There is not a flicker of the old Republican Party left. No embers of fiscal conservatism, global leadership, or moral decency. Reaganism’s ashes are stone-cold.

Milwaukee showed us a MAGA movement confident of victory. No previous Republican National Convention has known such vindictiveness, paranoia, and hero-worship.

Sporting bandages on their ears, delegates loudly insisted that their candidate, a convicted felon, was innocent, while simultaneously demanding that President Joe Biden be put on trial. They averred, and seemed genuinely to believe, that Biden was responsible for the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. Yet they hit the roof when anyone asked how Biden’s “bullseye” metaphor measured up against Trump’s long list of more overt rhetoric: “knock the crap out of ’em,” “there has to be retribution,” “stand back and stand by,” “we fight like hell,” “free the Jan. 6 hostages,” etc.

I was invited as part of a delegation from the British Tories. I attended the last three conventions, but I could not face this one. Like Mike Pence, I am too heartbroken at the death of the Grand Old Party to turn my full gaze on what has replaced it.

In consequence, I missed Sean O’Brien of the Teamsters tearing into business leaders because “their loyalty is to the balance sheet and the stock price at the expense of the American worker.” 

I missed Amber Rose, glamour model and author of How to Be a Bad Bitch, who dedicated a recent podcast to bigging up satanism. I missed Paul Manafort (if you’re not indicted, you’re not invited).

I missed the tech billionaire David Sacks claiming that Ukraine had been invaded, not because Russian President Vladimir Putin broke a treaty to attack a state that offered him no threat, but because of Biden: “He provoked — yes, provoked — the Russians to invade Ukraine with talk of NATO expansion.”

And, of course, I missed the elevation of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) who, in full socialist-populist mode, tied the Ukraine war to the defense of welfare, claiming that Biden wants to “throw our grandparents into poverty … so that one of Zelensky’s ministers can buy a bigger yacht.”

The phrasing here is significant. Straightforward isolationism is a view of the world that I don’t share but can respect. “Putin is a bastard, but wake me up when he invades Seattle” has a certain intellectual integrity. But that is not the position of the presumptive vice president, who parrots Russian propaganda — for example, spreading the absurd lie that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s wife had spent $4.8 million of aid money on buying a rare Bugatti, a claim that originated on a Russian disinformation site and has been comprehensively debunked.

If anyone can be said to personify the change in the party, it is Vance. Accepting the nomination, he repeated the usual Trumpy slogans. NAFTA had “sent countless good jobs to Mexico.” Trade with China had “destroyed even more good American middle-class manufacturing jobs.” These claims are as false, and as verifiably false, as the Zelensky Bugatti nonsense. Employment rose, both after NAFTA in 1994 and after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. The few jobs lost, mainly held by immigrants on the minimum wage, were vastly outnumbered by better-paid jobs created. And this job creation happened most in the sectors most affected.

Jobs become obsolete because of technological advances and automation, not trade. In any case, the Trump/Vance claim that China has hollowed out U.S. industry is another easily provable falsehood. Manufacturing has risen in value from $1.5 trillion to $2.5 trillion since China joined the WTO.

Now here’s the thing. Vance knows all this. He is a clever man who understands economics. Every commentator has fallen gleefully on his earlier attacks on Trump’s character. But the nature of those attacks should be teased out a bit. In an interview on NPR in 2016, Vance declared: “I think that I’m going to vote third party because I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”

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By “dark place,” he meant thinking that Trump would bring simple solutions to complex problems. “Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.”

That critique now applies to MAGA as a whole. The idea that protectionism, isolationism, and welfarism will solve America’s problems is precisely such an opioid as Vance identified. Except that he is the one now prescribing it, in full awareness of what he is doing. Yup: a dark place.