Poster Boy for the 'New Right': Behind JD Vance's dual identity in GOP politics

16 September 2024

GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), often rails against "elites." Yet in July, Forbes estimated the "Hillbilly Elegy" author's net worth to be around $10 million.

In a think piece article published on September 16, Politico's Ian Ward examines the "tension" between Vance's anti-elite rhetoric and the fact that he is a multi-millionaire who graduated from Yale University's law school and became a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley.

Vance, according to Ward, "has become a vociferous conservative critic of that same elite on behalf of disaffected Middle Americans, a role he can claim by virtue of his upbringing in post-industrial Ohio and his family's roots in eastern Appalachia."

"At various points throughout his career," Ward explains, "Vance has acknowledged this tension — without really trying to resolve it.… Now that Vance is accompanying Trump on the top of the Republican ticket, this paradox has opened Republicans up to fresh criticisms. How populist can Vance really be while cozying up to billionaires in Silicon Valley?"

Ward continues, "What does a Yale-educated attorney and ex-venture capitalist understand about the lives of Trump's blue-collar voters? Is a guy who owns not one but two million-dollar houses a credible mouthpiece for the GOP's fledgling economic populism? But the deeper I've dug into the conservative world Vance comes from — often referred to as the 'New Right' — the more I've come to see Vance's split identity as a feature rather than a bug for his ideological supporters."

Back in 1980, the term "New Right" referred to Ronald Reagan's conservative coalition. The late political R&B singer Gil Scott-Heron, a major supporter of progressive and left-wing causes, was fond of saying that "the New Right is the same old wrong."

But in 2024, the term "New Right" has a decidedly MAGA connotation and vehemently rejects the Reagan, Goldwater, Bush and McCain conservatism of the 1980s and 1990s.

"In fact, Vance embodies an archetype that has been theorized about at length in New Right-adjacent books and podcasts, many of which Vance has read and listened to," Ward explains. "By forging an alliance between the elite 'New Right' and the MAGA masses, Vance, according to this reading, could serve as the leader of a new movement to institute an illiberal and explicitly reactionary political order."

Ward adds, "Though adopting the rhetoric of conservatism populism, this new order would be a fundamentally elitist one: It would expel America's current ruling elite in order to replace it with a new, more conservative one, drawn from the ranks of the New Right."

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Read the full Politico article at this link.

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