I disagree with just about every word spoken by both Democratic Socialists and MAGA followers, but I envy the fact that both have created active political movements dedicated to electing candidates and fighting for control of the Democratic and Republican parties. Likewise, moderate establishment Democrats are part of an organized movement. You know who doesn’t have a movement? My tribe; legacy Reaganite Republicans who before Trump ran the Republican party. But that is changing.
Political movements consist of activists motivated by a common ideology, candidates, and infrastructure, such as political action committees. We have the ideas. We are building the infrastructure. And now we may have a candidate. The ground is going to shift once this midterm election is over.
From the 1950s until 1980, the Conservative Movement fought for control of the Republican party. From the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 until the election of Donald Trump in 2016, it ran the GOP. I was part of that movement as a candidate, elected official, and State Party Chairman.
But in 2016 it all came crashing down. Reagan’s Shining City was overrun by populists just as Rome was sacked by Visigoths. Overnight long-standing conservative positions on trade, free enterprise, immigration reform, NATO, and even the Constitution and the rule of law, were spun 180 degrees in reverse. MAGA took control of the party infrastructure. And the amazing thing is, very few members of our tribe put up a fight.
The Never Trump movement, of which I am a proud member, was always small. The vast majority of legacy Republicans, including many of my oldest friends and colleagues, either gave up and left politics, or bent the knee to Trump and became Vichy Republicans. For the past ten years there has been no organized conservative movement opposed to the MAGA takeover of the GOP. Until now.
In 2024, Senators John Danforth, Alan Simpson, and William Cohen, along with 34 other Republican luminaries, founded Our Republican Legacy (ORL) an organization dedicated to restoring the GOP to its traditional core principles. ORL now consists of five national chairs, multiple senior advisors, 30 state chairs, and roughly 15,000 members of our National Committee. In consultation with other traditional conservatives, we are beginning to prepare for the post-Trump battle for control of the party in 2028.
Movements are dependent on candidates willing to step up and run, and now the first potential conservative candidate for President may have emerged.
On a recent episode of our podcast, (can’t have a movement without a podcast these days) Congressman Don Bacon confirmed he is considering running for President. Bacon, a retired Air Force Brigadier General, is a great conservative leader. He stands with us on tariffs, Ukraine, NATO, and the need to get our debt under control. He describes himself as a Reaganite, and a legacy Republican.
Don Bacon may or may not decide to run for President. And he may or may not be the only legacy Republican in the race. But his potential candidacy, and the growth of ORL, are signs that the Conservative Movement is reawakening. And that is good news for America.
America needs a healthy two-party system, and that must include a Republican party once again dedicated to free enterprise, fiscal responsibility, national unity, fealty to the Constitution and the rule of law, and peace through strength. It is this movement, this ideology, which drove the Republican party at its best, from Lincoln, to Roosevelt, to Eisenhower, and to Reagan. Conservatives need to be determined to go to work in 2028 and keep on working as long as it takes to restore the GOP to its true values.
Movements don’t just happen. People have to fight for them. For too long my fellow legacy Republicans have either given up, or worked to hold the party together, resigned to the fact that Donald Trump was the new boss. The time for unity is over. Political parties are shaped by struggle and competition. As soon the dust settles on the midterm election conservatives need to begin fighting to turn the GOP in a new (old) direction.
So as the sun sets on the Trump era, and we begin the battle of 2028 and beyond, we legacy Republicans need to remember the battle cry of 1980: The Time is Now.
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As a long time Democrat, I welcomed reading Vance’s opinion in this Post Alley edition. A truly moderate Republican Party, based on their legacy, will be the best antidote for this country, given the damages done by the Trump regime. Democrats are far better when the same can be said about the Republican Party. I long for the day when congressional members will once again talk to each other across the aisles in D.C. That can only bring positives to our country, badly in need of a huge correction. Well said, Mr. Vance.
Do the GOP’s “true values” extend to the environment, or were Dan Evans, John Spellman, Ralph Munro etc. some kind of aberration?
Don Bacon: “I don’t think we know for certain how much of climate change is being caused by normal cyclical changes in weather vs. human causes. I support legislation that allows for continued incremental improvement in our environment but oppose extreme measures that create significant economic and job disruption.”
Reagan couldn’t have put it better. In other words, “let’s leave it to the rest of the world if effective measures need to be taken. I’m 63, I’ll be gone when the stuff really hits the fan.”
Do the GOP’s “true values” include drawing a line with our right wing allies? Let’s talk about Israel, the boat anchor tied to our neck because we’ve been unwilling to do that. Bacon doesn’t seem to see any problem here. Iran? Had to be done, long overdue. Would even Reagan have been so blind?
It’s too bad, really I like to see a Republican who isn’t just corrupt vermin, but let’s have another take on the GOP’s “true values”.
No, Mr. Vance, the time—the call to arms for the reasonable members of the Republicans party—is NOT now. The time was when Trump appointed know-nothing yes-men to the cabinet and you said nothing. The time was when Trump turned the Justice Department into his personal retribution agency, and you said nothing. The time was when inspectors general were fired from their posts and US-AID was dismantled and the State Department, NATO, and the FBI were undercut, and fools like Hegseth, and sycophants like Blanche and Bessent, and oligarchs like Musk and Kushner were put in place and you reasonable Republicans in Congress and in public and in private did nothing.
Like you said, « …very few of my tribe put up a fight. ». So now you get to suffer the results of cowardice .
When I said “nothing?!” Clearly you haven’t been paying attention to anything I have said, done, or written the past 10 years.
Frankly I don’t know what a moderate Republican stands for these days. It seems like Republicans are pro-market but at the same time never say “no” to further consolidation. So we have only a few big airlines that control prices in their major hubs. We have a few big grocery store chains. A few big food processing companies. A few big meat packers.
And most troubling a few big media conglomerates. Sinclair rolls out the same editorial content across their national TV network. What we call debate becomes one oligarch publicly disagreeing with another oligarch.
Private equity scoops in to buy up small local businesses and then wrings out every last bit of profit.
As for free-trade, it does provide improvements in standards of living on-average. But Ross Perot was right that NAFTA resulted in a giant sucking sound as jobs moved south to Mexico. And the WTO protests proved right that unbridled trade can result in lower working conditions and environmental degradation in countries that we trade with. Benefits of free trade here are not spread equitable with much of middle and rural America becoming worse off as everything becomes financialized. Small town main streets are hollowed out and there not the income to provide basic healthcare. Rural hospitals shutter and close.
Conservatives have noble values, but in the end those values always seem to be able to be sold to make a profit.
A real conservative would protect the small dairy farmers, not the huge CAFO dairies. A real conservative would restrict corporate and private equity from buying up farmland. A real conservative would support small landlords who own 10 houses or so, not the institutional investors that snatch up hundreds of single family homes. A real conservative would reform the tax code which favors capital to the extreme and consolidates economic and political power in the hands of fewer and fewer families.
We can all see the problem. Conservatives are unable to address it.
This is what we stand for. https://www.ourrepublicanlegacy.com/
Hi Chris. I looked it over. There is nothing here about the kitchen-table concerns that I raise. Doubling-down on the Republican “free-market” dogma side-steps the reasons why why Donald Trump was able to step in to take-over the Republican Party. In 2016, film maker Michael Moore had a better pulse of the nation than any DC insider on how what we call neo-liberal policies had screwed them over. Here is what Moore said about voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the so-called Brexit states, in a speech on October 29, 2016:
“And on November 8, Election Day, although they lost their jobs, although they’ve been foreclose on by the bank, and next came the divorce and now the wife and kids are gone, the car’s been repoed, they haven’t had a real vacation in years, they’re stuck with the shitty Obamacare Bronze Plan where you can’t even get a fucking percocet. They’ve essentially lost everything they had, except one thing — the one thing that doesn’t cost them a cent, and is guaranteed to them by the American constitution: the right to vote.
They might be penniless, they might be homeless, they might be fucked over and fucked up it doesn’t matter, because it’s equalized on that day – a millionaire has the same number of votes as the person without a job: one.
And there’s more of the former middle class than there are in the millionaire class.
So on November 8, the dispossessed will walk into the voting booth, be handed a ballot, close the curtain, and take that lever or felt pen or touchscreen and put a big fucking X in the box by the name of the man who has threatened to upend and overturn the very system that has ruined their lives: Donald J. Trump.”
Mr Vance
I read and enjoy your columns here but a far larger problem exists: I probably won’t live long enough to EVER vote for another Republican. There aren’t enough of you to even dream of retaking a once proud party and doing some civic good.
Your former party needs de-MAGAfication, not unlike post WWII when a slightly different de-_____-fication happened.
Best luck
A.S.
Agreed. And they way you do that is by winning the 2028 election
With J.D. Vance as candidate? J.D. (and his financier and mentor Thiel) are MAGA in both rhetoric and ideology. Republicans, it seems to me, need to return to being the Abraham Lincoln party, not the party of the wealthy autocrats. Rs can win with people like Dan Evans and Slade Gorton. Unfortunately, people like them have died. Who besides yourself would you recommend?
Agree that the MAGA politicians would likely keep too much of the DT shenanigans in place if they were elected to the presidency. The GOP needs someone outside the “box” to run.
Sorry. The difference between Reagan and Trump is one of degree not kind. The GOP has had offered nothing positive over the past 50 years. What they have given us is Trump. He is theirs and Trump absolutely embodies the GOP. Sorry but this latest rebranding is simply more of the same old same old.
One of the areas where Republicans have a lot to make up for, is the position of American institutions. Higher education, scientific institutions like NIH and NOAA. Modern Republican strategy seems to revolve around antagonism towards science, education and public institutions in general, which might seem to have been a logical extension of Reagan’s anti-government rhetoric.
But actual Republican policy of that era wasn’t so uniformly toxic. William Ruckelshaus for example was well regarded at the EPA. Respect and support for American institutions has been and could be a Republican virtue.
Certainly more plausibly than “fiscal responsibility”, after decades of debt-burdening tax cuts under Republican administrations starting with Reagan, or “free enterprise” after the decades of looting of American industry and commerce by unregulated financialization and monopoly.
I have been following your comments for many years..remember Channel 9 on Friday nights? The republicans really lost me with Sarah Palin followed by Rick Santorum and downhill from there. Watching and voter for many it always seemed the conservative all stars often had a disconnect with people who were struggling one way or another. Dan Evans,excepted. I could vote Republican again if it was a Jeff Flake maybe. The dems should have found a dynamic potential candidate right after Biden was elected but it seems the two party machines have the control so we get who owes who.
I liked the article and wish Our Republican Legacy well with their endeavors, which are sorely needed. Not only are 2 healthy political parties needed once again, but I would like to see even 3 or 4 strong parties working together.