without Trump is still untested. The available data we have in the form of competitive Senate and House races—and, for that matter, in the form of Vance’s staggeringly bad favorability ratings—suggests any successor will struggle to recreate both the vibe and the coalition that Trump has built. Vance was disciplined on Tuesday but he was also fortunate: Tim Walz started the debate nervously and, perhaps surprised by Vance’s friendly, at time self-effacing demeanor, often let the Ohio Senator off the hook. Still, there was nothing to suggest that Vance is the obvious successor to Trump or, for that matter, a generational talent.

What was clear, however, is that Vance’s approach to politics is not going away any time soon—perhaps not even if Trump and Vance are defeated in November. It will likely not involve wild digressions about crowd sizes, but it will involve calculated lies demonizing immigrants. It will be relentlessly focused on remaking America, politically and culturally, and on punishing anyone deemed to be an enemy of that project: Immigrants, women, liberals. It may not feature raucous rallies and digressions about Hannibal Lecter or electrocuting sharks. But it will be built on relentless lies about its true aims. The future of the GOP is locked in. It will arrive, as Vance did on Tuesday, with a smile.

Trumpism without Trump is a contradiction in terms, and not just in a trivial linguistic sense. But what Vance represents — extreme political and cultural reaction in the (this week anyway) Catholic integralist form, which for the moment is in an alliance of convenience with the Protestant evangelical dominionist variety of the same broad christofascist ideology — is part of an American form of anti-liberal anti-secularist authoritarianism that is going to be playing a major role in our politics long after Trump is finally gone.

Whether Vance himself is going to be a or the leader of that movement is, as Shepard suggests, a lot less significant than the ongoing existence of the movement itself.