The new three-legged stool of GOP politics is strange

It is statements like these from JD Vance, about the “postmenopausal woman,” that have him and other MAGA leaders labeled “weird.”

Here, Vance somehow transformed something that many families find rewarding—the role grandparents play in their grandchildren’s lives—into something imperious and vaguely sinister: the idea that human beings are defined by biological imperatives. That Grandma, because she’s old and infertile, is now the best-suited person to raise grandchildren.

It’s weird, it’s going to haunt the Trump-Vance campaign because It’s weird, and that’s as it should be. But it also holds a mirror up to Vance and the post-Trump GOP. I’ve never agreed with or admired the Republican view on most things, but for most of my career, Republicans have had no trouble articulating a vision of family life that doesn’t seem out of dystopian fiction. In its new configuration, the party selects for this kind of — yes, weird — rhetoric because its factions are more cohesive than they once were, and only a sinister ideologue can speak to every faction.

For decades before Trump, Republicans drew their political viability from a largely disconnected set of ideologies: a hawkish stance on national defense, Christian moralism, and a libertarian disdain for the social safety net.

This set of commitments was so fundamental to Republican politics that practitioners and hobbyists dismissed it as the GOP’s “three-legged stool.” Its appeal to party loyalists was simple: Each leg of the stool represented tons of people. Exorbitant defense spending appealed to weapons manufacturers and military base communities and research institutions, but in the Cold War and immediate post-Cold War era it also had an organic appeal to the broader population. There were (and, of course, still are) a lot of conservative Christians in the United States. And libertarian economics, though not enduringly popular, enjoyed a heyday from the end of the New Deal era through the Clinton era, as the public grew tired of hegemonic liberalism. (The fact that libertarian economics also serves as a pacifier for wealthy interests and other organized fools was a nice bonus.)

But that was about it. There’s not much internal coherence to these ideas. If your priority is defense spending, you can oppose other spending in a zero-sum allocation battle, or you can decide to make fun of anti-tax zealots. If you’re a fan of regressive economics, there’s no obvious reason to accept a defense sector, especially one as bloated as ours. And if you hate abortion, think homosexuality is immoral, and want to promote “traditional” family formation, there’s no reason to cut social spending or waste the federal budget on warships, fighter jets, and bombs.

Over time, the arbitrariness helped discredit the conservatism of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Mitt Romney. The GOP’s situational interest in “deficits” was a byproduct of unscrupulous politics and an agenda at war with itself. When they were in power, higher deficits were the natural byproduct of lower taxes and larger defense budgets, minus the political will or public support to tear up the safety net. When they were out of power, they used their own deficits as cudgels against Democrats and their liberal priorities.

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The old Barney Frank slogan, “Life begins at conception and ends at birth,” fell out of this ideological headwind. On the one hand, women should be forced to carry pregnancies to term; on the other hand, don’t expect the country to help with the costs of raising children (unless, perhaps, you live on a military base). Each individual goal was defensible on its own, but pursuing all three goals at once was a channel-confusing endeavor.

It was a messy and undignified logic, but there was nothing unusual about a political party functioning as a logbook of interest groups, some of whose priorities clashed.

The post-Trump GOP also rests on a three-legged stool, albeit a slightly different one. Because Trump is corrupt and transactional and self-righteous, and because his presence at the helm of the GOP has attracted an army of charlatans and nihilists, there’s a pervasive sense in the political establishment that the GOP has become more ideologically incoherent than it was under previous leaders. But beneath all the swindling and backbiting, it’s actually grown more coherent. In fact, the three flanks of post-Trump conservatism make most sense when grouped together, and less sense when cut into pieces.

They just clump together into something monstrous. A program of ethno-nationalist nativism.

The new three-legged stool is unifying, like the old Christian fundamentalists and Randy economic zealots. But it trades national defense conservatism for anti-immigrant conservatism. The warmongers are still there; the party has not completely turned against wasteful military spending. But between the end of the Cold War and the failure of the Forever Wars, Republicans can no longer draw mass support from hawkishness and have become further divided over geopolitical vision. Trump likes military spending to show off, but wants to undermine the security services of the “deep state” and would ostensibly create a transnational alliance of authoritarians instead of nurturing NATO and its many democracies. Some rank-and-file Republicans have followed suit. Others are also ready to cut defense spending. They are pushing back against the remaining members of the old guard who basically think Reagan and Romney have got the balance right.

Anti-immigrant sentiment of various kinds is widespread, however. In theory, it helps Republicans build appeal beyond their most committed voters, which has fueled the drift toward Trumpism. Even in the Bush-Romney years, Republicans were divided between an immigration-friendly, pro-business wing and a nativist one. Bush tried to pass comprehensive immigration reform; Romney promoted “self-deportation.” But their foreign policies overlapped greatly. Throughout those years, Republicans emphasized common ground and glossed over their divisions, which meant sowing fear in foreign countries and transnational terrorist groups rather than what they now call “invaders.” Now they’re trying to gloss over their foreign policy differences as they unite to push 15 million people out of the country.

But while a devotee of the old three-legged stool might look like Romney—clumsy, austere, politically backward—the new GOP looks like J.D. Vance, if not considerably more menacing. There is a fully formed ideology that embodies all three points, and you can find it in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or in various neo-fascist manifestos circulating among Vance and other Trump loyalists.

Refer a friend

Republicans only trip over themselves when they try to justify individual facets of the new agenda. The religious fundamentalists will claim that abortion is murder, but they will also claim that abortion is detrimental to prosperity. We cannot survive if our numbers are shrinking or we are reproducing below the replacement rate, and thus do not have enough workers to care for our elderly.

Liberals and progressives know how to solve this dilemma without being weird. We could make legal immigration easier. In recognition of the significant costs of raising children, we could also increase financial incentives for people who want to start a family.

Today’s Republicans overwhelmingly say no to both ideas. They have repeatedly blocked efforts to help parents pay for children. They want to deport immigrants and make legal immigration much more difficult, if not impossible.

Now ask yourself: What vision of the future does this entail? What kind of society is it supposed to create? What does it mean to empty the country of foreigners and fill it with the home-raised babies of prosperous families—or families where grandma is fulfilling her postmenopausal biological function as a provider of free childcare?

In a society that still enshrines legal and constitutional equality for its citizens, this is a policy recipe for the establishment of a semi-official caste system. At its most extreme, it is a backdoor endorsement of the white supremacist slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

J.D. Vance is married to a South Asian woman and has mixed-race children, but would clearly welcome a society with more class and racial stratification. If he had lived 170 years ago, Vance would have been a proud Know Nothing, complaining the “huge wave of Italian, Irish and German immigration” which led to “higher crime rates… ethnic enclaves… inter-ethnic conflict in a country where you didn’t have that before.”

His philosophy is Trump’s infamous tirade about “shithole countries” in the pseudo-intellectual jargon of the right-wing internet. If he weren’t CEO, he would have happily posted this campaign tweet himself.

It wouldn’t be hard, at least in theory, for Republicans to change these positions to something far less bleak. A center-right party that truly stood for orderly immigration (as opposed to immigrant-hatred) and nurturing families could roll back the austerity and xenophobia. A party that supported humanitarian border security, skilled immigration, and a safety net for families would be tough for liberals to defeat.