Republican Convention: A Last Farewell to the Neocons

If there is one thing that the Republican convention in Milwaukee made clear beyond any doubt, it is that the neocons have finally lost control over the Republican party. 

This is worth celebrating. Since the days of the Reagan presidency, the neoconservatives have held the Republican party in a firm grip. So overwhelming was their control that when someone else came in from the outside and challenged them—that someone else being Donald Trump—they did not even take him seriously at first.

That mistake eventually cost them the control over the party. This is why we have, all week long, heard nothing but laments and complaints from America’s neoconservative thought leader, the National Review Online. Their laments over Trump’s “America First” agenda—which Trump reiterated in his acceptance speech on Thursday night— knows no boundaries. While they were relatively civil in their running comments on X about Trump’s speech, they went unhinged in their attacks on his vice-presidential nominee, Senator J.D. Vance.

Noah Rothman, a senior writer with the National Review, gladly accused Senator Vance of “Hillbilly Hokum.” He also attacked Vance for criticizing the U.S. invasion of and war in Iraq, suggesting that

he relied on the calcified narratives that have sprouted up from the potted history of the Iraq War

This is the pet peeve of the National Review: if you are a Republican, do not dare to be critical of a single war America has ever engaged in—even if at the end of the war, you leave that nation no better than it was when you invaded it.

Jim Geraghty, senior political correspondent for the National Review, also opened his rhetorical floodgates:

Vance made the best possible pitch for a vision of the party I disagree with, using the most mainstream-friendly, warm, fuzzy language to sell an agenda of protectionism, populism, nationalism, industrial policy, and quasi-isolationism. … The Senate’s loudest opponent of assisting Ukraine didn’t mention the conflict with Russia at all

Senior editor Jay Nordlinger goes even further. His spotlight is on anyone who dares raise the possibility that the Biden administration’s insistence on bringing Ukraine into NATO might have been all the reason Russia needed to invade. He takes to X and calls such arguments “sickening”:

Nordlinger opines that anyone who does not want America in a full-scale war with Russia over Ukraine would somehow have blamed Poland, Denmark, and Britain for being targeted by Germany during World War II.

This downright hysterical argument is born from deep and unending resentment. Rothman, Geraghty, Nordlinger, and the rest of America’s neocons resent Donald Trump for ‘stealing’ the Republican party from them. They despise his supporters, people the neocons neither can nor want to understand. 

Those people are Mr. and Mrs. Applepie, ordinary Americans with ordinary jobs, who live in ordinary houses and struggle to pay their grocery bills. They go to church and they teach their kids to love their country not for all her wars, but for her peace, prosperity, and freedom. 

These are cardinal sins in the neocon playbook. But there is an even bigger one. Since Trump first became a presidential contender, Mr. and Mrs. Applepie have packed their kids in their pick-up trucks and driven across state lines to hear Trump speak. They never showed that devotion to any of the presidential candidates that the neocons fielded. 

Not for George Bush Sr. or Bob Dole, nor for George Bush Jr. or John McCain. 

To the neocons, Mr. and Mrs. Applepie should not get so deeply involved in politics that they drive from Kentucky to Georgia to hear a presidential candidate speak. They should obediently vote for whoever they are told to vote for—and spend the rest of their time producing kids that can go and die in the neocons’ endless wars. 

And right there, we have the core of the neoconservative ideology: war. Once upon a time, when the neocons ruled the Republican party, they could put that ideology to work without worrying about opposition within the party. So strong was their focus on war that Senator Rand Paul once referred to it as a “war forever” strategy. 

But Americans grew tired of year after year sending their kids to die in Iraq and Afghanistan. They grew tired of Republicans colluding with Democrats to grow government, just to secure a perpetually larger war budget. 

The Tea Party movement was born in 2009; it was primarily directed at the Obama administration, but it was nowhere near loyal to the Republicans. On the contrary, in the 2010 midterm election, the Tea Party began eating into the neocon party hegemony. 

In a tone-deaf response, the neocons elevated Senator Mitt Romney to the Republican presidential candidate in 2012. Few politicians are as contrived as Romney is and, predictably, he failed to raise enough enthusiasm among Republican voters. When he went jet skiing with his wife in the summer of 2012, he sealed his fate in that election. 

But his loss to Obama was not in vain. It helped the Tea Party movement understand just how much the neocons looked down their noses at them. From that jet-skiing moment on, something broke forever between the Tea Party movement and the establishment neocons. It was only logical that in 2016, a candidate would emerge who knew how to connect with Mr. and Mrs. Applepie. 

That candidate, of course, was Donald Trump. But he was more than just a working man’s ideal president. He was the neocons’ worst political nightmare; the day that he announced his campaign is forever etched in the memories of the neocons as a day of rage and vengeance. They did everything they could to sabotage Trump’s first term, but not even Liz Cheney’s botched political pirouettes on the January 6 committee helped. Trump was still around, and he remained very popular with his voters.

But don’t expect the neocons to understand Trump. They hate him with such fervor that all they can do is look down their noses at him. 

They thought they could defeat him in the presidential primaries last fall. They fielded four establishment candidates—and all of them failed miserably. They thought the Biden administration’s lawfare would bring Trump to his knees—and they were wrong again. 

Astonishingly, the neocons have not even been able to field their own independent candidate, even though they had former Congresswoman Liz Cheney as an obvious option. She has failed miserably to piece together an independent presidential campaign. 

All the neocons have now is the National Review, its increasingly sophomoric rhetoric, and its desperate campaign to turn Ukraine into America’s next Afghanistan.

So important is war to the neocons that they are willing to throw their country into an open confrontation with Russia. What they fail to understand is that Russia is not the Taliban. Russia is not even Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. 

Russia has a full-service, well-trained, well-equipped, and intelligently organized military, trained, funded, and commanded on par with its American counterpart. If the neocons got to realize their Ukrainian dream, the American death toll would likely be more than 100 times what it was in Afghanistan. 

From the common-sense viewpoint of a Trump voter, the obvious question is: what would those hundreds of thousands of Americans die for? 

Given how America’s 20 years in Afghanistan changed the country’s political leadership from Taliban to the Taliban, this one is easy. Suppose we neocon’d it all the way and threw all our military resources into Ukraine—and forgot about both China and our own territorial defense. Suppose we dug in for two decades and sent a quarter million or more of our men and women to die on the battlefield. When we reach a point where even the neocons agree that it might be time to leave, we pull out and hand over to the Russians whatever military equipment we happen to have there at the time.

As far as Ukraine is concerned, we replace the Russians with the Russians. 

When the National Review criticizes J.D. Vance because he “didn’t mention the conflict with Russia at all,” what they want is more battlefields where they can waste American lives, American tax dollars, and American industrial capacity. 

All over our country, Mr. and Mrs. Applepie are rejecting their war mongering. They want a strong military, but one that is focused on its actual job: to protect America. They also want a president whose ambition is not to fill corporate and lobbyist pockets, but to make sure that all Americans can thrive and prosper—and live in peace and freedom.