JD Vance and the ‘new right’ spark Washington policy war
A decade ago, when Republicans were consumed by cutting spending and repealing Obamacare, JD Vance was a 29-year-old conservative law clerk in Cincinnati who thought they were doing it all wrong.
He sent unsolicited emails to right-leaning editors telling them they needed to focus more on the people in rural America whom globalisation had left behind. He started taking an interest in Catholicism when the party was dominated by evangelicals. At one point, he even pushed his way into an invite-only conference in Middleburg, Virginia, according to people who attended, in which conservative intellectuals were trying to rethink the Ronald Reagan-era, limited-government approach that had dominated the Republican Party for decades.
Now Vance, who is preparing to take the stage at the debate against Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz on Tuesday, has emerged as one of the staunchest defenders and attack dogs for former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee. In Washington, he has become the unexpected figurehead of a new conservative movement that draws on his early fixation with policy to rewrite Republican orthodoxy with a philosophy that champions industrial policy, questions Wall Street and embraces trade protectionism.
While “Project 2025” has garnered attention for its radical prescriptions for a second Trump term, it has overshadowed a high-stakes debate between old-guard conservatives and the pro-Trump policy movement that calls itself the “New Right.”
As the movement has risen to prominence, its acolytes have helped rally Republicans to support some surprising causes including using U.S. government money to redirect the private sector, like a $280 billion law in 2022 to boost the U.S. semiconductor industry. They have moved the idea of expanding the child tax credit from the Republican fringes to a hotly debated issue in the presidential election. And they have at times expressed admiration for Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, whose crackdown on corporate consolidation has led business executives to push for her ouster.
Old-guard conservatives, from billionaire Charles Koch to antitax activist Grover Norquist, are working to hold together the Tea Party-era Republican coalition that remains a potent force in Washington despite Trump’s rise.
Hundreds of their activists and allies gathered at the Watergate Hotel recently for a gala hosted by the largest Koch-backed advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, where a string quartet played during cocktail hour and guests snagged cigars as party favours. The group’s chief executive, Emily Seidel, told the crowd they would work against “the insurgence of big government policies on both the left and the right.” ” Thomas Jefferson once warned, ‘the natural progress for things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground,’” Seidel said during her speech, adding: “Our message is clear: Not on our watch.” The crowd erupted in applause.
Vance’s allies say the old guard has already lost – the establishment has larger numbers and deeper pockets, but momentum is on the New Right’s side.
“The pre-Trump political alignment in this country is just gone,” said Oren Cass, a longtime friend of Vance’s who founded a think tank in 2020 called American Compass that has become the most influential New Right group on Capitol Hill. “It’s not coming back.” Courting the next generation Over a steak salad at Hawk ‘n’ Dove, a pub a few blocks from the Capitol that became a GOP favourite after it refused to follow lockdown orders during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Cass said his goal was to recruit the next generation of conservatives to his side.
Grover Norquist is working to hold together the Tea Party-era Republican coalition that remains a potent force. Picture: Bloomberg via Getty Images.
Grover Norquist is working to hold together the Tea Party-era Republican coalition that remains a potent force. Picture: Bloomberg via Getty Images.
A mild-mannered former Bain & Co. consultant and Mitt Romney policy adviser who lives in leafy western Massachusetts, Cass doesn’t share much in common on the surface with Trump – but their interest in conservative populism has placed the two on the same side of an ideological war.
Cass and his allies have gained a reputation for channelling Trump-era populism into Republican policy proposals, making him popular with a handful of senators including Sens. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Todd Young (R., Ind.), in addition to Vance, who represents Ohio in the Senate. Cass’s American Compass helped fill a void in the conservative ecosystem, Rubio said, which some Republicans long worried had become dominated by stale ideas.
Vance briefly dabbled with becoming a professional policy guy. When he wrote the first draft of his best-selling memoir, he focused on how government policies could help those who had been left behind in rural America, according to people Vance spoke to about his book. Instead, his editor convinced him to turn it into a narrative focused on his hardscrabble upbringing.
Catholics and IVF American Compass’s biggest effort to recruit younger conservatives takes place behind closed doors: An off-the-record, invite-only membership group of around 200 20- and 30-somethings who work in politics, law and business and have access to a weekly rotation of salon dinners, seminars, happy hours and an annual retreat at a Hyatt on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Many events are designed to include families and children, an effort by the group to promote family life, which often has deeply religious underpinnings. While Cass is Jewish, the movement has attracted a number of devout Catholics, and converting to Catholicism, like Vance did, is popular with members. (One Washington conservative joked that, upon hearing that another friend had converted, his reaction was simply: “We lost another one.”)
Members often debate what the New Right’s policy approach should be. Last spring on the Eastern Shore, a breakout group at the annual retreat largely agreed they wanted to make fertility treatments, a hot topic in conservative circles, needed less often by easing the economic burdens on young people so they could start families younger, according to one participant. But the group was divided over what the solution should be in the meantime: better to ban IVF altogether, or allow it to exist as a patch until the country can convince couples to stop delaying childbirth?
Moderate Washington Republicans snicker about the New Right being faddish and overly focused on increasing birthrates. Old-school conservatives like Norquist have used American Compass’s funders – including the Hewlett Foundation, which largely gives to left-leaning causes – and Cass’s unorthodox ideas, like raising the corporate tax rate, as ammunition to accuse him of being a Republican-in-name-only.
One recent morning, around 75 aides were shuffling into a Capitol Hill meeting room for a briefing from an American Compass aide when they were unexpectedly confronted by emissaries from the Republican old guard: Two aides from Norquist’s group were standing in the hallway doling out flyers titled, “Who Said It, Oren or Warren?” referring to liberal Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. For example: “Have tax cuts been working? No.” Asked about the flyers, Norquist said it was just “some of the interns having fun.” Cass’s influence, Norquist argued, has been exaggerated: “The only time I spend [on him] is talking to reporters.” Tax-code pushback Free-market conservatives still dominate much of Capitol Hill. This month a former aide to Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R., Wyo.) strode into the senator’s office to talk taxes, wearing a cowboy hat and a tie with the Koch-backed group Americans for Prosperity’s logo printed on it.
Lummis didn’t support a bipartisan tax plan earlier this year that American Compass backed. It would have used the tax code as a “social service program,” she told the aide-turned-Americans for Prosperity employee after greeting him warmly.
While the New Right has momentum, its future – and whether it will be dominated by Vance, or someone else – is still in flux.
A Trump loss in November could unleash a renewed campaign by establishment Republicans to wrest back control of the party, potentially scuttling Vance and Cass’s political future.
If Trump wins, many of the stars of the New Right movement could find themselves newly empowered. In addition to Vance, New Right-aligned lawmakers such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) and Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) are seen as possible contenders for senior jobs in a second Trump administration.
Yet Trump remains an unpredictable figure with few closely held beliefs. How he would govern, and whether policy issues would take a back seat to the political crises and palace intrigue that dominated Trump’s first term, is uncertain.
Whatever happens in November, change is afoot, Sen. Lummis said after the meeting. “I think there is a subtle transition going on between the more-establishment Republicans and whatever you wanted to call it – the ‘New Right’?”
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No wonder the legacy media is held in contempt
As readers know, in the US political donations are public information. So if you want you can look to see who gives to which party. That’s how a professor of law at Notre Dame University trolled through five years of data up to 2023 and calculated that US law professors give money to the two main political parties at a ratio of about 36 to 1 Democrats to Republicans. (At least, though, conservatives in the US are trying to do something about this incredible bias by giving money to the Federalist Society – our equivalent is the Samuel Griffith Society – and by pushing state legislatures to disband and fire all DEI employees in their public universities – which is happening in the US, with immediate and positive results, and which is the very first thing any Coalition government should do here in Australia when it turns its mind to our universities.)
Of course, some may say that these sorts of investigations tell us nothing about those who do not donate to a political party. So here’s a question for readers. Do you think that those in the US who do not donate monies to a political party would be disproportionately left-leaning or right-leaning? If it’s the former then the ratio is even worse, even more imbalanced than 36 to 1. If it’s the latter it would be a tad better.
Now there are other ways to try to measure political imbalance and the capture of key institutions by the political left. For instance, you can ask or poll members of these groups. That is what upstate New York’s Syracuse University Newhouse School of Public Communications recently did. (And just so readers are clear, this is not remotely a right-wing outfit.) It polled 1,600 US mainstream journalists in early 2022. What percentage of legacy media journalists, do you think, associate with the Republican party? You get the prize if you answered 3.4 per cent. Yes, under two in fifty were affiliated with Republicans. The rest answered 36 per cent Democrats, 52 per cent independents, and 8 per cent other. And we need to be clear that virtually no journo answering ‘independent’ would ever vote for Donald Trump. In fact, my bet is that a fair few of those who answered ‘Republican’ would be suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, something you can see in Australia in more than a few of our already sparse number of ‘conservative’ legacy journalists. Just pick up any copy of the Australian and see. Meanwhile, if you think this heavy skew to the political left doesn’t affect news coverage, if only by selection bias, then you probably also buy the claim that the total absence of any conservative presenter or producer on ‘our’ ABC TV current affairs shows in no way prevents the national broadcaster from producing wholly balanced, disinterested and even-handed programs. Yeah, and I’m a woman. (Oops, that quip isn’t what it used to be.)
The Syracuse study also noted that this is part of an ever-worsening ‘we are left-wing family’ trend amongst journalists. Over the last five decades the percentage of journalists identifying as Republicans has plummeted. Back in 1971, 26 per cent of journalists identified as Republicans, 35 per cent as Democrats, 32 as independents, and 6 per cent as other. Not surprisingly, this precipitous dwindling of any sort of political balance or even-handedness across the so-called fourth estate has meshed almost perfectly with the fall in trust Americans say they have in the mainstream media. Just 7 per cent of Americans say they have a ‘great deal’ of trust in the news media. And almost none of that meagre seven per cent comes from the right of politics.
Or consider this. Critics have gone back to look and note ‘that 100 per cent of the US’s ABC News coverage of Kamala Harris is positive, whereas something like 93 per cent of their coverage on Trump is negative’. I doubt that North Korea scores 93 per cent negative coverage. Remember, before Harris was the nominee she had strikingly low favourability ratings, probably she was the most disapproved of vice-president since the question has been asked. Since then the legacy media (not counting Fox) has basically gone all in trying to sell her as some transformative candidate while saying virtually nothing about the fact that she and her campaign simply refuse to do any live interviews, and certainly not with anyone who might ask a tough question. Recall that about two-thirds of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. So if the media were remotely balanced – rather than essentially operating as PR agents for the Democrats – the election wouldn’t be close. Key question: what conservative has any reason at all to trust the media? Heck, forget trust. What conservative has any reason to feel anything other than contempt for most all of the legacy media? (And for me this feeling came to fruition during the lockdowns when virtually all of the press abandoned any sort of scepticism and desire to hold the powerful to account and instead became agents of fear-mongering and unthinking government propaganda. Just sayin’, because the evidence that thuggish lockdown governments got near-on everything wrong is now overwhelming – not that the great and the good can ever openly admit their thuggery and panic.)
One more example. The legacy press has been running hard with the Kamala campaign line that Trump killed off a perfectly good ‘bipartisan border Bill’. This is laughable and every sentient being knows it. This Biden and Harris Bill that had a couple of chamber-of-commerce-type Republicans on board would have funded sanctuary cities, let in about 1.8 million illegals per year, funded lawyers for illegals, half-codified ‘catch and release’, weakened asylum screening, given work permits to illegals, and provided no immediate funds to finish building the wall. This is the so-called ‘border Bill’ that Kamala pretends Trump should have supported. It is obvious why he, and most all other Republicans, were against it and helped kill it off. But the press? Well, they trot out the Kamala line that this is some Bill that those who want an actual border should have supported. Come on! They know this is a lie. But nothing is too much trouble in the Pravda-like service of the Democrats.
I said a few weeks ago that this election boiled down to one question. Can the lefty legacy media drag Kamala over the line? Does the mainstream press have enough remaining support and trust to win this one for her? I said then that I didn’t think they did and that Trump would win. I still think that. Only time will tell but right now I’d even put some money on the Republicans taking the trifecta of the Presidency, Senate and House.
And boy do I hope I’m right.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/no-wonder-the-legacy-media-is-held-in-contempt/
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