Trump’s VP pick JD Vance: Intellectual, illiberal, and controversial – Ivo Vegter - Biznews

JD Vance, Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick, is an intellectual with illiberal views. Formerly a never-Trumper, Vance now fully supports Trump, even claiming he would have complied with Trump’s demands to not certify the 2020 election. Despite his intellectualism and conservative Catholic influences, his controversial statements and low approval ratings have raised concerns among Republicans about his suitability to attract swing voters in the presidential race.

Ivo Vegter

Unlike Donald Trump, his vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, is an intellectual. His views, however, are no less illiberal.

James David Vance, formerly known as James David Hamel and born as James Donald Bowman, who prefers to go by JD (without periods), is a curious character.

The Republican challenger in this year’s US Presidential election, Donald Trump, picked Vance as his running mate at the Republican National Convention held earlier in July, with the hope of shoring up support among his working-class white male base, whose enthusiasm for Trump was reportedly flagging.

Once a never-Trumper, Vance has become a doggedly loyal Trump supporter. In February, he made headlines when he went so far as saying that if he, rather than former vice president Mike Pence, had been told not to certify the 2020 election, he would have complied with Trump’s demands.

Vance landed on the public stage like a week-old fish. Despite being half Trump’s age (he turns 40 on 2 August), he started off with a net negative approval rating, the lowest of any vice-presidential choice immediately after the nominating convention ever.

Few laughs
In his home state of Ohio, he tried to make a joke, claiming that he’d probably be called racist for drinking Diet Mountain Dew, because Democrats call everything racist. Even in front of his Trump-Vance support base, the joke got few laughs.

Then he had to fend off an online hoax about having pleasured himself with a latex glove and a couch, which allegedly was described in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. It wasn’t, but an Associated Press fact check on the story, which claimed he had never done so, was pulled because it couldn’t be proved that he never did. That only served to give the fake story longer legs.

Then came the bombshell. Joe Biden – the millstone around the neck of the Democratic Party’s campaign – dropped out of the race and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to become nominee for president.

Suddenly, the Republicans had to go back to the drawing board. A petulant Trump posted to his personal social media site: “So, we are forced to spend time and money on fighting Crooked Joe Biden, he polls badly after having a terrible debate, and quits the race. Now we have to start all over again.”

Wrong choice
With Biden out and Harris in, the Democratic campaign received a massive boost, leaving senior Republicans openly saying Vance was the wrong choice. The Republicans didn’t need a conservative populist to galvanise the base; they now needed someone who could win Trump at least some of the undecided swing voters in the centre.

Then Trump himself had to defend Vance over offensive comments he made in 2021 that name-checked Kamala Harris, when he told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the country was run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too”.

“Look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance continued. “How does it make any sense we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

“He likes family,” said Trump, adding, “I think women understand.”

No doubt they do; Vance was hardly subtle. He also wants abortion to be banned nationally, and in the meantime wants a federal response to prevent women from leaving states with abortion bans to seek reproductive health care in states where such bans are not in place. I’m sure women understand exactly what kind of man Vance is.

Revealing
Vance’s comment about “childless cat ladies” is revealing in more ways than one.

Not only is it a petty personal insult that many have interpreted as misogynistic, but he really, really dislikes people who don’t have children.

So much so, in fact, that he proposed that childless Americans should pay more tax than those with children (they already do), and recently claimed (falsely) that Harris called for an end to the child tax credit.

This has a lot to do with Vance’s background and ideological views.

Vance comes from a financially struggling, broken home. His mother was the first to change his name, to remove references to Vance’s biological father, and instead name him after her third husband and his adoptive father. As an adult, Vance undid that, too, and adopted the surname of his maternal grandmother, whom he revered.

Catholic
He was raised as a conservative evangelical Protestant, became disenchanted and claims to have been an “angry atheist”, but in 2019, he converted to Catholicism. He chose St Augustine as his patron saint because he felt moved by his autobiographical Confessions, and by City of God, which established many of the early Catholic Church’s core doctrines.

In Augustine’s writings, Vance claims to have recognised a modern society “oriented entirely towards consumption and pleasure, spurning duty and virtue”.

It isn’t hard to see that a combination of a poor childhood in a broken home surrounded by hardship and vice, and Catholic teachings about the sanctity of marriage and family, sin and redemption, and virtuous self-denial, led Vance to view a pious nuclear family – which he never had – through rose-tinted lenses.

“My views on public policy and what the optimal state should look like are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching,” he told a friend at The American Conservative. “That was one of the things that drew me to the Catholic Church. I saw a real overlap between what I would like to see and what the Catholic Church would like to see. … I think the Republican Party has been too long a partnership between social conservatives and market libertarians, and I don’t think social conservatives have benefited too much from that partnership.”

Vance is, reportedly, and by his own admission, “plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures”.

Seven influences
His conversion both to Catholicism and to the MAGA movement has, according to Ian Ward, a reporter at Politico, been influenced by seven thinkers and groups, whom has cited or to whom he is close.

The first, Patrick Deneen, is a conservative Catholic professor of political theory who argues that liberalism has failed and should be replaced by a more communitarian approach to life.

Writes Ward: “Deneen argued that liberalism’s focus on individualism, secularism and free markets [sic] economics eroded the communal bases of American life — namely the nuclear family, shared religious faith and local economies.”

In his book, Regime Change, writes Ward, “Deneen – who is a conservative Catholic – argued for a ‘peaceful’ revolution to replace liberalism with a ‘postliberal order’ grounded in the promotion of conservative and religious values rather than the protection of individual rights.”

Vance, at the launch of Deneen’s book, identified himself as a member of the “postliberal right” and “explicitly anti-regime”.

Deneen is a Catholic integralist, which implies the belief that “rendering God true worship is essential to [the] common good, and that political authority therefore has the duty of recognizing and promoting the true religion.”

To Catholics like Deneen (and likely Vance), the notion of a secular state separated from the church is anathema.

Silicon Valley
The second is Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley venture capital icon who once was Vance’s boss, was the primary funder of his Senate campaign, and has also been a major donor to Trump’s campaigns.

Says Ward: “Thiel’s political outlook is complex and contradictory, but it revolves around the idea that misguided liberal ideology, sclerotic government bureaucracy and feckless elites have perverted the trajectory of technological progress, turning technology into a tool of national and civilizational destruction rather than renewal.”

The third is a programmer-turned-blogger called Curtis Yarvin, who has some truly scary ideas. Often described as the “house philosopher” of the “New Right” or “neo-reactionary” movement, of which Deneen, Thiel and Vance are a part, he has also been called a “techno-authoritarian”.

He has a terrific disdain for people he considers to be unproductive, and once proposed turning them into biodiesel, or locking them up and giving them a virtual reality life. He thought that would be a “humane alternative to genocide”.

Ward writes: “Yarvin believes that American democracy has denigrated [sic, meaning ‘deteriorated’] into a corrupt oligarchy, run by elites who strive to consolidate their power rather than serve the public interest. The solution, Yarvin argues, is for the American oligarchy to give way to a monarchical leader styled after a start-up CEO – a ‘national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator,’ as Yarvin has put it – who can de-bug the American political order like a computer programmer de-bugging some bad code.”

Philosopher
The fourth is Réne Girard, a philosopher and Catholic literary critic, whom Vance credits with having led him to Catholicism. He also, in Vance’s own telling, led Vance to view social problems through the lens of “sin” and “moral outrage”.

Next on Ward’s list in Politico is Sohrab Ahmari, who via Trotskyism, through neo-conservatism as editor at the Wall Street Journal, through supporting Hillary Clinton as the only hope against Trump, to converting to Catholicism, to embracing Trump, espouses a “‘working-class conservatism’ that has its roots in the tradition of Catholic social democracy”.

Ahmari welcomed Trump tapping Vance, approvingly describing the latter as “someone who is reviled by the keepers of the orthodoxy on free trade and foreign policy”.

Institute
Number six on the list of Vance’s intellectual influences is the Claremont Institute, which Ward describes as the “intellectual nerve center of the Trumpist right since 2016”.

Vance frequently speaks at the institute’s events, and the institute has endorsed Vance.

Writes Ward: “The institute’s scholars and fellows hold a range of political positions, but they are united by the belief that America lost touch with its founding ideas somewhere around the Progressive Era, driven by government bureaucratization, the loss of public faith in the principles of ‘natural law’ and the rise of ‘moral relativism’ and multiculturalism (what could be called ‘wokeism,’ in today’s parlance). Unlike Yarvin or Deneen, the Claremont crew tend to advocate a return to founding American principles like limited government and the protection of natural rights. In practical terms, this has led them to enthusiastically take up Trump’s crusade against the administrative state and “woke” initiatives like DEI and critical race theory.”

“Too weird”
The seventh and final influence Ward lists (to whose interview with Vance I linked above, concerning his Catholic conversion), is his friend Rod Dreher, who wrote for The American Conservative until they thought he had become “too weird”.

I’ll quote Ward again: “The Orthodox Christian writer and former American Conservative columnist is best known as the leader of the ‘crunchy cons,’ the ‘Birkenstocked Burkeans’ and ‘gun-loving organic farmers’ who embrace the countercultural, back-to-the-land attitudes typically associated with the hippie left but are themselves on the intellectual right. Dreher subsequently made a national splash with his 2017 book The Benedict Option, which counseled Christian conservatives to ‘embrace exile from the mainstream culture and construct a resilient counterculture’ based on the Christian virtues. Since then, he has relocated primarily to Hungary, where he has become something of an intellectual consigliere in Viktor Orbán’s government. His latest book – which got a friendly plug from Vance – is subtitled ‘A Manual for Christian Dissidents’.”

Postliberal
JD Vance is, clearly, an intellectual firebrand for religious conservatives. Although he is Catholic, rather than evangelical Protestant, his influences and ideas mesh well with the political ideology that underlies Project 2025, about which I wrote last week in The plan for an imperial Trump presidency.

His thought places him firmly in the postliberal camp.

“The central diagnostic claim of postliberalism,” writes Stefan Borg from the Department of Political Science and Law at the Swedish Defence University, “is that the two dominant forms of post-WW2 liberalism, market liberalism and social liberalism, instead of being somehow opposed, have coalesced around an all-encompassing sociopolitical project that above all else seeks to maximize individual autonomy. As a result, postliberals hold, the liberal order has become increasingly unable to cultivate the communal resources on which human sociability depends and erodes the values liberalism purportedly defends.”

As a conservative doctrine, postliberalism neatly meshes with Augustine’s assertion that human freedom exists only by the grace of God.

Borg argues that “a central, albeit not necessarily insurmountable, challenge for postliberalism lies in moving from a critique of liberalism to proposed remedies for its perceived deficiencies, without slipping into a political project with clear illiberal rather than merely non-liberal implications”.

Given Vance’s record, his statements, and his influences, as well as those of Trump, it is hard not to conclude that the Trump-Vance ticket is “slipping into a political project with clear illiberal … implications”.

No golden ages
Conservatives, which is what most “postliberals” really are, believe that society has strayed from a more pious, communitarian past, which they think was more wholesome.

What conservatives like Vance fail to realise, however, is that historical periods in which the Church dominated the state, and religious moral values kept families together no matter what, and women were mere vessels for procreation, were not happier than society is today.

In every historical era, people have felt nostalgic for an imagined “golden age” further in the past. Yet there are no real golden ages, and the past is rarely better than the present.

It is not at all clear to me, a classical liberal, why an artificially imposed and legislated communitarian and religious morality would make anyone more free, or more content, or more prosperous. It won’t.

Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist, columnist and speaker 

https://www.biznews.com/leadership/2024/08/01/trumps-vp-pick-jd-vance-ivo-vegter

This article was first published on the Daily Friend.