The Convert
JD Vance is forging an ideology of right-populism. That will have major consequences for the future of the GOP, the Democrats, and the United States
Persuasion asked me to expand on my brief and quickly written post from Monday afternoon, and this is the result. I’m making it available here without a paywall. You’ll hear from me at least one more time before the end of the week.
It can be a comfort and consolation to believe one’s political opponents don’t really mean what they say. They’re liars. Hypocrites. Shameless opportunists who will say and do anything to gain power. It’s impossible to take them seriously.
So it’s been with the reaction of Democrats to news that the Republican nominee Donald Trump has chosen Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate. Because Vance was once a ferocious Trump critic and changed his views around the time he launched his Senate campaign in 2021, it’s easy to conclude that everything he’s said and done since then has been a cynical ruse. He’s just saying what he thinks he must in order to get ahead in a Trumpified GOP. None of it’s real. He’s faking it from top to bottom.
I think that’s wrong—and Democrats affirm it at their peril.
Means and Ends
Of course, opportunism—self-interest—is always a big factor in politics. Politicians want to win approval and elections, and through them power and public honors. But politics can also be about ideas and ideology—the ends for which power is wielded. I don’t doubt that Vance made a self-interested calculation as he was contemplating a Senate run in Ohio. But he didn’t follow the path of so many Republicans who have reluctantly bent the knee to Trump after a half-hearted attempt to resist him. He didn’t just mouth empty pieties to flatter the voters and the Orange Man they love. He didn’t put his head down and slink away into the shadows while secretly hoping Trump will disappear, allowing the pre-Trump normalcy of Reaganite conservatism to return.
Rather, Vance set about building something—an ideological palace in which he could find a new home on the far side of the Rubicon his opportunism prompted him to cross. The Vance that emerged after 2021 is an aspirational right-populist who blends together staunch and unapologetic social conservatism, support for the kinds of economic regulations more often associated with progressives like Elizabeth Warren, and a desire for retrenchment in foreign policy, including the withdrawal of support for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.
The Road to Revolution
Donald Trump is a man of instincts and impulses, not ideas. He had a hunch back in 2015 that the Republican Party was hollow and weak, an easy target for an insurgency. He’d appeal directly to the masses on a short list of issues: immigration; trade; foreign policy. And he’d combine that with a somewhat softer line on entitlement cuts and promises of a more ferocious prosecution of the culture war. That would be the mix. Why? Because he intuited it would work. And, when wedded to Trump’s own fame, charisma, and pugilistic persona, it did—much more than even Trump himself expected it to.
But Trump didn’t know the first thing about governing, and there was next to no one in Republican circles interested in transforming Trump’s ad hoc mix of promises and positions into a policy agenda, let alone anyone who knew how to use the levers of power in Washington to get them enacted. Which is why the Trump administration was so hapless, with its main policy accomplishments things any old Republican would have attempted to do.
The intellectuals noticed. Despite building comfortable careers in the ideological universe of Reaganite conservatism, many of them responded to Trump’s uncanny electoral success by setting out to forge a new right-populist ideology and policy agenda from scratch. There was the new quarterly journal American Affairs, and the new think tank American Compass, and a revamped postliberal First Things magazine, and a series of conferences devoted to National Conservatism, and a more rabidly antiliberal Claremont Institute—all of them trying to develop a constellation of ideas for After Trump.
They were joined by a small number of elected officials, mostly in the Senate—Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and a handful of others—who began doing their own work of ideological and policy construction.
I don’t want to suggest that Vance has done more than these other figures over the 18 months since he joined the Senate. But I do think his way of talking about right-populist ideas and ideology is more cogent and coherent than what one hears from other officeholders. Vance cares about ideas, and he has a mind capable of synthesizing them in a compelling way. There’s a reason Trump tapped him instead of Rubio, Hawley, or Utah Senator Mike Lee—because Vance thinks and talks like a true believer eager to preach a gospel and quote from a catechism he’s writing in real time.
You’ll see this if you read his very informative recent interview with Ross Douthat of the New York Times. What one finds there is an effort to cash out what right-populism can and should be across the full range of what the government does, from economic to social to foreign policy. Vance argues that economic policy over the past few decades has been focused on the drive for cheap labor, and says he wants “the inversion of that,” with restrictions on immigration, the imposition of tariffs, and a sharp increase in the minimum wage (he mentions $20/hour) in order to apply “as much upward pressure on wages … as possible.” He’s eager to find a language in which Republicans can talk about issues like this to an electorate hungry for a change of direction.
It’s therefore entirely fitting that the opening evening of the Republican convention culminated in a lengthy speech by the head of the Teamsters union, as the Trump/Vance ticket looked on and listened respectfully. The right-populist ideology emerging from that ticket aspires to be a party of workers that puts their interests first. Will that ever be more than rhetoric? We don’t yet know. But with Vance lined up to serve as Trump’s vice president, the achievement of that revolution over the coming years has now become vastly more likely.
Trump’s Ideological Heir
Trump is the present-day avatar of and vehicle for this nascent right-populist ideology and agenda. But he won’t be around forever. Until the announcement of his choice of Vance, it made sense to assume Trump’s eventual passing from the scene might issue in at least a partial reversal of the slowly building changes in the GOP over the past eight years. The Reaganite-libertarian center-right would attempt to reassert control and turn back the clock to the years when Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan were the (half-hearted) choice of Republican voters.
With Vance now elevated to Trump’s anointed successor, such a reversal has become all but inconceivable (assuming, as seems likely, the Republican ticket defeats the Democrats in November). Trumpism now has an ideological heir, leaving the Reaganism that’s been shunted to the side for the past eight years well and truly dead.
Does Vance really believe it? Or is he just an opportunist? It’s probably a mix of both. But in the end, the precise proportions don’t matter. What counts is that he’s converted to a new faith and is eager to share the good news.
While I agree that Vance is sincere about much of what he professes, and has a compelling rise-from-poverty story to go along with his ideology, that doesn't make his views any less repellant. It was never Trump's ideas that Vance disliked; it was the man himself. I'd bet he still does. Vance is just a craftier sycophant than his competitors.
Hawley, Cotton, and Rubio have been in the Senate for years now. What legislation have they proposed to help working and middle-class voters? Aside from cosponsoring a railroad-safety bill with his Democratic colleague Sherrod Brown, what has Vance done in his short time in the Senate to advance much of anything beside the GOP culture wars?
For "populists," Vance and his cohorts get an awful lot of money from far-right billionaires. Would Vance even be in the Senate if it weren't for the $15 million Peter Theil dumped into his campaign? And are all those billionaires and corporate types pouring money into Trump's presidential run ($45 million a month from Elon Musk alone) doing so because they think the ticket is going to benefit the working class? Yeah, right. I haven't seen Trump promising to increase the minimum wage, or provide a child tax credit; he's been promoting more massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, while gutting more regulations, although these things take a backseat to his promises of retribution for anyone who ever looked sideways at him.
So color me cynical but I think most of this rightwing populism stuff is simply a shiny new repackaging of the culture wars designed to appeal to the masses, while the GOP further deregulates the economy and gives our corporate overlords ever greater power over our lives.
Vance supports Project 2025, which would gut the Fair Labor Standards Act. He would also appoint judges who’d be very hostile to the Civil Rights Act and other laws that offer protections to the types of workers Vance purports to champion. Vance has also shown hostility to labor unions.
He also wants to get rid of no fault divorce. And ban abortion nationwide. That isn’t conservative; it’s revanchist.
A champion of “the people” he isn’t. He might have the zeal of a convert, but it’s a zeal to be a 21st Century Bill Taft, not a conservative Dan Moynihan.
I also stand by my previous comments- to listen to him, he’s very uninspiring. He doesn’t speak of America with any degree of optimism at all. Most Americans are better off now than they were 40 years ago- a lot better. And Vance speaks as if it’s been 40 years of failure.
Tom Nichols was right- he’s an asshole. He’s also kind of a loser.