The New Right has a blueprint for seizing power. Is JD Vance executing it?
JD Vance’s political career has been defined by an apparent paradox. On the one hand, Vance is a member of the upper echelon of America’s ruling elite — a graduate of Yale Law School, a New York Times best-selling author, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and a United States senator. On the other hand, he has become a vociferous conservative critic of that same elite on behalf of disaffected Middle Americans, a role he can claim by virtue of his upbringing in post-industrial Ohio and his family’s roots in Appalachia. At various points throughout his career, Vance has acknowledged this tension — without really trying to resolve it.
“It’s the great privilege of my life that I’m deep enough into the American elite that I can indulge a little anti-elitism,” Vance said in one of his first major interviews in 2016, on the heels of the publication on Hillbilly Elegy.
But now that Vance is accompanying Trump on the top of the Republican ticket, this paradox has become a political problem for the GOP. Trump’s selection of Vance was designed to bolster Trump’s populist credentials, but instead it has opened Republicans up to fresh criticisms. How populist can Vance really be while cozying up to billionaires in Silicon Valley? What does a Yale-educated attorney and ex-venture capitalist understand about the lives of Trump’s blue-collar voters? Is a guy who owns not one but two million-dollar houses a credible mouthpiece for the GOP’s fledgling economic populism?
This tension between Vance’s elite credentials and his populist appeal has bubbled to the surface throughout my extensive reporting on Vance and the political undercurrents that shape his worldview, which combines economic nationalism, hard-line social conservatism and foreign policy non-interventionism with a forthright belief that liberal democracy is leading to the crack-up of America. But the deeper I’ve dug into this world — often referred to as the “New Right” — the more I’ve come to see Vance’s split identity as a feature, rather than a bug, for his ideological supporters. [Continue reading…]