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Flag, faith and family. That used to be a winning message for conservatism in America. Now, though? What if a target voter loves the flag but lacks the faith? What if he or she views the familial domain as unfit for political trespass?
Now let us travel one letter up the alphabet. Readers might remember “God, guns and gays” as another alliterative précis of the right’s obsessions in the later 20th century. But in 2024? What if a swing voter is a Second Amendment absolutist with no strong views on the other Gs? Or even takes a liberal line on them as a generational reflex?
We aren’t talking about exotic creatures here. The US is a nation of two-to-one support for same-sex marriage. Most people either “seldom” or “never” attend a religious service. At the same time, immigration is the top concern that voters name unprompted, and just one in three strongly objects to the idea that a president should be able to rule without much judicial or congressional restraint.
Put this all together, and something becomes clear. Lots of voters now are what I will call “public authoritarians”. Porous borders, tent cities, woke colleges, perhaps even Chinese imports: these things upset them. But private morals? Affairs of the bedroom and the chapel? You do you.
Donald Trump’s electoral genius consists of never frightening these people. Even at his demagogic worst, a certain reticence about the private realm, combined with some well-documented peccadillos, assures the conservative-but-not-pious that he isn’t going to go all Cardinal Spellman on them. And so his coalition hangs together. The Republicans, it seems, have lost that balance of late. The Dobbs ruling on abortion was the start. The elevation of JD Vance — conservative Catholic, scourge of the childless, worrier about porn — is a move in the same vein.
Vance himself might be the future. He has the time and the brain. He has the most underrated asset in politics and perhaps life: unembarrassability. But Vance-ism? There aren’t enough private authoritarians in the electorate to sustain it. And this assumes no further secularisation. (Church membership in the US under Reagan: 70 per cent. It is now below half.) Either he changes his outlook — he wasn’t too embarrassed to change his old distaste for Trump — or accepts that its natural ceiling is the lower half of a presidential ticket, shoring up the faithful as Mike Pence did.
To be clear, there are millions of intense Christians who vote Republican to defend the creed. Just not enough to elect a president. For that, it is an arithmetical must to bolt on the kind of Trump fan that I am likelier to encounter. These characters react as I do upon seeing an ancient and sublime place of worship (“What a darling Sofitel it would make”) and aren’t just liberal so much as outright incurious about people’s domestic doings. Their grievance isn’t with the cultural settlement of the 1960s, but with that of the 2000s, if that means woke-ism, trade and a foreign-born population above 10 per cent of the total.
To win, the devout need the louche. Trump was a vessel in which to smuggle a cultural conservatism that couldn’t prevail on its own terms. A clever scheme, this, as Dobbs proved, but not a lasting one. The inherent tensions were going to come out in time.
In France, the hard right has never quite settled a question. If Muslim immigration is a challenge, what is it a challenge to: the secular republic or a Catholic nation? The voter who wants to protect laïcité and the voter who wants to reinforce the church can be kept in the same coalition, just about. But it requires constant and meticulous hedging. Pander to the second voter, and the first recoils. This is why populist winners — Boris Johnson, Silvio Berlusconi — tend to have something of the playboy about them. “Relax,” is the implicit message, “I’m not a prig.”
Trump gets it, or at least got it. He is said to mistrust the clerical zeal of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. He avoids talking about the childless as demographic shirkers. But then what a righteous choice of dauphin. And, lest he scare wavering voters in a secular age, what pressure on the young changeling to mutate once more.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
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