A Night for Progressive Republicanism

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, July 16, 2024

 

So far, Donald Trump’s campaign for the White House has been relatively light on policy. If the Republican Party’s governing platform, which consisted of a variety of statements of principle, is any indication, that ambiguity is deliberate. But the GOP got a taste of the fully MAGA-fied Republican ticket’s policy instincts on night one of the GOP’s nominating convention. To conservatives of a certain age, a lot of it sounded like the boilerplate rhetoric they’ve spent their adult lives voting against.

 

We can judge the tone the RNC sought to set by the speakers it reserved for some of the most coveted speaking slots in prime time — the vast majority of whom were not Republican lawmakers. For the most part, the party’s leading lights were shunted off to the earlier part of the evening. The spotlight was reserved for internet sensations, political hobbyists, and rabble-rousers.

 

Take, for example, businessman David Sacks, who alleged that Russia’s war of conquest and subjugation in Ukraine and all the horrors that accompany it are solely Joe Biden’s fault. After all, he “provoked, yes provoked, the Russians to invade Ukraine with talk of NATO expansion,” only to compound his error by rejecting “every opportunity for peace in Ukraine, including a deal to end the war just two months after it broke out,” presumably by failing to acquiesce to Russia’s terms at gunpoint.

 

This is nonsense, but it’s popular nonsense among a particular sort of activist whose engagement with human beings outside online forums is severely limited. Along with Georgia, Ukraine’s NATO accession has not been a serious prospect since the Bucharest Summit of April 2008 — a fact Russia acknowledged in its decision to invade Georgia not four months later. After Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, the notion that the Western alliance would elect to inherit a hot war on the continent was anathema. Few in positions of power, including Joe Biden, talked about Ukraine’s NATO prospects in anything other than aspirational terms.

 

But Sacks’s vision has its appeal to certain wings of the GOP, including those to which its vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, is partial. He has made no secret of his hostility toward Ukraine’s cause, which he justifies sometimes by insisting that the U.S. has no interest in preserving peace on the European continent and at others because of his estimation that the U.S. is a spent force that must triage its resources. If the Ohio senator believed the U.S. lacks the “capacity” to meet the threats to its interest abroad, he might have voted to augment those capacities in either the National Defense Authorization Act or the various supplementals designed to do just that. But he didn’t. One could arrive at the conclusion that this ascendant wing of the GOP has set out to make American decline into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

Sacks’s address was followed by a remarkable spectacle in which a Republican audience was treated to a table-pounding stemwinder by Teamsters union president Sean O’Brien. The GOP faithful were bombarded by attacks on “big banks,” “corporatists,” “big business,” and an amorphous collection of elites who are engaged in an existential conflict with the working class. O’Brien bragged about his efforts to convince Republicans to turn against state-level right-to-work laws, which allowed workers to avoid forced unionization or — in the pre-Jannus era — have their wages garnished by organized-labor organizations to which they didn’t belong.

 

“The elites are not laboring on behalf of workers,” Sean O’Brien insisted. “There is a political caste system” in America, he continued, articulating a conception of America in which the economic pie cannot grow and must, therefore, be justly redistributed. “Elites have no party,” the functionary of an organization that reliably devotes its resources to Democratic causes. “Elites have no nation.” Traditionally, little good has come from talk of an ill-defined stateless cabal of nefarious moneyed interests secretly pulling the strings of the powerful with the aim of stealing from the salt-of-the-earth that which is their due.

 

According to reports from the ground suggest convention-goers were mostly nonplused by O’Brien’s impression of an early-20th century Wobblie. This was not the Republican Party to which they gravitated in their youth — a party of limited government that understands that liberating individuals to pursue their own interests maximizes personal happiness and economic competitiveness and pursues American interests abroad with confidence in the superiority of liberty and democracy as theories of human organization. But they had better get used to it.

 

If night one of the RNC in prime time is any indication, the 2024 race will boil down to a choice between two flavors of reckless profligacy at home and humiliating retrenchment abroad. We’ll be left to litigate the fine distinctions between the two parties’ various cultural grievances. Can’t wait.