A New Republican Future Is Emerging—the Return of Actual Conservatism

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.