JD Vance And The Second Faceplant Of The Reformicons

First, they failed to turn Republicans into economic populists; now they're trying to impose religious control on women anyhow, using Donald Trump as a vessel.

Most of my formative political experiences fell against the backdrop of the slow and steady discrediting of the George W. Bush administration. From 9/11 through the rise of Barack Obama.

Like Donald Trump, Bush fostered a cult of personality around himself—in his case, as a wartime cowboy. And like Trump, he plied the political strength he drew from jingoism and other-isms into the elite Republican cause of cutting income-tax rates for rich Americans.

But of course he also invaded Iraq on false pretenses. His wars of occupation collapsed into quagmires and corruption bonanzas, as his critics anticipated they would. He promoted cronies to big government jobs, and one of them happened to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency when a catastrophic hurricane struck a major U.S. city. The economy collapsed. Bush left office a pariah, and even before he was gone, conservative elites had put a lot of thought into how to regroup. 

The thinkers who ultimately got the most buzz would later describe themselves as “reformicons” but their ideas first came together in the crucible of the Bush collapse. Sam’s Club conservatism. The idea that the Republican Party might be indomitable if it could shake its image as the party of tax cuts for millionaires and appeal more to working-class voters instead. 

They did not make a lot of headway.

After Bush, Republicans stumbled right back into the old formula, drawing political strength from the cultish Tea Party, and using its political clout to fuel the austere candidacy of Mitt Romney.

Their ideas came back into vogue after Romney’s campaign failed, but in both instances, the reform movement was doomed because its leaders could not bring themselves to call for the right to end its decades long crusade against the social safety net. Voodoo economics was a bad look, they realized, but not as bad as conceding that Democratic ideas about national income distribution were broadly correct. 

Without that, there would be no real economic appeal to the white working class, and so those appeals would instead have to run through racial and religious and sexual resentments. For Bush: us vs. terrorists; for Romney: welfare moochers and self-deportation.

Donald Trump represented this more nightmarish incarnation of the reformicon’s paper revolution. He would bluster and lie about leaving Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid alone and pretend that he would raise his own taxes. But what he really offered was a Muslim ban, a crackdown on immigrants, hostility to trans people, and a huge, George W. Bush-style tax cut for himself and other millionaires. 

That was the reformicons first big failure: An unwillingness to accept that without a more sustained internal battle against Grover Norquist-style anti-tax absolutism, the reformicon-inspired push to appeal to working class whites would unleash resentment and aggression, rather than cross-racial solidarity among churchgoers. But appealing to working-class whites did work, even on identity grounds. Trump won, asterisks and all. Most of the reformers evolved into anti-anti-Trumpers if not out-and-out MAGA cheerleaders. But if you were to travel back in time and ask the 2008-vintage reformicons what they’d think of something like MAGA, they would have professed disgust. 

Now comes their second contact with reality: The fusing of the Christian-fundamentalist underpinnings of old reformiconism with the new morally depraved, antagonistic politics of Trumpism. This is the niche JD Vance fills. It turns out, people find it repulsive. 

VANCE ON THE FLOOR

The faceplanting of JD Vance is a story of the sanitized conservatism of those heady days—the ones you can still find in magazines and even mainstream newspaper op-ed pages—flying too close to the sun.

They understood the conservatism of their deepest ideals—the restoration of gender roles and religious instruction—wouldn’t go down without a big spoonful of sugar. That’s why they framed reform around the idea of advancing the economic interest of middle Americans. It was the flip-side to a governing vision in which abortion would be banned, childlessness would be stigmatized, pornography would be illegal, and divorce discouraged, perhaps by law. The offer, in theory, amounted to something coherent, if quite a bit too imperious for most Americans: You will work and raise a family and be virtuous—if you have recreational sex, you may not like the consequences—but in return, the state will support you. 

The writers who promoted this worldview, with varying degrees of explicitness, were thought leaders for Vance. Their criticisms of America’s supposedly decadent culture point straight to the Vance policy menu: menstrual surveillance, punishment for childlessness, the moral imperative of Kate Cox-ing women in urgent need of abortion.

All the meddling and presumptuousness that transformed Vance into an avatar of right-wing weirdness has flourished in mainstream conservative intellectual spaces for a long time now. But their main exponents were urbane and polished members of the bipartisan elite. They sought to put a gentle face on all of it. Vance was once of those guys. They’re old friends. He is operationalizing an ideology they all got too comfortable with. But over time, Republicans lost interest in putting a gentle face on anything. 

IMMORAL COMPASS

The point of being an ideological pundit is to persuade people that the ideology doesn’t bite, that people should open their minds to it. By contrast, to operationalize these ideas, Vance had to run it through Trump’s GOP, where it naturally accreted this abusive hue. 

Vance’s other thought leaders are fascists and protofascists. Some of them, like Trump himself, are hedonists and charlatans. Others are Christian nationalists who want to use Trump as a vessel for creating a society of control. Vance is, at the same time, a financial subsidiary of Peter Thiel and a vessel in his own right for greedy, hateful men like Elon Musk and David Sacks. That’s a bad formula. The money men expect the second Trump tax cuts to be just as regressive as the first, and to paper over the backlash with various forms of bigotry, leaving us right where we started with Trump 1.0. But this time, post-Dobbs, the religious right won’t be a junior partner, and it won’t bother with pieties like Mike Pence did.

If Reformicon Inc. was always just a Trojan horse for Christian supremacy (and for many it was) then the prospect of a Trump-Vance administration smells like success. But taken at face value, the reformers’ failure to actually reform their party looms large. There will again be tax cuts. There will again be no money for working families. There will again, instead, be racial and sexual scapegoats. But this time around there won’t even be a pretense that right-wing moral strictures should apply across the board.

Trump—a thrice-married sex abuser, libertine, and absentee father—has violated all of them. The ideology has drifted in practice if not in text to one that imposes strict rules of control on women and none on men. Childless women are “cat ladies,” childless men are… what? Based?

Women should resign themselves to abusive marriages, without a word of condemnation or accountability for the men who abuse them. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll for men like Elon Musk and Don Jr., menstrual police for any women they might impregnate.

Medieval policy, imposed with maximum contempt. Demanding police power over women’s reproductive organs, while being a complete asshole about it. That’s why it’s generating such a furious backlash.

It’s also why I suspect that if Trump had done due diligence before picking a running mate, he probably would’ve taken a pass on Vance. Trump is all in for cruelty against people who can’t fight back, he just knows women are half the country, and he knows this stuff loses elections. But he acted impulsively, blew the biggest decision of his third campaign for president, and now he’s stuck with it.

Correction: This article originally referred to Trump as “thrice divorced.” He is thrice married, but only twice divorced. I regret the error.