Politics
A Normal Country in a Normal Time
The line from Reagan to Buchanan to Vance is stronger—and more suggestive—than some would have it.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) may have been nominated for vice president by acclamation, but not everybody was happy.
Vance’s selection by Donald Trump was only part of the populist opening salvo in Milwaukee.
“To conservatives over the age of 30, the first night of primetime Republican Convention programming sounded like the boilerplate rhetoric they’ve spent their adult lives voting against,” protested National Review‘s Noah Rothman, who described appeals to blue-collar workers at home and for retrenchment abroad as “a night for progressive Republicanism.”
“Hearing A LOT of alarm today among GOP donors & Reaganite conservative types about J.D. Vance,” the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein reported. “On trade, taxes, unions, antitrust — he’s signaled [a] sharp departure from traditional conservatism, despite venture capitalist roots.”
“Vance it is,” wrote conservative radio talk show host Erick Erickson, getting the lineage of the New Right closer to, er, right. “Reaganites are passing the torch to the Buchananites.”
From his lips to God’s ears.
Yet Pat Buchanan was and in many ways is a Reaganite. He was for the Gipper right from the beginning, when some who would later describe themselves as neo-Reaganites were still writing speeches for Walter Mondale. Buchanan was with the “crew-cut militants” backing Barry Goldwater and wrote speeches for Richard Nixon.
Buchanan’s 1992 primary challenge against George H.W. Bush would likely have never gotten off the ground without his opposition to the latter’s promise-breaking, recession-enhancing tax increase. His culture war speech at that year’s Republican National Convention in Houston hailed Reagan as “one of the great statesmen of modern times.”
“You know, it is said that every American president will be remembered in history with but a single sentence. George Washington was the father of his country. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and saved the Union. And Ronald Reagan won the Cold War,” Buchanan thundered, challenging his “old colleagues, the columnists and commentators, looking down on us tonight from their sky boxes and anchor booths” to give Old Dutch his due.
Some of those pundits thought the torch had been passed from the Reaganites to the Buchananites all those years ago, at least to the extent that Buchanan’s speech wound up pushing Reagan’s out of primetime in many media markets.
(An aside: Watch Reagan’s speech that year, delivered two years before an official Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and ask yourself if Joe Biden could match it. Biden’s State of the Union address did not come close.)
But times do change, even if principles don’t. Reagan was as different from Goldwater as Goldwater was from Robert Taft. The problems of the 1980s are not necessarily the same as those of the 2020s, despite the best efforts of Beltway politicians to bring back the inflation Reagan and Paul Volcker whipped 40 years ago.
You either believe Reagan won that Cold War and that victory changed history. Or you believe that the collapse of the Soviet Union was an invitation to go around the world in search of new monsters to destroy, with every tinpot dictator across the globe a new Stalin or Hitler in the making.
There are continuities between Reagan and Trump, including a conception of peace through strength that in many respects more closely resembles the actual 40th president’s approach than the idealized neo-Reaganism that came afterward. And while a party cannot govern by tax cuts alone, the fate of Trump’s may be decided in this election. Three of the last four Republican presidents lowered taxes and the outlier, as we mentioned earlier, wasn’t Trump.
The Republican platform is now worse on the sanctity of life than it was in Reagan’s time all the way up to 2016, a shift Buchanan would be unlikely to endorse. But even that must be tempered with the fact that Roe v. Wade is no more, while the various iterations of the human life amendment were essentially a polite way to tell pro-life activists to go play in traffic.
Buchanan never broke as decisively with the Goldwater-Reagan consensus on limited government as many of his more recent admirers. Many paleoconservatives were strong decentralists, though there were exceptions seeking a stronger positive agenda for distressed middle Americans.
Nevertheless, the Buchananite positions on China, trade, immigration, national sovereignty, and foreign policy look better after the failed and false promises of the 1990s and 2000s. Humiliation in Iraq and Afghanistan is no way to pay tribute to the Republican leaders who helped bring down the Berlin Wall.
This year, Nikki Haley wound up mounting a bizarro-world neocon version of Buchanan’s 1992 protest candidacy. Trump did, after some haggling, invite her to speak at the GOP convention, much like Bush 41 with Buchanan 32 years ago. In Haley’s last convention addressed four years ago, she channeled Jeane Kirkpatrick’s from 1984.
At the end of the Cold War, however, Kirkpatrick called on the United States to become a normal country in a normal time. That would be a sound message for this year’s Trump-Vance convention.
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