In his speech accepting the Republican party’s nomination for vice-president, Senator JD Vance returned repeatedly to a formulation that at first seemed inapt. “Jobs were sent overseas and our children were sent to war,” he said. Both might be true, but were they related? “From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the financial crisis to the great recession . . . the people who govern this country have failed and failed again.”
Was this the foreign policy part of the speech or the economy part? For Vance’s purposes, they were one and the same. His sort of genuine conservative had controlled neither portion of the Republican Party’s agenda in his lifetime, and he was here to take them back.
No Republican candidate for president has earned 51 per cent of the popular vote since the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the Grand Old Party where Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan once built dominant, conservative coalitions across regions and classes, a new generation of politicians and their consultants has abandoned any pretence of government of, by and for the people. Instead they have sought to secure narrow victories through clever deployment of wedge issues and sophisticated microtargeting, using power gained to pursue a broadly unpopular agenda.