Vance vs. Rubio
Welcome to the GOP shadow primary.
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Today in Free Expression, columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon welcomes the monoculture back; Novi Zhukovsky argues it’s not crazy to worry about a low-T military; and Emma Camp wonders if we’ve got a friend in screens—or an enemy.
But first, the campaign jockeying has begun . . .
It’s 2028 Already
—Matthew Hennessey
The race to succeed Donald Trump as leader of the Republican Party is under way.
The midterm elections traditionally signal the soft start of the presidential cycle. This time, the presumptive GOP contenders aren’t waiting. They’re off and running.
As Free Ex columnist Matthew Continetti argued last week, Vice President JD Vance “is all but guaranteed” to get the nod if he wants it. The vice presidency might not be worth a bucket of warm spit, in John Nance Garner’s memorable phrase, but it does put you in a good position to win your party’s nomination.
Earlier this summer Mr. Vance released “Communion,” a book nominally about his conversion to Catholicism. Really, it’s a campaign book, a platform for his “updated thoughts on foreign policy and economics,” as Barton Swaim put it in his review for the Journal. Christianity shows up only at what Mr. Swaim describes as “opportune moments.”
Speaking of opportunism, during a nearly three-hour appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast last week, Mr. Vance took shots at California Gov. Gavin Newsom, hinted that Los Angeles’s mayoral primary was rigged against Spencer Pratt, claimed he poured his “heart and soul” into negotiations with Iran, alleged that members of the Israeli government are funding an effort to discredit him, admitted to being a Jeffrey Epstein “conspiracy theorist,” mused at length about aliens and UFOs, and outlined his commitment to a mushy concept he calls “third way” economics.
It was a lot, but running for president requires a lot. You have to be the kind of guy who’d leave his 40-weeks-pregnant wife in Washington for a quick trip to Austin, Texas, if it meant you could speak directly to Mr. Rogan’s multiple millions of listeners, most of whom are 18-34 year old guys.
I don’t mean to sell Mr. Vance short. The conversation wasn’t completely without substance, only mostly without substance:
We ran the experiment of offshoring all of our industrial jobs, of becoming a services-and-finance economy and allowing Wall Street to come in and buy every asset of modern life and turn it into an investable, you know, line-goes-up asset. And what has that done? It’s created a generation of kids who kind of are attracted to socialism. We have to fix that problem.
This explanation for socialism’s popularity doesn’t thrill me. It sounds a lot like a story Bernie Sanders would tell: Capitalism has hollowed you out. I don’t think so. Life in America 2026 is better than life has ever been anywhere—for anyone—and capitalism is the reason. A Republican vice president should know this, and say it.
The other as-yet undeclared candidate is Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The former Florida senator has run for president before, so we know he wants the job even if he hasn’t said so—or, rather, even if he can’t say so because of his current responsibilities.
In 2016 Mr. Rubio got chased out of the Republican primary by former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. He isn’t the same guy anymore. Back then he was the senior class president promising to put a vending machine in the cafeteria. Now he’s the Trump administration’s omnicompetent foreign-policy fixer—MAGA’s chief diplomat, the viceroy of Venezuela and the future governor-general of Cuba.
Mr. Rubio laid down a marker with an extraordinary speech in Washington last week:
One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism, for example, is that it sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice. That’s actually not true. Communism does not sound good in theory. The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, grey, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul. The world it envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity or ambition, a world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive towards, without—a world without miracles, without myths, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things. And the world communism envisions is a world without God.
That’s the stuff. Save all the talk about how the kids love socialism because the free market killed the American dream. Miss me with that business about Milton Friedman and The Wall Street Journal selling your high-paying factory job to the lowest bidder. Hit me with that real talk about good vs. evil.
Pour mine straight. Put it in my veins.
Mr. Rubio’s path to the nomination isn’t an easy one. It runs through Mr. Vance who, for reasons succinctly stated by Mr. Continetti on Friday, is in the pole position. To run at all, Mr. Rubio will have to give up his current jobs in the Trump administration, which means he’ll lose the advantage that comes from keeping busy and doing good work. The meme-making will cease. No small thing.
After the midterms the candidates will be freer to talk openly about their ambitions. But this is the campaign. We’re in it.
Come Together: What’s something most Americans can agree on? Our love of Costco, it seems. The big-box store overflowing with deals and free samples is evidence of Americans’ relative wealth, yet also our “spiritual efficiency,” as the Journal recently reported. “Costco seems to me to be kind of like the heartbeat of America culturally, in a way,” one influencer said. “It seems to be one of the last places that, across the aisle, we can all agree is good.” If a mecca of cheap groceries and a $1.50 hot dog combo makes Americans feel more united, we should probably just take the W. — Emma Camp
Monkey See: Yesterday we informed you that scientists had discovered a new monkey. Not long ago, we reported that giraffes can do math. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has mashed these two stories together in its finding that some monkeys can do geometry. The study gave baboons and macaques fruit for participating in a computer-based, shape-matching game. The results suggest that whatever innate spatial-analysis abilities exist in humans from birth are also present, in some form, in monkeys. A select few may be workaholics—or screen addicts. A baboon would “just sit there for two to three hours just doing all kinds of mathematical tasks,” the study’s lead author said. — Jack Butler
Back to School: Students in a rural upstate New York district will have a new teaching assistant in the classroom this fall: a humanoid robot named “Sally.” With brown hair and latex skin, the AI-powered pedagogue will be glued to her chair in the Salamanca City Central School District. Her legs won’t move, but she will be able to move her arms and hands, maybe even well enough to write on a chalkboard or grade a test. To make things creepier, the pilot program is a partnership with Realbotix Corporation, whose hyper-realistic humanoid robots have been used to combat loneliness among the elderly and provide a more intimate kind of “companionship.” It’s unclear if Sally will qualify for membership in the teachers union. — Mary Julia Koch
Return of the Monoculture
Meghan Cox Gurdon
Americans once shared something like a single culture. When neighbors had cultural touchstones in common, they were less tribal.
This summer has been almost like old times. Can you feel it?
Read Meghan’s Column ⧁
Don’t Get Testy Over Testing Testosterone
Critics are pumped up about a new Pentagon policy to test the testosterone levels of service members 30 and older annually. But it addresses a genuine issue that veterans and medical researchers have been trying to get the government to take seriously.
By Novi Zhukovsky
Screen Time, Tech Addiction and ‘Toy Story’
The vision of modern childhood the film presents is borderline apocalyptic: Parents are giving Gen Alpha attention-sucking devices that render children passive consumers of vapid media. Yet the film can’t quite commit to Luddism.
Christopher Nolan Knows His Audience
The director of ‘The Odyssey’ is in the blockbuster business.
By Kyle Smith
America Needs the Filibuster
Partisans warn of doom if their agenda isn’t enacted, but their expedient is what threatens the republic.
By Ben Sasse
Andy Burnham Is Mad for It
The conquering hero of Labour politics is bringing Manchesterism to London. Nobody knows for sure what that means.
By Dominic Green
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Mr. Rubio please.
My counterpoint to your claim about what JD Vance was saying would be he isn't talking about capitalism, he's talking about crony capitalism and the resulting consolidation that has squeezed competition and inflated prices. Not that I expect the Wall Street Journal opinion section to bite the hands that feed them, but I thought it might be worth clarifying.