It has been a tough month for American social conservatives. At the Republican National Convention platform committee, pro-life delegates were silenced and sidelined, and the resulting 2024 platform is the first since 1984 to leave out a commitment to the right to life. At the RNC itself last week, pro-life talking points were entirely absent, with Trump surrogates and LGBT activists touting the shift away from social conservatism. On July 18, vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance addressed the issue directly at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s “God and Country Breakfast.”
“There has been a lot of rumbling in the past few weeks that the Republican Party of now and the Republican Party of the future is not going to be a place that’s welcoming to social conservatives,” he told the Faith & Freedom Coalition. “And really, from the bottom of my heart, that is not true. Social conservatives have a seat at this table and they always will so long as I have any influence in this party—and President Trump, I know, agrees.” He reminded the crowd that Trump had previously delivered for social conservatives and on that basis, asked for “a little bit of trust” going forward.
As Ronald Reagan’s favorite Russian proverb puts it, “Trust, but verify.” At the moment, it appears that Trump is steering the GOP away from social conservative issues because he never believed in them—at least, that’s what his son Eric Trump told NBC. But there is also good reason to believe that Vance, based on his own record, is sincere in his statements. I hope that his own toeing of the new party line on abortion—such as his statement in support of access to the abortion pill—will be clarified in the months ahead, when he will be challenged on his previously articulated pro-life principles by the press.
Over the past several years, Vance has established himself as one of the more interesting social conservative intellectuals on the Right. Those cited as an influence on his thinking are almost all social conservatives, as well. Much has been made of his transition from ‘Never Trumper’ to Trump supporter; but, as Michael Brendan Dougherty observes in National Review, Vance’s intellectual trajectory has actually been quite consistent. Vance described the evolution of his religious views in a 2022 essay in The Lamp and the development of his political beliefs—including his view of Trump—in a conversation last month with Ross Douthat of the New York Times.
Ifirst saw Vance speak in 2019, at the National Conservatism conference put on by the Edmund Burke Foundation in Washington, D.C. Vance gave a speech titled “Beyond Libertarianism,” in which he cited the ubiquity of digital porn consumption, even among children, as an example of how libertarianism has failed us. Born in 1984, Vance is young enough to recognize the transformative effects of internet porn on the young, and I was very interested in his approach to the issue. I believe that pornography is fundamentally transforming our sexual economy and poisoning the culture—but few politicians are willing to countenance doing something about it. In the first of several interviews during his 2021 Ohio senatorial campaign, Vance revisited that theme.
“There have been a lot of examples throughout history where we’ve recognized that a given product or service is harmful and made a decision to protect those kids through legislation or regulation,” Vance told me. “You could do a straightforward ban on pornography for kids under the age of 18; you could give parents more control over the devices in their kids’ hands … Some of these fixes aren’t going to be easy, but it requires the political willpower for us to say enough is enough. The idea that you can’t regulate the internet in a way that protects children is just absurd.”
“In the scope of American history, the internet is very new,” he added. “The idea that a 9-year-old can watch a gangbang on the internet is very, very new. We have to keep making the argument that this is a bad deal for America’s kids. I happen to think we’re persuading people. When they hear the argument, they recognize it. There’s a lot of barriers, but I really don’t think most Americans want a 9-year-old to get on the internet and watch really disgusting material on their computer or on their phones.”
