Document:JD Vance has some weird influences

Vance: “He’s weird as hell,” says Tim Walz

"I think Trump is going to run again in 2024", JD Vance once said. "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."

 Article  by Gavin Haynes dated 17 July 2024

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Subjects: J. D. Vance, New Right, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, René Girard, Catholicism, Rod Dreher, MAGA, Patrick Deneen, Curtis Yarvin, Blake Masters, Heritage Foundation
Source: The Spectator (Link)

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JD Vance has some weird influences

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JD Vance, at 39, would be the first millennial Vice President. But not only is he a new generation, he might also be the first American Vice President to take his intellectual armoury from the extremely online world of the New Right.

Vance says he is ‘plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures’. He draws from a whole new political lexicon, one that would seem baffling to his more starched colleagues in the US Congress. Even someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – 34 years old – is taking her cues from a more orthodox political tradition.

The New Right is a tag that has been worn by many radically different movements down the years. But this version crystallised most publicly in a 2022 Vanity Fair piece entitled "Inside The New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets". Vance worked under Peter Thiel at Mithril Capital, and Thiel gave Vance $10 million for his US Senate run in 2022.

Thiel is critical to understanding Vance. Thiel, who co-founded PayPal alongside Elon Musk, was one of the most prominent Trump donors back in 2016, and kept supporting Trump candidates for years, until he gave up last year. According to The Atlantic, Thiel has ‘lost interest in democracy’.

Thiel began his career as a lawyer, and became a student of René Girard, the philosopher of religion. Girard had a view of people as driven by ancient clashes of rivalrous desire, what he calls ‘mimetic desire’. It was through reading Girard that JD Vance in turn came to convert to Catholicism, in 2019. He wrote about his journey in The Lamp the next year:

Despite [my grandmother’s] unfamiliarity with the liturgy, the Roman and Italian cultural influences, and the foreign pope, I slowly began to see Catholicism as the closest expression of her kind of Christanity: obsessed with virtue, but cognisant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims; protective of children and families and with the things necessary to ensure they thrive.

Present at Vance’s confirmation was Rod Dreher, the journalist and author of "The Benedict Option", which proposes Christian communities reject modern culture and go back to the old morals. This is a clear break. Through the 1980s onwards, Republicanism has been associated with the Baptist evangelical movement. George W. Bush was ‘born again’. The Bible Belt was really the Hardcore Protestant Belt. Now, the MAGA movement leans Catholic.

Protestantism is, at base and much like Reaganism, a liberal project. It is about the individual. A personal connection to God. In economic terms, that means revering the free-market. Catholicism, on this reading, takes in the community and speaks to fitting in with a grander plan. That might explain Vance’s coolness about tax rises. The model to be admired is not Javier Milei’s Argentinian libertarianism, but Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian ‘illiberal democracy’.

Here, we get to the heart of Vance-ism. It is post-liberal. It is part of this growing tribe that believes that the post-1945 consensus on welfare, state and self is precisely the problem. Thiel said that he was thinking he ‘no longer believed that freedom and democracy were compatible’ as far back as 2007.

Patrick Deneen, another friend of Vance and Thiel, laid all this out in his 2018 book: "Why Liberalism Failed". Liberalism, it concluded, had given the world a nightmare of clashing freedoms that beggared thy neighbour and led to total isolation.

That book divided politics in two: the Party of Progress – a mixture of conservative and liberal elites who argue for ‘progress’ (think of a unit both David Cameron and David Lammy would feel comfortable in), against a Party of Order.

The Party of Order is an anti-elite grouping that would seek to shield ordinary people against the gusts of outrageous fortune that the globalising 21st century keeps blowing in. It’s globalism versus localism. And it recognises that the price for tearing up globalisation is some of our freedom.

But beyond the many Catholics, it is an atheist Jew, Curtis Yarvin, who may form the more immediate fulcrum of the New Right’s agenda in action. Yarvin is a creature wholly of the internet. While he’s a programmer and tech entrepreneur, his fame is as a blogger, sometimes under his alias, Mencius Moldbug.

Yarvin is a philosopher of power, who believes that shadowy elites are even more powerful, and more shadowy, than traditional political theory reflects. He coined the term The Cathedral, to refer to the nexus of academia, politics, and the media: the reality-generating machine that controls the viable window for political action. It is Moldbug’s contention that the present Cathedral is irredeemably liberal-progressive. And that if a conservative-populist regime is ever to supplant it, they will need to dismantle the present regime’s Cathedral brick-by-brick.

That may well be Vance’s first task in 2025. Thiel’s other protege (and Vance’s fellow Senate candidate in 2022), Blake Masters, was asked about how Republicans could come to power, instead of merely arriving in office.

"My friend has a phrase for that", he said. "RAGE – Retire All Government Employees."

The friend he was referring to was Yarvin. The Moldbug plan for ‘real regime change’ involved stuffing the mouths of the deep state with gold, before putting them out to pasture.

"I think Trump is going to run again in 2024", JD Vance once said. "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."

Already this idea has other echoes in Project 2025. This is the much-talked-up proposal by the Heritage Foundation to reclassify hundreds of federal bureaucrats as political appointees, and switch them out with more ideologically aligned replacements in the first hundred days of a second Trump presidency.

Interestingly, Yarvin has endorsed Joe Biden for president in 2024 – as he did in 2020. With typically puckish wisdom, he sees Trump as too chaotic and fleeting to be a Caesar figure, and thinks Biden would be a better ‘monarch’.

Most politicians are purely reactive. But every generation, a few smarter ones draw their thinking from deep networks bubbling up in the culture, often from writers and philosophers who seem at odds with the prevailing currents.

In the 1980s, the term New Right used to refer to the small-state monetarists of the Reagan and Thatcher generation who loved human freedom above all. In the 1970s, they were still seen as eccentric outsiders. Then Mrs Thatcher was introduced to the Institute of Economic Affairs, and the world began to shift on its axis.

Today’s New Right is wholly different. It doesn’t much value freedom above security. But once again, a vibrant outsider movement has found a powerful champion on their way to the inside. A bullet that missed by an inch may not even be the most consequential event of the past week.