JONATHAN SWAN, YOUNG FOGEY

Jonathan Swan, who's usually better than this, begins his story about Mike Pence's presidential campaign launch this way:

Mike Pence is the most conservative candidate competing for the presidency. The former vice president wants abortion banned from the point of conception. He’s the only major candidate calling for cuts to Social Security and Medicare. And he has the most hawkish foreign policy, especially on confronting Russia.

Swan making the argument that no one else in the race is as conservative as Pence reminds me of baby boomers who say there isn't any good music these days. What those boomers mean is that there's no modern music that fits their definition of "good music," a definition that became fixed in their heads decades ago. Swan is doing the same thing with "conservative" -- which is weird because Swan is only 37 years old. He's nostalgically defining "conservatism" as "Reagan conservatism" even though he was born during Ronald Reagan's second term.

Are school library book bans, the rerouting of immigrants to liberal cities, and attacks on critical race theory and LGBT people somehow not conservative? In that case, I guess Pence is more conservative than Ron DeSantis. Is it not conservative to suggest that trans high school athletes are responsible for a rise in suicide among teenage girls, as Nikki Haley just did? Is it not conservative to want to send U.S. troops into Mexico to combat drug cartels, as Donald Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy have proposed?

Swan writes:

Being the most conservative used to matter in Republican presidential primaries.

Not anymore.

The president Mr. Pence served under, Donald J. Trump, transformed the G.O.P. electorate.... Mr. Pence has not really changed all that much since he was governor of Indiana less than a decade ago, but his party has. It’s the same Mike Pence but a different G.O.P., and it’s a different G.O.P. because of his former boss.

It's also a different GOP because the right is entrepreneurial, rewarding anyone who finds a clever new way to own the libs. Trump did change the party, but Trump isn't the reason right-wingers are obsessed with CRT, trans youth, Bud Light and Target -- people like Christopher Rufo and Chaya Raichik and Matt Walsh make moral panics like this happen, using the megaphones and money of Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk, and a hundred behind-the-scenes billionaire check-writers, none of them named Trump.

I know what Swan means. But conservatism isn't an ancient text -- it's a living, festering, mutating virus. Pence just hasn't evolved with it.