Post-liberals, “crunchy cons” and monarchists.
Illustration by Jade Cuevas/POLITICO (source images via AP, Getty Images and iStock)
By Ian Ward
Updated: 07/18/2024
Ian Ward is a reporter at POLITICO.
JD Vance represents something genuinely unusual for the MAGA movement: A national Republican who is deeply enmeshed with the elite world of the conservative intellectual movement — or what’s sometimes termed for convenience as “the New Right” or “the dissident right.”
As Vance himself confessed earlier this year, he is “plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures.” His transition from Never-Trump conservative to MAGA firebrand was influenced by his relationships with a handful of niche conservative writers and thinkers. Among them are people who push for post-liberal regime change, some who pine for the cultural conservatism of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, and one outright monarchist. This cohort espouses a variety of sometimes competing viewpoints, but they are bound together by the belief that the liberal project of “progress” — especially in the form of economic liberalization, technological advancement and the leveling of social hierarchies — has in fact been a mistake.
Many of these thinkers are still far, far away from being household names — but with Vance on the top of the GOP ticket, they’re only one step away from having a direct line to the White House. Here are the key thinkers who have influenced JD Vance’s intellectual trajectory — and, if November goes Republicans’ way, could define the trajectory of the country.
Patrick Deneen
A professor of political theory at the University of Notre Dame, Deneen rose to prominence in 2018 with the publication of his book Why Liberalism Failed, a sweeping critique of small-l liberalism and a forceful argument for a more communitarian approach to American political life. In the book — which won plaudits from Barack Obama and The New York Times — Deneen argued that liberalism’s focus on individualism, secularism and free markets economics eroded the communal bases of American life — namely the nuclear family, shared religious faith and local economies.
Deneen took a more radical approach in his next major book, Regime Change, published in 2023. In the book, 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. In practice, Deneen argued for “pro-family” and “pro-worker” economic policies like tariffs and manufacturing incentives, as well as foreign policy isolationism and strict social conservatism, including limits on gay marriage, gender-affirming care and abortion.
Vance has publicly cited Deneen as a major intellectual influence and even appeared on a panel with him at the book launch for Regime Change, hosted at Catholic University in 2023. At the event, Vance identified himself as member of the “postliberal right” and said he views his role in Congress as “explicitly anti-regime,” channeling Deneen’s critic of liberal progressivism.
In a statement after Vance’s selection, Deneen praised him as “a man of deep personal faith and integrity, a devoted family man, a generous friend, and a genuine patriot.”
Peter Thiel
Thiel is best known as Vance’s former venture capital boss and the primary funder of his 2022 Senate campaign, but he is also a close friend and major intellectual influence for Vance. The duo’s relationship began in 2011 when Vance — then a student at Yale Law School — attended a talk by Thiel in which he tied Silicon Valley’s failure to deliver truly revolutionary technologies to the stagnation of America’s political and social elites. As Vance later wrote of Thiel’s vision, “He saw these two trends — elite professionals trapped in hyper-competitive jobs, and the technological stagnation of society — as connected. If technological innovation were actually driving real prosperity, our elites wouldn’t feel increasingly competitive with one another over a dwindling number of prestigious outcomes.”
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. As Thiel famously put it, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”
Vance has not explained publicly exactly how much of Thiel’s worldview he shares, but the two men are close friends and regular conversation partners. “My relationship with Peter is what it has been for the close to 15 years that I’ve known him,” Vance told POLITICO Magazine earlier this year. “If there’s something interesting going on, and I want to bounce ideas off of a very fascinating and knowledgeable person, I’ll give him a call.”
Curtis Yarvin
Yarvin doesn’t hold any official title or office — he is an ex-computer programmer turned blogger, having first risen to prominence on the online right in the 2010s while blogging under the pseudonym “Mencius Moldbug.” But he’s often cited as the “house philosopher” of the New Right, chiefly for his promotion of the “neo-reactionary” (or “NRx”) movement.
Like Deneen, Yarvin and his NRx followers reject the quest for “progress” as the core of political life. As Yarvin told Vanity Fair in 2022, “The fundamental premise of liberalism is that there is this inexorable march toward progress. I disagree with that premise.” Instead, Yarvin believes that American democracy has denigrated 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.
Vance has said he considers Yarvin a friend and has cited his writings in connection with his plan to fire a significant number of civil servants during a potential second Trump administration. “There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said on a conservative podcast in 2021, adding: “I think Trump is going to run again in 2024 [and] I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
René Girard
A French-born philosopher and Catholic literary critic, Girard taught for several decades at Stanford University — where his acolytes included Peter Thiel.
Thiel, in turn, introduced Girard’s ideas to his own protégé. Vance has said that he was particularly influenced by Girard’s idea of “mimetic rivalry” — the idea that humans want certain things because they see other people wanting those same things — and his related idea of the “scapegoat myth”: That this competition for shared goals and objects leads to social and political conflict, which most societies ultimately resolve by committing an act of violence against a perceived outsider. To Girard, early Christians were the first group to escape this cycle of violence because they scapegoated one of their own — Jesus Christ — rather than an outsider.
Vance has credited his exposure to Girard — via Thiel — as a major impetus for his conversion to Catholicism in 2019: “Mired in the swamp of social media, we identified a scapegoat and digitally pounced. We were keyboard warriors, unloading on people via Facebook and Twitter, blind to our own problems. We fought over jobs we didn’t actually want while pretending we didn’t fight for them at all,” Vance wrote in a 2020 essay. “That all had to change. It was time to stop scapegoating and focus on what I could do to improve things.”
Vance’s conversion, however, hasn’t put an entire stop to his days of online trolling.
Sohrab Ahmari
The writer Sohrab Ahmari’s political evolution is arguably even more circuitous than Vance’s: The son of a secular Iranian family, he emigrated to the U.S. as a teenager, became a Trotskyist in college, then took up the neoconservative cause as an editor at The Wall Street Journal before converting to Catholicism in 2016 — the same year he voted for Hillary Clinton out of disgust for Trump. He has since moved rightward, embracing Trump and becoming a chief advocate for a new style of “working-class conservatism” that has its roots in the tradition of Catholic social democracy — which Ahmari describes, half-jokingly, as “pro-life New Dealism.”
Now, he’s the co-editor of Compact Magazine, an online journal that nominally brings together the populist right and left — but which has assertively promoted both Trump and Vance. Ahmari, meanwhile, remains close with Vance, having profiled him for several publications and hosted him at a buzzy conference for “Common Good” conservatives in 2022.
In an interview with POLITICO Magazine after Trump’s selection, Ahmari said he was “thrilled” to have Vance on the ticket: “Donald Trump could have listened to the advice of many other characters and picked a conventional Republican,” he said. “Instead, he picked someone who is reviled by the keepers of the orthodoxy on free trade and foreign policy, and who is also in line with the kind of RNC platform that we saw released [last week].”
He added: “If you want to push that platform, JD is the man to do it.”
The Claremont Institute
Based out of San Bernardino County, California, the Claremont Institute has become the intellectual nerve center of the Trumpist right since 2016, serving as the home to scholars like Michael Anton — whose infamous 2016 “Flight 93” essay offered an early intellectual justification for Trump — as well as former Trump attorney John Eastman, who has been indicted for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. Aside from its embrace of Trumpism, the institute is known as the home of “West Coast Straussianism,” a school of American political philosophy pioneered by the conservative historian and philosopher Harry V. Jaffa.
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.
Vance is closely tied to Claremont circles, frequently speaking at their events and appearing alongside their scholars. In a statement to the American Conservative on Monday, Claremont President Ryan Williams called Vance “the ideal pick for Trump’s Vice President,” adding: “It’s hard to find a more articulate and passionate advocate for the politics and policies that will save American democracy from the forces of progressive oligarchy and despotism.”
Rod Dreher
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.”
Dreher’s friendship with Vance began in 2016, when Dreher became an early champion of “Hillbilly Elegy” on the right, calling it “one of the best books I’ve ever read” and conducting a much-talked-about interview with Vance for The American Conservative. (Dreher’s blog got booted from the magazine last year after his primary funder thought it had gotten “too weird.”) The two remain friends, and Dreher even attended Vance’s baptism into the Catholic faith in Ohio in 2019.
“I need to send our next vice president a copy of ‘The Benedict Option,’” Dreher joked online after Vance’s selection.
CLARIFICATION: This article has been updated to clarify Sohrab Ahmari’s role at Compact Magazine, as well as the details of Patrick Deneen’s political views.
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