Reaganism in the 2020s or Bushism in the 2020s really makes absolutely no sense. VD Vance hints at this in one of his NatCon speeches.
Those types envisioned America as a place that [1] enforced a particular social and moral order on the rest of the world. [2] Had a trade policy where America's comparative advantage was as a reserve currency where the rest of the world parked their excess savings and the US focused on IP rents and importing most of it's manufactured goods.
A country that can't manufacture its own ships and weapons doesn't get to enforce it's vision of world peace and human rights. Period. People who get offended by this keep thinking the people like me simply like Vladamir Putin and want Liberal democracy to burn. Perhaps we do think that liberal hegemony has a bit of blood on its hands, perhaps setting Libya on fire is a small price to pay for preventing the chaos of a multipolar world. But the guys on the other side literally can't process that right does not make might. They're geopolitical world view is basically a Marvel movie where logistics and strategy don't matter and the plucky good guys always win.
Ukraine might still be winning the war on Twitter but on the ground it's Germany late '43 early '44. And as far as Taiwan goes, the gap the industrial gap between America and China today is essentially an analogy between Japan and America in 1941, with America in the "Six months of fighting and after that no expectation of success". (Except America still has natural resources). Both countries will be lost as long as the other side doesn't give up.
As far as deficits go, the Trump tax cuts were a Paul Ryan Mike Pence thing as much as they were a Trump thing. America really is circling a black hole when it comes to government spending, and there's nothing in pre-trump republicanism that has any positive inspiration.
The only thing the GOP has lost is a pretense of civility.
This is the actual private message from Vance to his friend (who disclosed it) from 2016. Note that it's more than 2 words long.
"I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler," Vance wrote. "How's that for discouraging?"
And really, did nothing happen between 2016 and 2024 that might have changed Vance's (or anybody else's) mind?
The party of feeble sleaze dominated by donors and mostly interested in wetting their beaks while pretending to someday -- real soon now! -- act against various social problems important to the voters ... does not strike me as accurately described as 'Reaganite'. The most Reagan-like activity I can see them doing is a massive amnesty.
Right. Plenty of people would be happy to vote for a Reagan party interested in restoring many features of Reagan's America. The GOP has not resembled or even been trying to offer anything like that for 30 years. Republican voters who think Trump is the worst haven't gotten to know the current GOP leadership, who make Trump look good in comparison.
A lot of conservatives are turned off by Trump. That's because they are constantly exposed to things about Trump. But even most educated people who follow politics have little knowledge of or exposure to even very high ranking GOP politicians and figures, who it is being charitable to describe not as 'bipartisan' but as 'collaborationist' at the expense of their own alienated constituents. The more one sees and learns about them, the less one is naive about who is the least worse option, and the less reluctant one is to choose him. Trump was creative destruction for an institution which had rotted from the top down due to its perception of being the only game in town for voters opposed to the left and the corrosive insulation from the incentives to stay sharp, effective, and grounded that would have been present if they felt at the level of their own personal interests that they had faced the prospect of real competition.
The country club Republicans finally lost me when they had the house, senate, and presidency in 2016, and could only pass a tax cut. Like the dog who caught the car...
Unfortunately, it's now a debate on what kind of BIG government we should have. Trump has continued to take the party towards those who have been abandoned by the Dems, i.e., people who want to be proud of their country. Meanwhile, the Dems have painted themselves into the Left corner, and need some time in the wilderness to get their heads straight. Unfortunately, Obama still lives in DC.
Us immigrants know the disaster of socialism and censorship. There is a huge gap in the center waiting for a third party and leader to break the duopoly and deliver a lean government that is fit for its few purposes. Maybe when libertarian Milei is done fixing Argentina, we can hire him as White House Chief of Staff to get it done.
Philip Klein wrote an article in National Review right after Vance was nominated, arguing that this was essentially the nail in the coffin for fusionist conservatism and that there probably will never be another Reaganite president. A commenter there made an excellent point: "When was the last Reaganite president besides Ronald Reagan?" It is a bit strange that Republicans have seldom nominated and haven't successfully elected a nominee who represents what was the dominant ideology in the party until some point during the Trump presidency. George H.W. Bush was somewhere between Reagan and a Rockefeller Republican. Bush and McCain were "compassionate conservative" neocons. I guess Dole and Romney were the closest nominees in ideology to Reagan, but (from my understanding because I wasn't alive at the time) Dole made his case in his campaign poorly, and I think Romney's tenure in the Senate has raised serious doubts about his conservatism.
This isn't unique to one party or another; I think elites in both parties who are sympathetic to classical liberalism will be squeezed out of the dominant factions. Peter Zeihan is correct that this election is a re-alignment into a new party system. Right-wing populism will rule the Republican party under Trump, Vance, Ramaswamy, DeSantis, or whoever else rises to the top. Biden's decline and impending political demise probably symbolize the fall of center-left liberalism with moderate social and economic stances from any dominant coalition in the Democratic Party. The American political landscape will probably shift indefinitely towards the populist one of Europe. If so, I suppose that means the revolt of the public is complete.
"When was the last Reaganite president besides Ronald Reagan?"
Reagan's influence is measured in terms of *Democrats*, most notably Bill "The Era of Big Government is Over" Clinton but also in the policy stances of *left-leaning* intellectuals like Larry Summers and Paul Krugman. Compare Paul Krugman's writings from the 1990s with now to understand the difference. Reaganism was so dominant that the left had no choice but to adopt (a perhaps lite version of) it. In contrast, where Trump differs from traditional Republicans --- trade protectionism and big spending social programs most notably --- Trump has adopted basically leftist positions. Reagan made Democrats more like Republicans, Trump the opposite.
Trump's tariffs are far less protectionist than many Buy America supporters want, or that H Ross Perot wanted in 1992, who's third party run was enough to get Clinton elected over 'Read My Lips' Bush41, the liar.
Reagan's globalization hurt lots of US manufacturing workers, tho it helped maybe 10x more Chinese workers. US workers like the peers of JD Vance's parents.
Arnold cavalierly dismisses the idea that the 2020 election may have been stolen, notwithstanding the many evidences for that possibility. Naturally we resist thinking that such a terrible thing might have occurred. But, where there is smoke, there is fire. Compare our elections to those, say, in France, where all voting is done on election day using paper ballots, and an undisputed count is available in short order. Our elections are arranged differently so that cheating is easy and difficult to stop. Why can't we have clean elections in which everyone can reasonably be confident in the result, regardless of his political preferences? It is because many politicians do not want that. Democracy depends upon public confidence in fair elections. When a very large proportion of the public doesn't feel they had a fair shake, government is drained of legitimacy and social chaos results.
Michael Brendan Dougherty has argued there's a distinction between the soft case that the 2020 election was "rigged" and the hard case that it was "stolen." The former argument would go that using COVID as a pretense for states to extend absentee ballot deadlines past election day was an unfair albeit technically legal thing to do; the same would apply to the media and intelligence officials writing letters to argue that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation and that a second Trump term was a national security risk. The latter case argues that Democrats submitted fake ballots from dead people, and there was a deliberate and coordinated effort to manipulate votes themselves. If the latter case were valid, it is hard to see why all of the Trump campaign's lawsuits fell utterly flat during the election, even ones where the judges reviewing the cases were ideologically sympathetic to Trump or were even appointed by him.
I don't think a large portion of the public believing the election was unfair is a good argument. They think that because Trump said so and he said that because he could not accept that a candidate as feeble as Biden beat him. Trump also made statements before the election indicating that he would not accept the results if he lost. None of that justifies Eastman's fake elector plot, even if it was doomed to fail by a hypothetical Supreme Court ruling that the Vice President can't submit false certificates of ascertainment. It wasn't difficult to see that Trump was in a position to lose. His approval ratings were bad his entire first term. The media entirely pinned the chaos of COVID onto his administration, and every boomer in America glued to their TV during the pandemic was angry at Trump. Scott Atlas' book shows just how out of their depth the administration was in articulating clear and coherent policies during the first year of the pandemic.
Every boomer? I'm a boomer who voted for Trump in 2020, but not in 2016. It was patently obvious that there was massive voter fraud in 2020 (and in various previous elections at the state and local level), but as Thucydides and others (Scott Adams) have argued, the design of our voting system makes it impossible to audit. Moreover, even if only what you call the 'soft case' is valid, it wasn't a free and fair election (technically legal is BS language) and therefore not consistent with democracy. The idea that Trump's mishandling of the covid fiasco was the reason he lost the 2020 election is just a narrative to cover up the reality of the soft and hard cases (as the Donkeys say, never let a crisis go to waste), and anybody who voted for Biden believing that his administration would have done a better job of 'articulating clear and coherent policies' deserves the ensuing chaos we have today. Geez, look at all the trouble they are having trying to get their vegetable not to seek reelection. "The adults are back in charge." What a joke.
If the fraud is patently obvious, then I don't see why it would be impossible to audit or why it could not be proven in court. I don't see why a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court, where Trump appointed half the conservative justices, would not be interested in the issue when they were willing to essentially decide the 2000 election on what some people still consider to be flimsy grounds.
The case you and others make on this topic is that the fraud was obvious but can't be proven, which is unfalsifiable. This is why people only believe it on ideological grounds and have never convinced the broader electorate or elite political class. I also think Michael Huemer is probably correct that not a single Republican elite in America believes the election was stolen (hard case). I say that as a Republican elite who has met Trump and has worked with people in his political orbit in the past.
That also raises the question of why Republicans are confident in betting markets and polls in this cycle when presumably neither the Biden Administration nor the Republican Congress have implemented voter security or transparency changes. You would assume the default assumption is that Trump will have the election stolen from him again. However, that's not the default assumption on the right because it is clear that Biden is now in the position that Trump was four years ago, which is the weak position of a historically unpopular incumbent.
It's disgraceful that Reps failed to get national laws to reduce voter fraud, like Voter ID, tho it's the Dems who successfully vote against them. And it's the states who run elections, so Florida has secure, trusted, counted in one day, paper ballots.
You should have at least one election case that looked at the evidence and declared no fraud, if you want to claim no fraud. I understood that most cases were dismissed for lack of standing, or some decision to dismiss without full examination of the evidence--I should also have such a case but don't right now.
The Russia Hoax Mueller investigation / cover up was premised on the idea that false information distributed by the Russians made the 2016 illegitimate, stolen. Apply that idea to the Biden laptop, and the US govt lying about the laptop means Biden's election was illegitimate, stolen. Which is what I call it, but Arnold thinks it's only fraud if the ballots are fraudulent. Those who believe it was NOT stolen have failed to present any reasons for their belief, other than presuming it and claiming the stolen case has not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. I claim it's a false negative, guilty/stolen but without enough proof.
The double standard, applying laws only against Reps but not Dems, is outrageous and anybody interested in Rule of Law should be outraged about the failure to indict Dems for crimes like bribery & corruption & pay to play meetings & illegal spying & illegal email servers & illegal destruction of evidence.
First I don't know much about Vance. (Well I read his book.) But I listened to his talk at NatCon4 that you linked to and some of his other interviews. And I have to say I like what I hear. I wish our country still had a big manufacturing base. Which could provide good jobs to all the men out there who are not cut out to go to college and be white collar workers. We need those jobs to bring back some sort of stable family. Men need those jobs so they can support a family. I still dislike Trump, but I feel I might be voting for the VP this year.
(aside: it seems during the Clinton years the Dems usurped the Rep position, and so now the Reps are usurping the old Dem standards.. weird but I like it. Someone needs to speak for the working man.)
1. There is a jurisdictional border between A and B across which goods move freely but, except rarely and temporarily, people can't.
2. Business-A thrives a mile away from the border in jurisdiction A, and its customers are in jurisdiction A.
3. Jurisdiction A's goverment passes regulations increasing the cost of production by 300%, the Business-A raises prices and reduces production accordingly.
4. A competitor opens up Business-B just across the other side of the border, producing without regard to A's new regs, at the old cost of doing business, charging the old prices, exporting to B, and business-A immediately goes bankrupt, while customers-A still get to buy all they want at low prices.
What happened here was what some lawyers call an uncompensated regulatory taking (even if one applies the overly strict "all economically beneficial use" test from Lucas (1992)). The state destroyed the property of some local business and the jobs of its workers purportedly to achieve some positive-sum greater local public benefit, but it didn't capture that public benefit in the form of higher taxes that it could then pay to the business owners and workers to compensate them for their private losses. The public has voted themselves something good and at the same time insisted that they face no trade offs and must pay no price while the cost falls entirely on some small number of politically impotent private parties, and thus there is no real incentive to make sure the reform is actually and genuinely positive sum, because it only bothers that tiny minority if it turns out to be negative sum. It was to prevent such situations, to encourage rigorous and honest forecasting of costs and benefits, and to ensure basic principles of fairness and justice, that the fifth amendment was written to require such just compensation.
Ok, now imagine that for some hypothetical reason jurisdictions and their voter-consumers are allowed to get away with uncompensated takings at the regulatory level. If the first best options of compensating the losers or repealing the regulations are off the table, then that is the second best and politically viable option in helping to level the playing field for businesses and workers who would otherwise be put by their government's actions at a ruinous competitive disadvantage? The answer is to reduce the advantage of regulatory arbitrage by raising import duties to whatever level that imposes equivalent increase in prices as would the verifiable imposition of the regulatory scheme on foreign producers. This raises prices for domestic consumers, but that's arguably fair, since they are also purportedly getting the benefit of some bad side effect of production not happening in their own backyard (except in the case of carbon emissions, for which there is not even any local benefit).
An even worse option is what the government often actually does, which is to subsidize demand from uncompetitive domestic producers by requiring that they win certain contracts regardless of price, which cause a lot of institutional rot because such businesses are no longer all that interested in innovation, efficiency, or quality control, and instead focus a lot of their effort on corrupt bribery to perpetuate and expand this kind of guarateed purchases rent-seeking, which of course for the politicians seeking such bribes is not a bug but a feature.
Tariffs - and the consequential increase in domestic manufacturing and employment - are an improvement over the uncompensated outsourcing scenario, and also the-corrupt state-keeps-rotten-zombies-on-permanent-life-support scenario, even arguably according to typical libertarian or econ-101 principles and logic.
That one has to turn to """MAGA POPULISTS""" to find anyone who seems to even nod an inch in the direction of publicly acknowledging these reasonable and straightforward ideas is not so much a point in their favor as it represents 100 points against the rest of the elite policy chattering class and paints an utterly bleak picture of the state of what passes for our society's intellectual discourse.
Wow, I'm sorry. I didn't get most of that. Let me just say that half of us have IQ (or whatever, g) under 100. And Moloch says those people get thrown under the bus. And I don't agree, I hate Moloch, as I buy from Amazon. (I'm as much to blame as anyone.)
"Uppity" is a word I've never heard used; generally applied in stories to black people, though, narratively - I've never heard anyone so described directly.
I'm sure J.D. Vance was ambitious, and politically so: the name change makes that clear. But how would a J.D. Vance *ever* get anywhere without being "uppity"? He certainly could not have foreseen the success of his book.
Mark Twain padded Huck Finn with a whole chapter devoted to ridiculing Arkansas. "LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED. ""There," says he, "if that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansas!'"
The Texas variants include "Goodbye to a River" which is regionally famous as an elegy for nature lost to dams, but is mostly about Scots-Irish people violently feuding - and no, they haven't disappeared - as well as the more recent "The Cedar Choppers" by Ken Roberts.
The Southern memoir of dysfunction and ignorance is as old as the hills.
William Faulkner didn't write about hill people, but he won a Nobel prize for putting a Gothic gloss on the broken elite of the postbellum Deep South.
Your TV and movies and now I presume your Youtube have been filled for the last 30 years with Southern people of all stripes acting the fool and worse. J.D. Vance's culture is a significant strand of the last American culture standing. I think as he does, that it deserves some exploration.
Sam Quinones thought so as well, in "Dream Land".
I mean, have you guys seen what rural America looks like in many places?
I remember once crossing the state on a train with my husband's Southern grandmother, who tended to be pithily blunt. "You can certainly tell the German farms" she noted, though some were probably Swedish or Moravian.
And I notice that a subject that is fretted about and discussed and funded out of all proportion to its importance to the polity - the homeless, and as such the wholly unproductive - has had millions of words spilled on it, without a one *ever* attempting to figure out *who the hell are these people and where they came from*. I guess somebody who tried to figure that out would be uppity indeed. I have a strong hunch there would be a connection to Vance's story.
Meanwhile Alice Munro - back in mind because in the news - deployed her gift of detailed observation entirely in the service of airing dirty laundry, of presenting acrid people in sordid surroundings (that bathroom in the kitchen!).
But that’s celebrated - more Nobel - as much for its subject as its artistry. Sure, she’s very good with a turn of phrase, good with an image or a little joke - but it’s her POV as thwarted writer, the big soul among the little, feminist v. world, that makes her indispensable to the literati.
It strikes me that the libertarian hand-wringing over the shift in the GOP's positions entirely misses that even when moving "left" the GOP is still well to the right of the actual left.
The actual left has moved from Hilary Clinton's "You didn't build that" in 2012 to California in 2024 saying "Your kids aren't actually your kids".
There is a lot less coherence in Deneenism than it seems. "Why Liberalism Failed" was much more coherent and novel than "Regime Change." The definition of "common good" in the latter book is also different from the one Vermeule uses in "Common Good Constitutionalism." In CGC, it's clearly used as a canon of constitutional and statutory construction. To be clear, a canon of construction is just a broadly accepted method that a judge uses to justify a particular interpretation of a statute and/or the constitution.
Vermeule's definition of the common good is both precise and flexible enough to be applied by a judge, and could be applied differently by two different judges without fudging the overall definition. Deneen's definition of "common good," which purports to comport with Vermeule's, is a muddy mess in part because Deneen tries to turn a canon of construction into a political program. That political program is more or less "I want good things to happen and do not want bad things to happen." This is ironically one of the criticisms Vermeule has of textualism/originalism, that it is a valid canon of construction that has mutated to a perverse justification for rulings on behalf of narrow factional interests.
I don't think it's accurate to say, like the WSJ did the other day, that the Trump administration will be "postliberal." The first Trump administration was neocon, conventional GOP, libertarian, protectionist, pro-immigration, anti-immigration, Buchananite, Bushite, pro-criminal justice reform, pro-China, anti-China, and pro-law-and-order. Which is to say that it was totally eclectic platform that has no fixed form. Deneen himself, in RC, reserves his highest praise for Disraeli and Burke. Most would place both within the broader liberal tradition.
The other thing with Vermeuleism is that Vermeule is the administrative state's strongest defender, as anyone who has read one of his administrative law casebooks could tell you. This does not jive all that well with a platform that criticizes the regulatory and corporate elites. There is also a major tension between a platform that purports to be skeptical of the administrative state, but demands for a strong executive. These things are all in tension with one another.
Glad someone else could appreciate it besides me trolling my wife by claiming that everything that I want to do already is justified in the name of the "common good."
>What sets J.D. Vance apart from the fray is the nakedness of his ambition, his self-import. In his memoir, Vance presents the chaos and misfortunes of his family not as communal tragedies but as obstacles that stood in the way of his own personal success, obstacles he—unlike almost everyone else in his family—bravely overcame. Some might call it narcissistic, but in the South we call it uppity.
Well, I'm a born and raised Alabamian and I definitely think we need more uppityness. Drug addiction, poverty, and white-trash culture are not virtues. Vance has every right to look down on where he came from and critique it - it's because he is better than them.
"I see Mr. Vance as an intellectual with no management experience. His life story is a big part of his personal brand. A lot like Barack Obama, but without the faculty-lounge worldview."
Vance actually has a more interesting and varied professional than Barack Obama, but I maybe agree about the fundamental lack of management experience... He worked (in order) as a combat correspondent, law clerk, associate attorney, and principal at a venture capital firm (which GPT-4o says involves checking out investments, including doing due diligence). He then got hired to expand the the "Rise of the Rest" initiative for a VC firm (basically investing in the Midwest) and did that for a couple years. In 2020, he did co-found a VC firm called Narya. It seems fine (see here: https://naryavc.com/)? Peter Thiel seems to like him. Do you any insights on this career in terms of what he would have learned? It seems better than Obama: at least Vance had to prove himself at for-profit enterprises... On the other hand, switching employers literally every two years seems odd.
"I should note that he went from one extreme view of Mr. Trump (“he’s Hitler”) to the other extreme view that the 2020 election was stolen. Neither view ever resonated with me."
I keep trying to make this point to folks like you: Trump is still to a large extent an unknown quantity, and so we still need to think about tail risks with him. Obviously he is not Hitler. But is there a 2% chance he might turn out to be like Erdogan, or Hugo Chavez? Yes, and that is a risk that should bring your rating of him far below a 3 or 4.
That's ridiculous. The dictatorial character of people like Erdogan and Chavez is/was a product of their ideology. You claim there are unknown risks associated with Trump (none of which were apparent when he was in office), but the only analogies you can come up with are ludicrously inapt.
Again, this is an unlikely but real risk. The first administration he had a VP and cabinet that was working against him to a significant degree, and everyone agrees that will not happen this time. I could also mention Orban as a relevant comparison, but of course many Trump supporters don't consider Orban bad, so I wanted to choose some less controversial examples.
How is Orban a less controversial example than Erdogan the Islamist or Chavez the socialist? What exactly has he done that makes him so 'bad,' other than criticizing NATO policy with regard to Ukraine/Russia conflict, enforcing Hungary's borders or protecting Hungarian schoolchildren against LGBTQ+ indoctrination? He was also reelected despite significant externally-funded efforts to get him out of office. So much for all this BS about liberal democracy. It's all about power, pure and simple.
What is MAGA populism? I understand the progressive definition - racist or even white supremacist patriarchy - but it's much less clear to me how the right defines it. Is there even a shared understanding among different factions on the right?
Thank you. It was well worth reading the 20 bullet points. Everyone should do that.
Now I see my problem with MAGA isn't just Trump himself. There's a lot there I don't agree with and some is just plain silly - "End inflation"! - and some that seems contrary to what Trump supports.
For me, what is truly depressing is I expect I'll find far more in the Democratic platform to dislike.
"While people seem driven to rate Mr. Trump on a scale of 1 to 10 as either 1 or 10, my feeling is about 3 or 4. That happens to be higher than my feeling about Mr. Biden, which is about 2 or 3."
I'd reverse those numbers but it makes no difference who is right on that. I wonder if it even matters who gets elected as long as Congress isn't also both of that party. All three aligned (either direction) is the disaster to be avoided.
Note: I prefer a somewhat conservative SCOTUS but Biden making one appointment would probably be better than adding another conservative judge.
The worst thing that can happen for traditional GOPers is for Trump-Vance to win. I'm not sure whether they realize that though because many of them, at least outwardly, appear to be supportive of the ticket, treating it as the "lesser of two evils".
I realize now --- many others may have realized it sooner --- that the GOP is more like two parties competing for the same general election ballot slots than a single party. The Reaganite GOP and MAGA are more like the Kansas City Chiefs and New England Patriots competing for the AFC slot in the Super Bowl than they are two QBs competing for the starting position on the same team. The latter is like the old (pre-1968) system: party leaders chose candidates to win elections in the same way a coaching staff might choose a starting QB. Current primary elections are more like regular season games, competitions to win general election playoff slots. Anyone can run and, practically speaking, anyone can vote in them. At most, one just needs to temporarily declare oneself a party member and, in many states, one doesn't even need to do that. That's why the MAGA playbook (policy stances) looks so different from the Reaganite playbook. They're two different teams. To his credit, Trump realized this at least as far back as 2016. Trump has never hesitated to attack fellow Republicans even while his Republican primary opponents treated him with kid gloves --- like a QB with a red jersey in practice --- to avoid offending his base for the general election.
That's also why MAGA relentlessly attacks Reaganites: pre-primary, during primaries, after primaries --- it doesn't matter. Heck, 8 MAGAs joined forces with Democrats to oust Republican Speaker McCarthy, just like any third party might form temporary coalitions with one major party against the other. MAGA views itself as a different party than the traditional GOP. MAGA even calls the traditional GOP "RINOs" (ironically), which means "not really part of our party". I'm not sure when, if ever, the traditional GOP will recognize the same.
With only two major-party general election ballot slots and Dems controlling one of them, the worst thing for the Reaganite GOP is to permanently cede the other one to MAGA.
Reaganism in the 2020s or Bushism in the 2020s really makes absolutely no sense. VD Vance hints at this in one of his NatCon speeches.
Those types envisioned America as a place that [1] enforced a particular social and moral order on the rest of the world. [2] Had a trade policy where America's comparative advantage was as a reserve currency where the rest of the world parked their excess savings and the US focused on IP rents and importing most of it's manufactured goods.
A country that can't manufacture its own ships and weapons doesn't get to enforce it's vision of world peace and human rights. Period. People who get offended by this keep thinking the people like me simply like Vladamir Putin and want Liberal democracy to burn. Perhaps we do think that liberal hegemony has a bit of blood on its hands, perhaps setting Libya on fire is a small price to pay for preventing the chaos of a multipolar world. But the guys on the other side literally can't process that right does not make might. They're geopolitical world view is basically a Marvel movie where logistics and strategy don't matter and the plucky good guys always win.
Ukraine might still be winning the war on Twitter but on the ground it's Germany late '43 early '44. And as far as Taiwan goes, the gap the industrial gap between America and China today is essentially an analogy between Japan and America in 1941, with America in the "Six months of fighting and after that no expectation of success". (Except America still has natural resources). Both countries will be lost as long as the other side doesn't give up.
As far as deficits go, the Trump tax cuts were a Paul Ryan Mike Pence thing as much as they were a Trump thing. America really is circling a black hole when it comes to government spending, and there's nothing in pre-trump republicanism that has any positive inspiration.
The only thing the GOP has lost is a pretense of civility.
As far as order, trade policy, and manufacturing, we must be looking at different countries. I have no clue where you get those things ideas
This is the actual private message from Vance to his friend (who disclosed it) from 2016. Note that it's more than 2 words long.
"I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler," Vance wrote. "How's that for discouraging?"
And really, did nothing happen between 2016 and 2024 that might have changed Vance's (or anybody else's) mind?
Vance was wrong - Trump's an optimistic, America First asshole unlike any other post-WWII politician.
What happened was: no new wars, less illegal immigration, growing median wages & growing median Black wages.
Those with an open mind on Trump see he's definitely not like Hitler -- so the progressives claiming that are clearly lying.
I think I get your point and agree but it's interesting to note the left became more convinced T is a second Hitler.
The party of feeble sleaze dominated by donors and mostly interested in wetting their beaks while pretending to someday -- real soon now! -- act against various social problems important to the voters ... does not strike me as accurately described as 'Reaganite'. The most Reagan-like activity I can see them doing is a massive amnesty.
Right. Plenty of people would be happy to vote for a Reagan party interested in restoring many features of Reagan's America. The GOP has not resembled or even been trying to offer anything like that for 30 years. Republican voters who think Trump is the worst haven't gotten to know the current GOP leadership, who make Trump look good in comparison.
A lot of conservatives are turned off by Trump. That's because they are constantly exposed to things about Trump. But even most educated people who follow politics have little knowledge of or exposure to even very high ranking GOP politicians and figures, who it is being charitable to describe not as 'bipartisan' but as 'collaborationist' at the expense of their own alienated constituents. The more one sees and learns about them, the less one is naive about who is the least worse option, and the less reluctant one is to choose him. Trump was creative destruction for an institution which had rotted from the top down due to its perception of being the only game in town for voters opposed to the left and the corrosive insulation from the incentives to stay sharp, effective, and grounded that would have been present if they felt at the level of their own personal interests that they had faced the prospect of real competition.
The country club Republicans finally lost me when they had the house, senate, and presidency in 2016, and could only pass a tax cut. Like the dog who caught the car...
Unfortunately, it's now a debate on what kind of BIG government we should have. Trump has continued to take the party towards those who have been abandoned by the Dems, i.e., people who want to be proud of their country. Meanwhile, the Dems have painted themselves into the Left corner, and need some time in the wilderness to get their heads straight. Unfortunately, Obama still lives in DC.
Us immigrants know the disaster of socialism and censorship. There is a huge gap in the center waiting for a third party and leader to break the duopoly and deliver a lean government that is fit for its few purposes. Maybe when libertarian Milei is done fixing Argentina, we can hire him as White House Chief of Staff to get it done.
> The country club Republicans finally lost me when they had the house, senate, and presidency in 2016
Trump may own country clubs, but he's no country club Republican.
He's way too gauche to be acceptable to country club Republicans, or to country club Democrats like Judge Smails. Er, I mean Sheldon Whitehouse.
Philip Klein wrote an article in National Review right after Vance was nominated, arguing that this was essentially the nail in the coffin for fusionist conservatism and that there probably will never be another Reaganite president. A commenter there made an excellent point: "When was the last Reaganite president besides Ronald Reagan?" It is a bit strange that Republicans have seldom nominated and haven't successfully elected a nominee who represents what was the dominant ideology in the party until some point during the Trump presidency. George H.W. Bush was somewhere between Reagan and a Rockefeller Republican. Bush and McCain were "compassionate conservative" neocons. I guess Dole and Romney were the closest nominees in ideology to Reagan, but (from my understanding because I wasn't alive at the time) Dole made his case in his campaign poorly, and I think Romney's tenure in the Senate has raised serious doubts about his conservatism.
This isn't unique to one party or another; I think elites in both parties who are sympathetic to classical liberalism will be squeezed out of the dominant factions. Peter Zeihan is correct that this election is a re-alignment into a new party system. Right-wing populism will rule the Republican party under Trump, Vance, Ramaswamy, DeSantis, or whoever else rises to the top. Biden's decline and impending political demise probably symbolize the fall of center-left liberalism with moderate social and economic stances from any dominant coalition in the Democratic Party. The American political landscape will probably shift indefinitely towards the populist one of Europe. If so, I suppose that means the revolt of the public is complete.
"When was the last Reaganite president besides Ronald Reagan?"
Reagan's influence is measured in terms of *Democrats*, most notably Bill "The Era of Big Government is Over" Clinton but also in the policy stances of *left-leaning* intellectuals like Larry Summers and Paul Krugman. Compare Paul Krugman's writings from the 1990s with now to understand the difference. Reaganism was so dominant that the left had no choice but to adopt (a perhaps lite version of) it. In contrast, where Trump differs from traditional Republicans --- trade protectionism and big spending social programs most notably --- Trump has adopted basically leftist positions. Reagan made Democrats more like Republicans, Trump the opposite.
Trump's tariffs are far less protectionist than many Buy America supporters want, or that H Ross Perot wanted in 1992, who's third party run was enough to get Clinton elected over 'Read My Lips' Bush41, the liar.
Reagan's globalization hurt lots of US manufacturing workers, tho it helped maybe 10x more Chinese workers. US workers like the peers of JD Vance's parents.
Arnold cavalierly dismisses the idea that the 2020 election may have been stolen, notwithstanding the many evidences for that possibility. Naturally we resist thinking that such a terrible thing might have occurred. But, where there is smoke, there is fire. Compare our elections to those, say, in France, where all voting is done on election day using paper ballots, and an undisputed count is available in short order. Our elections are arranged differently so that cheating is easy and difficult to stop. Why can't we have clean elections in which everyone can reasonably be confident in the result, regardless of his political preferences? It is because many politicians do not want that. Democracy depends upon public confidence in fair elections. When a very large proportion of the public doesn't feel they had a fair shake, government is drained of legitimacy and social chaos results.
Michael Brendan Dougherty has argued there's a distinction between the soft case that the 2020 election was "rigged" and the hard case that it was "stolen." The former argument would go that using COVID as a pretense for states to extend absentee ballot deadlines past election day was an unfair albeit technically legal thing to do; the same would apply to the media and intelligence officials writing letters to argue that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation and that a second Trump term was a national security risk. The latter case argues that Democrats submitted fake ballots from dead people, and there was a deliberate and coordinated effort to manipulate votes themselves. If the latter case were valid, it is hard to see why all of the Trump campaign's lawsuits fell utterly flat during the election, even ones where the judges reviewing the cases were ideologically sympathetic to Trump or were even appointed by him.
I don't think a large portion of the public believing the election was unfair is a good argument. They think that because Trump said so and he said that because he could not accept that a candidate as feeble as Biden beat him. Trump also made statements before the election indicating that he would not accept the results if he lost. None of that justifies Eastman's fake elector plot, even if it was doomed to fail by a hypothetical Supreme Court ruling that the Vice President can't submit false certificates of ascertainment. It wasn't difficult to see that Trump was in a position to lose. His approval ratings were bad his entire first term. The media entirely pinned the chaos of COVID onto his administration, and every boomer in America glued to their TV during the pandemic was angry at Trump. Scott Atlas' book shows just how out of their depth the administration was in articulating clear and coherent policies during the first year of the pandemic.
Every boomer? I'm a boomer who voted for Trump in 2020, but not in 2016. It was patently obvious that there was massive voter fraud in 2020 (and in various previous elections at the state and local level), but as Thucydides and others (Scott Adams) have argued, the design of our voting system makes it impossible to audit. Moreover, even if only what you call the 'soft case' is valid, it wasn't a free and fair election (technically legal is BS language) and therefore not consistent with democracy. The idea that Trump's mishandling of the covid fiasco was the reason he lost the 2020 election is just a narrative to cover up the reality of the soft and hard cases (as the Donkeys say, never let a crisis go to waste), and anybody who voted for Biden believing that his administration would have done a better job of 'articulating clear and coherent policies' deserves the ensuing chaos we have today. Geez, look at all the trouble they are having trying to get their vegetable not to seek reelection. "The adults are back in charge." What a joke.
If the fraud is patently obvious, then I don't see why it would be impossible to audit or why it could not be proven in court. I don't see why a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court, where Trump appointed half the conservative justices, would not be interested in the issue when they were willing to essentially decide the 2000 election on what some people still consider to be flimsy grounds.
The case you and others make on this topic is that the fraud was obvious but can't be proven, which is unfalsifiable. This is why people only believe it on ideological grounds and have never convinced the broader electorate or elite political class. I also think Michael Huemer is probably correct that not a single Republican elite in America believes the election was stolen (hard case). I say that as a Republican elite who has met Trump and has worked with people in his political orbit in the past.
That also raises the question of why Republicans are confident in betting markets and polls in this cycle when presumably neither the Biden Administration nor the Republican Congress have implemented voter security or transparency changes. You would assume the default assumption is that Trump will have the election stolen from him again. However, that's not the default assumption on the right because it is clear that Biden is now in the position that Trump was four years ago, which is the weak position of a historically unpopular incumbent.
It's disgraceful that Reps failed to get national laws to reduce voter fraud, like Voter ID, tho it's the Dems who successfully vote against them. And it's the states who run elections, so Florida has secure, trusted, counted in one day, paper ballots.
You should have at least one election case that looked at the evidence and declared no fraud, if you want to claim no fraud. I understood that most cases were dismissed for lack of standing, or some decision to dismiss without full examination of the evidence--I should also have such a case but don't right now.
The Russia Hoax Mueller investigation / cover up was premised on the idea that false information distributed by the Russians made the 2016 illegitimate, stolen. Apply that idea to the Biden laptop, and the US govt lying about the laptop means Biden's election was illegitimate, stolen. Which is what I call it, but Arnold thinks it's only fraud if the ballots are fraudulent. Those who believe it was NOT stolen have failed to present any reasons for their belief, other than presuming it and claiming the stolen case has not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. I claim it's a false negative, guilty/stolen but without enough proof.
The double standard, applying laws only against Reps but not Dems, is outrageous and anybody interested in Rule of Law should be outraged about the failure to indict Dems for crimes like bribery & corruption & pay to play meetings & illegal spying & illegal email servers & illegal destruction of evidence.
First I don't know much about Vance. (Well I read his book.) But I listened to his talk at NatCon4 that you linked to and some of his other interviews. And I have to say I like what I hear. I wish our country still had a big manufacturing base. Which could provide good jobs to all the men out there who are not cut out to go to college and be white collar workers. We need those jobs to bring back some sort of stable family. Men need those jobs so they can support a family. I still dislike Trump, but I feel I might be voting for the VP this year.
(aside: it seems during the Clinton years the Dems usurped the Rep position, and so now the Reps are usurping the old Dem standards.. weird but I like it. Someone needs to speak for the working man.)
Imagine this sequence of events.
1. There is a jurisdictional border between A and B across which goods move freely but, except rarely and temporarily, people can't.
2. Business-A thrives a mile away from the border in jurisdiction A, and its customers are in jurisdiction A.
3. Jurisdiction A's goverment passes regulations increasing the cost of production by 300%, the Business-A raises prices and reduces production accordingly.
4. A competitor opens up Business-B just across the other side of the border, producing without regard to A's new regs, at the old cost of doing business, charging the old prices, exporting to B, and business-A immediately goes bankrupt, while customers-A still get to buy all they want at low prices.
What happened here was what some lawyers call an uncompensated regulatory taking (even if one applies the overly strict "all economically beneficial use" test from Lucas (1992)). The state destroyed the property of some local business and the jobs of its workers purportedly to achieve some positive-sum greater local public benefit, but it didn't capture that public benefit in the form of higher taxes that it could then pay to the business owners and workers to compensate them for their private losses. The public has voted themselves something good and at the same time insisted that they face no trade offs and must pay no price while the cost falls entirely on some small number of politically impotent private parties, and thus there is no real incentive to make sure the reform is actually and genuinely positive sum, because it only bothers that tiny minority if it turns out to be negative sum. It was to prevent such situations, to encourage rigorous and honest forecasting of costs and benefits, and to ensure basic principles of fairness and justice, that the fifth amendment was written to require such just compensation.
Ok, now imagine that for some hypothetical reason jurisdictions and their voter-consumers are allowed to get away with uncompensated takings at the regulatory level. If the first best options of compensating the losers or repealing the regulations are off the table, then that is the second best and politically viable option in helping to level the playing field for businesses and workers who would otherwise be put by their government's actions at a ruinous competitive disadvantage? The answer is to reduce the advantage of regulatory arbitrage by raising import duties to whatever level that imposes equivalent increase in prices as would the verifiable imposition of the regulatory scheme on foreign producers. This raises prices for domestic consumers, but that's arguably fair, since they are also purportedly getting the benefit of some bad side effect of production not happening in their own backyard (except in the case of carbon emissions, for which there is not even any local benefit).
An even worse option is what the government often actually does, which is to subsidize demand from uncompetitive domestic producers by requiring that they win certain contracts regardless of price, which cause a lot of institutional rot because such businesses are no longer all that interested in innovation, efficiency, or quality control, and instead focus a lot of their effort on corrupt bribery to perpetuate and expand this kind of guarateed purchases rent-seeking, which of course for the politicians seeking such bribes is not a bug but a feature.
Tariffs - and the consequential increase in domestic manufacturing and employment - are an improvement over the uncompensated outsourcing scenario, and also the-corrupt state-keeps-rotten-zombies-on-permanent-life-support scenario, even arguably according to typical libertarian or econ-101 principles and logic.
That one has to turn to """MAGA POPULISTS""" to find anyone who seems to even nod an inch in the direction of publicly acknowledging these reasonable and straightforward ideas is not so much a point in their favor as it represents 100 points against the rest of the elite policy chattering class and paints an utterly bleak picture of the state of what passes for our society's intellectual discourse.
Wow, I'm sorry. I didn't get most of that. Let me just say that half of us have IQ (or whatever, g) under 100. And Moloch says those people get thrown under the bus. And I don't agree, I hate Moloch, as I buy from Amazon. (I'm as much to blame as anyone.)
I believe the U.S. does still have a lot of manufacturing. It just doesn't employ many people because of automation.
Yeah IDK, we just need good jobs for those guys who are average and below average. The alternative, which we are living, is having many single moms.
"Uppity" is a word I've never heard used; generally applied in stories to black people, though, narratively - I've never heard anyone so described directly.
I'm sure J.D. Vance was ambitious, and politically so: the name change makes that clear. But how would a J.D. Vance *ever* get anywhere without being "uppity"? He certainly could not have foreseen the success of his book.
Mark Twain padded Huck Finn with a whole chapter devoted to ridiculing Arkansas. "LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED. ""There," says he, "if that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansas!'"
The Texas variants include "Goodbye to a River" which is regionally famous as an elegy for nature lost to dams, but is mostly about Scots-Irish people violently feuding - and no, they haven't disappeared - as well as the more recent "The Cedar Choppers" by Ken Roberts.
The Southern memoir of dysfunction and ignorance is as old as the hills.
William Faulkner didn't write about hill people, but he won a Nobel prize for putting a Gothic gloss on the broken elite of the postbellum Deep South.
Your TV and movies and now I presume your Youtube have been filled for the last 30 years with Southern people of all stripes acting the fool and worse. J.D. Vance's culture is a significant strand of the last American culture standing. I think as he does, that it deserves some exploration.
Sam Quinones thought so as well, in "Dream Land".
I mean, have you guys seen what rural America looks like in many places?
I remember once crossing the state on a train with my husband's Southern grandmother, who tended to be pithily blunt. "You can certainly tell the German farms" she noted, though some were probably Swedish or Moravian.
And I notice that a subject that is fretted about and discussed and funded out of all proportion to its importance to the polity - the homeless, and as such the wholly unproductive - has had millions of words spilled on it, without a one *ever* attempting to figure out *who the hell are these people and where they came from*. I guess somebody who tried to figure that out would be uppity indeed. I have a strong hunch there would be a connection to Vance's story.
Also, I’m not sure that writer has fully reckoned with how pride and shame work in certain subcultures.
Meanwhile Alice Munro - back in mind because in the news - deployed her gift of detailed observation entirely in the service of airing dirty laundry, of presenting acrid people in sordid surroundings (that bathroom in the kitchen!).
But that’s celebrated - more Nobel - as much for its subject as its artistry. Sure, she’s very good with a turn of phrase, good with an image or a little joke - but it’s her POV as thwarted writer, the big soul among the little, feminist v. world, that makes her indispensable to the literati.
It strikes me that the libertarian hand-wringing over the shift in the GOP's positions entirely misses that even when moving "left" the GOP is still well to the right of the actual left.
The actual left has moved from Hilary Clinton's "You didn't build that" in 2012 to California in 2024 saying "Your kids aren't actually your kids".
It was Obama who said "you didn't build that" (referring to the highways and other public infrastructure).
You're right, I was confusing that one and the similarly left wing Hilary quote:
"Don’t let anybody, don't let anybody tell you that, ah, you know, it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs"
Point still stands though. The entire discussion has shifted to the left. But the right is still the right and the left is still the left.
There is a lot less coherence in Deneenism than it seems. "Why Liberalism Failed" was much more coherent and novel than "Regime Change." The definition of "common good" in the latter book is also different from the one Vermeule uses in "Common Good Constitutionalism." In CGC, it's clearly used as a canon of constitutional and statutory construction. To be clear, a canon of construction is just a broadly accepted method that a judge uses to justify a particular interpretation of a statute and/or the constitution.
Vermeule's definition of the common good is both precise and flexible enough to be applied by a judge, and could be applied differently by two different judges without fudging the overall definition. Deneen's definition of "common good," which purports to comport with Vermeule's, is a muddy mess in part because Deneen tries to turn a canon of construction into a political program. That political program is more or less "I want good things to happen and do not want bad things to happen." This is ironically one of the criticisms Vermeule has of textualism/originalism, that it is a valid canon of construction that has mutated to a perverse justification for rulings on behalf of narrow factional interests.
I don't think it's accurate to say, like the WSJ did the other day, that the Trump administration will be "postliberal." The first Trump administration was neocon, conventional GOP, libertarian, protectionist, pro-immigration, anti-immigration, Buchananite, Bushite, pro-criminal justice reform, pro-China, anti-China, and pro-law-and-order. Which is to say that it was totally eclectic platform that has no fixed form. Deneen himself, in RC, reserves his highest praise for Disraeli and Burke. Most would place both within the broader liberal tradition.
The other thing with Vermeuleism is that Vermeule is the administrative state's strongest defender, as anyone who has read one of his administrative law casebooks could tell you. This does not jive all that well with a platform that criticizes the regulatory and corporate elites. There is also a major tension between a platform that purports to be skeptical of the administrative state, but demands for a strong executive. These things are all in tension with one another.
Great overview of PD and AV, thanks
Glad someone else could appreciate it besides me trolling my wife by claiming that everything that I want to do already is justified in the name of the "common good."
Does that work for her?
>What sets J.D. Vance apart from the fray is the nakedness of his ambition, his self-import. In his memoir, Vance presents the chaos and misfortunes of his family not as communal tragedies but as obstacles that stood in the way of his own personal success, obstacles he—unlike almost everyone else in his family—bravely overcame. Some might call it narcissistic, but in the South we call it uppity.
Well, I'm a born and raised Alabamian and I definitely think we need more uppityness. Drug addiction, poverty, and white-trash culture are not virtues. Vance has every right to look down on where he came from and critique it - it's because he is better than them.
Ha! Good point!
"I see Mr. Vance as an intellectual with no management experience. His life story is a big part of his personal brand. A lot like Barack Obama, but without the faculty-lounge worldview."
Vance actually has a more interesting and varied professional than Barack Obama, but I maybe agree about the fundamental lack of management experience... He worked (in order) as a combat correspondent, law clerk, associate attorney, and principal at a venture capital firm (which GPT-4o says involves checking out investments, including doing due diligence). He then got hired to expand the the "Rise of the Rest" initiative for a VC firm (basically investing in the Midwest) and did that for a couple years. In 2020, he did co-found a VC firm called Narya. It seems fine (see here: https://naryavc.com/)? Peter Thiel seems to like him. Do you any insights on this career in terms of what he would have learned? It seems better than Obama: at least Vance had to prove himself at for-profit enterprises... On the other hand, switching employers literally every two years seems odd.
"I should note that he went from one extreme view of Mr. Trump (“he’s Hitler”) to the other extreme view that the 2020 election was stolen. Neither view ever resonated with me."
I keep trying to make this point to folks like you: Trump is still to a large extent an unknown quantity, and so we still need to think about tail risks with him. Obviously he is not Hitler. But is there a 2% chance he might turn out to be like Erdogan, or Hugo Chavez? Yes, and that is a risk that should bring your rating of him far below a 3 or 4.
Erdogan is an Islamist/merchant in a Turkish bazaar, and Chavez was a socialist. I could come up with more plausible risks than that.
The risk is that Trump would be as illiberal/dictatorial as those two, not that he would be a carbon copy of their ideology.
That's ridiculous. The dictatorial character of people like Erdogan and Chavez is/was a product of their ideology. You claim there are unknown risks associated with Trump (none of which were apparent when he was in office), but the only analogies you can come up with are ludicrously inapt.
Again, this is an unlikely but real risk. The first administration he had a VP and cabinet that was working against him to a significant degree, and everyone agrees that will not happen this time. I could also mention Orban as a relevant comparison, but of course many Trump supporters don't consider Orban bad, so I wanted to choose some less controversial examples.
How is Orban a less controversial example than Erdogan the Islamist or Chavez the socialist? What exactly has he done that makes him so 'bad,' other than criticizing NATO policy with regard to Ukraine/Russia conflict, enforcing Hungary's borders or protecting Hungarian schoolchildren against LGBTQ+ indoctrination? He was also reelected despite significant externally-funded efforts to get him out of office. So much for all this BS about liberal democracy. It's all about power, pure and simple.
I was saying that E and C were less controversial examples.
What is MAGA populism? I understand the progressive definition - racist or even white supremacist patriarchy - but it's much less clear to me how the right defines it. Is there even a shared understanding among different factions on the right?
In my opinion, the most explicit articulation so far has been the Republican Party's 2024 platform.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform
Thank you. It was well worth reading the 20 bullet points. Everyone should do that.
Now I see my problem with MAGA isn't just Trump himself. There's a lot there I don't agree with and some is just plain silly - "End inflation"! - and some that seems contrary to what Trump supports.
For me, what is truly depressing is I expect I'll find far more in the Democratic platform to dislike.
"While people seem driven to rate Mr. Trump on a scale of 1 to 10 as either 1 or 10, my feeling is about 3 or 4. That happens to be higher than my feeling about Mr. Biden, which is about 2 or 3."
That pretty well hits the nail on the head.
I'd reverse those numbers but it makes no difference who is right on that. I wonder if it even matters who gets elected as long as Congress isn't also both of that party. All three aligned (either direction) is the disaster to be avoided.
Note: I prefer a somewhat conservative SCOTUS but Biden making one appointment would probably be better than adding another conservative judge.
The worst thing that can happen for traditional GOPers is for Trump-Vance to win. I'm not sure whether they realize that though because many of them, at least outwardly, appear to be supportive of the ticket, treating it as the "lesser of two evils".
I realize now --- many others may have realized it sooner --- that the GOP is more like two parties competing for the same general election ballot slots than a single party. The Reaganite GOP and MAGA are more like the Kansas City Chiefs and New England Patriots competing for the AFC slot in the Super Bowl than they are two QBs competing for the starting position on the same team. The latter is like the old (pre-1968) system: party leaders chose candidates to win elections in the same way a coaching staff might choose a starting QB. Current primary elections are more like regular season games, competitions to win general election playoff slots. Anyone can run and, practically speaking, anyone can vote in them. At most, one just needs to temporarily declare oneself a party member and, in many states, one doesn't even need to do that. That's why the MAGA playbook (policy stances) looks so different from the Reaganite playbook. They're two different teams. To his credit, Trump realized this at least as far back as 2016. Trump has never hesitated to attack fellow Republicans even while his Republican primary opponents treated him with kid gloves --- like a QB with a red jersey in practice --- to avoid offending his base for the general election.
That's also why MAGA relentlessly attacks Reaganites: pre-primary, during primaries, after primaries --- it doesn't matter. Heck, 8 MAGAs joined forces with Democrats to oust Republican Speaker McCarthy, just like any third party might form temporary coalitions with one major party against the other. MAGA views itself as a different party than the traditional GOP. MAGA even calls the traditional GOP "RINOs" (ironically), which means "not really part of our party". I'm not sure when, if ever, the traditional GOP will recognize the same.
With only two major-party general election ballot slots and Dems controlling one of them, the worst thing for the Reaganite GOP is to permanently cede the other one to MAGA.