A Party of Bootlickers

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, July 16, 2024

 

At some point on Tuesday, Nikki Haley will address the Republican National Convention.

 

Why?

 

The most accomplished Reagan conservative in America spoke on Monday and was booed mercilessly. A few hours later Donald Trump bypassed two conservative-ish vice presidential hopefuls and chose a Buchananite populist as his running mate instead.

 

Politicians typically have two reasons for wanting to speak at a national convention, one professional and the other ideological. They share the policy vision their party’s leader has proposed for the country and they see electoral opportunity for themselves by embracing it on a big stage.

 

Neither obtains in Haley’s case. Tapping J.D. Vance as Trump’s heir apparent extinguished whatever hope remained that she and conservatives like her will continue to have a meaningful role in the party, even if some of them haven’t quite realized it yet.

 

Everything you need to know about the new prince can be reduced to two sentences, elegantly stated by the Wall Street Journal’s Kyle Smith. “The pillars of conservatism are limited government, economic freedom, and the rule of law. J.D. Vance seems to have contempt for all three,” he wrote. Liz Cheney elaborated in a separate post: “J.D. Vance has pledged he would do what Mike Pence wouldn’t—overturn an election and illegally seize power. He says the president can ignore the rulings of our courts. He would capitulate to Russia and sacrifice the freedom of our allies in Ukraine.”

 

“The Trump GOP is no longer the party of Lincoln, Reagan, or the Constitution,” she concluded, obviously correctly. So what is Nikki Haley doing at its convention?

 

Jerry Seinfeld has a famous joke about how being a fan of a sports team is tantamount to “rooting for laundry.” Because your loyalty is to the franchise and not its personnel, you might cheer wildly for a player one season and give him the McConnell treatment the next, after he’s traded away. Ultimately you’re rooting for whoever wears the team’s uniform—for “laundry.”

 

Silly tribal allegiances are fine for silly diversions like sports, but rooting for laundry in politics is idiotic. If a party continues to command your loyalty by dint of the color of its jersey, it has no incentive to meet your policy demands. By stumping for a movement now led by Trump and J.D. Vance, Haley is telling conservatives that laundry is more important than the principles she and they purported to hold for the last 40 years.

 

Wars traditionally end with surrenders. Maybe that’s her role today—to formally capitulate on behalf of Reaganites by handing her sword to the conquering Birchers.

 

But even if Haley feels a faint duty to do one last good deed for a party that made her famous, one would think simple dignity at this point would lead her to beg off. Vance’s ascension hasn’t just cemented Trump’s party as illiberal and authoritarian, after all; it’s affirmed abject bootlicking as model behavior for Republicans.

 

Haley should have more self-respect than to vouch for a party of bootlickers.

 

***

 

The most poisonous aspect of Trumpism is the moral incentives it creates.

 

The policies are usually bad, but not universally. A stronger border would be an improvement over whatever the hell Joe Biden has been doing for three and a half years.

 

Trumpism’s brinkmanship with the constitutional order is atrocious, but a pie-eyed optimist would remind us that nothing too terrible has happened … yet. The coup plot failed. The insurrectionists went to prison. Trump was tried and convicted in New York. Institutions have done their jobs, sort of.

 

The real calamity of the modern right’s politics is the moral lessons being taught and learned, especially by impressionable constituencies.

 

Among them: Loyalty is the cardinal virtue and a duty that’s owed to you unconditionally, but not one that you owe anyone in return (including your spouse). If you lose a contest, you should fight to overturn the result by hook or by crook rather than accept defeat. Ruthlessness is strength; if you can get your way by making your enemy feel threatened, you’d be a fool not to do so. Winning is good, but dominating and humiliating your opponents is even better.

 

In seeking to satisfy your own desires, you should try to get away with whatever you think you can get away with without penalty, whatever price that might impose on others.

 

Somehow the candidate who practices that worldview is the favored candidate of evangelical Christians, or what now passes for them. A few social conservatives were chagrined to see an OnlyFans model address the Republican convention on Monday night, reasoning that “what she represents is antithetical to the values and virtues the party claims to stand for.” But that’s not true. It may be antithetical to what the GOP used to stand for, but it sure isn’t antithetical to what the party’s current leader stands for. And insofar as he pretends otherwise, only a rube would believe him.

 

I could fill several newsletters describing the moral perversions of Trumpism. But here’s another that’s germane today: It treats fulsome obsequiousness by a weaker man toward a stronger one as something to encourage and reward.

 

Of all the twisted moral lessons a parent should not want to instill in their children, it’s that they should eagerly tongue the boots of those with authority over them and expect their own boots to be tongued by subordinates in return. And you would think Trumpists, of all people, would agree. Their faction is a rolling boil of male bravado, in the image of its leader, and it’s descended from a Tea Party faction that furiously resented federal authority.

 

Leftist soy boys might bow and scrape to their masters, but a real American man is proud, strong, independent, and free. Neither he nor his sons will ever lick anyone’s boots …

 

… except Donald Trump’s, that is, in which case they’re happy to lick even the soles clean.

 

It will never stop being strange that a political movement of loud-and-proud self-styled alpha males, many of them with genuinely impressive masculine credentials, have conspired to form the most embarrassing cult of teenybopper-ish idol-worship in American political history. With a blow-dried blowhard from Manhattan at its center, no less.

 

But, strange or not, it makes J.D. Vance the perfect choice as Trump’s running mate and heir apparent. No one in the party has bootlicked quite like him since 2016. 

 

Every Republican politician of note has toadied to Trump to one degree or another since he entered politics. Some, like Elise Stefanik, have undergone astonishing faux-transformations from establishment centrists leery of his influence to fire-breathing MAGA disciples willing to defend anything he does, the more offensive the better.

 

It’s stiff competition to be the ultimate Trump sycophant. But I do think Vance is the winner.

 

Partly that’s due to where he started from. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words about Trump over the last nine years but never have I speculated that he might be “America’s Hitler.” Vance did. He was a strong-form Never Trumper in 2016, leveraging his authority as a man with special insight into the problems of rural Americans to declare that Trump wasn’t the solution. 

 

Today he’s among the most effusive Trump apologists in Congress. Essentially, he’s added an enthusiastic exclamation point to his prior observations about Trump’s fascist tendencies.

 

The other reason he wins as premier bootlicker is how far he’s been willing to go to earn the title. Figures like Stefanik and Marco Rubio can mouth all the right words about the greatness of the “America First” agenda, but the hardcore demagogues around Trump like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon can smell a phony. No doubt Elise and Marco worked hard behind the scenes to try to reassure them that they could be trusted as heir apparent.

 

Vance outworked them. God only knows what he said privately to the post-liberal brain trust, but by decision day all the worst people on the right were pushing Trump to put him on the ticket: Tucker, Elon Musk, Trump’s sons, and tech bro David Sacks, who licked a different authoritarian’s boots onstage at the convention on Monday night. Again and again in public, Vance seemed willing to go just a bit further than the rest of the competition to flatter Trump’s nationalist preferences and demonstrate his loyalty. He wasn’t merely against funding Ukraine; he didn’t care about Ukraine. He didn’t merely disagree with what Mike Pence did on January 6; he would have thrust the country into a constitutional crisis.

 

He’s the ur-sycophant, the supreme example of a clear-eyed Trump skeptic gone bad. Even the beard he grew after 2016 suggests, a la Mr. Spock, a more sinister version of his alternate self. 

 

Shouldn’t a party of bootlickers have one of its own on the ticket?

 

***

 

Vance is notable for another reason. In his best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegy, he appealed to the rural underclass to take responsibility for its own ills. “I don’t know what the answer is precisely,” he wrote, “but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.” He lived that ethic too, pulling himself up by the proverbial bootstraps.

 

“Personal responsibility” was a classic Republican pitch, typical of the party at the time. It was partly because he feared Trumpism would be a diversion from that necessary task that Vance opposed the GOP’s nominee in 2016.

 

Eight years later, he’s foursquare behind Trump’s message that rural Americans have been exploited by predatory globalist forces and only the “cultural heroin” of Trumpism can save them. The bootstraps pitch has been replaced by something new. “I think our people hate the right people,” he said in an interview in 2021. When asked who “the right people” to hate were, his campaign named “the political, financial and Big Tech elites.” (Vance himself is now a member of all three of those groups.)

 

It’s no exaggeration and no coincidence to say that the transformation of J.D. Vance mirrors the transformation of the Republican Party over the last decade. As much as the left, if not more so, the modern GOP has encouraged its members to believe that the institutions of American life are arrayed against them and spoiling to victimize them. But unlike the left, the only solution Republicans can think to offer to that problem is placing a singular messianic hero above the law.

 

Vance might have more insight than most into how that came to be.

 

On Monday data circulated from a new survey detailing Trump’s popularity with male voters. It’s not news that he polls better with men than with women, and that was true in this poll across all marital subgroups. But where he dominated, interestingly, was among divorced men. Fully 56 percent are supporting him in November, easily topping his numbers among married and single males. The gap in his support between divorced men and divorced women was also wider than in any other cohort.

 

It makes sense that men who feel disempowered would be drawn to a political figure who radiates male power, and there are a lot of men out there who feel that way besides just the divorced. That’s what Vance worried about in 2016, I think—that anomic and dispossessed Americans would be seduced by Trump’s strongman persona because they would derive a sense of vicarious empowerment from it. They would come to see him as a sort of avenging angel, capable of exacting revenge on the cultural enemies responsible for their impotence in a way that they can’t.

 

And so maybe it isn’t such a paradox that a party of tough-guy alpha males and salt-of-the-earth “real Americans” would also end up as a party of bootlickers. That’s how it always is in authoritarian movements, no? Once your sense of personal agency and authority comes to depend on the leader’s empowerment, you’re incentivized to exalt him in unusually cringey and alarming ways. Boot slobber is assured, which is just what Vance gave us as he swung around toward Trumpism.

 

***

 

There’s one other person besides Donald Trump to whom Vance owes his new promotion. We should say a word about him.

 

Here he was on Monday evening, speaking—or trying to speak—to NBC News.

The rest of the interview wasn’t much better. 

 

The worst possible candidate to oppose a party that fetishizes strength and promises vicarious empowerment is a geriatric who seems more grotesquely enfeebled by the day. Many times I’ve speculated here that MAGA Republicans secretly prefer to lose elections, but it’s not the GOP this time that seems intent on sabotaging itself, is it?

 

The private polling Democrats are seeing is reportedly abysmal. The president’s allies are so anxious about him suffering another cognitive catastrophe in public before he’s nominated that they’re rushing to make it official even though there’s no logistical reason to do so. Nothing demonstrates confidence in your party’s chances like anointing your candidate early because you’re worried he’ll blow up his campaign before the convention if you don’t.

 

Reportedly Trump came very close to choosing North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a more traditional Republican, as his running mate but was talked out of it at the last second by his sons. And under the circumstances, you can understand why: Joe Biden’s weakness as a candidate is so glaring that Trump presumably saw no reason not to gamble on someone with whom he has more in common ideologically than to make a “safe” pick.

 

He’s going to win either way, so why not choose Vance?

 

Choosing Vance instead of Burgum will have momentous consequences for the right even if Trump loses in the end. Vance is now the frontrunner for the nomination in 2028; his ascension to the ticket will chase more Reaganite conservatives out of the party, tightening populists’ grip; debates on matters from regulating Wall Street to funding Ukraine to seizing the assets of political enemies will tilt further toward the Buchananites; the lesson that lavish obeisant bootlicking is the path to advancement in the GOP will be reinforced.

 

Vance represents the professionalization of post-liberalism. Trump will be seen in time as a charismatic revolutionary, talented at smashing things but not really cut out for management; the wave of disciples who follow him into power will be viewed as the New Right finally gaining its bearings and becoming more efficient at executing its project. Trump 2.0 will be “an order of magnitude more effective” than the first iteration, wrote an excited Christopher Rufo on Monday, because this time it’ll be backed by “an emerging right-wing counter-elite.” 

 

That’s Vance. And that’s why the worst people in the party want him.

 

A more formidable Democratic nominee might have forced Trump to play it safe with Burgum or Rubio. As it is, the Biden catastrophe has given us a Trump running mate whose promotion means the end of Reaganism and will very likely give us President Trump in November. We’ve already paid a terrible price for an old man’s vanity.