In former President Donald Trump’s choice of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) as his vice presidential candidate, I hear echoes of history.

As others have pointed out, Vance’s selection makes little sense in the short term. He brings little experience in government — 18 months in the Senate — and was a desultory vote-getter in his home state of Ohio, which is no longer a target state anyway. Nor is Vance likely to inspire unity from those whose first instinct when Trump was shot Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, was to blame the former president’s own rhetoric.

And not necessarily a preacher of unity. “Today is not just some isolated incident,” he posted after Trump was shot from almost point-blank range. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Vance was chosen not for short-term help but for long-term political effect. He served in the Marine Corps and worked in Silicon Valley: If elected, he would bring a broader range of experience in critical segments of American society than the two vice presidents elected at younger ages, John Breckinridge in 1856 and Richard Nixon in 1952.

His academic record at Ohio State and Yale Law School, or his pre-debate, pre-shooting interview with the New York Times’s idiosyncratic conservative Ross Douthat, leaves no doubt about his intellectual chops. And, despite his scorn for Trump eight years ago, he has the potential to lead the party and the country in the direction Trump wants to go.

I wrote yesterday about how the political climate and controversies in this year’s election resemble those of the election of 1920 — a year of unmatched repudiation of a Democratic administration.

In the potential of a Trump-Vance administration, I hear echoes of the decade that followed — the unheralded but genuine successes of the administrations of the 1920 Republican ticket mates Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge and the 1920s Republican Party, whose policies resulted in vast improvements in standards of living and unprecedented electoral success.

That record has been ridiculed and trivialized by the talented historians who depicted the 1920s as a wild binge that produced an inevitable hangover in the Depression. But the Depression was not inevitable and the gains of the 1920s not imaginary. The much-ballyhooed Teapot Dome scandal shouldn’t be taken as the defining event of Harding’s administration any more than the Internal Revenue Service’s violation of opposition activists’ privacy was of Barack Obama’s.

Harding was indeed a womanizer with a taste for whiskey and poker, a small-town newspaper publisher with a gift for phrases: After the tumult of Woodrow Wilson’s years, he called for a “return to normalcy.” He appointed a first-rate Cabinet: ex-governor and near-president in 1916 Charles Evans Hughes at State, venture capitalist Andrew Mellon at Treasury, food relief organizer for millions Herbert Hoover at Commerce.

Mellon’s tax cuts killed inflation and sparked growth. The federal government assisted marginally as state governments paved roads, oil companies built gas stations, and recently started-up firms provided the masses with automobiles, refrigerators, radios, and sliced bread. Compare that progress with today’s federal government, which spends billions of dollars to build only seven charging stations and exactly zero rural high-speed internet connections.

The 1920s Republicans provided a contrast to Wilson’s retrograde record on civil rights and civil liberties. Wilson’s administration jailed Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs for speaking against the war and the draft. Harding commuted his sentence and invited him to lunch at the White House. Harding was also the president most committed to civil rights for black people than any other between Ulysses Grant and Harry Truman, and traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, to speak out against segregation.

On policy, the 1920s Republican presidents tended toward protectionism on trade, toward restrictions on immigration, and away from an alliance-based foreign policy. Similar impulses, though sharply different on details, seem likely to animate a Trump-Vance administration.

Not even Trump’s call for 10% tariffs — a campaign initiative unlikely to be legislated — would come close to the tariff levels of the 1920s, and any possible clampdowns on illegal immigration, like the first Trump administration’s successful “Remain in Mexico” policy, aren’t likely to include big drops in the 1 million-plus legal immigrants allowed yearly.

Nor was the 1920s presidents’ foreign policy entirely isolationist (the peak of U.S. isolationism came in the 1930s, until Franklin Roosevelt, fluent in German, started listening to Hitler’s speeches). Under Harding and Coolidge, the United States negotiated a naval disarmament treaty, orchestrated successive rounds of European war reparations reductions, and signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact renouncing war.

The 1920s Republicans had their schisms, notably over farm policy: Farmers, a declining share of the workforce, wanted subsidies to maintain the high commodity prices of 1914-18 when the U.S. was feeding wartime Europe. Today, congressional Republicans have been split on Ukraine aid and antitrust policy.

Electorally, the 1920s Republicans were hugely successful. Harding and Coolidge were elected with percentages of the two-party vote never achieved by other Republicans before or since.

Harding carried all five boroughs of New York City, and though Democratic machine Tammany Hall lived to fight another day, through the 1920s, Philadelphia was governed by a Republican machine and Chicago had a Republican mayor, British-bashing Big Bill Thompson, during most of the decade.

Harding and Coolidge won huge majorities in fast-growing industrial Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit, and at the same time were competitive in the Border South — Kentucky and Tennessee, West Virginia and North Carolina.

The blue-collar, patriotic, demotic majorities that Republican presidents and policies achieved in the 1920s disappeared in the Depression, and the collapse of the party’s fortunes in the economic trough year of 1932 was, by some though not all metrics, as complete as the collapse of Woodrow Wilson’s Democratic Party in the postwar turbulence year of 1920. But just as the Democratic Party survived 1920, the Republican Party survived 1932.  

New Deal historians have understated Republicans’ 1920s success and 1930s and 1940s recovery. Their vivid accounts of Franklin Roosevelt’s policies have made them a tempting template for Democratic presidents ever since, even in the wildly different circumstances of 2020 and the unlikely person of Joe Biden. The success of the 1920s Republican presidents is far less familiar, even to those people whose readings in history are wider than Trump’s — though perhaps not to Vance.

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Of course, all analogies break down at some point, and the striking personal similarities between the weakened Joe Biden and Woodrow Wilson, the flamboyant Donald Trump and Warren Harding, and the previously not much experienced two-year Massachusetts Gov. Calvin Coolidge and two-year Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance may prove little relevant. But in selecting Vance for vice president and thus as a possible successor, Trump seems to be playing a longer game than even he must have expected when he came down that escalator nine years ago.

All political careers end in failure, the British politician Enoch Powell wrote, and every emerging partisan majority eventually crumbles. Trump’s career came within an inch of ending last Saturday, but it seems unlikely to end in failure this year, and his selection of Vance suggests he means it to endure for some time to come.