Politico’s Ian Ward on the Thinkers and Groups Who Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual Worldview

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. It’s “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman.

We continue our look at Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance with a new piece headlined “The Seven Thinkers and Groups That Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual Worldview.” It was written by our next guest, Politico reporter Ian Ward, who’s joining us from New York. He spent a few months with Vance this year for a profile about his first year in the Senate and his broader vision for the Republican Party in a piece that was headlined “Is There Something More Radical Than MAGA? J.D. Vance Is Dreaming It.”

Ian Ward, welcome back to Democracy Now! We had you on during the Republican convention when we were in Milwaukee. Now these comments have surfaced, that Vance doesn’t disavow, from 2021 in an interview where he attacked Kamala Harris, AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pete Buttigieg, calling them “cat ladies,” “childless cat ladies.” Can you talk about where does his views come from? Who were the people who influenced him most?

IAN WARD: Yeah. Well, Vance comes out of a conservative intellectual ecosystem that’s very concerned with this question of child rearing, family policy and, in particular, the declining birthrate in the United States. I mean, currently the birth is around 1.7 children per family, which is below the replacement rate, what they call the replacement rate. You know, if two people having 1.7 children, the population, in theory, won’t propagate itself. You know, many of these people on the populist nationalist right see that as an enormous sort of civilizational existential challenge, right? That’s not just a technocratic issue. That’s an issue of whether a society can propagate itself into the future, right?

The converse of that is they’re looking at ways to raise the birthrate through public policy. One of their primary influences in that respect is Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary. Orbán’s government has adopted a very sweeping set of what they call pro-family policies. These are tax subsidies for families with children, block grants for newly wedded families to buy houses, a whole range of things. And there’s actually a fairly robust interchange between conservative intellectuals in America and pro-family advocates in Hungary looking at ways to raise the birthrate.

AMY GOODMAN: So, why don’t you begin, as you profile these seven thinkers, start with — and I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing his name right — Patrick Deneen?

IAN WARD: Yeah, Patrick Deneen. He’s a philosopher, a professor of political theory at the University of Notre Dame. He himself is a Catholic. He’s become known as sort of the figurehead for a group of thinkers who call themselves postliberals. You know, they believe — Deneen wrote a book back in 2018 arguing that liberalism, small-L liberalism, as a sort of system of political philosophy, had actually undermined itself, that the expansion of individual rights and the expansion of a free market economy had undercut the collective bases of American life — you know, family, religion and sort of any sort of communitarian, communal ethos.

In a more recent book, published in 2023, called Regime Change, Deneen argued for a kind of — what he calls a peaceful revolution to replace the liberal order with a postliberal order, you know, the difference being a liberal order would — you know, is primarily directed towards the protection of individual rights and liberties; a postliberal order, which is grounded in a sort of Catholic worldview and Catholic social teaching — though Deneen doesn’t say that explicitly, so an important caveat — but the postliberal order is directed towards, you know, the preservation and proliferation of kind of conservative values and religious values.

Deneen, very close with Vance. Vance actually attended the book launch for this book, Regime Change, back in 2023. And Vance has said explicitly that he’s a member of the postliberal right and that he views his role in Congress as anti-regime. So, he’s closely tied in with this world that Deneen represents.

AMY GOODMAN: And Vance himself converted to Catholicism in 2019. His wife is Hindu. Who is Brad Wilcox, the University of Virginia professor, who wrote Get Married: Why Americans Should Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization?

IAN WARD: Yeah. He comes off a pro-family intellectual, again, a conservative religious guy. You know, the broader intellectual context here is this is a group of people who are questioning whether what liberals call progress is actually good for society, and also whether the past sort of 60 years of social change, dating back to the 1960s, has actually been a good thing.

You know, Vance doesn’t think it has been. You know, he thinks — he comes from this world that thinks sort of the sexual revolution was a mistake or has had terrible unintended consequences, that women’s entrance into the workforce has not been the sort of boon for feminism that liberals make it out to be. You know, he had this tweet, and he’s used this line in a couple speeches, that’s like, if your worldview tells you it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90-[hour] weeks in a cubicle at The New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had. You know, this is part of his broader critique that the culture war is class war, that liberals have weaponized social views to consolidate and advance their own economic interests. So, the idea that it’s liberating for — this is his conception — the idea that it’s liberating for women to enter the workforce ultimately redounds to the benefit of companies who can benefit from more and cheaper labor, as opposed to benefiting the women who find some sort of fulfillment or liberation in the work.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk again about Peter Thiel, I mean, when you talk about the great influences in Vance’s life, his former venture capital boss, primary funder of his 2022 Senate campaign, gave something like $10 million, where his philosophy fits in here.

IAN WARD: Yeah, Thiel, if I’m being honest, Thiel has not spoken — I mean, Thiel is wrapped up in this idea that the society can’t propagate itself if the birthrate is low. But Thiel’s influence on Vance is primarily thinking about, one, the relationship between democracy and freedom, and, second, thinking about the role that technology plays in society.

You know, Thiel is a sort of technolibertarian, which occasionally verges into kind of techno-authoritarianism, but who thinks that technology holds the potential to be completely revolutionary but has been perverted by various economic incentives and the poor leadership of liberal elites — right? — to become a thing that shackles us and prevents us from building a better society, as opposed to liberating us and building a better society. You know, his famous slogan is that “We wanted flying cars, and we got 140 characters,” you know, meaning we thought technology could change the world, and instead we turned it into things like Twitter and Instagram, which make us anxious, unhappy and more open to economic exploitation by companies than ever before.

He’s also said he doesn’t think that freedom and democracy are compatible anymore. You know, Vance has not endorsed that view specifically, but that’s sort of Thiel’s political philosophy in one line.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about — Ian, talk about Curtis Yarvin.

IAN WARD: Yeah. Yarvin — I should begin this with a caveat, which is, many of the thinkers that I mention in the piece, Vance is actually in regular contact with. You know, he talks to people like Patrick Deneen. He talks to Peter Thiel. He’s called Yarvin a friend. I assume they talk. But I think Yarvin is a bit more distanced from some of these thinkers — from Vance than some of these other thinkers.

But Yarvin is a blogger. He’s a former computer programmer. He came to internet fame in the, like, early aughts, blogging under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. And he articulated this worldview that he calls neo-reactionary. You know, NRx is often how it’s abbreviated. He’s sort of often cited as the house philosopher of the new right, which is the world that Vance comes out of intellectually.

Yeah, he’s a monarchist, straight up. I mean, that’s how he would describe himself. You know, he thinks that American democracy has sort of denigrated into a corrupt oligarchy and that the way to resolve this oligarchic tendency is to install a dictator — that’s the term he’s used — a kind of nationalist CEO who would run the country like the CEO of a startup would run a startup.

You know, Vance has not endorsed, in public, this whole project. He has cited Yarvin’s work in connection with his belief that a second Trump administration should fire a significant number of civil servants and replace those people with people who are ideologically aligned with himself and with Trump. But, yeah, this is another guy that Vance is clearly reading and engaging with, so…

AMY GOODMAN: And what about René Girard?

IAN WARD: Yeah, René Girard is a French-born philosopher, literary critic. He was, in fact, Thiel’s — one of Thiel’s mentors at Stanford University when Thiel was a student there. So, Girard was introduced to Vance by Thiel.

Girard’s ideas are incredibly complicated, so I won’t do them the indignity of trying to summarize them very shortly. But, you know, one idea that Vance has cited, I think, in connection with his own conversion to Catholicism is what Girard calls the scapegoat mechanism, which is the idea that in societies, people compete over a limited set of goods, and they often want the same things, which creates social conflict, which is ultimately resolved by identifying a member of that community who somehow wronged the community. You then scapegoat them, often by killing them, and then that leads to sort of social equilibrium. This changed, Girard thinks, with the advent of Christianity, because for the first time a society scapegoated someone who was very clearly not guilty of any crime against the community. You know, this was Jesus Christ. And so, by killing someone who was obviously innocent, the Christian narrative shows that the problem is not with the scapegoat, the problem is with ourselves now. And this led to the whole Christian theology.

But Vance has said he’s, like, identified with the story and found it profound. It helped him, you know, identify some of his own spiritual hang-ups. So, he cited that narrative in particular as a way of explaining his own conversion to Catholicism.

AMY GOODMAN: And talking about conversion to Catholicism, Sohrab Ahmari. We just have a minute.

IAN WARD: Yeah, yeah. Ahmari is the co-editor of a magazine called Compact, which began as a kind of union between the populist right and the populist left. He’s an advocate of pro-worker conservatism, what he calls pro-worker conservatism, which, again, Sohrab is a Catholic convert. This is a kind of idea of the conservative right inflected by Catholic social teaching and the doctrines of the Catholic Church.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to have to leave it there. People can read your articles. You talk about the Claremont Institute and other influences on JD Vance, who you profiled. Ian Ward is a political reporter. The new piece, “The Seven Thinkers and Groups That Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual Worldview.” And his recent piece, “Is There Something More Radical Than MAGA? J.D. Vance Is Dreaming It.”

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