Does J.D. Vance threaten the regime?

by
Tho Bishop
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The sitting president is facing an unprecedented inner-party campaign to end his candidacy over his obvious cognitive decline. The presidential front-runner was an inch away from being killed on live television. Yet, in the middle of one of the craziest weeks in modern political history, the most fascinating development is the nomination of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate.

The significance of the decision is itself influenced by the context of the moment. Media accounts suggest that Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance helped influence Trump’s Veep consideration, and the 38-year-old Vance - the first Millennial on a national ticket - is a stark contrast to America’s current gerontocracy. It has similarly been reported that figures like Tucker Carlson advocated for Vance, in part because he was viewed as insurance against a deep state coup.

What is it, then, about J.D. Vance that has propelled the second-youngest Senator in the country to not just national prominence but a figure perhaps even less appealing to the regime than Donald J. Trump? And why has the response to his selection been so polarizing among libertarians, with some warning that he represents a unique authoritarian threat, while celebrated by others.

The answer is that he is, for any other concerns, a rare politician of substance. While there is reason to believe that the best-selling author of Hillbilly Elegy should provide value in courting rust-belt voters that swung away from Trump in 2020, ultimately, the selection of Vance is most intriguing when viewed as an investment in shaping a post-Trump Republican Party.

Much has already been written about how the Yale-educated venture capitalist transformed from a public 2016 Never Trumper to MAGA-heir apparent, but what is most striking is the apparent sincerity of the evolution. While typical Washington swamp creatures like Lindsey Graham have transparently attempted to stroke Trump’s famous ego to undermine the populist hostile takeover of the GOP, Vance can be viewed as a champion for what is often called the “New Right.”

Of course, as is often the case in politics, there is little truly “new” about the philosophical underpinnings of this political movement. Many of the themes evoked in Vance’s convention speech would have been right at home in Pat Buchanan’s famous primary campaigns in the 1990s, with an emphasis on rejecting the notion of America as a “propositional nation,” skepticism of Wall Street, and calling out the disasters of neoconservatism.

The influences on Vance are also shaped by old ideas as well. These include prominent “post-liberals” such as Patrick Deneen and Sohrab Amari, the neo-reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin—himself influenced by figures like Thomas Carlyle, James Burnham, and even Hans-Herman Hoppe, and the libertarian-ish venture capitalist Peter Theil, among others.

A current theme through these intellectual influences is deep-rooted criticism of the post-Cold War American political order. American decline has been fueled by a toxic mix of cultural egalitarianism, open borders, government-managed international trade agreements, a progressive captured administrative state, neoconservative foreign policy, and the consequences of economic financialization. These failures have been promoted by left-dominated universities and protected by an ideologically aligned corporate press. The greatest victims are white, working-class Christians who find themselves without the political privileges attached to the modern civil rights legal environment.

Many of these critiques explain why he is viewed as a uniquely dangerous style of Republican in certain libertarian circles that align culturally with many of the assumptions of the modern state. The same critiques would also be right at home at a Mises Institute event. These common enemies were themselves the catalyst for the creation of the John Randolph Society, which brought paleolibertarians such as Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell into a common movement with paleoconservatives like Buchanan.

The divergence, of course, is the remedy to these problems.

For radical libertarians, the source of the rot is the state, particularly the centralized power wielded by the federal government, which exploits the nation via taxation and inflation, hollows out civil society via bloated welfare programs and indoctrinates the public by replacing pre-political ties of religion, family, and shared history with dependence and allegiance to political authority.

For modern post-liberals, their sharpest barbs tend to be directed at a particular brand of “libertarianism” that replaces traditional morality for atomistic individualism. In their view, global trade mainly outsources American jobs for the pursuit of corporate profits, devastating small American towns while corporate hub cities prosper.

In their defense, this confusion is partially understandable, given the extent to which many nominally “libertarian” and “free market” Washington-based think tanks have largely celebrated the foundation of the modern economic system. While campaigns for reforms on the margin helped justify their continued existence among their donor classes, for the most part, the most prominent advocates of “capitalism” were at peace with the replacement for property rights for civil rights, a central bank-regulated monetary system, government-managed trade agreements, and state-subsidized immigration.

Advocating a return to the gold standard was cooky. Skepticism of NAFTA was an attack on trade. Abolishing the regulatory state was extreme. Schmoozing central bankers? Respectable.

In doing so, they were indeed useful idiots for a financialized economy that best served corporate interests at the expense of America’s middle class, national sovereignty, and cultural heritage.

The clearest indication of the inner contradictions of this pseudo-libertarianism was on display during covid-19. There, nominally private economic actors were most explicit in their willingness to serve as an enforcement wing of the state. Tech and media companies censored credential health experts who dissented from the regime’s official narrative. Companies were willing to harass and terminate employees who refused to be vaccinated. At this time of terrifying tyranny, many nominal libertarians defended the actions of these “private” actors on the grounds of “property rights” that only served to authorize discrimination against those who opposed the edicts of the regime.

As J.D. Vance noted in 2023:

“[T]he reality of politics as I’ve seen it practiced, the way that lobbyists interact with bureaucrats interact with corporations, there is no meaningful distinction between the public and the private sector in the American regime. It is all fused together, it is all melded together, and it is all, in my view, very much aligned against the people who I represent in the state of Ohio.”

This brings us back to the question of what is the proper reaction to these underlying problems? Is the problem of the state’s capture of private industry the politicization of the private sector or the ideological direction of those in charge?

For many in Vance’s sphere, the answer is the latter. Figures like Deneen and Ahmari appear to proudly reject economics in their advocacy for a strongly interventionist state that replaces progressive social views in favor of a Catholic-based pursuit of a “common good.” Alternatively, Oren Cass of American Compass, a think tank that has promoted Vance, is explicitly Hamiltonian in their economic worldview, advocating for a robust program of industrial subsidies and protectionism, bolstered by a strengthening of organized labor unions.

Such policies, of course, would only strengthen Washington’s imperial rule over the small towns that Vance claims to champion. Even a cynically pragmatic view that it would be easier to replace the cogs of the administrative state than to destroy the state’s machinery itself ultimately rests upon a strategy of perennial political dominance.

Far more interesting are New Right advocates who view the administrative state as the problem itself. This branch of thought is represented by the more libertarian elements of Vance’s circle, such as Thiel and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. This branch of the New Right often has ties to peak Silicon Valley in the early 2000s, an entrepreneurial-driven climate that had clear libertarian influence. With an emphasis on innovation and equipped experience shaped by dealing directly with the burdens of the federal bureaucracy, there is a core of strong - if inconsistent - skepticism of the state.

Speaking of the administrative state at the RNC this week, Vivek said, “The only right answer left is to get in there and actually shut it down.”

Of course, one issue often ignored by the proudly statist post-liberals is the one issue that has helped fuel the chances for Republican political success in 2024: inflation. As I’ve noted, the American Compass crowd, true to their Hamiltonian roots, have little criticism for the Federal Reserve which ultimately would be a necessary instrument for their policy ambitions.

The Silicon Valley New Right, in contrast, has been a hotbed for alternatives to politicized money.

While largely overshadowed by debates over cultural issues, perhaps the most noteworthy addition to the Republican Party platform was the explicit championing of Bitcoin and the pledge to “ensure every American has the right to self-custody of their Digital Assets and transact free from Government Surveillance and Control.”

Shaped in part by the Biden Administration’s strong anti-crypto stance over the past four years, the crypto industry has matured into a potent political special interest group firmly aligned with the Trump-Vance ticket. Trump, who criticized Bitcoin on Twitter during his first administration, has worked pro-crypto talking points into his speeches. Vance himself has been an advocate in the Senate and owns Bitcoin.

Given that Bitcoin was created directly as a response to distrust of the Federal Reserve and the politicized banking system, the industry’s rise as a politically potent special interest group creates the potential for legislative priorities that would negatively impact the Fed’s control over the economy.

One of Ron Paul’s legislative priorities in Congress was eliminating capital gains taxes on gold and silver to allow currency competition against the Fed’s dollar. Taking this structure of parallel currencies and adding on Bitcoin would represent one of the most significant blows to the central bank against its creation, freeing Americans to save in non-politicized assets with the penalty of taxes.

In conclusion, J.D. Vance’s elevation creates a fascinating opportunity for a radical change in the Republican Party’s prevailing ideological direction. His philosophical worldview represents a significant break from the stale “Reaganism” of his predecessor, Mike Pence, both of which stand in stark contrast to the non-ideological transactional political character of Donald Trump.

He brings an important critique of the modern American regime to the position, but his intellectual influences invite as many new concerns as they do interesting possibilities. Ultimately, however, addressing the very real issues that have devastated the nation requires more than winning elections. It requires striking at the economic roots of that prop up Washington.