What JD Vance Thinks About Power

In September 2021, JD Vance made two predictions about former President Donald J. Trump and one piece of advice.

Mr. Trump would run again in 2024, Mr. Vance said. He would win.

And when he did, Mr. Vance advised him that this time he needed the right people around him.

“Fire every mid-level civil servant, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” Mr. Vance said. said in a podcast.

He continued.

“And if the courts stop you, stand up for the country like Andrew Jackson did,” Mr. Vance said, referencing a (possibly apocryphal) quote long attributed to America’s seventh president, “and say, ‘The Chief Justice has given his verdict. Now let him enforce it.’”

In his odyssey from anti-Trump author to MAGA-approved Ohio senator and running mate, Mr. Vance has built a reputation for ideological flexibility: broad-minded, say supporters; coreless, critics charge.

But in recent years, he has been unwavering in his assessment of how Republicans should behave if they win: They should use all the state’s available resources, even if that means testing the limits of the constitutional system.

“We are in a late Republican period,” Mr. Vance said. said in 2021stressing the need to counter what he described as the political ruthlessness of the left. “If we’re going to stand up to it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, go pretty far, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives are uncomfortable with right now.”

For years, Mr. Vance has seemed entirely at home in the far reaches of his party, embracing thinkers and proposals from the so-called New Right. He has drawn influences from as diverse a circle as a monarchist blogger, “postliberal” conservative Catholics and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, according to a review of dozens of speeches, interviews and writings since Mr. Vance formally entered politics and interviews with people close to him.

During his bumpy first weeks as Trump’s junior partner, Vance has worked to combat the Democratic attack line that he is not only opinionated but also “weird” and backward, and prone to musings about “childless sociopaths” and “cat ladies” and the ills of the sexual revolution.

Yet many of Mr. Vance’s intellectual allies agree with his opponents on some level on a core idea: He has made progress by promoting ideas that fall far outside the traditional political mainstream. He insists that these zero-sum times require a zero-sum strategy.

He has called on Republicans to seize the endowments of left-leaning universities and to punish nominal ideological opponents through dramatic changes to the tax code, and warm quotes Richard Nixon’s observation about higher education: “The professors are the enemy.”

He has proposed that parents should be given extra votes in elections – one for each child in their care – to dilute the left’s electoral power. (His team now claims this was more of a thought experiment than a serious proposal.)

“When our enemies use guns and bazookas,” Mr. Vance said has warned“We’ve got to fight back really hard with more than just wet noodles.”

In both political instincts and on many policy issues, Mr. Vance bears little resemblance to Trump’s previous top lieutenant, Mike Pence.

Among others, Mr Vance, who has perpetuated Mr Trump’s lies about the election results, said He would not have behaved as Mr. Pence did on January 6, 2021.

Mr. Vance, a leading Republican voice against aid to Ukraine, is also not nearly as nostalgic about a bygone conservative movement. He rarely dwells on past party fixations, such as the size of government and open adjustments the legacy of greats like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

He speaks bluntly about what he sees as the limits of America’s reach and resources abroad — “Those days are over,” he says. said about the “glory years” of American hegemony in the 20th century – and even more emphatically about the prospect of right-wing victories at home if conservatives could only muster the necessary courage.

“We are still terrified of exercising power,” Mr. Vance said complained from his party last year.

Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist and an ally of Mr. Vance who helped catalyze right-wing campaigns against critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion programs, said the switch from a traditionalist like Mr. Pence to Mr. Vance is an example of “how the Republican Party is going to think about power in the future.”

“In the past, the political right operated under the illusion that institutions could be neutral,” Rufo said in an interview, “that any use of state power was illegitimate and that the only correct policy would be to try to reduce or shrink the size of government.”

Mr. Rufo described Mr. Vance’s intellectual evolution, “somewhat ironically,” as a journey “from the pages of National Review to the fever swamp of right-wing Twitter.”

Mr. Vance wouldn’t necessarily disagree, those who know him said. He has spent his last years at the intersection of intellectual debate, campaign rhetoric, outright trolling and actual policy — as likely to point out his past “Randian arrogance” (as in Ayn) as he is to quote Samuel L. Jackson’s character from “Pulp Fiction.”

People Mr. Vance has cited to explain his worldview or details that helped shape his thinking include: Patrick Deneena political science professor at the University of Notre Dame who has suggested that conservatives should use state power to counter “liberal totalitarianism”; Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist for whom Mr. Vance worked; and Curtis Yarvina prominent voice on the new right who argues that American democracy has degenerated to the point where the country needs a monarchist leader.

Mr. Vance recently wrote an admiring blurb for a book co-written by far-right activist Jack Posobiec, who promoted the “Pizzagate” hoax. He is also mention as the author of a foreword to a forthcoming book by Kevin Roberts, the chairman of the Heritage Foundation and a leader of the Project 2025 initiative, a conservative governing plan for a possible Trump presidency (prepared in part by many of Trump’s allies) that the Trump campaign has tried to deny.

At times, Mr. Vance’s views and affiliations seemed almost deliberately provocative.

He said that Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is a more reliable source of information than Rachel Maddow — partly to rile Democrats, he has acknowledged, but also because he recognized important truths in Mr. Jones’s stirring arguments, according to 2021 comments by Mr. Vance reported by ProPublica: “that a transnational financial elite controls our country’s affairs,” Mr. Vance said, “that they hate our society, and oh, by the way, many of them are probably sex perverts, too.”

Mr. Vance has also followed with interest the rise of nativist politics in Europe and wonders why more elected officials are not getting the message.

“You hear the European elites and the American elites talking in fearful tones about threats to democracy,” he said. an interviewer told this year. “Isn’t it a greater threat to democracy if people keep voting for less migration but don’t get it?”

Echoes of Bannon

Mr. Vance says his perspective is shaped largely by his own biography: as a son of Middletown, Ohio; as a veteran of a war marked by Washington’s mistakes; as an author feted by the coastal elite he later came to despise.

Despite some Senate collaborations with Democrats such as Elizabeth Warren targeting In taking on the big banks, Mr. Vance’s opponents have questioned the sincerity of his economic populism, pointing to his ties to billionaires like Mr. Thiel and a voting record that often parallels that of his Republican colleagues.

Democrats have also highlighted several of Mr. Vance’s previous comments on social issues. Mr. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, has complained a culture where Americans ‘change partners like they’re their underwear’.

He has supported a federal abortion ban and opposed exceptions for rape and incest. However, he recently said that because Trump is the party leader, he supports the former president’s call for “reasonable exceptions” and allowing states to dictate their own abortion policies.

Mr. Vance has sometimes portrayed himself as a generational break from Republicans obsessed with issues such as gay marriage. (He has resisted (He received federal protection, but emphasized the tolerance his grandmother instilled in him.)

Mr. Rufo suggested that Mr. Vance’s opposition to DEI programs — he has introduced legislation to ban them from the federal government — stemmed from the senator’s own marriage.

“He and I are both in interracial marriages, have children of mixed race, and we lamented the fact that when we were growing up, it felt like we were on the verge of becoming a colorblind society,” Mr. Rufo said. “We were on the verge of that becoming universally accepted and getting past some of the recriminations of the past.”

Argue that “culture war is class war,” Mr. Vance has repeatedly encouraged Republicans to use the machinery of government to reclaim institutions that he believes are entirely in the hands of the left.

He highlighted two approaches to Orbán’s Hungary, a pole star for much of the New Right: tightening the state’s grip on universities and offering loans to married couples, which are forgiven if the couple has enough children.

“Whether it’s the incentives you set, the funding decisions you make, the curricula you develop, you can really use politics to influence culture,” Mr. Vance said. said earlier this year“And we should do that more often on the American right.”

In the Senate, as The Washington Post reportedMr. Vance created a questionnaire for potential ambassadors, asking questions about issues such as “gender-neutral bathrooms” and “gender transition care.”

He has proposed that Republicans must pack the Justice Department with appointments who “actually take a side in the culture war, the side of the people who elected us, and not just pretend that we don’t have to take a side at all.”

Ramesh Ponnuru, editor of National Review and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has known Vance for years. He cautioned that little can be said with certainty about the policy outcomes of a potential Trump White House, given the man in charge.

But he was confident that Mr. Vance “wouldn’t be the guy who would say, ‘Wow, wow, I’m not sure we really have the power to do that.'”

Mr. Ponnuru cited a figure from Trump’s early days in office: another culture-warring, boundary-breaking, self-defining populist who has worked to give intellectual form to Trump’s impulses.

“In a way,” he said, “it’s like Trump chose Steve Bannon as his running mate.”