[Here's an insightful essay from Oren Cass about the changing of the guard in US politics. Excerpts:
J.D. Vance is the harbinger of the generational change. No matter what happens in November, he is the GOP's future.]
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Conservatives my age [Cass was born in 1983 RD] or younger were raised at the end of history, with market democracy the only option. Our idea of a Democrat is Bill Clinton, declaring the era of big government over. The global vision we saw American leaders pursue was not the epochal defeat of communism but the foolish embrace of China. Our experience of American foreign policy is repeated failure, in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya, Crimea and Ukraine. I was fortunate to enter the labor market in 2005, when the economy was performing well, but most people in their 30s who earned college degrees graduated into the Great Recession and the painfully slow recovery thereafter.
For older conservatives, the triumph of Reagan's tax cuts and deregulation over 1970s stagflation is the dominant economic narrative. In finance, in technology, in health care, America was a nation ascendent. When younger conservatives think "economic boom," we are more likely to think of the late 1990s. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were a squandering, not an achievement. Our crises are the rapid offshoring to China, the Wall Street meltdown, and the opioid epidemic; skyrocketing student debt and declining family formation.
We take the computer and the cellphone for granted and have experienced Silicon Valley's innovation mainly as the proliferation of rent-seeking corporations pursuing monopoly, abusing their market power, and disseminating corrosive social media apps. Intel is a floundering company that gave away American leadership in cutting-edge technology. General Electric is a cautionary tale of MBA mismanagement. Boeing is an embarrassment that somehow lost the ability to make reliable airplanes.
Thus, rejection of the old guard's conservatism is not some generic case of the young whippersnappers rebelling against their elders. Today's problems are ones to which the prior generation's solutions are entirely unresponsive. Often, today's problems are the direct result of that which the prior generation insisted on doing long past the point of diminishing returns. That the old guard continues to propose doing yet more of the same looks outright disqualifying. How can anyone propose yet another tax cut when the last three have sent us into a fiscal crisis and delivered none of the promised growth? Are we really supposed to let the model that gave us free trade with China guide our economic policy going forward?
J.D. Vance is the harbinger of the generational change. No matter what happens in November, he is the GOP's future.]
