On Thursday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and newly-elected junior Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) held a live edition of Cruz’s The Verdict podcast on the main stage at CPAC. Each senator discussed the future of what they called “The New Republican Party.”
“J.D.’s personal story is one that describes who we are as a party,” said Cruz. “He grew up in Appalachia… in rough working-class environments.” After serving as a Marine in Iraq, he went on to graduate summa cum laude from The Ohio State University and Yale law school. Vance then wrote the autobiographical New York Times best-selling book called Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. The book powerfully describes “the pathologies that have been just hammering working men and women in this country,” Cruz stated. It also supremely illustrated how “people who are not working” are impacted by “the opioid crisis and addiction, the destruction of manufacturing jobs, [and] the loss of fathers at home raising kids.” It is a powerful explanation of the damage that’s been done to the culture in that area and around the country. In addition, Cruz believed it was “a clarion call” for change.
Cruz said today’s Republican Party “is no longer the party of country clubs” that it once was. And some Republicans “are really confused” about who this guy, J.D. Vance, is and how he and people like him fit into the Republican Party. “A lot of our leaders in the party are ashamed of our base,” agreed Vance. “I’m not.” As a self-proclaimed blue-collar conservative, he is in fact, one of them.
For our VIP Members: On the Ground at CPAC 2023
“We’re the party of soldiers and sailors, of nurses of construction workers, of people who go to work, pay their taxes, raise their children, and just want to live in safe communities. That is our base right now, and I love that. We should be proud of that base, and we should be working hard to serve that base. A lot of elites, a lot of our leaders, a lot of the establishment of the Republican Party, they are ashamed of our new base.” Neither Cruz (the son of legal Cuban immigrants) nor (Hillbilly) Vance is ashamed — and that’s a very good thing for the New Republican Party.
“The way that I think about it is we are the party of wage earners, we’re the party of taxpayers, and we’re the party of the people who fight and hopefully win America’s wars,” explained Vance. Because Republicans have a different coalition than we did in the past, that also means the party has to think differently about certain issues. “I think the Old Republican Party would’ve maybe seen Merrick Garland applying equal justice in our country unequally and would’ve said, ‘well, they’re in power, [so] the Democrats get to do what they want to do,'” said Vance.
Meanwhile, the New Republican Party’s “attitude is if we don’t stop this dead in its tracks, we’re going to lose the very thing that makes life livable for our own voters and our own people; that’s unacceptable.” Vance went on to give the example of how the Old Republican Party “was okay with trade deals and negotiations” giving China” most favored nation status “that destroyed the manufacturing base.” And “that, by the way, hollowed out our ability to make our own weapons on the national security side but also destroyed a lot of good middle-class jobs in” Ohio.
“We’re not doing that anymore,” said Vance. “We’re not playing that game anymore. We’re the Pro-America Party, not the Pro-China Party — that’s changed” with the New Republican Party. While the Democratic Party believes in welfare for all, “We believe in the dignity of work and of moms and dads supporting their families, and we want policies that are going to make that easier to happen,” Vance said.
We’re seeing that divide take place in lots of issues in which the blue-collar shift is playing out. Immigration is front and center, for example. There used to be Chamber of Commerce Republicans who were all for open borders because they looked at it and saw cheap labor. That’s not where the American people are, that’s not where the Republican Party should be, and that change matters.
Watch the entire discussion here:
Join the conversation as a VIP Member