Politics has taken an unexpected turn. For decades, weirdness was associated with the Democrats. Excessively concerned with a culture war most Americans don’t care about while remaining captive to parochial subcultures — this used to be the purview of the Left. With Democrats now mocking Republicans for being “weird”, it is worth asking: how did this reversal of roles take place?
It would be easy to look at the flailing state of Trump’s campaign and pin the blame on an erratic candidate, or bad advisers, or, as so many have done, single out J.D. Vance as the source of the misfortune. But the fault lies neither with Trump nor Vance, nor any single individual. Instead, we must look back to the foundations of the modern conservative movement, for it is arguably the persistence of a distinct political culture rooted in those formative years that holds back the growth of the Republican coalition.
Since its emergence in the industrialising America of the 19th century, the Republicans had been the party of the buttoned-down business and professional classes, embodying hegemonic political capital. The Democrats encompassed those opposed to this hegemony, be they populist farmers and organised labour, rival blocs of provincial capital, and after the Sixties, the new social movements with their subaltern identities and subversive lifestyles. By 1972, they were the party of “acid, amnesty, and abortion”. Yet even as the party coalitions rested on these coordinates, the first signs of a realignment began to take place — blue-collar workers started to show a propensity to vote for Republicans such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
There was a time, therefore, between the Seventies and the Nineties, when both the ascendant yuppies of America and working-class hardhats could be kept together in the Republican coalition. As long as they could be focused on a common enemy. In those years, thinkers on the Right found such an enemy in “the New Class”, not dissimilar from its conceptual counterpart in leftist discourse, the “professional managerial class” (PMCs).
The New Class trope has ever since played a central role in conservative demonology; they are defined by their college educations (usually in some airy liberal arts field) and extremely liberal (or “weird”) social views, but above all, by their perch as administrators and functionaries in bloated, non-competitive bureaucracies like government, academia, legacy media, and NGOs. These “verbalist elites” were a self-perpetuating caste of privileged mandarins; unlike the yuppies and the hardhats, they were insulated from risk and never got their hands dirty, residing instead in an immaterial realm of symbols and abstractions. The idea of the New Class was thus a convenient foil for conservative rhetoric on both free markets and social conservatism.
The American Right sought to organise itself around fighting this mandarin-dominated liberal establishment, whose control over public-sector and cultural institutions had to be overturned before the liberation of the still-virtuous private sector could be accomplished. Enter the rise of aggressive new conservative institutions meant to take back power in Washington: multimillion-dollar think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute looked not just to crafting policy but to credentialing whole cadres of conservative appointees who could fill executive and legislative offices; while journals like National Review set the moral tone of conservatism.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe