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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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