Vance, Disraeli, and the Angels in Marble
Donald Trump’s choice of vice-president has proven to be the smartest feature of his campaign. In the three weeks since JD Vance bested Tim Walz in the vice-presidential debate, Real Clear Politics’ polling average has shifted by a full percentage point in the Republican direction both nationally and in the battleground states.
After Vance was found to have made in the spring of 2021 a mean-spirited remark about “childless cat ladies,” the media expected Walz, a nice Minnesota man, to emerge as the kindler, friendlier, more popular candidate. But Vance proved to be as courteous as Walz and far more self-confident, capable, and ready to take command of the ship of state.
None of this should count for much, given the slight weight the public places on the bottom half of presidential tickets. Vice-presidents do little more than deliver their home state and reveal whether the persons picking them exercise good judgment.
Ah, there’s the rub. Trump understood he could best be served by turning to a relatively unknown political figure who had the capacity to transform his tweets into a philosophically coherent vision. Vance’s conservatism is strikingly different from that of big business cigar smokers, laissez-faire economists, libertarians, or reactionary romantics. His conservative philosophy, best characterized as nationalist, celebrates his homeland’s mountains and streams, its institutions and practices, its families and neighborhoods, its homes, bars, and shops. The Senator never forgets to remind voters he, too, was once a hillbilly, his mom an alcoholic, his rise in the world as much a matter of self-reliance as good fortune, his Yale degree a tool, not his core identity.
Unlike the colder, self-interested strands of conservativism, Vance’s brand appeals to the ordinary man and woman on the street. The great Tory prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, a national conservative who climbed to the top of the greasy pole, was not afraid to broaden the nation’s electorate. Working class voters were “angels in marble,” he said, waiting to be carved into loyal Tories by a political Michelangelo who could clarify for the people the importance of a nation, its landscape, its traditions, and its institutions.
Nothing more consequential has happened in recent American politics than the steady shift of the Republican party away from sophisticated, educated gals and guys, who converse over Zoom from their home offices toward plain folks who wear company uniforms as they drive pre-owned gas-burners to day jobs and night work.
In 2020, 68% of white adults with no more than a high school degree said they were Republicans, a percentage that will likely be more than matched in 2024. In 1992, when upstart cracker Bill Clinton bested George H. W. Bush, that percentage was no more than 43%. In other words, a fourth of a major segment of the population has switched partisan identification.
Meanwhile, the upper crust drifts in the opposite direction. In 1992, 45% percent of those with a college degree said they were Democrats; by 2020, that had shifted upward to 52% and is expected to rise still higher this November.
It is not hard to locate the material from which conservative angels may be carved. American workers are anxious about the loss of jobs to automation, overseas competition, and undocumented immigrants. They are distressed at the rising cost of living, dismayed by bans on the production of fossil fuel, and afraid that crime will reach their neighborhoods. They are frightened their children could be seduced into the world of the trans-gendered.
They are also tired of tedious insults tossed out by those who think they are their betters. They don’t like to be told they are deplorable racists or that they cling to outdated religious traditions. They take umbrage when coastal snobs make a running joke out of Vance’s home state of Ohio.
Nothing better symbolizes the re-alignment of the political parties shift than Harris’s failure to attend in person the annual New York City fund-raiser for the Alfred E. Smith Memorial foundation, a Catholic charity. In his 1928 presidential run, this Catholic, urban, Democrat campaigned against the constitutional prohibition against drinking German beer in Irish pubs. He was the herald who opened the door for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Now Al Smith is a Republican hero. On the New York stage last week, Trump smiled to the Cardinal, cracked jokes, and bonded with New York City’s black mayor. Harris, like her well-educated, zoom-consumed supporters, chose to appear on a screen.
Vance’s political significance ranks well above that of the traditional vice-presidential candidate. He will certainly deliver Ohio. He has a reasonable chance of helping his party pick up his home state’s closely contested seat in the U. S. Senate. He could receive credit for bringing into the Republican column his neighboring industrial states of Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Above all, Vance’s presence on the Republican ticket gives meaning to the rocks tossed by his boss. Out of that less than glorious detritus, he is carving a philosophy that celebrates the “near and the dear,” to use the phrase coined by conservative theorist Michael Oakeshott.
Whatever else happens in this election, a Republican party in which workers can believe is appearing as mysteriously as the angels carved by Michelangelo. The nation’s political system is experiencing a political earthquake, an electoral realignment not unlike the one Al Smith initiated nearly a century ago.
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Paul E. Peterson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and a professor of government at Harvard University.