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It is not unusual for those with lofty political ambitions to reach some sort of accommodation with more powerful figures they have previously quarrelled with.
When all other routes to the top have been sealed off, aspirants must reluctantly fall in behind the leader and dutifully mouth the party line.
In 2024, there is no position worth having in the Republican Party that does not go through Donald Trump and his brood.
In March, Trump passed the 1,215-delegate threshold required to secure the GOP nomination for president in the shortest period of time since John McCain in 2008.
Since Trump (very reluctantly) left office in 2020, he has consolidated his hold over the Republican Party to the point where, four years later, those who wish to progress must embrace him and everything he stands for.
Which is exactly what the 39-year-old Ohio senator JD Vance has done. A venture capitalist turned politician who rose to fame with his 2016 memoir turned Netflix movie Hillbilly Elegy, Vance has metamorphosed from a “never Trump” guy to his presidential running mate.
Elegy captured the zeitgeist in 2016, winning plaudits from liberals who wanted to explain the Trump phenomenon and from conservatives who wanted to pad out their prejudices with some “authentic” imagery. It was a bucolic coming of age story in which the white rural poor were depicted (by one of their own no less) as the purveyors of a “culture” of poverty rather than the victims of material deprivation.
Vance had little time for Trump back then. In 2016, in a private message to an old law school classmate, Vance wondered whether Trump was a “cynical asshole like Nixon” or “America’s Hitler”. In a more measured essay he penned for The Atlantic that same year, Vance wrote that while Trump “feels good” to many people, “he can’t fix America’s growing social and cultural crisis”.
JD’s Trump Turnaround
At some point Vance overcame those reservations about Trump. So much so in fact that for several years he has been a dutiful ventriloquist of the Trumpian gospel.
Following the 2020 presidential vote, Vance accused Joe Biden of stealing the election. He has since fundraised for those who really did try to steal it on January 6.
In true “America first” fashion, Vance wants to cut off military and financial assistance to Ukraine, effectively giving Vladimir Putin carte blanche to reduce swathes of the country to semi-slavery.
The apotheosis of this squalid political journey occurred this week when Vance stood on stage at the Republican National Convention next to the man he once compared to another dictator who pursued lebensraum in Europe. At this stage in his political evolution one wonders if he’s also changed his mind about the Austrian corporal.
Trump’s choice of Vance as his vice presidential pick is a way of thumbing his nose at the Republican Party’s conservative elite. It is also a sign that Trump feels supremely confident about his prospects for re-election in November.
The JD Vance that Trump has picked as vice presidential nominee is not only more Maga than the Vance of 2016, but he is more Maga than much of the Republican Party.
Vance has said that he would have refused to certify the 2020 election results as vice president, as required by the Constitution and as then-vice President Mike Pence did. He has also urged Trump, should he win office again, to “fire” every civil servant and replace them with Trump loyalists (and to violate the constitution by defying the supreme court when it invariably acts to stop him).
The Radicalisation of the American Right
Vance’s whiplash-inducing political volte-face probably isn’t driven by ambition alone. Like much of the American right he has been radicalised in recent years.
Vance has cited the Kavanah hearings and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 as events that denuded him of whatever liberal sensibilities he previously had.
For others it was Covid-19 that convinced them they were living under communist tyranny. For the Maga stenographer, Sohrab Ahmari, it was drag queen story hour. For Jordan Peterson the “woke mind virus”. For yet more, it is a social media ecosystem that has been gamified by Elon Musk to boost an army of resentful edgelords and crypto-fascists with $8 blue ticks next to their names.
Many no longer bother to hide the crypto part. Nate Hochman, a former staffer for Republican governor Ron DeSantis who was fired in the summer of 2023 for sharing a video containing symbols used by Nazis and white supremacists, told the New York Times that “every junior staffer in the [previous] Trump administration read Bronze Age Mindset’, a bombastic Nietzschean book whose author has said he “believe[s] in fascism or something worse”.
Vance, who follows the author of the aforementioned book on X (because of course he does), has talked about being “red pilled”, a favourite metaphor on the reactionary right which alludes to the uncomfortable truths about reality that are purportedly being concealed by progressive orthodoxy.
Taken from The Matrix films, the metaphor was first given this meaning in 2009 by a blogger called Mencius Moldbug, the nom de guerre of software engineer and “techno-monarchist” Curtis Yarvin. During a 2021 appearance on the podcast of Jack Murphy, a masculinity influencer who once claimed that “feminists need rape”, Vance credited Yarvin with helping him to recognise that America was in a “late republican period”.
Yarvin, whose writings are an eclectic mix of philosophical waffle, supercilious elitism and “scientific” racism, is contemptuous of democracy, which he describes as “an ineffective and destructive system of government”.
Yarvin would prefer it if the demos were replaced by a CEO-as-sovereign, the state effectively turned into a business which owns a country. He too called on Trump to carry out a “very legal coup” in January of 2021 – in order to “steal the election back”. Yarvin has called on Americans to “get over their dictator phobia” and described some humans as “more suited to slavery” than others.
These pitiable circumlocutions could be dismissed as the impotent fantasies of a crackpot were it not for Yarvin’s influence over both Vance and a billionaire class that has started to act on its own reservations about democracy.
‘The First Shoots of a new Conservative Ideology’
In a 2016 article for Breitbart News, the far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos described Yarvin’s writings as “the first shoots of a new conservative ideology”. What Yiannopoulos failed to mention was that these shoots were being watered by the libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel.
The Paypal and Palantir co-founder was an early investor in Yarvin’s startup Tlon and would go on to donate millions to pro-Trump Republican politicians, including 16 federal-level Republican candidates to whom Thiel donated $35 million during the 2022 election cycle.
The most prominent of these was JD Vance, who spent several years working with Thiel as a hedge fund investor and to whom Thiel contributed $10 million during Vance’s efforts to secure the senatorship in Ohio.
In his 2021 book, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, the journalist Max Chafkin describes Yarvin as the “house political philosopher” of Thiel’s “budding movement”.
In 2016 Yarvin informed Yiannopoulos that he had been “coaching Thiel” and that the two of them had watched the 2016 election together at the billionaire’s house.
Like Yarvin, Thiel has made a number of anti-democracy utterances in the past. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote in a 2009 essay on being a libertarian. He has also talked more recently about being “partial to a Nietzschean, Bronze Age Pervert-type perspective”.
Statements like this, along with donations to socially conservative politicians, might seem at odds with Thiel’s professed libertarianism. However, it really isn’t that deep.
Thiel and Yarvin believe in an authoritarian model of society whose starting point is the assumed superiority of any rich person. Thiel’s idea of liberty is that the capitalist class should be free to do as it pleases. Both men see the masses as too stupid for self-rule because they occasionally vote for restrictions on capitalists.
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The techno-libertarianism of the billionaire class may sit in uneasy alliance with the Hillbilly populist and his speculative calls for antitrust crackdowns and a higher minimum wage.
But movements of the radical right have always been characterised by incoherence and internal inconsistency. What unites the various Maga factions are hatreds and grievances as well as a common enemy: liberal democracy. Dismantling that is enough to go on with at this stage.