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| Former president Donald Trump walks out to deliver his speech on the final day of the Republican National Convention on Thursday in downtown Milwaukee. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) |
| The metamorphosis of the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan into something rather different — the party of Hulk Hogan, perhaps — is almost complete. The Republicans, in thrall to former and perhaps future president Donald Trump, have embraced his illiberal nationalism, his protectionist zeal and his anti-migrant nativism. In the figure of Trump’s tapped deputy, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), they have a youthful heir apparent to the “America First” movement who seems poised to drill down on its radical ideological moorings. For decades, the Republicans styled themselves as the party of big business and free trade. At the Republican National Convention this week, Trump vowed more tariffs and Vance declared an end to the era of “catering to Wall Street” and championed “the working man.” For decades, the Republicans styled themselves as the more muscular actors on the world stage, boosters of military spending and hawkish on the threats posed by autocrats abroad. Yet Vance and like-minded lawmakers opposed fresh military aid to Ukraine for months, while Trump has a conspicuously cuddly rapport with many foreign strongmen, not least Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In his last speech as president in 1989, Reagan famously extolled immigration as the core driver of the United States’ incomparable strength and vitality. He also passed legislation that provided amnesty to millions of undocumented people in the country. Fast forward to the present: Trump, the Republican standard-bearer, was greeted on the convention floor in Milwaukee with placards calling for “Mass Deportations,” while both he and Vance stoked hysteria about a surge in migration being the root cause of spikes in crime, rises in housing prices and inflation. (None of these claims are borne out by evidence.) In all this, the Republicans under Trump have shed the trappings of a “mainstream” right-wing party for a platform more akin to the far-right parties in ascendance in Europe. For years, experts in comparative politics have charted how the U.S. Republicans have drifted ideologically away from their traditional center-right peers across the pond and toward more extremist and illiberal factions. In 2024, the Republican Party shares far more in common, for example, with France’s National Rally — which is virulently anti-migrant, calls for forms of state welfarism and has documented links to the Kremlin — than it did with the French far right just a decade ago.
The Trump-Vance ticket seems to cement this transformation. Vance, in particular, has leaned into championing an overt “blood and soil” nationalism. In his Wednesday speech, he scoffed at the lofty, universalist ideals that often accompany paeans to American patriotism, and spoke instead of the cemetery in eastern Kentucky where his forebears are buried. “Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland,” Vance said. “People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home. And if this movement of ours is going to succeed, and if this country is going to thrive, our leaders have to remember that America is a nation.”Vance added that his family “would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.” John Ganz, a commentator and historian of populism, linked Vance’s rhetoric — his grandstanding over the bones of his ancestors — to what the venerable French historian Michel Winock once described as “mortuary nationalism.” Winock was trying to place a frame over France’s evolving politics at the turn of the previous century, when a host of Catholic nationalists and reactionary thinkers like the philosopher Charles Maurras (much admired by Trump whisperer Stephen K. Bannon) were coming to the fore. Their proto-fascist brand of nationalism, Winock explained, would “subordinate everything to … the nation-state: to its force, its power, and its greatness.” And its appeal hinged on the promise of “a resurrection: the restoration of state authority, the strengthening of the army, the protection of the old ways, the dissolution of divisive forces.” But Winock adds, such politics only gave momentum to, “in varying dosages, xenophobia, antisemitism and anti-parliamentarianism” — the latter, from our 21st century perspective, can be understood as a hostility to the constitutional functioning of democracy. It’s still unclear how deep Trump and the vice-presidential nominee’s avowed set of beliefs may be. “Vance articulates a very clear perspective on the failure of what he’ll call the ‘market fundamentalism’ of the GOP — the consensus economic policy of the last few decades,” Oren Cass, president of American Compass, a think tank closely tied to the economic populists in the GOP, told my colleague Jeff Stein. Still, others suggest reasons to be skeptical about Republican pro-worker rhetoric. “Vance’s attacks on big business came despite his brief political career being backed by some of the wealthiest men in the U.S., including libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, and as he formally joined a Trump campaign supported by Wall Street titans such as Stephen Schwarzman and Bill Ackman,” noted the Financial Times. Over the weekend, Elon Musk — hardly a friend of labor — announced he would commit around $45 million each month to a pro-Trump super PAC. In the broader scheme, Trump’s GOP is participating in the same conversation taking place in many countries in Europe. It shares the same antipathy and disquiet over pro-feminist legislation and “gender ideology” that has animated parties like Spain’s far-right Vox. Like the far-right Alternative for Germany party, it sees environmental regulations and climate action — a “scam,” as Trump put it in his speech Thursday night — as an impediment to economic growth. It looks admiringly at the crackdown on liberal civil society and universities carried out by Hungary’s ruling Fidesz. And the Vance wing of the Republican Party, like some of their European nationalist counterparts, is eager to end military assistance to Ukraine, no matter if that means allowing Russia’s invasion to change the country’s borders. This week, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov cheered Vance’s addition to the ticket. “We can only welcome that because that’s what we need — to stop pumping Ukraine full of weapons, and then the war will end,” Lavrov said. | ||||||||