How JD Vance thinks about power

In September 2021, JD Vance offered two predictions about former President Donald Trump and one piece of advice.

Trump would run again in 2024, Vance said. He would win.

And when he did, Vance counseled, he needed the right people around him this time.

“Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our people,” Vance said on a podcast.

He continued.

“Then when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did,” Vance said, citing a (possibly apocryphal) quotation long attributed to America’s seventh president, “and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

In his U-turning path from anti-Trump author to MAGA-approved Ohio senator and running mate, Vance has developed a reputation for being ideologically pliable – open-minded, supporters say; coreless, critics counter.

But he has been unswerving in recent years in his assessment of how Republicans should carry themselves when they win: use every available lever of state, even if that means testing the bounds of the constitutional system.

“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said in 2021, stressing the need to counter what he described as the political ruthlessness of the left. “If we’re going to push back against it, we have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

For years, Vance has appeared entirely comfortable in far-out-there corners of his party, embracing thinkers and proposals on the so-called New Right. He has drawn from influences as varied as a monarchist blogger, “postliberal” conservative Catholics and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, according to a review of dozens of speeches, interviews and writings since Vance formally entered politics and interviews with people close to him.

Through his bumpy early weeks as Trump’s junior partner, Vance has strained to combat a Democratic attack line that he is not just wrongheaded but “weird” and retrograde, prone to meditations on “childless sociopaths” and “cat ladies” and the ills of the sexual revolution.

On a certain level, though, many of Vance’s intellectual allies agree with his opponents on a core premise: He has ascended while advancing some ideas that fall well outside the traditional political mainstream, insisting that these zero-sum times require a zero-sum strategy.

He has urged Republicans to “seize the endowments” of left-leaning universities, punishing nominal ideological foes through dramatic changes to the tax code, and warmly quotes Richard Nixon’s observation about higher education: “The professors are the enemy.”

He has suggested that parents should receive extra votes in elections – one for each child in their care – to dilute the electoral power of the left. (His team now insists this was more of a thought exercise than a serious proposal.)

“If our enemies are using guns and bazookas,” Vance has warned, “we damn well better fight back with more than wet noodles.”

‘Those days are over’

On political instincts and many policy issues, Vance bears little resemblance to Trump’s previous top lieutenant, Mike Pence.

Among other differences, Vance, who has perpetuated Trump’s election lies, has said he would not have conducted himself as Pence did on Jan. 6, 2021.

Vance, a leading Republican voice against aid for Ukraine, is also not nearly as nostalgic for a bygone conservative movement. He rarely dwells on past party fixations like the size of government and openly tweaks the legacies of eminences such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

He speaks bluntly about what he sees as the limits of the United States’ reach and resources abroad – “Those days are over,” he has said of the 20th-century “glory years” of American hegemony – and even more forcefully about the prospect of right-wing victories at home if conservatives could only summon the requisite gumption.

“We’re still terrified of wielding power,” Vance complained of his party last year.

Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and an ally of Vance’s who helped catalyze campaigns on the right against critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion programs, said the move from a traditionalist like Pence to Vance exemplified “how the Republican Party is going to think about power moving forward.”

“In the past, the political right operated under the illusion that institutions could be neutral,” Rufo said in an interview, “that any use of state power was illegitimate and that the only rightful policy would be to try to roll back or reduce the size of government.”

Rufo described Vance’s intellectual evolution, “somewhat tongue-in-cheek,” as a journey “from the pages of National Review to the fever swamp of right-wing Twitter.”

Vance would not necessarily disagree, those who know him said. He has spent his recent years at the four-way intersection of intellectual debates, campaign rhetoric, outright trolling and actual policy – as liable to note his past “Randian arrogance” (as in Ayn Rand) as he is to quote Samuel L. Jackson’s character from “Pulp Fiction.”

People whom Vance has cited to explain his worldview or detail who helped shape his thinking include Patrick Deneen, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame who has suggested that conservatives must harness the power of the state to counter “liberal totalitarianism”; Peter Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist for whom Vance worked; and Curtis Yarvin, a prominent voice on the New Right who has argued that American democracy has devolved to the point that the country needs a monarchical leader.

Vance recently contributed an admiring blurb for a book co-written by far-right activist Jack Posobiec, who promoted the “Pizzagate” hoax. He is also listed as the author of a foreword for an upcoming book by Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and a leader of the Project 2025 initiative, a conservative governing blueprint for a prospective Trump presidency (prepared in part by many Trump allies) that the Trump campaign has tried to disavow.

At times, Vance’s positions and affiliations have appeared almost deliberately provocative.

He has said Alex Jones, the Infowars conspiracy theorist, is a more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow – in part to get a rise out of Democrats, he has allowed, but also because he recognized key truths in Jones’ animating arguments, according to 2021 remarks from Vance reported by ProPublica: “that a transnational financial elite controls things in our country,” Vance said, “that they hate our society, and oh, by the way, a lot of them are probably sex perverts, too.”

Vance has also watched with interest the march of nativist politics in Europe and wondered why more elected officials do not get the message.

“You hear European elites and American elites talking in frightened tones about threats to democracy,” he told an interviewer this year. “Isn’t it a greater threat to democracy if people keep voting for less migration but don’t get it?”

Echoes of Bannon

In Vance’s telling, his perspective has been shaped most by his own biography: as a son of Middletown, Ohio; a veteran of a war defined by Washington’s mistakes; an author who was feted by coastal elites whom he came to despise.

Despite some Senate collaborations with Democrats such as Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts aimed at cracking down on big banks, Vance’s opponents have questioned the sincerity of his economic populism, noting his ties to billionaires such as Thiel and a voting record that has often aligned with those of his Republican peers.

Democrats have also emphasized several of Vance’s past comments on social issues. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, has lamented a culture where Americans “shift spouses like they change their underwear.”

He has endorsed a federal abortion ban and opposed exceptions for rape and incest, although during the 2022 general election, he said he supported “reasonable exceptions.”

More recently, he said that because Trump is the leader of the party, he supports the former president’s position that states should be allowed to dictate their own abortion policies.

Vance has at times sought to present himself as a generational break from Republicans who obsessed over subjects such as same-sex marriage. (He has opposed federal protections for it but stressed the tolerance his grandmother instilled in him.)

Rufo suggested that Vance’s opposition to DEI programs – he has introduced legislation to eliminate them from the federal government – was informed by the senator’s own marriage.

“He and I are both in interracial marriages, have mixed-race kids, and we were lamenting the fact that when we were growing up, it felt like we were on the cusp of a colorblind society,” Rufo said. “We were on the cusp of that being kind of universally accepted and having moved beyond some of the recriminations of the past.”

Arguing that “culture war is class warfare,” Vance has repeatedly encouraged Republicans to use the machinery of government to reclaim institutions that he sees as wholly captured by the left.

He has highlighted two approaches from Orban’s Hungary, a North Star across much of the New Right: tightening the state’s grip on universities and offering loans to married couples, to be forgiven if the pair have enough children.

“Whether it’s the incentives that you put into place, funding decisions that are made and the curricula that are developed, you really can use politics to influence culture,” Vance said this year. “And we should be doing more of that on the American Right.”

In the Senate, as the Washington Post reported, Vance issued a questionnaire to would-be ambassadors asking about issues including “gender-neutral restrooms” and “gender transition care.”

He has suggested that Republicans should stack the Department of Justice with appointees 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.”

Ramesh Ponnuru, editor of National Review and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has known Vance for years, cautioned that little about the policy outcomes inside any Trump White House could be predicted with certainty, given the man in charge.

But he was confident that Vance was “not going to be the guy to say, ‘Whoa, whoa, I’m not sure that we really have the power to do that.’”

Ponnuru invoked a figure from early in Trump’s tenure – another culture-warring, boundary-busting self-described populist who has worked to give an intellectual shape to Trump’s impulses.

“In a way,” he said, “it’s like Trump chose Steve Bannon to be his running mate.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.