JD Vance Has His Reasons

“Vice President JD Vance, by far the front-runner in the contest for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination, has become the leading elected official aligned with a movement questioning the founding principles of American democracy.

 

In sharp contrast to his political partner, President Trump, who governs from the gut, the vice president has imbibed many of MAGA’s political theories and made them his own. His steady shift to the right has been driven by a deepening affiliation with an intellectual network that describes itself with the seemingly innocuous term “the postliberal right.”

 

Here are some samples of Vance’s thinking taken from a single 2021 podcast interview when he was running for the Senate with Trump out of power: “Step 1 in the process is to totally replace, like, rip out, like a tumor, the current American leadership class and then reinstall some sense of American, you know, political religion, some sense of shared values.”

 

If Trump were to win in 2024, Vance continued, he should “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.’”

 

“The Harvard University endowment pays a zero tax rate. Maybe it’s time to tax that endowment,” Vance said, incorrectly, before noting what was perhaps his real concern: “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.”

 

There are many more examples.

 

At the 2021 National Conservatism Conference, Vance told the audience, “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” He went on to quote Richard Nixon to say that “the professors are the enemy.”

 

At a 2023 Claremont Institute event, “Up From Conservatism,” Vance declared, “Maybe we should be appointing people 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.”

 

Stephanie Slade, a senior editor at the libertarian magazine Reason, wrote by email in reply to my queries: “Vance absolutely is the most prominent intellectual proponent of an anti-liberal, mode of governance.”

 

Slade continued:

 

I have a book coming out later this year, “Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right,” in which I describe the new dissident right as consisting of three loose factions: theocons, national conservatives and neoreactionaries.

 

The striking thing about Vance is that he has close ties to all three of those camps. Think of him as the foremost member of a community of intellectuals and influencers who want conservatives to wield state power in a more “muscular” fashion in order to advance the common good as they understand it.

 

Slade wrote that she “would sum up Vance’s view 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.”

 

In a lengthy phone conversation, Shikha Dalmia, founder and editor of The UnPopulist magazine and the president of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, described Vance as an exceptionally complicated political and intellectual figure.

 

Dalmia, an Indian American, said “a few years ago, I stumbled upon a Thanksgiving photograph of Vance with his family. It was him wearing his Indian garb and he was holding his young toddler son with his wife and all his wife’s relatives who look very much like my relatives.”

 

But, Dalmia continued, instead of following

 

the natural intellectual trajectory of a man who has opted to marry the daughter of immigrants, a woman who’s a practicing Hindu, has mixed-race children and a mixed-religion family to become a poster child for a Reaganesque shining city on the hill, an open society conservatism, he is the opposite.

 

I see him as a pretty thoroughgoing illiberal at this stage. This whole idea of a heritage American is directly in tension with his wife’s claim to being an equal citizen in the United States. He’s, he’s a bundle of contradictions; his biography and his beliefs are in tension with each other.

 

While Dalmia sees political opportunism playing a major role in this transformation, it’s not that simple. “He’s definitely ambitious,” she said. “You don’t do such a major, 180-degree turn on Trump if you are not ambitious. He is really trying to curry favor with Trump.” At the same time, Dalmia pointed out, “he’s trying to consolidate his power base within the Republican MAGA Party.”

 

But, Dalmia contended, “I also think that, unlike Trump, who is in it only for the power, Vance is an ideologue.” Vance, she argued, believes “American liberalism is on a bad path,” with the result that

 

He’s repudiated America in a way.

 

I don’t know if he wants a complete regime change, but he does want an America which is much more religious, much more closed. It’s not just isolationism in the Pat Buchanan sense; it’s a superreligious project.

 

Because of this, Dalmia said, “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.”

 

Vance’s ideological journey has taken him from outspoken Trump critic 10 years ago to loyal servant to the cause of crushing every vestige of liberalism in the public and private sectors.

 

In 2016, Vance texted a former law school roommate, saying that he was going “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical” piece of work “or that he’s America’s Hitler.” On PBS the same year, Vance declared, “There is definitely an element of Donald Trump’s support that has its basis in racism, xenophobia,” and on NPR, he described Trump as “noxious.”

 

Since then, his worldview has pivoted. The threat is no longer Trump, “America’s Hitler.” Instead, the entire American left has become a cancer that needs to be excised if the nation is to survive. Vance described his current way of thinking relatively early on in his transition to MAGA loyalist, at a 2023 event honoring the post-liberal political theorist Patrick Deneen. “We on the right, on the sort of the postliberal right, the new right,” Vance said, “we are really, really kidding ourselves about the weight of the challenge, and when we talk about changing the regime.”

 

The corrupting power of liberalism, Vance argued, has infected both the public and private sectors:

 

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. It is all, in my view, very much aligned against the people who I represent in the state of Ohio.

 

In fact, Vance continued, “the regime is the public and private sector. It’s the corporate C.E.O.s, it’s the HR professionals at Budweiser, and they are working together, not against one another, in a way that destroys the American common good.”

 

By 2025, Vance’s animosity toward the left had become venomous. In the wake of the Sept. 10, 2025, killing of Charlie Kirk by a lone assassin, Vance blamed “an incredibly destructive movement of left-wing extremism” for contributing to Kirk’s death.

 

“There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk’s assassination,” Vance said, as he hosted “The Charlie Kirk Show.” “There is no unity with the people who fund these articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathizers, who argue that Charlie Kirk — a loving husband and father — deserved a shot to the neck because he spoke words with which they disagree.”

 

Vance’s comments are revealing because he knows that his universal denunciations of the American left are simply not true.

 

He is an intelligent man who could not help but learn during his years at Ohio State and Yale and his attendance at conferences in Aspen and other venues that liberals are not the embodiment of evil — that just as many MAGA voters are decent men and women, so are many Democrats.

 

Vance’s thinking has been heavily influenced by three thinkers very wary of democracy and especially of liberalism: Deneen; the venture capitalist Peter Thiel; and Adrian Vermeule, a law professor at Harvard who in 2017 wrote that it is “the relentless aggression of liberalism, driven by an internal mechanism that causes ever more radical demands for political conformism, particularly targeting the church.” Vermeule added, in a tone reminiscent of Vance’s after Kirk’s assassination, 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.”

 

In Deneen, Vance has found common ground with a political theorist who sees liberalism as a malignant force that created “a new aristocracy that has enjoyed inherited privileges, prescribed economic roles and fixed social positions.”

 

For Deneen, the classical liberalism that laid the philosophical groundwork for the American Revolution, from the Enlightenment and the writings of John Locke to the Declaration of Independence, is the bedrock of contemporary discontent, economic unfairness and moral corruption.

 

This managerial elite, Deneen argued, 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.”

 

Unlike communism and fascism, Deneen wrote in his influential 2018 book, “Why Liberalism Failed,” that liberalism is “insidious”:

 

A political philosophy that was launched to foster greater equity, defend a pluralist tapestry of different cultures and beliefs, protect human dignity and, of course, expand liberty, in practice generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation and undermines freedom.

 

Deneen elaborated on his critique in his 2023 book, “Regime Change”:

 

The regimes arising from the political philosophies of modernity thus pit an enlightened ruling class against a backward, unprogressed element of the population.

 

In practice, this results in the elimination of a “mixed constitution” in favor of a ruling class that governs in the name of progress, visibly and measurably at the expense of the flourishing of the large swath of the population that is — justifiably in the view of the elite — “left behind.”

 

Before the emergence of Trump and MAGA populism, both Democrats and Republicans were, in Deneen’s view, liberal in the sense that both sought to eliminate economic and cultural restraints that he thinks are essential to an ordered and equitable society.

 

In the 2023 presentation I mentioned earlier, Deneen linked the purposeful dismantling of “those conservative or stabilizing constraints upon the disorder that an unbridled economy can produce” with:

 

The de-linking of reproduction from sexuality, from reproduction; birth control and abortion; the disassociation of our sexuality from bringing new life into the world — and now abortion being praised as a positive good and something one should celebrate.

 

The result? A “tradition that prized order and stability and balance was replaced over time by revolutionary disorder, one that prizes liberty as a kind of abstract ideal of simply free choice disruption.”

 

To Deneen, the rise of Trump and right-wing populism is the logical result of a “demand by those who are at least residually of the party of order, saying we need order in our lives, we need stability, we need balance, and we need it in both the economic realm and in the social realm.”

 

It would, of course, be unfair to attribute to Vance all the views of his philosophical ally Deneen, but in fact Vance’s evolving views of liberalism and the left are very similar to his, as they are to Vermeule’s.

 

In a sharply critical essay published in 2023, “‘It Is Tash Whom He Serves’: Deneen and Vermeule on Liberalism,” Andrew Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern, worried that some recent Christian criticisms of liberalism are a “kind of fantasy” that could “lead idealists to gullibly embrace authoritarian kleptocrats who do not give a damn about the people the idealists are trying to help.”

 

Koppelman noted that Deneen describes the goal of liberalism as “the greatest possible freedom from external constraints, including customary norms,” a self-defeating agenda because “democracy requires extensive social forms that liberalism aims to deconstruct, particularly shared social practices and commitments that arise from thick communities.”

 

In this venture, “liberalism cannot help itself. ‘Liberalism’s internal logic leads inevitably to the evisceration of all institutions that were originally responsible for fostering human virtue: family, ennobling friendship, community, university, polity, church.’ ”

 

Deneen’s driving conviction, according to Koppelman, “appears to be that it is inevitable that someone will end up being bullied and humiliated by the law, and his mission is to make sure that the victims are not Christians.”” [1]

 

1. JD Vance Has His Reasons: Guest Essay. Edsall, Thomas B.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Mar 3, 2026.