This has been the week that Senator JD Vance fought back against those who thought he was a bad choice as Donald Trump’s vice-presidential candidate. He chose a fascinating and wholly unexpected approach during his debate on Tuesday night with Tim Walz, the Harris VP pick.
Vance was nice.
Really nice. Studiously nice. Clammily nice. Almost as nice as his wonderful memoir Hillbilly Elegy suggests that he is, or can be. That book, about his hardscrabble upbringing and about the damage done by neglect and poverty, is one of the reasons why Vance was once the toast of liberal America. In more recent times, his support for Trump and his acknowledgement that he would have supported his attempts to delay certification of Joe Biden’s victory if he had been vice-president in 2020 has somewhat dented his charm in those circles.
Not to mention his forays into right-wing media where, among other things, he suggested that “childless cat ladies” dominated the Democratic Party and somehow had no stake in the future of the nation.
But on the debate stage he smiled, shook hands warmly with Walz, and disarmed him with answers that gave every impression of deep thought and painstaking consideration to other points of view. For instance, on abortion, where he accepted that his party “have got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue, where they, frankly, just don’t trust us”.
Much ink has been spilled about the reasons for the Vance pivot to niceness in the context of the race. I suspect it will do little good to the Trump ticket, because Americans who like “nice” might think that Trump is not the way to achieve it. Trump himself might not like the praise heaped on his number two – one imagines the congratulatory call (if it came at all) might have been frosty.
But there is a separate, wider set of questions that new look (or old look revivified) Vance presents.
What is the Maga coalition? Does it hold together post-Trump? If Trump is elected can it govern coherently?
We are used to thinking of the Democrats as a broad and unruly church and the Republicans under Trump as united and determined as never before: a party wholly and slavishly in service of a man.
But that is simply not true. The fact is that the Trump coalition is a complicated array of disparate political thinking and policy preferences.
What we can say with certainty is that the old Republican Party is indeed dead. The “three legged stool” that Ronald Reagan liked to talk about is over: social conservatism, interventionism abroad and libertarian economics no longer meet in a viable coalition.
Instead, there are new groups whose differences are papered over by Trump but not, perhaps, for long.
This is why Vance matters. However much he chose to de-emphasise it during the debate, he represents a fascinating strand of new right thinking that regards itself as the post-Trump path for the party. This thinking is ideological. It is rooted in the idea that decency and human virtue – our ethical lives – have been privatised, handed to individuals, by conservatives like Reagan and Thatcher, and this has done huge damage to societies. The state, they believe, must re-establish virtuous order. The cat ladies hurt us all, the thinking goes, and we must not put up with them.
There is, they believe, something better than freedom. There is a good society. There are policies that strengthen families and communities. And the federal state has the right, indeed a duty, to impose those laws that might help. A good example: the Project 2025 papers assembled by a group of new right think-tanks as a blueprint for a Trump second term contain suggestions that pornography should be banned in America. All of it, gone. And prison time for those who dabble.
What would Donald Trump make of that? We know he has tried to separate himself from Project 2025, but this goes deeper than a disagreement about advice. The so called “bar stool” conservatives, the working men who watch sports and think little about politics but who back Trump in large numbers, are a group energised by a powerful if limited sense of fighting for freedom, the right to talk dirty or think naughty thoughts. They support Trump because he cocks a snook at the censoriousness of the modern left. They will not be keen on banning Pornhub.
Nor will they be particularly keen on the agenda of the tech bros on the West Coast who still hold out hopes – via cryptocurrency, among other libertarian things – that the America under Trump can become a free-wheeling, free trading place again.
All of these fissures will become wider and more salient after the election. If Trump wins he will be a lame duck from day one, and it will be up to JD Vance to disown or to bring on board some of the new right programme with which he is associated. And if Trump loses then the battle for the future of the party begins right away.
Trump is a huge figure. He has taken control of a party. But the party will outlive him. And Republicans will have to decide, for future elections, what they stand for and how broad their church can be. The party has been brought together, galvanised by Trump. It may well fall apart when he’s gone.
Justin Webb presents the Americast podcast on BBC Sounds
