(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)

A LONG TIME AGO in what feels like a galaxy far, far away, I used to compare JD Vance to Anakin Skywalker: Once a hardscrabble hero with an angry streak, he succumbed to the lure of the dark side, becoming the vicious and strangely religious enforcer of an evil emperor. If the emperor were gone, perhaps Vance would reveal he wasn’t beyond saving. As Luke Skywalker says about his father, “There is still good in him.”

It all seems so long ago now, but Vance once appeared to be a beacon of a reform-oriented center right. He wrote for David Frum in 2010 and 2011, praised people like Jon Huntsman, and talked about softening the edges of conservatism to make it work for the working class. He grew close with the group of “reform conservative” (“reformicon”) think tankers who, in the late Obama years, sought to bend the Republican party toward policy wonkery and away from culture-war fights. He was a Never Trumper who once compared Trump to cultural heroin. He even reportedly attempted to advise Hillary Clinton’s campaign on ways to defeat Trump.

But over the past seven years, Vance systematically remade himself into a darling of the MAGA New Right—that coterie of intellectuals and think tanks seeking to transform Donald Trump’s political instincts into a meaningful ideology and ride his populist coattails to settle their own grievances. Each of the different sub-ideologies and factions within the MAGA New Right sees Vance as their preferred successor to Trump.

From Silicon Valley rightists to Catholic postliberals to national conservatives, Vance has flattered each of these groups’ prejudices and assumptions, presenting himself as the man to enact their specific agenda in the White House. Once a soft-faced purveyor of a gentle conservatism, he’s become the ironhearted would-be successor to Trumpism with a bleak vision for the republic. Vance is perhaps the most rigidly ideological man to be so close to the presidency.

THE REASON RIGHT-WING INTELLECTUALS see themselves in Vance is because in many ways he is one of them. Vance first broke through in mid-2016 as a word-pusher—the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a conservative but only slightly heterodox memoir about growing up in the Appalachian white working class. Vance says it was his interview on the conservative blogger Rod Dreher’s site that changed his life (and sparked a friendship turned frenemyship turned friendship again). Vance did the conservative podcast circuit; he wrote for magazines and websites; he went on TV. He was an ideas guy first and foremost.

The last decade has been a brutal one for the conservative intellectual world. Trump smashed virtually every assumption possessed by conservative thinkers and writers about how conservatism represented the real America or how a true conservative would finally drag an overwhelming silent majority to the polls. The “reformicon” movement winked out of existence basically the moment he won in 2016. Trump pantsed the idea that Americans wanted free markets or global leadership or even constitutional norms. What they wanted was destruction.

Faced with the new Trumpian reality, the denizens of the conservative intellectual world—the one the right had spent five decades building—faced three choices. Either (1) commit to democracy and liberalism and oppose Trump unequivocally; (2) put their heads in the sand and hope that when it all goes away Ronald Reagan and Frank Meyer will still be there; or (3) wholeheartedly embrace Trump and MAGA.

A handful of individuals chose the first option. Most of conservative intellectual world split between the second and third options.

Vance picked the third option. And the MAGAfied think tanks are all-in on Vance. The Heritage Foundation, which convened and published the work of Project 2025, is reportedly “investing heavily in its relationship with Vance.” Meanwhile, Vance has shown up for and boosted the program of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a think tank regularly criticized by one of its former presidents for embracing illiberal principles under Trump. One thing that distinguishes Heritage and ISI from the old-fashioned conservative think tanks is their desire to use state power to bring “woke” organizations to heel. Meanwhile, Vance has hired staff from American Compass, the think tank trying to formulate America First trade policy, whose leadership sees Vance as a potentially historic leader.

Each of these outfits sees Vance as aligned with the versions of intellectualized Trumpism they have been trying to build: restrictionist on immigration; deeply conservative on culture and social issues; hostile to the federal government and to federal workers; and determined to destroy the administrative state.

VANCE HAS ALSO MADE HIMSELF the great hope of what we might think of as the interlinked “five families” of the New Right.

National conservatives. Vance has wooed the thinkers and intellectual entrepreneurs who have attempted to reorient the right toward nationalism. He hits their major themes and has keynoted their major conferences: In 2021, he declared “The Universities Are the Enemy” at their big annual conference; in 2024 he returned to assert “America Is a Nation.” Besides Trump himself, Vance has been the most prominent politician articulating a blood-and-soil type of nationalism at odds with the “creedal” conception previously expressed by conservatives like Ronald Reagan.

Claremonsters. Vance expressed some of his most nationalistic shibboleths while speaking at the Claremont Institute, a California-based think tank once known for its gauzy celebration of the Founding and particularly the Declaration of Independence. Home of the “West Coast Straussian” school of MAGA intellectuals, the Claremonsters warped the ideas of their original lodestar, Harry Jaffa, and became a hardline Trumpy outfit, preaching immigration restriction and calling for a restoration of the nineteenth-century constitutional order. They’re the ones who gave us Michael Anton. Vance has been a regular around Claremont, and when in 2025 he won the institute’s award for statesmanship—another of their buzzwords—he gave a speech leaning into the type of restrictionism the group pioneered, declaring, “America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.”

Silicon Valley tech right. Let’s move now from Southern California to the Bay Area. Out of Yale Law School, Vance worked as a venture capitalist, including for tech’s right-wing dark lord, Peter Thiel (Vance is a former Mithril Capital employee); from there, Vance cofounded the sort of Lord of the Rings–themed tech investment firm that marks participation in Thiel world. Indeed, Thiel’s biographer called Vance an “extension” of Thiel. A 2022 Vanity Fair profile of Thiel’s political bets that dwelled on Vance, then campaigning for the U.S. Senate seat in Ohio, found him mired deep in the dyspeptic mindset of the tech elite, alluding to his friendship with the reactionary blog-philosopher Curtis Yarvin while dropping terms like “regime” to describe the American political order. “‘Despair,’ he signed off, ‘serves the regime.’”

Postliberals. The fourth MAGA intellectual family is the postliberals, a circle of academics and writers who, considering liberalism a spent force, hanker for something richer—with state backing. Like virtually every postliberal, Vance is a convert to Catholicism, announcing his newfound faith in a long essay and again, sort of, in his new memoir. This may be the group in which Vance is most at home. He’s certainly convinced them that he is. The circle includes folks like the Department of Homeland Security’s new theologian, Chad Pecknold, and Harvard Law School’s leading reactionary, Adrian Vermeule, as well as softer postliberals like Sohrab Ahmari and Ross Douthat who see in Vance the makings of a De Gaulle-like national statesman. At a postliberal confab at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in 2022, Vance suggested they represented the “vanguard of a new Republican party or a new conservative movement, whatever you want to call it.” Before the postliberals’ international darling Viktor Orbán faced defeat in Hungary earlier this year, Vance stumped for the authoritarian prime minister, to no avail.

The Hard Right Underbelly. That’s Laura K. Field’s term for the right-wing trolls and demagogues who lean into conspiracism, antisemitism, open racism, and more. Vance plays footsie with this group. A prominent figure here is Tucker Carlson, who boosted the rising Vance on his show on Fox and helped win Trump’s crucial endorsement for the Senate hopeful; the relationship is so close that Carlson’s son worked as a staffer for Vance until earlier this year. Now Vance seemingly won’t disavow Carlson despite the host’s break with Trump, descent into conspiracism, and platforming of white supremacist Nick Fuentes and World War II revisionist Darryl Cooper while chortling about antisemitic exclusions. Whenever Vance, who seems to be terminally online, smirks about cat ladies or cat eaters or dirty areas full of immigrants, he’s playing directly to this digital audience that understands precisely what he’s doing.

In his latest memoir, Vance dedicates enormous space—it seems to be his primary motivation—to decrying the ambition of his peers at Yale Law School. The irony, of course, is he is nothing but a striver himself. And sure enough, he has done everything possible to make himself the obvious candidate for each of the MAGA New Right families. Cofound a Thiel-backed company? Check. Convert to Catholicism? Check. Keynote the National Conservatism Conference? Check. Traverse the podcast circuit? Check. Tweet like a statue-faced anon? Check.

Notwithstanding the tensions and contradictions among the families of the MAGA New Right, Vance has fashioned himself into their embodiment. Each family sees in Vance what they want to see. The only human thing Vance seems to have left is what may stop the most racist and nativist elements of the right from accepting him: He married the Hindu daughter of Indian immigrants.

Share

DESPITE THE WAY he has insinuated himself with these groups, it’s not clear to anyone that Vance has any principles at all. While he plays all things to all right-wingers, Vance codes as a chameleonic opportunist—sidling up to Trump, for example, and grinning through the president’s nonsense, out of ambition rather than conviction.

It’s possible Vance really is very shallow—constantly working to put himself at the dead center of his party, like a Nixon of the hard right.

Or perhaps he really is amoral, simply taking stands to get ahead, motivated only by a monstrous ambition.

Or maybe he believes it all: each aspect of the MAGA right’s nightmarepolitik.

It’s hard to know which option is worse, though if I had to guess, I would say Vance believes the totality of the MAGA New Right’s charge against liberals and liberalism. He’s embraced a deeply pessimistic worldview of friends to be rewarded and enemies to be punished: a politics of vengeance motivated by despair.

But despite the energy Vance has spent cultivating the MAGA New Right, it’s not clear that Americans actually vote for ideologues.

Rep. John Ashbrook (R-Ohio) primaried Nixon from the conservative right in 1972. He got pummeled. Reagan won the presidency as an avowed conservative in 1980, but while he paid homage to the conservative movement, his appeal had a far more hopeful edge. And as president, he governed as a politician rather than intellectual first, with a surprising degree of pragmatism and, at times, starry-eyed liberal optimism. After Reagan, many of the conservative intellectuals plumped for the hard-right commentator Pat Buchanan over George H. W. Bush. It didn’t matter: Buchanan never came close to scratching the presidency in any of his campaigns.

You could even say some of Trump’s appeal in 2016 was the way he bucked GOP dogma. Trump wiped the floor with representatives of every (then-)plausible conservative lane during the primary.

Even so, Trump’s immense political gravity has shifted the political world off kilter. Who knows what the Trumpified rump base might want in a candidate and how far the president’s endorsement, if he chooses to bestow it on Vance, will carry him. (Trump has reportedly privately told donors to back Vance, though it is unclear whether this preference will hold through 2028.) Likewise, should the presidency pass from Trump to Vance for any reason over the next two years, Vance may enjoy a honeymoon period and the incumbency effect.

Regardless, it’s fair to say of Vance: He’s more machine now than man.

Want to comment? Join Bulwark+