To understand the full political significance of J.D. Vance’s selection as Donald Trump’s running mate, one has to look back more than 30 years, to a time when Vance himself was just a boy. In the early 1990s—in the afterglow not of nuclear war, but of a miraculously peaceful end to the Cold War—conservative thinkers and statesmen started to think again. “Capitalism” no longer simply meant the opposite of Communism. American foreign policy could no longer be oriented toward containing or rolling back a Soviet Union that no longer existed. And the counterculture of sex, drugs, and alternative lifestyles—which had served as an uneasy ally against a Communist system that denied personal autonomy along with the existence of God—was no longer in any sense on the same side as religion, family, and traditional community.
Yet anti-communist ideological antibodies didn’t die with the disease; instead, they became an autoimmune disorder attacking society itself. Ideological capitalism, rebranded as globalization or neoliberalism or a half-dozen other terms, took the place of revolutionary Marxism as a scientific and moral imperative. Alliances against Communist blocs ceased to be defensive alliances when those blocs ceased to exist—they expanded. These alliances were now imperial, with a police-keeping mission that extended far beyond the borders of their member states. The United States itself became a “universal nation” and an “indispensable nation”—not really a nation at all, but a self-appointed sheriff of human rights and trade routes and intellectual-property rights around the globe. Voters didn’t get much of a say in this: The treaties and institutions that made it all possible had all been set up decades ago for very different purposes. The treaties didn’t expire with the threats they were designed to meet.
And the ghost of countercultural freedom lived on, too, even in the hearts, or other parts, of younger yuppie conservatives. The cultural picture was a great deal more complicated, since rethinking capitalism and hegemonic foreign policy once again put many cultural conservatives on the same side as old hippies, some Marxists, and even certain postmodernists. What’s more, reconsidering capitalism didn’t necessarily mean embracing anti-capitalism of either a traditionalist or Old Left variety; some on the right, the “paleo-libertarians,” tried to recover a capitalism that wasn’t part of the Cold War project and its intemperate imperial heir.
In 1992, Pat Buchanan and, in a quirkier way, Ross Perot signaled the homeward turn of the right. The Wall Street Journal editorial pages called for open borders; Buchanan opposed mass immigration. Sinecured neoconservatives called for America to export democracy and go abroad in search of rogue states to destroy. Buchanan, the old Richard Nixon hand, said it was time to “come home, America.” He supported tariffs and opposed free-trade agreements and the admission of the People’s Republic of China to the World Trade Organization and other global economic institutions.
“There was some truth in the extreme things the paleos said.”
Buchanan was a staunch social conservative, as well. This put him at odds with Perot and with many on the left who grudgingly admitted he was on to something with his economics and foreign policy. (Though immigration remained a sticking point for many otherwise curious progressives.) Buchanan was a standard-bearer in politics, but the movement—or rather, the mood—he led wasn’t simply “Buchananite.” Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, the paleoconservatives of Chronicles magazine, paleolibertarians, and many others rallied around his banner. They were all rethinking the right and the post-Cold War world. This made many of them seem prophetic decades later, after the rise of Donald Trump.
There were critics of these thinkers who nonetheless took them seriously—or who, failing that, were fascinated by the face of evil, which is what the neoconservatives and liberals of the turn of the new century considered these men and women to be. The same hyperbole that characterizes denunciations of Trump and Vance today was typical of how movement conservatives and triumphant liberal internationalists talked and wrote about the Buchananite right in the 1990s. Yet despite rote denunciations, the smarter sort of opponent recognized that there was some truth in the extreme things the paleos said—or at a minimum, some validity to the questions they were raising.
Vance has a rich biography, of which his bestselling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, is a powerful part. He served in the US Marine Corps. He earned degrees from Ohio State University and Yale Law School. He succeeded in finance, and in the Obama era was already making his voice heard, and ideas known, as a writer. Vance came of age as a public voice at a time of (dare I say) post-paleoconservatism. The George W. Bush years had ended in disaster for Republicans and the conservative movement. There were attempts by many in Washington and New York to devise something new that wouldn’t be “paleo” or as hard-edged as Buchananism, but that would ask, however belatedly, the questions that had to be asked about capitalism, foreign policy, and the nexus of society and morality in the era after the Manichean struggle with Communism. Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam, Yuval Levin, and numerous others became “reform conservatives,” or moved in parallel with those who accepted that label.
David Frum was one of the 1990s neoconservatives who had taken the trouble to read the paleoconservatives, if only to more forcefully denounce them. He served in the George W. Bush administration, where he promoted war with the cockamamie concept of the “Axis of Evil.” Afterward, he had an association for some time with National Review, until he had a bitter split with the magazine that in 2003 had published his anti-antiwar-conservative screed “Unpatriotic Conservatives.” Having been kicked out of movement conservatism—whatever was left of it at that point—he set up his own website, FrumForum, before he alighted on a perch at The Atlantic. A young J.D. Vance—who at 39 isn’t exactly old today—contributed to the short-lived FrumForum.
A few years later came Hillbilly Elegy, and after that, some personal text messages and public statements expressing distaste for Donald Trump in strong terms. These remarks are now the stuff of CNN exposés and attempts to embarrass the 2024 GOP ticket. The story about Vance that Frum, Mitt Romney, and the media that hate Trump would like everyone to accept goes as follows: Vance was a smart and compassionate man who sold his soul to the devil, first for a Senate seat, now for a slot on Satan’s own presidential ticket. Trump is a rich man who isn’t a populist of any kind, despite the curious fact that ordinary people who’ve been screwed over by elites keep voting for him—he’s a populist in their eyes, but what do they know? Vance had all the makings of a good, respectable member of the slightly chastened liberal or neoconservative elite. He had made money, he had the Ivy League imprimatur, and his far-from-elite background and homeborn concern for the pathologies of hillbilly America were qualities that could give his more privileged peers a bit of compassionate rouge.
That was the role the system expected Vance to play. The one thing he must absolutely not do is convert any of his experience or heart or understanding into radical words or actions—like running for office as a populist or speaking out in favor of Trump, instead of against him. To connect the critique to politics like that would be to commit the same sin as Buchanan. He, too, could have been a good conservative, if only he hadn’t talked about tariffs or the Persian Gulf War.
“Vance had the courage and moral acuity to turn away from respectability.”
Vance had the courage and moral acuity to turn away from respectability and take up populism. And he has been consistent—if his criticisms of Trump in 2017 were over the top, some of his words on the campaign trail in 2022 were, too. Vance is consistently bold, even if he hasn’t always been right. What I have noticed in attending his speeches over the last few years, however, is that he is a very quick learner, and he has become more effective as he has become more modulated. Vance will be attacked in the weeks to come, perhaps even more than Trump himself will, with every hard-edged statement hyped by the Republicans’ opponents as a sign of illiberal sinfulness. Vance is ready for that. He’s a Marine. He has faced worse.
There is another consistent quality to be found in Vance’s remarks before and after his entry into populist politics. He cares deeply about the plight of ordinary Americans and the policies that have served them ill. But in 2016 and 2017, people in Vance’s position were told by those who claimed to sympathize with their attempts to reform foreign policy, economics, and conservatism itself that everything they cared about would be destroyed by association with Donald Trump, a man who was sure to lose in a landslide to Hillary Clinton. The only way to save, say, the cause of realism in foreign policy, or economic nationalism in trade and immigration, was to sever these things from any association with Trump. The only way to salvage the issues that Trump was championing was to trash Trump himself, so a clean respectable Republican like Mitt Romney could take up the working-class interest or foreign-policy restraint.
This counsel that Vance received—and I know exactly what it sounded like, because I received it, too—was often sincerely intended but always seriously off-base: There is simply no substitute for supporting the politician who supports your cause, and it’s vain to hope your enemies will champion your beliefs better if you just show them that you are a nice, cooperative guy. Vance chose not to cooperate, and now he is in for the same fury that has long been unleashed against Trump.
The work of uprooting the Soviet legacy in post-Cold War Russia was never completed. The work of uprooting the Cold War neoliberal legacy in our country is still ongoing. Conservatives have fundamental questions to face that the clash with the USSR disguised for decades. Vance is not only facing up to those questions—he is answering them.