In June 2016 JD Vance published his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, and appointed himself explainer-in-chief of America’s white working class. Vance, who grew up in the rust belt city of Middletown, Ohio, was feted for his insights into the struggles of the left-behind communities in the former manufacturing heartland, and the otherwise inexplicable rise of Donald Trump. He delighted liberals by describing Trump as “cultural heroin”, asking if the presidential candidate might be “America’s Hitler”, and declaring himself a “never Trump guy”. Today Vance, the Republican senator for Ohio and candidate for vice-president, calls Trump “America’s last best hope”.
The simplest rationale for this turnaround is that JD Vance will say whatever it takes to get ahead. A more unsettling explanation is that he means precisely what he says. Instead of comforting ourselves with the notion that Vance is just being provocative, or playing to the Maga base with his attacks on “childless cat ladies”, antipathy towards abortion and suggestion that people with children should get more votes, we should be asking what he would do with power.
Vance has undergone a profound religious and political transformation over the past eight years. He has converted to Catholicism and to Trump, and engaged with intellectual debates about the future of conservatism and American democracy. The Vance of Hillbilly Elegy seethed with anger at the “learned helplessness” of his community, explaining away the poverty and violence he saw around him with wild generalisations: “We spend our way into the poorhouse… We choose not to work when we should be looking for jobs.” That rage is now directed outwards towards the American political system and liberal democracy as a whole. The Vance of 2016 described in his memoir the growing movement among the “white working class to blame problems on society or the government”; now he is leading the charge. He proudly identifies as a member of the “post-liberal right”, a movement dominated by Catholic thinkers arrayed around the idea that liberalism, with its emphasis on individual rights, is responsible for the myriad social and economic challenges confronting the US, and that the old liberal “regime” supposedly running things must be overthrown.
The would-be vice-president does not hide these beliefs. Fox News hosts have practically implored him to take back his politically toxic past comments about women without children, but his concerns about demographic decline and the fate of the American family are real. This does not seem to have affected his popularity among Republicans, 75 per cent of whom said they had a favourable opinion of Vance in a YouGov poll in July, but his support among other groups has fallen. As an extremely online millennial – Vance is 40 – he has documented his political evolution across a range of right-wing podcasts, setting out an unapologetically radical world-view that compares the contemporary United States to the final days of the Roman Republic. “We are in a late-republican period,” Vance warned on the Jack Murphy Live podcast in 2021. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild.”
This means not only defeating the left, but establishment conservatism, too, and the conventional wisdom that has guided the Republican Party since the days of Ronald Reagan. “The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems,” Vance writes in the foreword to a forthcoming book by Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, which coordinated the Project 2025 policy agenda. (Billed as a “Mandate for Leadership” the 900-page document advocated replacing thousands of government workers with conservative appointees, abolishing the department of education and banning the abortion pill). But the right, Vance explains, can no longer afford such a laissez-faire approach. “We are now all realising that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”
[See also: JD Vance interview: Hillbilly energy]
Vance attributes his Catholic faith to Saint Augustine and Peter Thiel. In a 2020 essay for the Catholic journal The Lamp entitled “How I joined the resistance”, he writes that he was raised Protestant, but rarely went to church, and considered himself a Christopher Hitchens-reading atheist by the time he arrived at Ohio State University in 2007. Yet over the years that followed, he found himself drawn to Augustine’s teaching after being assigned some of his works to read. He was particularly moved by the Christian theologian’s fifth-century treatise The City of God, which lamented the debauchery of Rome’s ruling class. “It was the best criticism of our modern age I’d ever read,” Vance wrote. “A society oriented entirely towards consumption and pleasure, spurning duty and virtue.”
From Ohio, Vance went to Yale Law School, where in 2011 he attended a talk by the billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel, in which Thiel assailed the damaging trends of “elite professionals trapped in hyper-competitive jobs, and the technological stagnation of society”. Vance started to imagine a career beyond law, and began to question his entire belief system. “[Thiel] was possibly the smartest person I’d ever met, but he was also a Christian. He defied the social template I had constructed – that dumb people were Christians and smart ones atheists.”
He found Thiel’s email address and sent him an admiring note, initiating a now-15 year relationship. Thiel gave Vance a job at one of his investment firms and later funded his 2022 Senate campaign in Ohio, reportedly donating around $15m (£11.5m). He also introduced Vance to the work of the Catholic philosopher René Girard, under whom Thiel had studied at Stanford, which prompted a deeper exploration of his faith and his eventual conversion. When Vance was baptised in 2019, he chose Augustine as his patron.
Vance’s religious and political evolutions have been closely aligned. In his essay for The Lamp, he reflected on the process of writing Hillbilly Elegy and how he had found himself “desperate for a world-view that understood our bad behaviour as simultaneously social and individual, structural and moral”. He found the conventional approach on both the left and the right lacking. “The left’s intellectuals focused much more on the structural and external problems facing families like mine… but theirs was a kind of compassion – devoid of any expectation – that reeked of giving up,” he wrote. “And I had no use for it.” Equally, the conversation on the right seemed to stop at bland, ill-defined terms such as “culture” and “personal responsibility” that blamed individuals and their communities for their struggles. While Vance agreed there was “something dysfunctional about some of the places in which I’d grown up”, he found this discourse “a little heartless”.
As Vance sought out a new form of conservatism, the Republican Party was undergoing its own reckoning. Right-wing populism had emerged in previous decades, most recently in Pat Buchanan’s campaign for the Republican nomination in 1992, pitched as a “struggle for the soul of America”. Buchanan lost to George HW Bush, and mainstream conservatism was dominated for the next quarter of a century by a fusion of free-market economics, social conservatism and an unapologetically muscular foreign policy. But the global financial crisis, the devastating impact of globalisation on American manufacturing and the reactionary backlash to the election of Barack Obama eroded that consensus, and it was finally shattered by Trump.
In September 2016 the conservative scholar Michael Anton published an essay titled “The Flight 93 Election” in the Claremont Review of Books, a right-wing journal published by the California-based Claremont Institute, which has been described as the “intellectual nerve centre” of the new American right. Writing under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus (a Roman consul who is said to have sacrificed himself in battle), Anton used the analogy of the passengers and crew who fought back against the al-Qaeda hijackers on board United Airlines flight 93 on 11 September 2001 as he exhorted his fellow conservatives to set aside their misgivings and unite behind Trump. “Charge the cockpit or you die,” Anton wrote. A Clinton administration would be “pedal-to-the-metal on the entire progressive-left agenda”, he warned. But establishment conservatives were to blame too, for bowing to the left’s supposed capture of universities and the media, and “ceaseless importation of third world foreigners”, which had brought Democrats to the “cusp of a permanent victory”.
The late conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh read much of the essay aloud on his influential talk show, warning that the future of the country was “hanging in the balance”. Steve Bannon, who was one of the lead architects of Trump’s 2016 election campaign and is currently in prison for contempt of court, described Anton’s essay as the “intellectual basis” for Trumpism. After Trump won, Anton joined the national security council as a director of strategic communications.
In 2018 Patrick Deneen, a political theorist at the University of Notre Dame, published what became the foundational text of the new right, Why Liberalism Failed. The book’s argument was that personal and economic liberalism, with its emphasis on individual freedoms and free-market economics, had destroyed societal cohesion, imperilled the American family and worsened inequality. Obama named it one of his books of the year.
Deneen was just getting started. His next book, 2023’s Regime Change, argued for the rediscovery of “early-modern forms” of conservatism that echoed the lessons of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. This meant overthrowing the “corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class” (peacefully, but vigorously) and replacing the “progressive elite” with a post-liberal order that served the “common good” by fostering support for institutions “from which deep forms of solidarity emerge: family, community, church, and nation.”
Vance has praised Deneen as a significant intellectual influence alongside Thiel and Girard. Since being elected to the Senate, he has aligned himself with an emerging faction of senators – most notably Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio – that has opposed establishment Republicans and mainstream Democrats alike. Instead of what they deride as the failed groupthink of the Washington establishment, they want economic populism, a retreat from foreign intervention and a hardline approach to immigration.
There is a generational aspect to the ideological struggle taking place within the Republican party, with the ascent of younger politicians for whom the foundational political memory is no longer the Cold War but the war on terror. Vance has spoken of his disillusionment with America’s forever wars after his own experience serving with the US Marines in Iraq. There is also a political realignment taking place in the country as a whole as wealthier, better educated Americans, who might once have gravitated towards the Republicans, move left, particularly on social issues, and working-class, non-college-educated voters, once seen as the core of the Democratic Party, move right. Whereas 45 per cent of white voters without a college degree voted for Bush in 1992, 65 per cent of the same group voted for Trump in 2020.
Trump and Vance are assiduously courting this last group, which they view as key to victory in November. The Ohio senator is touring manufacturing heartlands across the Midwest, parading his hillbilly credentials as he blames China for taking American jobs and denounces free trade. But Trump and Vance are not aligned on their economic visions. While Trump claims to hold “elites” and the Washington consensus in contempt and is keen on tariffs and industrial policy, he appears equally invested in delivering tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations.
Vance might see Trump’s utility as a political wrecking ball, but he has far more ambitious plans, including a complete reversal of what he sees as a decades-long obsession with GDP growth as the measure of a successful economy. This would take place along the lines proposed by Oren Cass, Mitt Romney’s former domestic policy director who in 2021 founded a conservative think tank, American Compass, to promote populist economic policies. (Vance has cited Cass’s 2018 book The Once and Future Worker as another key influence in his political evolution.) Cass advocates higher tariffs on imported goods and a new industrial policy that reinvigorates American manufacturing. He also supports sectoral bargaining and other measures to strengthen workers’ rights, and what he calls the “flourishing” of working families. As Marco Rubio said in 2019: “The economy… should work for us, not people for the economy.”
This has led Vance to work in Congress with Democratic senators such as Elizabeth Warren, who praised him as “terrific to work with” after they joined forces on legislation to reclaim bonuses from the executives in charge of failed banks in 2023. “If you look at the people that I’ve worked with most successfully, it’s people who, even though they’re from the left, recognise that something’s pretty fundamentally broken about American society,” Vance told Politico earlier this year. “Obviously, I disagree with [Warren] more than I agree with her, but she’s at least thinking deeply about what’s going on in the country.”
There is a more radical side to the post-liberal firmament, however. The new tech right has disturbing ideas about reordering society according to IQ and an obsession with natalism, exemplified by Elon Musk who has reportedly fathered 12 children with three women and describes the “collapsing birth rate” as the “biggest danger civilisation faces”. Thiel has said he no longer believes “freedom and democracy are compatible” and appeared to criticise the decision to give women the vote (he later clarified that he did not support disenfranchising women).
Vance, too, has voiced grave concerns about the declining US birth rate. “That is not a we-can’t-afford-social-security problem,” he said in an interview earlier this year. “That’s a your-f***king-society-is-collapsing problem.” Aside from suggesting giving more votes to parents (or taking voting power away from people without children), he has voiced his admiration for the illiberal Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who provides financial support to “traditional” families. “Why can’t we do that here?” Vance asked in a speech in 2021. He has also bemoaned the prevalence of divorce, complaining that the sexual revolution has enabled people to “shift spouses like they change their underwear”.
Before joining the Republican ticket earlier this year, Vance was vehemently opposed to abortion, describing himself as “100 per cent pro-life”. When he was asked in 2021 whether he supported exceptions to allow abortions for victims of rape and incest, he replied, “two wrongs don’t make a right”. (Vance has since said he supports exceptions for “the life of the mother, for rape, and so forth”, and backed Trump’s position that the issue should be left to individual states.) He has attacked universal daycare as “class war against normal people”, and claimed that helping to raise children is “the whole purpose of the post-menopausal female”. His war against “childless cat ladies” is entirely consistent with this world-view. In fact, the unifying thread between Vance and much of the new right, according to Laura K Field, a political theorist at American University, is “overt chauvinism that seeks to roll back much of feminism’s gains”.
In the abstract, many liberals might agree with the concerns of post-liberals about the breakdown of families and communities, and increasing economic inequality. But when it comes to the question of whose rights and freedoms should be constrained in service of the “common good”, the new right’s vision for America is less clear. When some of these ideas were written down in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Democrats seized on the manifesto as evidence of Republicans’ “extreme” agenda, and the project was retired. After the foreword Vance wrote for Kevin Roberts’s book – in which he praised the Heritage Foundation president for articulating a “fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics” – was leaked in August, the book’s publication was postponed until after the election, presumably to avoid spooking voters.
JD Vance wants to circle the wagons and load the muskets – but quietly, without stoking alarm. The post-liberal right has crept from the fringe of American politics to the threshold of real political power. With Vance as vice-president, they would have an influential voice inside the White House, and in the room with Trump as he makes his most important decisions. This doesn’t mean they will get everything they want. Trump has called some of the proposals in Project 2025 “abysmal”. But if his first four years in office are anything to go by, a second Trump term would primarily be focused on pursuing his vendettas and monitoring his coverage on TV rather than scrutinising the details of individual policies or appointments. This will also be his last election. If Trump wins in November, Vance will be the Maga heir apparent in 2028. The presidency itself will be in reach. He has said himself that this is a long-term project, and while the left is fixated on defeating Trump – treating his emergence as a temporary aberration – Vance and his allies are already preparing for what comes next.
[See also: Donald Trump’s identity crisis]
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This article appears in the 04 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Starmer under fire