NeverVancers are the Republican establishment’s new NeverTrumpers. An independent thinker from Appalachia has intruded into their country club. They have reprimanded The Help—that is, Ohio voters—for allowing him to walk through the front door. Now they want Vance and his policies shoved out through the loading dock, exiled with his fellow rude mechanicals among the dumpsters and delivery trucks.

The left-wing media and the NeverVance/Endless Wars faction of the Republican Party are collaborating in a disinformation campaign. During the GOP convention, they said that J. D. Vance’s foreign policy puts him at odds with “Reaganites.”

The truth is that Vance repudiates the disastrous, utopian policy of George W. Bush—not Reagan. Dubya’s policy was the antithesis of the realism that made Ronald Reagan’s foreign and national security policy a success.

Vance’s opponents in the GOP—who apparently didn’t get the memo about party unity—are unreconstructed supporters of George W. Bush’s failed wars and nation-building follies. As such, they have no right to call themselves Reaganites.

Vance, on the other hand, is an authentic heir to the Gipper, who was denounced as reckless by the Republican establishment that he defeated. Vance refuses to carry on with policies that plainly repeat Bush’s costly mistakes. He has leadership and diplomatic skills based on listening, careful thinking, and moral imagination.

Reagan, as Margaret Thatcher said, “won the Cold War without firing a shot.” He did this by combining military strength—notably the Strategic Defense Initiative and the Pershing II deployment in western Europe—with shrewd diplomacy.

George W. Bush, by contrast, bungled diplomacy and plunged American forces into decades-long wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, costing many American lives, an unconscionable number of Iraqi and Afghan lives, and trillions of dollars in American taxpayers’ money. America lost both wars catastrophically. Iraq now is a client state of Iran, and Afghanistan is back in the hands of Al Qaeda’s enablers, the Taliban.

Late in his tenure, when his popularity was at its lowest and when shoes were hurled at his head in Baghdad, Dubya increasingly retreated from reality. He found solace in the soft distractions of sentimental humanitarianism and left-wing social engineering projects in countries the realist Donald Trump has described with scatological language.

U2 lead singer and social justice activist Bono became Dubya’s Kumbaya Rasputin. A favorite pastime of his wife Laura and aides Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner was pouring money into the most anti-American bureaucracy in all of Washington, the U.S. Agency for International Development.

We can look forward to something different in a Trump-Vance administration.

Reagan knew when to retreat and cut his losses. When a terrorist bombing killed hundreds of U.S. Marines in Lebanon, he withdrew our Marines from that country. Dubya, by contrast, urged on by Bill Kristol and the self-regarding Gen. David Petraeus, “surged” more American troops to their deaths in the losing wars of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Who are these GOP foes of Vance who falsely call themselves Reaganites?

They were first elected to Congress many years after the Reagan era.  Mike Pence (first elected in 2000) and Mike McCaul (2004) were acolytes of Dubya and Karl Rove. Mike Pompeo (2010) is a protégé of Pence, Tom Cotton (2012) is a creation of Biden backer Kristol, and Liz Cheney (2016) is her father’s daughter. Cotton repaid his IOU by putting Kristol’s son on the Senate payroll as his legislative director.

The real Reaganites, statesmen who led Reagan’s success in the Cold War—Caspar Weinberger, William Casey, George Shultz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, William Clark—are now deceased.

The post-Reagan generation of Republicans failed us. Vance belongs to the generation that will replace them and restore sanity to our national security policy.

Charlie Kirk reminded us that Mike Pence “assembled the entire national security team to try to prevent Donald Trump from ending the Afghan war.” Pence, observed Kirk, “would always be backchanneling to the intel agencies while Donald Trump was doing his work.”

Endless War Republicans in the Senate are quite open about their aims of loading a Trump-Vance cabinet so that it becomes the administration dreamed about by the Mike Pence for President campaign.

Jonathan Martin of the left-wing news site Politico interviewed Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), whom he mendaciously calls a Reaganite. Ernst told him: “I would love to see more like-minded people in cabinet positions,” mentioning Mike Pompeo and Tom Cotton specifically.

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), first elected to the Senate in 2004 with the support of Dubya and Rove, is seeking to become the new Mitch McConnell. He also mentioned Pompeo and Cotton when he told Martin he urged Trump and Vance “as they think about populating their cabinet and these key agencies and positions, to make sure that all those voices within the Republican heritage when it comes to national security policy are heard.”

“The hawks are eager,” wrote Martin, “to install Pompeo at the Defense Department, see Cotton at the CIA or inside the White House and are supportive of Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) or Robert O’Brien, Trump’s first-term national security adviser, as Secretary of State.”

Well, sure. Come to think of it, NeverVancers also are pining for someone like John Bolton as president. “Where have you gone?” they sigh, as they turn their lonely eyes to Bill Kristol’s favorite, Mad Dog Jim Mattis.

Unlike the transition to the first Trump term, a second one won’t be run by Mike Pence.

There are reports that Vance’s friend Donald Trump, Jr. wants to assert veto power over appointments during a possible transition to a second Trump term. The tin-eared arrogance of Joni Ernst, John Thune, and their “like-minded people” has just made Jr.’s job easier.