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(Credit: Leon Neal/Getty)
The nomination of J.D. Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate has already proved controversial. With Trump leading in the polls, it means the 39-year-old is likely to become the next vice president of the United States. Perhaps more importantly, it means that the Ohio senator, venture capitalist and bestselling memoirist is now the heir apparent to the 78-year-old Trump’s political legacy — and the de facto prince of the MAGA movement.
But on the Left, Vance who turns 40 next month, is seen as representative of the worst tendencies of “MAGA extremism”, an opportunistic convert to the cult of Trump — Vance denounced the former president in florid terms during the 2016 election cycle — who now stumps for Trump’s agenda with all of a convert’s zeal, calling for purges of the federal bureaucracy and endorsing Trump’s scepticism about the legitimacy of the 2020 election. On the Right, at least among parts of the old party establishment, Vance is seen as either as a political liability (he ran two points behind Trump’s 2020 result in his 2022 Senate race) or a big-government apostate ready to surrender Ukraine to Putin and walk picket lines with auto unions. Little wonder there was a frantic lobbying campaign to block Vance’s selection from various Right-wing power brokers, including Rupert Murdoch. Farther out on the Right, Vance’s Indian-American wife and apparently warm feelings toward Jews have earned him denunciations from Nick Fuentes, Keith Woods, and other leaders of the so-called “Groyper Army”.
There’s no doubt that the Vance pick, as Emily Jashinsky wrote here, represents a desire by Trump to designate a “mate, politically and intellectually”. Vance is, undoubtedly, the most intelligent and articulate of the many politicians and pundits who have attempted to take up Trump’s mantle, and he looks good on TV — never a small consideration with the Donald. But it would be a mistake to view Vance as some sort of Trumpian Mini-Me. Trump was born in 1946 and raised in the postwar American golden age; his signature slogan, “Make America Great Again”, speaks viscerally to popular feelings of American decline, but can also be taken literally in terms of its author’s biography. Napoleon said that to understand a man, you need to know what was happening in the world when he was 20. In 1966, when Trump was 20, the United States accounted for just under 40% of the global economy and Bonanza was the highest-rated show on TV.
Vance, by contrast, is a millennial whose life path has given him a front-row seat to the extremes of America’s new Gilded Age. Raised in a poor white family, a child of divorce whose mother eventually became a heroin addict, Vance enlisted shortly after graduating high school and spent his 20th birthday as a combat correspondent in the Marine Corps. (The first member of the post-9/11 generation of veterans to appear on a major-party ticket, Vance is a vocal critic of “endless wars” and American nation-building.) He graduated college — the decidedly non-elite Ohio State University — straight into the teeth of the Global Financial Crisis, and then punched his ticket to wealth and prestige via Yale Law School, a stint in Silicon Valley as a principal for Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital, and finally as the bestselling author Hillbilly Elegy, which for a brief period made him something like the white-trash pope for Blue America. All of which is to say, Vance, unlike Trump, has never known the confident and cohesive America of mid-century, but rather successively more dysfunctional versions of the country we see today: unequal, divided, and diverse.
Vance has since, in his own telling, rejected the culture of America’s elite coastal enclaves for failing the sorts of people he grew up with. Given his apparent ideological transformations and his vertiginous ascent through the American class ladder, critics have found it easy to dismiss Vance as a cynical opportunist — even if the story of an ambitious young provincial winning the admiration of society, only to then reject it as false and hypocritical, would have been familiar to Stendhal or Balzac.
But sincere or not, Vance is a violent critic of the status quo who speaks in the language of the millennial New Right. The energy of this young political rump, just as with the millennial socialist Left, derives from online debate on social media. As Aris Roussinos wrote on UnHerd: “It is an intra-elite competition, aiming to seize control of sclerotic party structures to win the support of the masses for their respective revolutionary projects. Like millennial socialism, the New Right represents the political battlegrounds of the near future: both share revolutionary dissatisfaction with the status quo, and both share the desire to win the coming ideological battle.”
Vance has described himself as a “reactionary” at war with the “regime.” He drops casual references to his personal friend Curtis Yarvin, and he’s fond of delivering thunderous pronouncements like “the universities are the enemy” (the title of a 2021 speech) and “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” (his 2021 advice on a podcast to a future President Trump). On X, where he is a prolific and at times pugilistic poster, Vance follows a host of edgy right-wing accounts, from the race-realist blogger Steve Sailer to the infamous anarcho-fascist Bronze Age Pervert. He doesn’t eat seed oils. And he has voiced support for some of the passing enthusiasms of the “based” internet crowd, such as banning internet pornography.
A handful of liberal pundits, including MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and the newly minted lolcow Will Stancil, have pointed to these connections as evidence that Vance himself is a budding authoritarian, or that his brain has simply been “pickled”, in Hayes’s words. It seems more likely, however, that what appears as “fascism” to the decaying organs of the former American mainstream — a boomer fantasy-world now held together by duct tape and empty appeals to squandered authority — is simply the political self-assertion of the millennial generation, radicalised, on both Left and Right, against the pieties of a gerontocratic and corrupt establishment. Is J.D. Vance the conservative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Neither would find the comparison flattering, but it is certainly more realistic than viewing Vance as the American Hitler or AOC as the American Mao.
The difference, as of this week, is that Vance now has a clear path to the White House as the designated heir of the human wrecking ball who has done more than anyone to break the American political scene out of its post-Cold War sclerosis.
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SubscribeI’d really like to see a Vance/Gabbard ticket in the future…unlikely but there’s no doubting their respective competencies and sincerity.
Wasn’t Gabbard a Democrat?
She was but, for a variety of reasons, switched parties in Independent in late 2022. Has since campaigned for many Republicans…
Rather than Balzac or Stendhal it is the political imagination of William Cobbett which is the paradigm at work here, I suspect.
The great Cottage Economist and Tory Radical seems to be rather overlooked as a the eudaemon of the National Conservative movement on either side of the pond. But there he is, the ghost at the feast.
He should be understood as the father of Vance’s apparent view of politics just as Thomas Paine (the man whos bones Cobbett brought back to England) is the father of Ocasio-Cortez’s particular vision.
‘white-trash Pope’
Well done, Park!
Actually, when elites use the term, ‘white trash’, I find myself cringing. I don’t know Mr. Park’s story, but I suspect, like most of us, he owes his station in life in large part to the conditions in which he was born. His clear attitude of superiority is something that, with reflection, Mr. Park might regret. If he (and some of our Unherd readers) was to spend a year working in a West Virginia coal mine or an Arizona copper mine, he’d likely meet some people with coarse habits and missing fingers, but he’d also find kindness, humility, and, yes, even wisdom. Would he have the grit to excel in such an environment? People who perform back-breaking work under dangerous conditions tend to be deeply unimpressed with people whose sole claim to credibility is their ability to wrap small ideas in big words.
Every pope should be “trash”.
Hayes is a paid hack and AOC is a floozy. Vance is smart and principled
Vance is both a future Teddy Rosevelt and protection for Trump. The security state will hesitate to murder Trump because it elevates Vance to the Presidency. Vance will do everything to destroy the elite establishment. Trump is less likely to invest in serious political action.
After Yale Law, several venture capital firms, and tutelage by Peter Thiel and David Sacks JD Vance is miraculously, not part of the elite establishment?
He’s clearly elite, in terms of talent, intelligence and ambition. And what he has achieved so far on account of that.
Being wealthy and successful doesn’t make you necessarily part of the establishment. That’s a matter of values, and whether or not you see the maintenance of the establishment as something worth sacrificing the interests of those who are clearly not part of it, deplorables, to borrow a phrase.
The beard is a giveaway….
“The universities are the enemy” and “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” are not thunderous pronouncements; these are statements of fact and necessity. Liberal academics outnumber conservatives by as much as 12 to 1, and over 80% of US Government employee political donations go to the Democrat party (ex. DoD) — in fact is >90% in the Dept. of Ed., which is clearly doing everything in its power to indoctrinate America’s youth with corrosive thinking.
What is Trumpism? It doesn’t have much of a track record judging by Trump’s first term. He passed a huge tax cut, raised tariffs on Chinese goods, danced with the Saudi King, capered with Kim and pandered to Putin. He puffed out his chest and declared himself bigly but couldn’t make a speech that was much more than an incoherent rant. As for ending endless wars, neo-liberalism and helping the working class, there have only been promises. Promises he probably won’t keep.
Don’t get me wrong the Democrats and progressives are toast and should be, but the jury is still out on whether a Trump’s second term will be a triumph or a tragedy. So please, let’s not talk about Vance carrying the torch for Trumpism because we still don’t know what that is.
Excuse the ignorance of a mere limey, but what is a “newly minted lolcow”?
I was also briefly challenged by “Groyper Army” and “anarcho-fascist Bronze Age Pervert”, but I think I understand now (just).
AOC is a vapid, whiny-voiced, knee-jerk woke narcissist who believes that getting her nails done is a significant political statement (yes, really). If Vance is her counter on the Right, than score a big one for conservatives. Can’t wait to see them get into it after November 5th.
New/populist/radical right wing millenials like Vance identify the problem and those who suffer from it: 40 years of neoliberalism and the working class. A problem broadly ignored by the center-left over the past decades. However, the next question would be, what are you going to do about it? As far as I can see, this is where it gets vague with people like Vance. In fact, once in power, many right wing governments do not deliver.
To fight an intrinsically elitist economic system, left wing economic policies are probably inevitable. That means breaking quite some persistent taboos. I can see that republicans would not go full-on socialist, but something like a return to the New Deal might not be so crazy. Despite not agreeing on social issues (at all), left wing millennials would support such a left wing economic turn. In fact, I think that once the surging inequality is finally stopped, and there is something of a welfare state, many of social grievances might become less important. Society becomes less of a pressure cooker. Who probably won’t support this, though, are the oligarchs and the donor class. And that is a delicate problem, since they are also involved a lot in the right wing movement – just as they controlled the center-left for years. Trump was/is actually one of them. Perhaps because of this, right wingers have a tendency to go no further than rhetoric about “bringing jobs back”. Or that even more neoliberalism will help.
Well, who knows, perhaps the money will finally trickle down after 40 years, but probably not.
He doesn’t eat seed oils? Smart man.