The New Three-Legged Stool Of GOP Politics Is Weird

It's also a formula for evil.

It’s lines like this from JD Vance, about the “postmenopausal female,” that got him and other MAGA leaders pegged as “weird.”

Here Vance somehow transformed something many families find rewarding—the role grandparents play in the lives of their grandchildren—into something imperious and vaguely sinister: The idea that people are defined by biological imperatives. That because grandma is old and infertile, she’s now best suited for grandchild rearing.

It’s weird, it’s going to dog the Trump-Vance campaign because it’s weird, and that’s as it should be. But it’s also holds a mirror up to Vance and the post-Trump GOP. I have never agreed with or admired the Republican view of most things, but for most of my career Republicans had no problem articulating a vision of family life that didn’t seem plucked from dystopian fiction. In its new alignment, the party selects for this kind of—yes, weird—rhetoric because the factions that comprise it cohere better than they did until recently, and only a dark-minded ideologue can speak to every faction.

ROMNEYSHAMBLES

For decades prior to Trump, Republicans drew political viability from a largely unrelated set of ideologies: national defense hawkishness; Christian moralism, and libertarian contempt for the social safety net.

This set of commitments was so elemental to Republican politics that practitioners and hobbyists short-handed it as the GOP’s “three-legged stool.” Its appeal to party loyalists was simple: Each leg of the stool represented tons of people. Exorbitant defense spending appealed to weapons manufacturers and military-base communities and research institutions—but in the Cold War and immediate post-Cold War eras, it also had organic appeal within the broader population. There were (and obviously remain) a ton of conservative Christians in the United States. And libertarian economics, though not enduringly popular, enjoyed a heyday from the end of the New Deal era through the Clinton era, as the public grew weary of hegemonic liberalism. (The fact that libertarian economics doubles as a sop to moneyed interests and other organized cranks was a nice ancillary benefit.)

But that was basically it. There isn’t much internal coherence to this set of ideas. If your main priority is defense spending, you might oppose other spending in a zero-sum fight for appropriations, but you might also just decide to hell with anti-tax zealots. If you’re a fan of regressive economics, there’s no obvious reason to except the defense sector, particularly one as bloated as ours. And if you hate abortion, think homosexuality is immoral, and want to promote “traditional” family formation, there’s no reason to choke off social spending or blow the federal budget on warships and fighter planes and bombs.

Over time, the arbitrariness helped discredit the conservatism of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Mitt Romney. The GOP’s situational interest in “budget deficits” was a byproduct of unprincipled politics and an agenda at war with itself. When in power, higher budget deficits were the natural byproduct of lower taxes and bigger defense budgets, minus the political will or public support to destroy the safety net. When out of power, they wielded their own deficits as cudgels against Democrats and their liberal priorities.

The old Barney Frank barb, “life begins at conception, and ends at birth,” fell out of these ideological crosswinds. On the one hand, women should be forced to carry pregnancies to term; on the other hand, don’t expect the country to help with the cost of child-rearing (unless maybe you live on a military base). Each individual objective was defensible on its own terms, but pursuing all three objectives at once created channel confusion.

It was logically messy and undignified, but there was nothing terribly unusual about a political party serving as a log roll of interest groups, some of whose priorities clash.

STOOL PIGEON

The post-Trump GOP also rests on a three-legged stool, just a slightly different one. Because Trump is corrupt and transactional and self-obsessed, and because his presence at the helm of the GOP has attracted an army of charlatans and nihilists, there’s a pervasive sense in the political establishment that the GOP has grown more ideologically incoherent than it was under past leaders. But beneath all the con-artistry and backbiting, it’s actually grown more coherent. In fact, the three flanks of post-Trump conservatism make the most sense when grouped together, and less sense piecemeal.

They just happen to congeal into something monstrous. A program of ethno-nationalist natalism.

The new three-legged stool, as the old one, unites Christian fundamentalists and Randian economic fanatics. But it swaps out national-defense conservatism for anti-immigrant conservatism. The war hawks are still there, the party hasn’t turned entirely against profligate military-spending. But between the end of the Cold War and the failure of the Forever Wars, Republicans can no longer draw mass support from hawkishness, and have become further divided over geopolitical vision. Trump loves military spending for bragging rights, but wants to gut the “deep state” security services and would seemingly form a transnational alliance of authoritarians rather than nurture NATO and its many democracies. Some rank and file Republicans have followed suit. Others are ready to cut defense spending, too. They stand against the remaining old-guard members who basically think Reagan and Romney struck the right balance.

Anti-immigrant sentiment of various kinds is quite widespread, though. It in theory helps Republicans build appeal beyond their most committed voters, which has underwritten the drift toward Trumpism. Even in the Bush and Romney years, Republicans were divided between an immigration-friendly pro-business wing and a nativist one. Bush tried to pass comprehensive immigration reform; Romney promoted “self-deportation.” But their foreign policies overlapped a great deal. Through all those years, Republicans emphasized points of agreement, and papered over their divisions, which meant fear mongering foreign nations and transnational terrorist groups rather than what they now call “invaders.” Now they try to paper over foreign policy divisions as they rally to expel 15 million people from the country.

But whereas an adherent of the old three-legged stool looks like Romney—awkward, austere, politically obsolete—the new GOP looks like JD Vance, if not significantly more menacing. There is a fully formed ideology that inheres all three prongs, and you can find it in Viktor Orban’s Hungary or in various neofascist manifestos that circulate among Vance and other Trump loyalists.

Republicans only trip over themselves trying to justify individual facets of the new agenda. The religious fundamentalists will argue that abortion is murder, but they’ll also claim to believe abortion is inimical to prosperity. We can’t survive if our number shrink or we reproduce below replacement rate, and thus don’t have enough workers to care for our elders.

Liberals and progressives know how to resolve this dilemma without getting weird. We could make legal immigration easier. In recognition of the significant costs of child-rearing, we could also bolster financial inducements to people who want to form families.

Today’s Republicans overwhelmingly say no to both of those ideas. They have repeatedly blocked efforts to help parents afford children. They want to expel immigrants from the country, and make legal immigration much harder, if not impossible.

Now ask yourself: What vision of the future does this advance? What kind of society is it meant to create? What does it mean to rid the country of foreigners and replenish it with the home-grown babies of affluent families—or ones where grandma serves her post-menopausal, biological function as a provider of free childcare?

In a society that still enshrines legal and constitutional equality to its citizens, this is a policy recipe for establishing a semi-official caste system. At its most extreme, its a backdoor affirmation of the white supremacist slogan, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

JD Vance is married to a South Asian woman, and has mixed-race children, but would quite clearly welcome a more class- and race-stratified society. Had he been alive 170 years ago, Vance would’ve been a proud Know Nothing, lamenting the "massive wave of Italian, Irish and German immigration,” which yielded “higher crime rates… ethnic enclaves… inter-ethnic conflict in the country where you really hadn't had that before.”

His philosophy is Trump’s infamous rant about “shithole countries” dressed up in the pseudo-intellectual jargon of the right-wing internet. If he weren’t a principal, he would’ve happily posted this campaign tweet himself.

It would not be hard, at least in theory, for Republicans to modify these positions into something much less bleak. A center-right party that truly stood for orderly immigration (as opposed to immigrant hatred) and wanted to nurture families could dial back the austerity and the xenophobia. A party that supported humanitarian border security, skilled immigration, and a safety net for families would be hard for liberals to defeat.

But they don’t want that. The propulsive intellectual forces of the new GOP reject ideas that foster pluralism. They don’t want to advance American society with “somebody else’s babies” and they don’t want to encourage the wrong kinds of Americans to breed. They share pamphlets and self-published material from psudonymous fascists like Bronze Age Pervert who fixate, as Politico noted several years ago, “on population genetics and [have] a high affinity for Slavic and northern European cultures.” Who “oppose mass migration, echoing the themes of the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory invoked by the gunman who perpetrated the Christchurch, New Zealand, massacre, and apparently again by the El Paso shooter.”

They want the whole package, all three legs of the stool. These ideas sum, in their minds, to blood-soil nationalism under the law, and a secure future for white children. When Vance says things like child rearing is "the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female," we hear strangeness. Cultural cacophony. They hear a patron saint.