Last week Professor Stefano Luconi, professor of American History in Padua, spoke on FIRSTonline on the meaning of choice of Kamala Harris to call the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, to join her in the race for the White House.
Today Luconi intervenes on the meaning of choice of JD Vance including candidate vice-president in the ticket of Republican party. A choice that has more of a prospective than tactical meaning and which says a lot about the future positioning of the GOP in the event of a success Trump in the November elections.
The race
La nomination of Tim Walz as her deputy she was thought of by Kamala Harris especially for balance il ticket democratic: a woman considered progressive, of Indian and African ancestry as well as an expression of an urban reality such as that of California, was joined by a moderate white man and spokesperson for the rural province of the United States. Instead, choosing the federal senator from Ohio JD Vance as your number 2, Donald Trump he has shown that he does not want to appoint a politician with a profile that is complementary to his own.
Vance and Trump, different twins?
Vance might seem like a tycoon clone, although much younger (just turned 40 compared to the former president's 78), more photogenic, less subject to subversive temptations and with an immaculate criminal record.
Furthermore, although yes degree in law in a particularly prestigious and expensive private university like Yale and has worked in the venture capital sector, Vance poses as a representative of a middle class and a working class of the American Mid West, impoverished as a consequence of globalization which has caused the relocation of industrial plants abroad.
These are the cohorts of voters who constituted Trump's main electoral base in both 2016 and 2020 and on whom The Donald continues to rely to defeat Harris next November.
Vance's candidacy is, therefore, a product of innovative strategy which Trump has implemented since the announcement of his first run for the White House in 2015. It does not serve to snatch the moderates and undecideds from the opposing party, diluting the most extremist programmatic options to broaden the basis of consensus, according to the canons established in the electoral campaigns starting from the mid-XNUMXs.
The awarding of the vice presidential nomination to Vance is rather aimed at strengthen the attractiveness of the Republican ticket on those more radical potential voters who abstained in the past because they did not feel represented by the two major parties.
Vance is, therefore, the personification of Trump's desire to apparently characterize himself as an alternative personality to conventional politics and its power games, rejecting the logic of compromise which, in his opinion, would distinguish the Washington elite and make it deaf to the real needs of the American people.
An increasingly Trumpist Republican Party
Vance is the embodiment of this approach even with respect to the dynamics within the Republican Party. Trump, in fact, refused to select his deputy from among his own challengers in the primaries. He did not follow the model applied, for example, in 1980 by Ronald Reagan, who had wanted George HW Bush as his number 2, after having snatched the Republican nomination for the White House from him, in order to be inclusive towards the minority of his own party .
Trump did not choose the former governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley, also of Indian ancestry like Harris, a figure who, in addition to downplaying the accusations of machismo and flattening of white claims aimed at The Donald's policies, would have helped to absorb at least part of the dissent within the party.
Although in 2016 Vance expressed fear that the tycoon could turn out to be an "American Hitler", he quickly converted to Trumpism to such an extent that the former president supported him in his victorious campaign for the Senate in the mid-term elections of 2022.
In other words, preferring Vance, to Haley or the governor of Florida Ron De Santis, his other challenger in the primaries, Trump wanted to demonstrate that he has forged the Republican Party in his own image and likeness, avoiding giving in to his opponents within this political formation.
Trumpism beyond Trump
Beyond the intentions of the former president and perhaps even going beyond the projects of the egocentric tycoon, Vance's candidacy appears as a guarantee in the eyes of the most conservative voters to ensure alegacy of Trumpism in the future.
Even if he managed to beat Harris, Trump would still be forced to leave the White House at the beginning of 2029 in compliance with the two-term limit. Regardless of the victory or defeat of the Republicans in the presidential elections in November, therefore, Vance - in his current role as the party's most likely candidate for the Oval Office in four years - also seems to be the most accredited continuer of Trump's policy.
In reality, however, the positions of the senator from Ohio are not a photocopy of those of the former president and, more than an exponent of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, Vance appears as the emerging leader of a New Right. Especially as a result of the defeats of Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida in the race for the 2016 nomination, this group, which includes other federal senators such as Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, has preferred not to compete for the leadership in Trump, as Ron DeSantis tried to do in last winter's primaries, resulting only in a bitter debacle.
Instead, he jumped on the bandwagon of the current winner of the battle for the soul of conservatism in order to put himself in the best position to give it an even more radical turning point, mainly through the culture wars, the conflict of values between a reactionary tradition and a progressive vision that contributed to today's dramatic split in American society.
The assumption from which the reflection of the New Right moves is that according to which developments such as the integration of world markets, the rapid succession of technological innovations and the completion of the emancipation of sexual behavior, rather than being factors of the advancement of society, as supported by progressives, would constitute elements of decadence.
Hence, on Vance's part, the defense of the value of the family, the encouragement to get married and have children as well as the vision of marriage, not as a legal contract, but as a sacred and hopefully lasting union, all evaluations that not only led him to enter into controversy with the "childless cats ” of democratic orientation, but which certainly do not place him in particular harmony with Trump himself, divorced twice, married three times and inclined to frequent prostitutes.
From paleoconservatives to the New Right
In repudiating the internationalism and globalism that the Republicans introjected in the second half of the twentieth century, with a particular emphasis starting from Reagan's neoliberalism, Trump has effectively brought his party back to the positions of the 1920s, those of the administrations of Warren harding, Calvin Coolidge e Herbert Hoover, marked by customs protectionism, by the closure of mass immigration with the restrictionist laws of 1921 and 1924, by cuts in income taxes and by the isolationism following the refusal to join the League of Nations.
La controversy of Trump towards the NATO, in particular the threat not to intervene in defense of allies who do not adequately finance their military budget, may partly recall the diatribe triggered by another Republican senator from Ohio, Robert Taft, who in 1949 was against Washington's participation in the Atlantic Pact.
But, while sharing Trump's positions, Vance goes beyond these forms of paleoconservatism. In foreign policy, for example, his firm opposition to US aid to Ukraine, expressed since the 2022 election campaign, and his calls for a peace negotiation based on the cession of some territories of Kiev to Russia do not only reflect the cyclical re-emergence of isolationism in the ranks of conservatives, which re-emerged for example in the XNUMXs with Pat Buchanan's calls that the United States should be a Republic and not an Empire.
They also express Vance's intention to overcome the vision of an international order based on respect for some shared rules, starting from safeguarding of territorial integrity of States, which established itself after the Second World War as one of the cornerstones of the collective security system.
In domestic politics, Trump has had a fluctuating attitude onvoluntary termination of pregnancy: in favor before running for the White House; opposed as president and former president to the point of demanding the overturning of the Roe v. ruling. Wade in 2022 as a success of his administration thanks to the appointment of three of the conservative judges to the Supreme Court who denied that access to abortion is a right to be protected at a federal level; now he is no longer pushing for the adoption of a constitutional amendment that would prohibit it and would like to leave the decision to the individual states. Instead, Vance in the past he has repeatedly declared his own support to a possible one prohibition federal – except in cases of rape, incest and danger to the life of the mother – and in 2023 he even invoked the application of an 1873 law against the dissemination of obscene material to prevent the sending of RU-486 by post.
Furthermore, he became the protagonist of a campaign against the treatment of gender dysphoria in minors, also justifying it in the name of a battle against pharmaceutical multinationals who would profit from the sale of drugs for changing phenotypic sex.
This last consideration, which presents Big Pharma in the role of predators, is paradigmatic of Vance's attempt to paint the culture wars as a modern form of class struggle, in which Republicans pose as champions of the weakest against the dominant elites.
A revolution to complete
Beyond the singularity of some proposals, which include declaring English as the official national language of the United States and even banning gas stoves (judged cheaper and even easier to operate than electric ones for families less well-off and for small restaurateurs) as part of the programs transition to renewable energy, Vance not only places himself at the vanguard of the possible continuers of Trumpism after Trump's exit from the scene.
He is running for leadership of the radicalization of a political revolution that, after taking control of the Republican Party, aspires to transform the entire US society, with or without Trump.
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Stefano Luconi teaches History of the United States of America in the Department of Historical, Geographical and Antiquity Sciences at the University of Padua. His publications include The “indispensable nation”. History of the United States from its origins to Trump (2020), US institutions from the drafting of the Constitution to Biden, 1787–2022 (2022) and The dark soul of the United States. African Americans and the Difficult Path to Equality, 1619–2023 (2023).
Books:
Stefano Luconi, The race for the White House 2024. The election of the president of the United States from the primaries to beyond the vote on November 5, goWare, 2023, pp. 162, €14,25 paper edition, €6,99 Kindle edition
Stefano Luconi, US institutions from the drafting of the Constitution to Biden, 1787–2022, goWare, 2022, pp. 182, €12,35 paper edition, €6,99 Kindle edition
