Disbelief flashed across Vivek Ramaswamy\u2019s face. The Republican presidential candidates, minus the front-runner, were 42 minutes into their first debate when former Vice President Mike Pence took issue with the young businessman\u2019s claim that America was gripped by a national identity crisis.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not looking for a new national identity,\u201d said Mr. Pence, 64. \u201cThe American people are the most faith-filled, freedom-loving, idealistic, hard-working people the world has ever known.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is not morning in America,\u201d Mr. Ramaswamy, 38, shot back in his rapid-fire Harvard debating style. \u201cWe live in a dark moment. And we have to confront the fact that we\u2019re in an internal sort of cold, cultural civil war.\u201d<\/p>\n
Extolling Ronald Reagan used to be the safest of safe spaces for an ambitious Republican. Yet here was an upstart candidate, with no record of public service, standing at center stage in a G.O.P. debate and invoking Mr. Reagan\u2019s famous 1984 \u201cmorning in America\u201d theme not as an applause line, but to mock one of the party\u2019s staunchest conservatives \u2014 an original product of the Reagan revolution \u2014 as out of touch with America\u2019s true condition.<\/p>\n
The moment captured a rhetorical and substantive shift inside the G.O.P. that accelerated during the Trump era and is now being fed to the base in a purer form by Mr. Ramaswamy, who in late July overtook the former vice president in national polling averages. It is a shift to the so-called new right \u2014 often younger, often very online \u2014 that rejects the sunny optimism of Mr. Reagan\u2019s acolytes as the delusional mutterings of \u201cboomers.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the new right\u2019s overheated vernacular, these older, more established Republicans \u2014 a group that includes Mr. Pence but also most of the Republican conference in the United States Senate \u2014 have no idea \u201cwhat time it is.\u201d They don\u2019t understand that the Republic is on its last legs.<\/p>\n
In the new right\u2019s telling, conservatives like Mr. Pence are hopelessly na\u00efve, and must stop fetishizing civility, decency and the self-defeating ideal of \u201climited government.\u201d Republicans aligned with the new right, such as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, argue that conservatives should instead use every lever of governmental power available to them to defeat the \u201cwoke\u201d left.<\/p>\n
Donald J. Trump established this theme in his 2016 campaign for president. He reinforced it in his inaugural address in 2017, in which he offered a dark vision of \u201cAmerican carnage.\u201d And he continued the apocalyptic and vengeful rhetoric throughout his presidency. But the four criminal indictments of Mr. Trump have only intensified this retributive mood.<\/p>\n
Shortly before Mr. Trump surrendered on Thursday at the Fulton County jail, Taylor Budowich, the chief executive of the main pro-Trump super PAC, pointed to the Pence-Ramaswamy exchange in the debate as emblematic of a larger battle inside the party.<\/p>\n
\u201cLast night Vivek Ramaswamy challenged Vice President Mike Pence\u2019s strikingly na\u00efve characterization of what ails America with, \u2018It is not morning in America! We live in a dark moment\u2019,\u201d Mr. Budowich wrote in a statement he blasted out to the PAC\u2019s email list. \u201cThe existential crisis facing the G.O.P. today is understanding the moment we live in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Saurabh Sharma, the 25 year-old founder of American Moment, a Washington, D.C.-based organization dedicated to staffing the next Republican administration with \u201cAmerica First\u201d conservatives, saw the interaction between Mr. Pence and Mr. Ramaswamy as one that \u201claid bare a core divide in the conservative movement.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOlder, well-meaning conservatives believe that the cultural and economic divide in America can be solved with modest policy changes,\u201d Mr. Sharma said. \u201cGenerational change in the conservative movement and Republican Party will be the process by which quiet reformers give way to energetic young revolutionaries.\u201d<\/p>\n
During Wednesday night\u2019s debate, the repeated clashes between Mr. Pence and Mr. Ramaswamy dramatized this generational and ideological rift. On issue after issue, they seemed to be inhabiting different planets and speaking in different languages.<\/p>\n
Mr. Pence reminded the audience of the value of experience. In a shot at Mr. Ramaswamy, he said now was not the time for on-the-job training, not the time to risk a \u201crookie\u201d in the White House. He talked about the need for America to show leadership in the world, about \u201cpeace through strength,\u201d and he framed Ukraine\u2019s fight against Russia as a fight for freedom that America must not shirk.<\/p>\n
Mr. Pence reminded the audience that he was a House conservative leader \u201cbefore it was cool.\u201d He quoted from Scripture to explain his opposition to abortion rights. He talked up the budgets he balanced in Indiana and said Republicans needed to confront the problem of the national debt. He promised more tax cuts and emphasized the need to reform entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare \u2014 a statement that used to be Republican orthodoxy but is now almost taboo after Mr. Trump jettisoned traditional fiscal conservatism.<\/p>\n
Mr. Pence left the impression that America would be fine if only it could be returned to the way things were. \u201cWe just need government as good as our people again,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Mr. Ramaswamy, listening, frowned contemptuously. \u201cI don\u2019t know what that slogan means,\u201d he replied. \u201cWe need to shut down the administrative state.\u201d<\/p>\n
In breaking with Mr. Pence and his Reagan-inspired rhetoric, Mr. Ramaswamy has sought to cast himself as this era\u2019s transformational figure \u2014 ready to deliver a 1980-style \u201cReagan Revolution.\u201d Mr. Ramaswamy has praised Mr. Reagan as someone who did what was appropriate for his era, though he has argued that \u201cReaganite solutions\u201d don\u2019t meet the current moment.<\/p>\n
Ken Khachigian, a former Reagan speechwriter, found himself agreeing with much of what Mr. Pence was saying and criticized Mr. Ramaswamy for \u201cusing exaggerated phrases like \u2018a dark moment\u2019\u201d that he said did not provide \u201ca good snapshot of what America is today.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think if there\u2019s no message of hope, or vision that America shares some of what Reagan\u2019s sense of vision was, then you draw the curtain against what drove America to make it different \u2014 that we\u2019re still a good people, and there\u2019s still a lot of optimism in America,\u201d he said in an interview.<\/p>\n
Mr. Ramaswamy took every opportunity during the debate to mock the incrementalism and governing records of his opponents.<\/p>\n
He instead promised \u201crevolution.\u201d He doubled down on his outlandish promises to shut down a host of government agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service and the Education Department. He deployed Trumpian personal insults against his opponents \u2014 accusing all of his opponents of being \u201cbought and paid for,\u201d claiming Nikki Haley was chasing lucrative jobs with defense contractors, and suggesting Chris Christie was angling for a job on the liberal cable news network MSNBC.<\/p>\n
And, in a moment that visibly enraged several of his opponents, Mr. Ramaswamy, in full Tucker Carlson mode, ridiculed the idea that Republicans should support Ukraine.<\/p>\n
\u201cI find it offensive that we have professional politicians on the stage that will make a pilgrimage to their Pope, Zelensky, without doing the same thing for people in Maui or the South Side of Chicago,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The audience in Milwaukee cheered as Mr. Pence and Ms. Haley attacked Mr. Ramaswamy for caving in to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. But outside the arena, the party is shifting away from the old guard. The top two candidates in the race, Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis, are skeptical of support for Ukraine. And Mr. Trump, the overwhelming front-runner, has floated handing off chunks of Ukraine to Mr. Putin.<\/p>\n
This fight over foreign policy reveals the most radical difference between the Republican Party that Mr. Pence is belatedly trying to preserve and the one that Mr. Trump ushered in.<\/p>\n
Mr. Ramaswamy said that if elected he would stop all U.S. funding to help Ukraine fight back against Russia. \u201cI have a news flash,\u201d he told Mr. Pence. \u201cThe U.S.S.R. does not exist anymore. It fell back in 1990.\u201d<\/p>\n
The last time a presidential candidate delivered a line like that on a debate stage was in 2012, when then-President Obama mocked his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, for naming Russia as America\u2019s greatest geopolitical threat. \u201cThe 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,\u201d Mr. Obama said.<\/p>\n
While Mr. Pence recoiled from Mr. Ramaswamy\u2019s line, leaders of the increasingly emboldened anti-interventionist wing of the party rejoiced.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe divide in the G.O.P. on foreign policy isn\u2019t between so-called isolationists or interventionists \u2014 it\u2019s between people who still want to pretend it\u2019s 1983 and those who recognize America exists in a much different world than 40 years ago,\u201d said Dan Caldwell, who runs the foreign policy program at the Center for Renewing America, a think tank with close ties to Mr. Trump.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is heartening,\u201d he added, \u201cthat the three candidates polling the highest in the Republican presidential primary largely recognize the U.S. simply doesn\u2019t have the financial, military or industrial capacity to do everything the neoconservative dead-enders want us to do globally.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Caldwell has another reason to feel heartened: It is his wing of the party that will probably take charge of the national security apparatus if Mr. Trump gets back into office in 2025.<\/p>\n