What we’re seeing this week — a little — is that the Republican establishment is not what it used to be. Not in terms of its hold on the party as a whole.

Mind you, I don’t have an enormous amount of evidence to back this contention. I’m not that convicted about it. My faith in the GOP as the necessary institution to affect the American revival we so desperately need and which is so overdue is actually waning rather than growing — at least at the higher levels of politics. At the lower levels, something I’m going to talk about in my next column, I think things are getting better, but it takes time for that to percolate upward. Too much time, and faster, please.

But a couple of things happened this week that indicate that while the Republican leadership structure is too chaotic at present, one element of that is that the old Beltway gang is melting away.

One indication came from Wednesdsay night’s debate in Milwaukee. The four unmistakable establishment GOP candidates — Mike Pence, Chris Christie, Asa Hutchinson, and Nikki Haley — unleashed a series of shrill attacks on Donald Trump and on his de-facto surrogate on the Fiserv Forum stage, Vivek Ramaswamy. There are some who say Haley had a good night — I call that pure insanity. As Kurt Schlichter put it, Haley comes off as everybody’s ex-wife, and honestly, she’s offensive. (READ MORE: Downright Disgust With Dirty Joe)

Permit me a digression here, but Nikki Haley’s politics are almost indistinguishable from those of Mitt Romney or John McCain. What is distinguishable is that she’s of Indian descent and she’s a woman, and that’s what she tries to monetize politically. And what comes out of that presentation is the notion that (1) the Republican Party owes something special to minorities and women, and (2) therefore we should accept garbage politics we’ve already rejected because it comes in a new package and if not, then we’re bigots and see No. 1.

It’s not surprising at all that she’s getting nowhere. And to watch Haley first recycle a 40-year-old Margaret Thatcher line about how men talk and women do in response to two of the other candidates on the stage fighting was just irritating.

Particularly when Haley then proceeded to go Full Karen on Ramaswamy over an unclear foreign policy statement, which gave the lie to the idea that she was some sort of Woman of Action Who Doesn’t Just Talk.

Nikki Haley slams Ramaswamy at the GOP debate on foreign policy:
“Ukraine is the first line of defence for us. Vivek wants to hand Ukraine to Russia. He wants to let China eat Taiwan. He wants to stop funding Israel. You don’t do that to friends.” ????????pic.twitter.com/LMVDTOuGws

— Bella Wallersteiner ???????? (@BellaWallerstei) August 24, 2023

It was a terrible night for the GOP establishment. Between Pence’s wooden virtue-signaling, Christie’s slovenly insults that nearly got him booed off the stage, and Haley’s “let me talk to your manager” swipes at Ramaswamy, the old Bush Republican crowd came off as out of touch and desperate. And for all the talk about how Ron DeSantis is somehow a GOP establishment type, he sounded a whole lot more like Ramaswamy than like Haley and Pence.

And of course, the debate was a kids’-table affair, because Trump’s interview with Tucker Carlson generated a good 50 times the audience. Which meant the GOP establishment wasn’t just at the kids’ table, they got franks and beans while the populists dined on steak.

But there’s something else going on that was even more suggestive that the Republican establishment is beginning to melt away.

To a lot of people, the mention of the Heritage Foundation generates an image of a Republican establishment organization — in fact, one of the foundational institutions that signifies the GOP establishment. But Kevin Roberts is the president of the Heritage Foundation, and he’s fairly new at that job; he took the position in October of 2021. Since his arrival, Heritage is moving in a markedly populist, flyover-country-centric direction that is much more in line with the Republican Party’s gradual transition to a working- and middle-class party and away from the Mitch McConnells and Liz Cheneys of the world.

And a very pronounced example of this was an op-ed Roberts penned at the Hill last week. In it, he lit up the Biden administration and members of Congress for a noxious tactic — attaching Ukraine War funding to a must-pass bill refilling the FEMA Disaster Relief Fund:

Of course, irresponsibly forcing bloated “must-pass” bills through Congress to fund an expensive, far-off war effort lacking in accountability or oversight is nothing new for the D.C. establishment. But this latest effort doesn’t merely break standard procedure in the House and Senate, it also betrays the very definition of what it means to be a representative of the people.

This proposal isn’t about whether or how America should continue to support Ukraine. It’s about whether our political representatives are going to hold hostage funds reserved for Americans in order to spend more money in Ukraine. That’s just plain wrong.

Anyone in Congress who thinks differently needs to spend a little less time in the Washington swamp and a little more time in the swamps where I grew up.

All this raises the question: Why are members of Congress going to such great lengths to send more and more money to Ukraine without the demonstrated support of the American people?

Maybe it is because they’re under the illusion that our European allies can’t do more. Maybe it is because they believe that standing up to Russia is deterring China from attacking Taiwan, even though better deterrence would be to support Taiwan directly. Or maybe it is because they’ve just spent so much time inside the Beltway that they’ve forgotten how best to serve their constituents.

My guess is that they know most Americans are fed up with the war and they’d rather try backdoor tricks like this than make a full-throated case to the voters for supporting Ukraine.

Roberts is right. Earlier this month, a CNN poll found that more Ukraine funding is upside down by a 45-55 count per its respondents, and more and more it’s becoming obvious that the much-ballyhooed Ukrainian counteroffensive is a bust, the Ukrainian military is all but spent, and there is no plausibility left for the scenario that our political elite has been touting all along — namely, that the war would end with the Russians leaving all of Ukraine and maybe even Vladimir Putin’s ouster.

Those are delusions. Everybody knows that now. The Ukraine War will be brought to an end with a negotiated peace, just like it always was going to be. That might not be the situation we wanted, and it probably won’t result in American prestige being elevated, but that you can blame on Joe Biden — who stupidly scuttled a peace deal last year that would have extricated us from the Ukraine mess without a substantial loss of money or stroke on the world stage.

But the GOP establishment has been happy to sit in Dirty Joe’s lap on the Ukraine issue all this time, and the GOP establishment has gone even further into absurdity. Don’t forget Mitch McConnell’s grotesque explanation that all the money we’re sending to Ukraine isn’t actually going to Ukraine; it’s really just an economic development plan for our defense industry.

Meantime, talk to actual servicemen and they’ll tell you American military readiness looks like it did in the mid-to-late 1970s, which isn’t what you’d prefer while our leaders keep taking us closer and closer to a fight with the Russians.

So Roberts demands that we don’t approve any more money for Ukraine without a realistic exit plan. In other words, perhaps shore the Ukrainians up to the point where Russia won’t stonewall peace talks in hopes they can rout the Ukrainians and dictate the terms of a surrender, but then go to the peace table and make this stupid war end.

Ask around, and you’re going to get more than 55 percent of the American people who support that contention. He’s not even saying that we can’t send more aid to Ukraine, he’s saying that it has to be tied to some evidence that we’ve done some thinking on the subject.

And Heritage is backing that op-ed with an ad:

Until Joe Biden offers a plan to end the war in Ukraine, Congress shouldn’t approve another cent. pic.twitter.com/E0oWOkm5vW

— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) August 22, 2023

As the Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson noted, the establishment neocons, especially at National Review, blew their tops over this Heritage heresy:

But for Heritage to articulate all of this was too much for the neocons. As with one voice, they denounced Heritage and invoked Ronald Reagan, declaring that Reagan is surely “rolling over in his grave,” as both Marc Thiessen and Avik Roy put it. National Review’s Jay Nordlinger went a step further, pronouncing that the Heritage Foundation has become a “moral obscenity.”

Elsewhere at NR — which unlike Heritage has not managed to escape irrelevance — there was an unintentionally hilarious post from Dominic Pino critiquing Heritage’s position on U.S. aid to Ukraine. Pino managed to sum up the neocon worldview in a single line, noting that “not all the money goes to Ukrainians. Much of it goes to U.S. defense contractors, which employ Americans and contribute to U.S. economic output.”

Ah yes, there’s nothing like bankrolling foreign wars with no end-game strategy to get the American economy going. Defense contractors are Americans too! Think about it, the Ukraine war is a U.S. jobs program!

Ronald Reagan, of course, wasn’t much one for starting wars. It was the Bushes and the party establishment (who hated Reagan) following the Gipper who did that, something the GOPE gang doesn’t seem to be willing to acknowledge. It’s interesting, though, as Davidson goes on to say, that they’re lamenting the change in Heritage’s direction under Roberts.

But this is a hopeful sign for the rest of us. It’s an indication that maybe a sane, middle-class populist center-right approach that is far closer to the conservatism of Reagan than the corporate-captured, checkbook “conservatism” of the Bushie Beltway elite ever was, is percolating upward.

Asa Hutchinson, Chris Christie, Mike Pence, and Nikki Haley may not like it. I doubt much of anybody else feels their pain.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

The Worst of the Max Miller Debacle

The Spectacle Ep. 39: The Breaking of the American Heart

Five Quick Things: What Really Brought About Trump’s Atlanta Indictment?