The debate on Wednesday between eight Republican presidential contenders showed beyond doubt that the neoconservative wing is working full force to take back control over the Republican party. They put their elaborate tactics on full display during the debate.
It was entertaining to watch, but also informative of what is to come.
The neocon wing within the party lost control of the party with Trump’s upset victory in the 2016 primaries. This means, primarily, that they lost access to the presidential powers and some of the official fundraising arms of the Republican National Committee.
Trump slowly put his Make America Great Again—MAGA—policy agenda to work. As president, he maintained the grassroots groundswell that carried him into the White House. In his wake, a wave of new candidates ran for public office as Republicans, people who had never considered running for office before. They shared Trump’s MAGA vision of a stronger American economy, fewer wars abroad, a stop to illegal immigration, schools that teach about America instead of bashing the country, and a government focused on its core functions.
The neocons did not like this, and they plotted a comeback. With the debate in Wisconsin on August 23rd, they showed beyond any doubt that they are back, and that they are determined to take back the party.
Of the eight candidates on the stage, four of them clearly profiled themselves as members of the ‘neocon party within the party’: Christ Christie, former governor of New Jersey; Asa Hutchinson, former governor of Arkansas; Mike Pence, former vice president under Trump; and Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and U.N. ambassador. They all dispensed the same neoconservative agenda: a confrontational military build-up against China, and doubled-down support for Ukraine vs. Russia, all wrapped in the American flag to instill patriotism.
That is as far as the neocon vision for America goes. This explains why the neocon squad was notably thin on ideas for addressing other domestic issues, with two characteristic exceptions. They mustered to speak out on crime, where Chris Christie—a federal prosecutor before he was governor—promised to have the federal government prosecute violent crimes that local prosecutors (also known as district attorneys, D.A.s) fail to go after.
The other exception was Mike Pence, when he added that Congress needs to extend the Trump tax cuts, which are set to expire at the end of 2025.
Overall, the neocons sounded old, vision-less, and frankly tired. I can see why: they are not used to having to fight for control over the Republican party. They began losing that with the so-called Tea Party movement in 2009-2011. Before then, every Republican presidential debate sounded like the neocon squad did last Wednesday. The choice for Republican voters stood between the guy who wanted another pro-life judge on the Supreme Court and another guy who wanted another tax cut. They were all focused on confrontational diplomacy and military expansion, basically leaving the domestic issues to the Democrats.
Their party control, which went unchallenged from about the end of the Vietnam War through the Bush-Cheney presidency, ran into its first wave of resistance with the Tea Party movement. It began influencing election outcomes in 2010 and translated into widespread support for Congressman Ron Paul for president in 2012. He won more than two million primary votes, but neocon homeboy Mitt Romney eventually clinched the nomination.
He, on the other hand, proved sorely inept at understanding, communicating with, and inspiring the conservatives who had become active Republicans thanks to the Tea Party. Hence, he lost to Obama in 2012.
The neocons thought they would get back in the front seat in 2016. They did not. With his Make America Great Again campaign, Trump revived the energy of the Tea Party grassroots, and he turned America-first conservatism into actual policy. With his four years as president, he put the MAGA agenda to work, in part by rolling back America’s military commitment abroad. He showed an unrelenting desire to replace diplomatic confrontationalism with a combination of strength and diplomatic cooperation. He got North Korea to rein in its military aggression, he negotiated the Abraham Accords for a new peaceful Middle East, and he shifted some of the funding burden for NATO from American taxpayers to the Europeans.
At home, Trump deregulated the economy and championed policy reforms that strengthened families, poor urban communities, and entrepreneurship. He catered less to the big corporations than a neocon president would do, though they and their political allies should have been more than happy with the results of his major tax reform.
It was not enough. Trump met formidable neocon resistance to his foreign policy. As the 2020 election approached, it was clear that the neocons were backing away from, even actively opposing Trump.
One has to imagine that the neocons are happy with Biden. He has opened the southern border so Corporate America can enjoy waves of cheap labor, and with Ukraine as a pretext, he is pumping as much military spending out the door as he possibly can. All the neocons need to do now is make sure there is no hiccup on the Republican side in next year’s election. They are not going to let the MAGA wing of the party get another presidential candidate.
Their tactic was put on full display in the debate in Wisconsin. Since Trump was not present, Christie, Haley, Hutchinson, and Pence—the neocon squad—took aim squarely at Vivek Ramaswamy. The 38-year-old self-made entrepreneur, whose parents came from India to America two years before he was born, profiled himself as a ‘MAGA truth-sayer’. He swayed notably between sounding contrived and coming across as genuine, which probably is attributable to his complete lack of experience in politics.
Every time he spoke, he met a barrage of aggressive opposition and comebacks from the neocon squad. They pounded him verbally with such precision and determination that it could only have been orchestrated in advance. Upon analyzing the 2016 Republican primary, the neocons have likely concluded that it was a mistake to leave Trump alone and not confront him in the debates.
Back then, the neocons also had multiple candidates, but they were pushing Jeb Bush—the son and brother of former Bush presidents—as their candidate-apparent. However, on the debate stage next to Trump, Jeb Bush looked like an awkwardly smiling public works administrator. This, the neocons have concluded, allowed Trump to surge in the primaries.
They are not going to make that mistake again. In lieu of Trump himself, they decided to cast Ramaswamy as the MAGA candidate, and to confront him relentlessly.
Again, Ramaswamy showed multiple signs of his own inexperience, but he also made some strong points that lay outside of the normal political narrative. Perhaps his best moment during the debate was his comment that there is a mental health crisis among young Americans, and that the country needs to address it.
He is right: the crisis spans from the widespread flight into drug abuse to the sprawling alphabet soup that is the LGBT-etc. movement. It was refreshing to hear a candidate for U.S. president speak up about this in a manner that was respectful to those who suffer, and to do so in such a prominent public forum.
True to the pre-debate prepared tactics, Mike Pence sprung into action and confronted Ramaswamy about the mental-health crisis. It was Pence’s biggest mistake during the debate: he rejected the idea that there is a mental-health crisis, portraying himself as being out of touch with how young Americans are doing today.
When Pence told Ramaswamy that the American people are fine and that all they need is a better government, he looked like an old, stale, establishment candidate who has no idea why he is running for president.
It was also a classic neocon message: domestic policy is boring and solving problems that matter to American families won’t reap any corporate donations. So long as The Joneses encourage their sons and daughters to join the military, all is fine on Main Street.
Overall, the neocon squad showed off their tactics with prowess and efficiency. One curious component in it was their lack of attacks on Ron DeSantis, the successful conservative governor of Florida who has put many of the MAGA movement’s policies to work. He was allowed to shine as a MAGA-style conservative. Given the attacks on Ramaswamy, this can only be interpreted one way: the neocons need DeSantis to win over MAGA voters who would never consider voting for an aggressively anti-Trump candidate like Chris Christie or Mike Pence.
Thanks in part to his shielded status, DeSantis was allowed to shine on stage. He has been floundering in the polls recently, but being given a platform to sound like a Trump light, he will most certainly rise in the polls going forward. If he is being groomed by the neocons—and I would bet that he is—then he will continue to speak like a MAGA candidate. If he surges strongly enough, he can become the candidate in next year’s election; if he does well but does not emerge on the top, he will be given a prominent place in a coming Republican administration.
That, of course, means that the Republicans will have to win next year. If one of the members of the neocon squad clinches the nomination and goes up against Biden next year, it will take almost a miracle to rally tens of millions of Trump loyalists behind him. If that candidate is Chris Christie, his New Jersey no-nonsense personality may play in his favor; if the candidate is Mike Pence, the party will lose a million young voters every time he speaks.
Nikki Haley will not be the presidential candidate. She is simply too weak. She could, however, end up as the vice presidential candidate, though there is another woman gunning for that job, someone who has not yet officially declared whether or not she is running for president.
Haley could end up being secretary of state. But, again, that requires a Republican candidate’s victory in November next year. The more strongly the neocon wing of the party influences its policies, its messaging, and its candidates, the more likely it is that Biden will be re-elected.
This is worrisome, given that neocons actually can win the primaries. The reason why they have four candidates in the race, instead of one, is a matter of primary-delegate counts. During the primary season, voters who are registered as Republicans choose on a state-by-state basis who they want to see as their party’s candidate. The winner is formally appointed by the party at its convention in the summer before the election.
Each candidate wins delegates to the convention based on his or her performance in the primaries. During the primary season, if a candidate discovers that he or she does not stand a chance to win, the candidate can sign over his or her delegates to another candidate.
By fielding four candidates, the neocons expect to gather more delegates in total than they would with just one candidate. If, e.g., Asa Hutchinson manages to get more voters than his wife and his dog, and he sees that Chris Christie has a good chance of winning, he can drop out and simply sign his delegates over to Christie.
The goal, of course, is to out-delegate the MAGA wing. It is a sleazy way to do it, but politics is a sleazy business everywhere. The difference between us and Europe is that here in America, we make no bones about it. We recognize that politicians are driven by their primary instincts: the desire for money and the hunger for power. We vote accordingly, which is why we continue to have faith in a system that looks hopelessly dysfunctional from the outside.
Republican Debate: The Neocons Are Back in Town
The debate on Wednesday between eight Republican presidential contenders showed beyond doubt that the neoconservative wing is working full force to take back control over the Republican party. They put their elaborate tactics on full display during the debate.
It was entertaining to watch, but also informative of what is to come.
The neocon wing within the party lost control of the party with Trump’s upset victory in the 2016 primaries. This means, primarily, that they lost access to the presidential powers and some of the official fundraising arms of the Republican National Committee.
Trump slowly put his Make America Great Again—MAGA—policy agenda to work. As president, he maintained the grassroots groundswell that carried him into the White House. In his wake, a wave of new candidates ran for public office as Republicans, people who had never considered running for office before. They shared Trump’s MAGA vision of a stronger American economy, fewer wars abroad, a stop to illegal immigration, schools that teach about America instead of bashing the country, and a government focused on its core functions.
The neocons did not like this, and they plotted a comeback. With the debate in Wisconsin on August 23rd, they showed beyond any doubt that they are back, and that they are determined to take back the party.
Of the eight candidates on the stage, four of them clearly profiled themselves as members of the ‘neocon party within the party’: Christ Christie, former governor of New Jersey; Asa Hutchinson, former governor of Arkansas; Mike Pence, former vice president under Trump; and Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and U.N. ambassador. They all dispensed the same neoconservative agenda: a confrontational military build-up against China, and doubled-down support for Ukraine vs. Russia, all wrapped in the American flag to instill patriotism.
That is as far as the neocon vision for America goes. This explains why the neocon squad was notably thin on ideas for addressing other domestic issues, with two characteristic exceptions. They mustered to speak out on crime, where Chris Christie—a federal prosecutor before he was governor—promised to have the federal government prosecute violent crimes that local prosecutors (also known as district attorneys, D.A.s) fail to go after.
The other exception was Mike Pence, when he added that Congress needs to extend the Trump tax cuts, which are set to expire at the end of 2025.
Overall, the neocons sounded old, vision-less, and frankly tired. I can see why: they are not used to having to fight for control over the Republican party. They began losing that with the so-called Tea Party movement in 2009-2011. Before then, every Republican presidential debate sounded like the neocon squad did last Wednesday. The choice for Republican voters stood between the guy who wanted another pro-life judge on the Supreme Court and another guy who wanted another tax cut. They were all focused on confrontational diplomacy and military expansion, basically leaving the domestic issues to the Democrats.
Their party control, which went unchallenged from about the end of the Vietnam War through the Bush-Cheney presidency, ran into its first wave of resistance with the Tea Party movement. It began influencing election outcomes in 2010 and translated into widespread support for Congressman Ron Paul for president in 2012. He won more than two million primary votes, but neocon homeboy Mitt Romney eventually clinched the nomination.
He, on the other hand, proved sorely inept at understanding, communicating with, and inspiring the conservatives who had become active Republicans thanks to the Tea Party. Hence, he lost to Obama in 2012.
The neocons thought they would get back in the front seat in 2016. They did not. With his Make America Great Again campaign, Trump revived the energy of the Tea Party grassroots, and he turned America-first conservatism into actual policy. With his four years as president, he put the MAGA agenda to work, in part by rolling back America’s military commitment abroad. He showed an unrelenting desire to replace diplomatic confrontationalism with a combination of strength and diplomatic cooperation. He got North Korea to rein in its military aggression, he negotiated the Abraham Accords for a new peaceful Middle East, and he shifted some of the funding burden for NATO from American taxpayers to the Europeans.
At home, Trump deregulated the economy and championed policy reforms that strengthened families, poor urban communities, and entrepreneurship. He catered less to the big corporations than a neocon president would do, though they and their political allies should have been more than happy with the results of his major tax reform.
It was not enough. Trump met formidable neocon resistance to his foreign policy. As the 2020 election approached, it was clear that the neocons were backing away from, even actively opposing Trump.
One has to imagine that the neocons are happy with Biden. He has opened the southern border so Corporate America can enjoy waves of cheap labor, and with Ukraine as a pretext, he is pumping as much military spending out the door as he possibly can. All the neocons need to do now is make sure there is no hiccup on the Republican side in next year’s election. They are not going to let the MAGA wing of the party get another presidential candidate.
Their tactic was put on full display in the debate in Wisconsin. Since Trump was not present, Christie, Haley, Hutchinson, and Pence—the neocon squad—took aim squarely at Vivek Ramaswamy. The 38-year-old self-made entrepreneur, whose parents came from India to America two years before he was born, profiled himself as a ‘MAGA truth-sayer’. He swayed notably between sounding contrived and coming across as genuine, which probably is attributable to his complete lack of experience in politics.
Every time he spoke, he met a barrage of aggressive opposition and comebacks from the neocon squad. They pounded him verbally with such precision and determination that it could only have been orchestrated in advance. Upon analyzing the 2016 Republican primary, the neocons have likely concluded that it was a mistake to leave Trump alone and not confront him in the debates.
Back then, the neocons also had multiple candidates, but they were pushing Jeb Bush—the son and brother of former Bush presidents—as their candidate-apparent. However, on the debate stage next to Trump, Jeb Bush looked like an awkwardly smiling public works administrator. This, the neocons have concluded, allowed Trump to surge in the primaries.
They are not going to make that mistake again. In lieu of Trump himself, they decided to cast Ramaswamy as the MAGA candidate, and to confront him relentlessly.
Again, Ramaswamy showed multiple signs of his own inexperience, but he also made some strong points that lay outside of the normal political narrative. Perhaps his best moment during the debate was his comment that there is a mental health crisis among young Americans, and that the country needs to address it.
He is right: the crisis spans from the widespread flight into drug abuse to the sprawling alphabet soup that is the LGBT-etc. movement. It was refreshing to hear a candidate for U.S. president speak up about this in a manner that was respectful to those who suffer, and to do so in such a prominent public forum.
True to the pre-debate prepared tactics, Mike Pence sprung into action and confronted Ramaswamy about the mental-health crisis. It was Pence’s biggest mistake during the debate: he rejected the idea that there is a mental-health crisis, portraying himself as being out of touch with how young Americans are doing today.
When Pence told Ramaswamy that the American people are fine and that all they need is a better government, he looked like an old, stale, establishment candidate who has no idea why he is running for president.
It was also a classic neocon message: domestic policy is boring and solving problems that matter to American families won’t reap any corporate donations. So long as The Joneses encourage their sons and daughters to join the military, all is fine on Main Street.
Overall, the neocon squad showed off their tactics with prowess and efficiency. One curious component in it was their lack of attacks on Ron DeSantis, the successful conservative governor of Florida who has put many of the MAGA movement’s policies to work. He was allowed to shine as a MAGA-style conservative. Given the attacks on Ramaswamy, this can only be interpreted one way: the neocons need DeSantis to win over MAGA voters who would never consider voting for an aggressively anti-Trump candidate like Chris Christie or Mike Pence.
Thanks in part to his shielded status, DeSantis was allowed to shine on stage. He has been floundering in the polls recently, but being given a platform to sound like a Trump light, he will most certainly rise in the polls going forward. If he is being groomed by the neocons—and I would bet that he is—then he will continue to speak like a MAGA candidate. If he surges strongly enough, he can become the candidate in next year’s election; if he does well but does not emerge on the top, he will be given a prominent place in a coming Republican administration.
That, of course, means that the Republicans will have to win next year. If one of the members of the neocon squad clinches the nomination and goes up against Biden next year, it will take almost a miracle to rally tens of millions of Trump loyalists behind him. If that candidate is Chris Christie, his New Jersey no-nonsense personality may play in his favor; if the candidate is Mike Pence, the party will lose a million young voters every time he speaks.
Nikki Haley will not be the presidential candidate. She is simply too weak. She could, however, end up as the vice presidential candidate, though there is another woman gunning for that job, someone who has not yet officially declared whether or not she is running for president.
Haley could end up being secretary of state. But, again, that requires a Republican candidate’s victory in November next year. The more strongly the neocon wing of the party influences its policies, its messaging, and its candidates, the more likely it is that Biden will be re-elected.
This is worrisome, given that neocons actually can win the primaries. The reason why they have four candidates in the race, instead of one, is a matter of primary-delegate counts. During the primary season, voters who are registered as Republicans choose on a state-by-state basis who they want to see as their party’s candidate. The winner is formally appointed by the party at its convention in the summer before the election.
Each candidate wins delegates to the convention based on his or her performance in the primaries. During the primary season, if a candidate discovers that he or she does not stand a chance to win, the candidate can sign over his or her delegates to another candidate.
By fielding four candidates, the neocons expect to gather more delegates in total than they would with just one candidate. If, e.g., Asa Hutchinson manages to get more voters than his wife and his dog, and he sees that Chris Christie has a good chance of winning, he can drop out and simply sign his delegates over to Christie.
The goal, of course, is to out-delegate the MAGA wing. It is a sleazy way to do it, but politics is a sleazy business everywhere. The difference between us and Europe is that here in America, we make no bones about it. We recognize that politicians are driven by their primary instincts: the desire for money and the hunger for power. We vote accordingly, which is why we continue to have faith in a system that looks hopelessly dysfunctional from the outside.
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