Dem
47
GOP
53
Many people see J.D. Vance as an unprincipled opportunist with no principles other than doing what is best for the advancement of J.D. Vance. Thomas Edsall has a column in The New York Times arguing that this view is false. He argues that J.D., despite having a J.D. from the Yale Law School, firmly believes that a form of authoritarian government should replace the Constitution, and has demonstrated this repeatedly, starting in the interregnum, even before he hitched his wagon to Trump.
Vance has evolved since 2016, when he called Trump "America's Hitler" and went on NPR to describe Trump as "noxious." Since then he has come to see the entire left as a cancer than must be excised from the body politic.
Vance has become the leading official openly aligned with the movement questioning the foundations of democracy. Unike Donald Trump, who governs from the gut, Vance subscribes to the "postliberal right," meaning the rule of law is no longer obligatory or even important. Getting the results he wants is what counts. In a podcast, then-Senate-candidate Vance talked about what Donald Trump should do if he won in 2024, namely "fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say: 'The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.'" In other words, he was openly calling for Trump to do things Vance knew very well were illegal (he did pay attention at Yale) and then defy the Supreme Court when it called him on it.
Vance also wants to tax the Harvard endowment, saying: "The Harvard University endowment is ammunition that the left uses to penalize conservatives. We need to give them less ammunition. It's like a basic principle of warfare." First, that is a lie. Harvard's endowment is used to fund scholarships and help run the university. It is not used for "warfare." Second, Harvard's money is private property, which Vance seems to have little respect for. At a conference in 2021, Vance quoted Richard Nixon as saying "the professors are the enemy."
At a conference in 2023 at the Claremont Institute, Vance declared: "Maybe we should be appointing people to the Department of Justice who actually take a side in the culture war, the side of the people who elected us, and not just pretend we don't have to take sides at all." In other words, in his view the DoJ should not be there to enforce the Constitution and the law, but to support conservatives, Congress and the law be damned.
Stephanie Slade, a senior fellow at the libertarian magazine Reason, summed up Vance's worldview as follows: "The left is willing to use all the power at its disposal—cultural as well as governmental—to impose its way of life on the American people, whether they like it or not, and so if conservatives are to have any hope of saving the country from left-wing tyranny, they must be willing to respond in kind."
Shikha Dalmia, founder and editor of The UnPopulist magazine, said Vance is an ideologue and "I don't think he's seeking power for power's sake. I think he is seeking power to remake America in some fundamental way."
By 2025, Vance's hatred for the left had become venomous. He blamed "an incredibly destructive movement of left-wing extremism" for contributing to Charlie Kirk's death. even though there was a lone assassin and it is not even clear now what his motives were or who radicalized him."
Vance is an intellectual who has been heavily influenced by three thinkers who are very wary of democracy: the postliberal political theorist Patrick Deneen, billionaire Peter Thiel, and conservative Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule. Vance believes Deneen, who wrote: "The managerial elite has come to see itself as opposed to everything the working class embodied. Its representatives denounced 'deplorables' who 'cling to their guns and Bibles. Backward-looking, loyal to declining places and benighted, they died deaths of despair that were their own fault.'" Steve Bannon couldn't have put it better.
In a 2009 guest essay, Peter Thiel, a German immigrant, wrote: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." He also argued against women having the vote because few of them are libertarians. He apparently couldn't find the collected works of Ayn Rand in the original German.
Vermeule said that with liberals, "there can be no lasting peace. Yesterday the frontier was divorce, contraception and abortion; then it became same-sex marriage; today it is transgenderism; tomorrow it may be polygamy, consensual adult incest or who knows what."
With mentors like these, Vance may go far. Or maybe we should say that he may go too far. People who want to impeach Trump might want to think a bit about the potential consequences of that. (V)