What Makes Vance Appealing

I t’s getting to be that time in the political calendar, later in the second term of a Republican presidency, when we are approaching the inevitably disappointing midterms and must face the airing of grievances. Twenty years ago, I was making my first forays into Washington, D.C., to see the carnage, after what George W. Bush called “the thumpin’” in 2006. Everyone would gather and make his case in panels over chicken dinners: “If it were more like me, the Republican Party would be better off. It’s failing because it’s like you.”

Twenty years ago, I sat in those rooms as the libertarians were asking for more libertarianism and less social conservatism. Give up on the anti-gay stuff, they said. The paleocons were asking for immigration restriction and a rethink of trade policy. The social conservatives were asking for more fighting on the issues that mattered to them. And don’t get me started on foreign policy! At the time, I thought they were all probably wrong. And Obama’s election seemed to confirm my judgment. Wilderness time for all of us.

From 2026, I now think they were all proven right. Donald Trump moved, following the party’s leftward drift on same-sex marriage and libertine drift on issues of vice: drugs, gambling, and things we barely dreamed of back then, such as prediction markets. He picked up the dormant paleocon themes about immigration and trade. He made his promise to appoint anti-Roe justices more explicit than any Republican nominee before him had, he and even went on a televised debate and described late-term abortion in the exact terms of disgust that had been previously reserved for meetings of the American Life League. He engaged in not enough war for neoconservatives, but too much for the paleocons.

From my perspective now, all the participants in those debates got some of what they wanted from Trump. But, as with most presidencies, everyone got a lot more than they bargained for and not always what they wanted. And so, midterms and lame-duck periods are for misery, moralism, and recrimination, more than self-examination and the mortification of our desires.

Because he’s the vice president, and because he’s preparing a run, JD Vance is attracting a great deal of the focus. In a notably spiky segment on The Editors last week, Charles Cooke asked aloud why he seemed to be hearing simultaneously from Vance supporters that the reason to support Vance is because he rejects Zombie Reaganism, but also because, if you squint, he’s not so different from Reagan. To spare listeners from a debate that was about to spiral in five directions, we had to cut it short before I could respond.

Now, I’ve never put support for Vance in terms largely drawn from Reagan either way. And while I’ve heard variations of both of those arguments myself, I hear them from different Vance supporters or at least at different times, and I don’t find it mysterious or surprising why. The clue is partly in the word “zombie.”

A very typical understanding of Ronald Reagan is that he was tough on crime and made alliances with the Evangelical leaders of the Moral Majority. He significantly expanded on Jimmy Carter’s first tentative efforts at deregulation. Reagan spoke disparagingly about government’s role in interfering with economic realities, proclaimed himself a free-trader, and passed an amnesty for illegal immigrants paired with a promise of border security that quietly died even as the amnesty expanded beyond his promises. He pursued a military buildup that put the Soviet empire on the back foot, headed toward extinction. All in all, some might say his legacy points toward the post–Cold War era of globalization: freer movement of goods, people, and products over borders. This is a legacy that inspires many today.

But in viewing Reagan this way, have they distilled his legacy into its essence? Or have they distorted it to their current commitments?

At the same time, others have pointed out that Reagan didn’t govern in an ideologically rigorous way and had a populist edge. Some of these accounts are congratulatory, like Henry Olsen’s book The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism, which shows Reagan as not an enemy of the New Deal, but a “true heir” of Roosevelt and the program’s savior. In his analysis, Olsen leans on the import quotas and other trade actions of the administration. Other accounts of this era from the right condemn Reagan for the exact same thing. As the Cato Institute’s Sheldon Richman wrote in 1988, “Ronald Reagan by his actions has become the most protectionist president since Herbert Hoover, the heavyweight champion of protectionists.”

So which is it? Is Reagan a hero of free markets or the worst protectionist of the second half of the 20th century? I’m hearing both from conservative and right-leaning sources.

The same dispute goes to his foreign policy views. Was he the uber-hawk whose defense buildup caused the Soviet Union to go down? Was he the man of moral clarity who denounced the Soviets as an evil empire? Or was he a radical idealist who sought the abolition of nuclear weapons? Was he the appeaser of the Soviet Union who engaged in useless “summitry,” as neoconservatives at the time made him out to be? Long before they tried to reclaim him, the Republican Party’s hawks were very chatty about their despair at his running away from the Middle East or his supposed “abandonment” of Poland. They accused him of shoring up the Soviet system and mocked him for believing in “the fantasy of Communist collapse.”

We can even go a little deeper and talk about Reagan’s discontinuities with Reagan. Like most politicians, Reagan changed over time. He signed the Mulford Act in California, a major gun-control bill. As president, he signed the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act, which was generally pro-gun but had controversial riders on it. In 1991, he wrote a New York Times op-ed in support of the Brady Bill, which required federal background checks on people buying handguns from licensed dealers. He liberalized divorce laws and abortion laws in California. He was encouraged in this by people on the right who viewed themselves as individualists.

All presidencies and their meanings are disputed. Obama was seen as a rejection of Clintonism in some ways and as an extension of it in others. People are currently arguing over whether Trump made the GOP pro-choice or should be given credit for ending Roe. We are almost 42 years removed from Ronald Reagan’s last electoral victory, in 1984. Anyone who voted for him for president is now at least 60 years old. Roughly one-third of the voting-eligible population was born after Reagan’s presidency. That is, they probably don’t have much political memory of the Clinton years, either. The other third of eligible voters, elder Millennials and Gen X, have very little recollection of Reagan’s presidency.

People pick their own Reagan to admire or abominate — and they can make that image one of a compromiser of principles or a fanatic fool devoted to the wrong ideas. But besides the distortion of those debates, there is also the interference from what voters and movement joiners are telling themselves, which may or may not connect to reality or any of the above narratives. I’m sure there were some George H. W. Bush voters in 1988 and 1992 who had never voted for Reagan, because they wanted a more moderate Republican. And some Bush voters probably supported Bush because he was the closest thing they could get to more Reagan. Russell Kirk, who used to write for this magazine, was a huge fan and admirer of Ronald Reagan’s, and the two of them kept up a correspondence during Reagan’s presidency. But in the late ’60s, Kirk had trouble deciding between Eugene McCarthy and Richard Nixon. This was not a hard choice for most conservatives and not for Reagan, either.

My own cards on the table: I’m of the school that holds that conservatism is not reducible to classical liberalism and that it’s not ideological at all but anti-ideological. I think Reagan’s policy legacy as president is heterogeneous, and that is why his estate was a lasting one. I’m looking forward to a Vance run because I believe one present danger to our republic — its sovereignty, security, and political cohesion — is an excess of liberal ideology in our ruling class and their institutions. This ideology imposes a kind of missional politics that is not just antidemocratic but anti-constitutional in effect and application.

This liberal politics is easy to apprehend and sloganize and appeals to people who have received the modern liberal arts education from which history and literature have largely been evacuated. This ideology talks about Western democratic values, and it sometimes dresses in drag as conservatism, but it attempts to implement Popper’s “open society.” Vance has made it clear in myriad ways that while he is deeply fluent in the principles of the conservative movement, this other global-liberal ideology that various actors have tried to tack onto it repulses him. G. K. Chesterton’s fictive Father Brown said that the “first effect of not believing in God is losing your common sense.” It’s precisely Vance’s commitment to an orthodoxy in its appropriate sphere that prevents him from embracing the regnant asphyxiating and false political dogmatism. That demonstrated freedom to think things through for oneself appeals to me, and I think it will appeal to others, too.