Message Received

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, September 05, 2024

 

There is a simple but easily forgettable aphorism in politics that prescribes humbly asking for voters’ support rather than merely expecting it. That seems straightforward, but it’s easily forgotten by candidates who succumb to the temptations toward pomposity that accompany efforts to persuade voters of their strength and self-assuredness. The inverse also applies. Voters who are consistently told that they are not wanted tend to take the hint.

 

J. D. Vance has become a proficient practitioner of this latter style — addition by subtraction. In a recent sit-down interview with Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, he demonstrated his talent for dissuasion. There, the GOP’s vice-presidential nominee reacted to the positively shocking news that former representative Liz Cheney will not vote for Donald Trump. In response, Vance rattled off a response evocative of the hollow, lazy, emotionally manipulative left-wing prattle any Republican over the age of 40 has spent their entire adult lives voting against:

“This is a person whose entire career has been about sending other people’s children off to fight and die for her military conflicts and her ridiculous ideas that somehow we were going to turn Afghanistan, a country that doesn’t even have running water in a lot of places, into a thriving liberal democracy, and for that, Liz Cheney was willing to kill thousands of her children,” Vance replied, finally stumbling across a period.

 

“Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney make very, very interesting partners,” he continued. “They get rich when America’s sons and daughters go off to die. They get rich when America loses wars instead of winning wars. And they get rich when America gets weaker in the world.”

 

“Let’s bring peace back to the world,” Vance closed. “And Donald Trump is the candidate to do it.” That’s nice, but how? What mechanisms will restore stability to regions where America’s enemies are undeterred? The preposition in the phrase “peace through strength,” which the Trump campaign retails as its foreign policy, implies a transition. Maybe he thinks you won’t dwell on the implication. Perhaps he thinks those questions can be papered over by rallying the party against apostasy. Maybe he just thinks you’re not capable.

 

This is not serious talk. It’s a species of the empty pugilistic bombast that passes for discourse among people who spend too much time behind keyboards. What’s more, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with Liz Cheney. What in her record establishes her as a bloodthirsty warmonger who profits off the blood of our children? Is it opposing the Iran nuclear deal in 2015? After all, it was Barack Obama and his allies who alleged that the only alternative to that accord was direct conflict with Iran. Was it her support for a “proportional military response” against Iran when it and its proxies engaged in a campaign strikes on U.S. positions and those of its allies — a recommendation Trump himself took up? Was it her decision to join 160 of her fellow Republicans in opposing the repeal of the 2002 Iraq War AUMF in 2021, which would have consigned American troops deployed in the region since the rise of ISIS to a legal limbo?

 

None of this makes much sense if you think about it too hard about it. That’s probably because Vance isn’t talking about Liz Cheney. He’s talking about Dick Cheney. Republicans of a certain age are old enough to remember the baseless charge that the former vice president’s relationship with the oil services company Halliburton rendered the Bush administration’s post-9/11 wars suspect. It was a vulgar Marxian analysis of geopolitics, which boiled all events down to their presumed profit motives. Vance has exhumed this line of attack from its deserved grave and rebooted it for a right-wing audience.

 

Vance’s deliberate adoption and invocation of themes that I remember hearing shouted at me by George W. Bush–hating professional protesters outside the GOP’s 2004 nominating convention is no flight of fancy. Say what you will about the vacuity promulgated during the Democratic Party’s nominating convention, at least it was a display of continuity. All the Democrats’ leading lights were present. The same cannot be said of the GOP, which, in the age of Trump, has gone to war with its past. On the national level, at least, the Republican Party is engaged in a project designed to make you embarrassed of those formative years you spent voting for Republican presidential tickets. They were jingoists and militarists, rapacious capitalists, elitists who would sell your interests out to the highest foreign bidder. Everything the Democrats said about them was true.

 

Vance has made it very clear that this Republican ticket doesn’t want to be saddled with the humiliating constituencies that delivered the GOP to its best political position this century by 2015, when Donald Trump descended the golden escalator. The blinkered pro-lifers, the belligerent hawks, the “free market fundamentalists” who think you know best how to handle your economic affairs — they can all go jump in a lake. This is a new GOP — one that finally knows how to win. This ticket conveys in no uncertain terms its belief that anyone who retains some nostalgic fondness for the GOP they spent decades supporting at the polls is no longer wanted.

 

Well, message received. Maybe the Trump camp’s addition-by-subtraction theory is right, and for every conservative they jettison, they earn two more votes from the disaffected Democrats to whom this sort of rhetoric appeals. But Vance’s fusillade of left-wing calumnies doesn’t betray confidence in the success of this project. Rather, it’s a display of insecurity. Regardless, the notion that the biggest obstacle before Republican success at the presidential level was its mortifying voters will be tested in November. Best of luck.