The Return of the 19th Century Republican

A historical context to JD Vance and his nationalist politics.

Since Donald Trump announced his vice presidential pick in Ohio Senator JD Vance last month, there has been speculation about Vance’s personal and ideological evolution. Much of it takes the form of contrasting JD Vance the Hillbilly Elegy pundit with JD Vance, the right-wing politician. When Vance first came on the scene, he was a NeverTrumper explaining how America’s white working class was following a false prophet in Donald Trump. Now he is the Donald’s pick for VP. The old Vance was for sober praise of free markets and entitlement reform, but the new one is for the forgotten worker and Lina Khan’s FTC. The old one was for tampering down partisan disagreements, but the new one is for brawling with journalists and Democrats on Twitter. A good deal of this punditry focuses on the character and evolution of Vance. Is he normal or is he weird?

Instead of joining in this analysis, I went to one of the staffers I know in Vance’s Senate office and asked about his vision. What does JD Vance believe the GOP should stand for in the future? Here is what he said:

Republicans embrace laborers as well as capitalists within a broader framework valorizing work and social harmony. They are mercantilists, believing that the state has a particularly important role to play in ensuring economic development. They are statists, believing in strong government and the dignity of government service, and believing that good government occurred when the voice of the masses is properly channeled through institutions, rather than directly expressed. They are a party of order, inveighing against the dangers of unrestrained individualism, violence, and parochialism. They are Yankee Protestants, believing that human beings have a responsibility to reform themselves and to reform society. They are, finally, Nationalists, believers in the preeminence of American interests and American ideals.

The phrases “dignity of government service”, “dangers of unrestrained individualism”, or “Yankee Protestant” might have been a tell. I confess, I am not recounting what a Hill staffer told me, but a description of the Whig and Republican party ideology over most of the 19th century. This is a lightly edited (for tense) excerpt from a political science book on party ideology published in 1998.

A quarter of a century later, it is not far off from describing JD Vance’s aspiring worldview today.

The excerpt comes from Party Ideologies in America: 1828 - 1996, in which the political scientist John Gerring describes the early Republican party’s ideology. Before Vance’s speech invoking workers, one might consider the Teamsters speech at the RNC did not endorse the ticket so much as open a bipartisan hand. Gerring’s thesis suggests there is a reason for that; Republicans are not and have never been a pro-labor union party. Prior to their anti-statist turn in the early 20th century, Republicans were first and foremost nationalists. They primarily sought unification of American society against the disorder and threats a young republic might face (and famously did in the Civil War.)

In fact, Vance’s background as a military veteran from Ohio would fit right in with most national Republicans of this period. So would his advocacy of tariffs. Before the Republican party’s turn to what Gerring describes as their neoliberal era, the party upheld the industrial tariff as a great mercantilist device. It was repeatedly idolized in party magazines and speeches as the guardian of the rising American standard of living against poorer countries and labor conditions. Tariffs were also the means by which the post-Civil War federal government financed its expenditures, often on pensions of Union veterans (which lorded over budgets and politics then not unlike Social Security and Medicare do today.)

This mercantilist philosophy flowed into the Republican approach to labor and capital. Early Republicans believed their industrial tariff and stable currency would provide the average American with a rising standard of living. They repeatedly emphasized mercantilism to many of their working class voters, upholding the fruits of national economy over Democratic appeals to class populism. Instead of invoking the small business owner against organized union power and international communist threats, Republicans of this era handled the labor question with a more ecumenical approach.

Vance’s moral critique of large technology firms and consumerism for its own sake takes up this lineage. For all the talk of JD Vance’s conversion to Catholicism (and Vance himself has personally written on it), the Republican scene of young converts can sometimes resemble the 19th century Republicans that applied their (mainline) Protestant Christian faith to matters of commerce and government. This high church approach differs from the more anti-statist and evangelical rhetoric that creeped into Republican speeches over the second half of the 20th century. To some of Vance’s critics, this potential shift suggests a threat to the separation of church and state. But for his devout fans, it might be a simply cautionary tale. The historic collapse of the mainline and the social rout of George W. Bush’s born-again Christian presidency suggest political activism and elite-connected religious faith do not easily strengthen one another.

Conservative political activism coupled with an aversion to class populism also describes another issue Vance has brought forward: Immigration restriction. Republicans are ruthlessly prosecuting the immigration issue against the incumbent Democratic administration which rapidly expanded legal immigration through asylum law. The journalist Matthew Zeitlin has noted Vance’s particular hawkishness on the issue in political economy terms.

Here too, the Republican party of the late 19th and early 20th century provides a parallel. As Gerring notes, while the Democratic party often eagerly embraced new European immigrants, “National Republicans wished all foreign races and languages, once in the country, might dissolve in a thorough process of ‘Americanization.’” This urge to assimilate an orderly citizenry could be starkly partisan for Republicans; “the Democratic party was viewed through National Republican eyes as treasonous, boss-ridden, immigrant-dominated, and prone to dangerous experimentation.” For Republicans today as in their earlier period, disorderly immigration is seen as a challenge to the republic’s work ahead.

It is worth moving from Gerring’s thesis to briefly recount how the immigration issue historically related to a recurring concern of Vance’s critics, namely the specter of white racism in American politics.

Historically, the white man’s democracy brought forth by Democrats embraced many European nationalities and encouraged religious toleration (alongside a ruthless exclusion of citizenship for black Americans, native peoples, and later on Asian immigrants.) Race was a direct means¹ by which the followers of Jackson expanded America’s mass democracy, which proceeded at a faster rate than some of its European cousins. Accordingly, Antebellum Democrats repeatedly called their party “The Democracy” in many of their newspapers. But Republicans, like their forefathers in the Northern Whigs and earlier Federalists, insisted on a more small-r republican and particular folkway. To be an American was something honed in a particular middle class way of life, not granted with a party ticket to any Europeans arriving on the country’s shores. This made Republicans more open to smaller sets of native political activists, such as the abolitionists², but also more skeptical of different newcomers to America, such as the Irish Catholics.

Such a history helpfully complicates the cultural fights that JD Vance has entered. It pushes back at some tired Republican punditry that because their party freed the slaves, they could never be bigots at the same time. The history also complicates Democratic slogans, which uphold their party’s long-standing pro-immigration nature as synonymous with inclusion itself. Democrats have always been the more ethnically and culturally diverse party in America. But that is not the same thing as being inclusive of everyone in America. While America today is thankfully far less violent and ideologically racist than its 19th century settler-state past, recent losses by progressives over civil rights cases suggest a curious development between the parties. For all the progressive scorn of the conservative originalist legal doctrine, the Democratic intelligentsia’s understanding of both racially inclusive law and American society is more originalist than ever. Republicans and Democrats will likely need one another to chart a better future on these matters.

The themes of nationalism, economic development, and internal order have old ties to the Republican party, but they are not the same as a settled policy agenda. There are important nationalist reasons America might seek to “friend-shore” our industry with geopolitical allies and offer visas to immigrants with particular industrial skills. One doesn’t have to be a senior fellow at the Cato Institute to notice wage compression is in tension with new industrial development.

Industrial growth already faces challenges in both environmental litigation and interest group politics. Unions are not eager for a middle class attitude towards labor mobility—or more bluntly, hiring and firing—for new growing industries. This might be especially true of mining and manufacturing, which any revival of American industrial might (or technological approach to climate change) will require a lot more of³. Alongside every enthusiastic column on supply-side progressivism (and often continued opposition by progressive legislators), Democrats are aware they have too many interest groups seeking to cook in their policy kitchen. In light of these industrial and political challenges, should Republicans eagerly brush off the benefits of their current anti-statist paradigm? Others doubt Republicans could shift even if some party men wanted to.

Yet the most polemical critics of Vance insist his ideology is not merely complicated by political and policy challenges, but foreign, subversive, and outright dangerous. They insist his nationalism is an import from Hungary, a hybrid regime that too easily wins odd praise by hosting weekend junkets for more disenchanted American writers on the cultural right. These critics sometimes insinuate that, under his public image, Vance is a political cynic seeking to mobilize white chauvinists against multiracial democracy. They insist he has the wrong types of fans on Twitter, and the most right-wing crowd in Silicon Valley, so he cannot offer any good development for American democracy.

In response to these accusations, conservatives can become vengeful. They often denounce attacks as nothing more than a social clique of liberal journalists and progressive academics attached to radical strains of thought from the 1960s. But conservatives shouldn’t be so certain about this ideological source. Ignorance or caricature of the pre-WW2 Republican party is often due to New Deal, not Civil Rights historiography⁴. Vance’s critics and supporters alike would benefit from learning about the 19th and early 20th century Republican party before narrowing the public debate to personality, rhetoric, or yet another argument about the 1960s.

The greater challenge for Vance, however, comes from other parts of the 19th century Republicans. They were a party of new industry and national unity over all forms of populism. This is not obviously the case for Republicans today. Along with his praise for the current FTC, Vance’s musings on foreign policy have notably met the harshest criticism from even his own party. Here too, Vance’s focus on Asia over Europe resembles the pre-NATO Republican party. An important question for Vance’s critics is whether a foreign policy that focuses on both actually has the votes for the necessary long-term defense spending, as opposed to one-off aid bills. Too often center-left politicians can talk like Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan on global leadership and yet vote to spend like Jimmy Carter.

The United States of the late 19th century understood security questions in recently finished expansion across the western frontier and naval power in the greater Pacific. It was far more uncertain in its future and wary of national division after the Civil War. The United States today is both more united in its internal commerce and morals and yet appears more disjointed in where to focus abroad. Whereas JD Vance prizes America’s alliance with Israel, a younger generation of Democrats speak of Israel like William Jennings Bryan did of the Philippine-American war. John Gerring’s book on the party ideologies cannot offer much analysis in the realm of foreign policy. That is probably for the best.

Foreign policy is where the limits of a 19th century Republican analogy become most obvious, more than any one-off debate on tariffs or immigration. It was a different time for leaders facing different questions. Since the 19th century Republican has evidently returned, it is incumbent on us to try and understand why. It might be a weird political tradition in the 21st century. But it would be weirder if we could not recognize our country’s own past and mistook it for something more menacing and less able to adapt to new problems ahead.

1. The historian Michael Kazin’s book on the Democratic party and its chapter on Martin Van Buren (the only American president so far whose first language was not English) is especially instructive of this fact.

2. Importantly, it does not follow that American politics was exclusively divided by anti-immigration partisans and pro-slavery partisans on either side. Several abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglass and Charles Sumner were in favor of an anti-racism that argued for a broader citizenship available to both black Americans and new Chinese immigrants. Simultaneously, white settlers in the West Coast often drew links between an Asian and black presence as undesirable for equal citizenship in their Jacksonian vision. But like some moral causes in the GOP today, Gerring notes abolitionists were never a majority of the Republican party. Instead, they punched above their weight in connections to important party men. After summarizing the free-labor ideal and deeply moral view of commerce that united Whigs and Republicans, Gerring suggests “it was no accident, therefore, that so many old-line Whigs eventually found their way into the newly formed Republican party.” Nor is it an accident that Frederick Douglass understood Lincoln’s party was concerned, first and foremost, with reunifying the country.

3. The former FT reporter Henry Sanderson provides an important overview of the climate change matter and how industry plays a role in his book Volt Rush.

4. Gerring’s book also points to a key transformation from “populism” to “universalism” as a party era in the Democratic party, and he identifies this transformation with Adlai Stevenson. This suggests anyone seeking explain the end of New Deal politics will have to look at its final form in the populist presidency of Harry Truman, not Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton.