Why Vance-ism won’t be the future - FT中文网
登录×
电子邮件/用户名
密码
记住我
请输入邮箱和密码进行绑定操作:
请输入手机号码,通过短信验证(目前仅支持中国大陆地区的手机号):
请您阅读我们的用户注册协议隐私权保护政策,点击下方按钮即视为您接受。
FT商学院

Why Vance-ism won’t be the future

Trump’s genius, which is to be rightwing but not pious, is lost on his election running mate 

Flag, faith and family. That used to be a winning message for conservatism in America. Now, though? What if a target voter loves the flag but lacks the faith? What if he or she views the familial domain as unfit for political trespass?

Now let us travel one letter up the alphabet. Readers might remember “God, guns and gays” as another alliterative précis of the right’s obsessions in the later 20th century. But in 2024? What if a swing voter is a Second Amendment absolutist with no strong views on the other Gs? Or even takes a liberal line on them as a generational reflex?

We aren’t talking about exotic creatures here. The US is a nation of two-to-one support for same-sex marriage. Most people either “seldom” or “never” attend a religious service. At the same time, immigration is the top concern that voters name unprompted, and just one in three strongly objects to the idea that a president should be able to rule without much judicial or congressional restraint.

Put this all together, and something becomes clear. Lots of voters now are what I will call “public authoritarians”. Porous borders, tent cities, woke colleges, perhaps even Chinese imports: these things upset them. But private morals? Affairs of the bedroom and the chapel? You do you.

To win, the devout need the louche. Trump was a vessel in which to smuggle a cultural conservatism that couldn’t prevail on its own terms

Donald Trump’s electoral genius consists of never frightening these people. Even at his demagogic worst, a certain reticence about the private realm, combined with some well-documented peccadillos, assures the conservative-but-not-pious that he isn’t going to go all Cardinal Spellman on them. And so his coalition hangs together. The Republicans, it seems, have lost that balance of late. The Dobbs ruling on abortion was the start. The elevation of JD Vance — conservative Catholic, scourge of the childless, worrier about porn — is a move in the same vein.

Vance himself might be the future. He has the time and the brain. He has the most underrated asset in politics and perhaps life: unembarrassability. But Vance-ism? There aren’t enough private authoritarians in the electorate to sustain it. And this assumes no further secularisation. (Church membership in the US under Reagan: 70 per cent. It is now below half.) Either he changes his outlook — he wasn’t too embarrassed to change his old distaste for Trump — or accepts that its natural ceiling is the lower half of a presidential ticket, shoring up the faithful as Mike Pence did.

To be clear, there are millions of intense Christians who vote Republican to defend the creed. Just not enough to elect a president. For that, it is an arithmetical must to bolt on the kind of Trump fan that I am likelier to encounter. These characters react as I do upon seeing an ancient and sublime place of worship (“What a darling Sofitel it would make”) and aren’t just liberal so much as outright incurious about people’s domestic doings. Their grievance isn’t with the cultural settlement of the 1960s, but with that of the 2000s, if that means woke-ism, trade and a foreign-born population above 10 per cent of the total.

To win, the devout need the louche. Trump was a vessel in which to smuggle a cultural conservatism that couldn’t prevail on its own terms. A clever scheme, this, as Dobbs proved, but not a lasting one. The inherent tensions were going to come out in time.

In France, the hard right has never quite settled a question. If Muslim immigration is a challenge, what is it a challenge to: the secular republic or a Catholic nation? The voter who wants to protect laïcité and the voter who wants to reinforce the church can be kept in the same coalition, just about. But it requires constant and meticulous hedging. Pander to the second voter, and the first recoils. This is why populist winners — Boris Johnson, Silvio Berlusconi — tend to have something of the playboy about them. “Relax,” is the implicit message, “I’m not a prig.”  

Trump gets it, or at least got it. He is said to mistrust the clerical zeal of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. He avoids talking about the childless as demographic shirkers. But then what a righteous choice of dauphin. And, lest he scare wavering voters in a secular age, what pressure on the young changeling to mutate once more.

[email protected]

 Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen

版权声明:本文版权归FT中文网所有,未经允许任何单位或个人不得转载,复制或以任何其他方式使用本文全部或部分,侵权必究。

令人大开眼界的时间测量新科学

在科罗拉多州没有窗户的实验室里,摆放着20台原子钟,全世界都在用它们来计时。它们几乎跟不上。

特朗普政府财政部长之争的内幕

贝森特在当选总统的宫廷内部经过激烈的影响力争夺战后获胜。

比特币和香蕉成为新的炫耀性消费品

两者都加入了无用物品的精英世界,价格越高越受欢迎。

Bluesky趁X用户流失迅速崛起,Threads未能抓住机会

在X遭遇大量用户流失之际,Meta旗下的Threads却将机会让给了只有20个员工的Bluesky。

拜登希望通过卸任前的政策突击保护自己的政治遗产不被特朗普破坏

即将离任的总统为乌克兰进行最后的推动,并寻求新的司法任命和制造业补贴。

高盛因投资北伏而损失9亿美元

这家美国银行是本周申请破产保护的瑞典电池制造商的第二大股东。
设置字号×
最小
较小
默认
较大
最大
分享×