JD Vance’s political career has been defined by an apparent paradox. On the one hand, Vance is a member of the upper echelon of America’s ruling elite — a graduate of Yale Law School, a New York Times best-selling author, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and a United States senator. On the other hand, he 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, Vance has acknowledged this tension — without really trying to resolve it.
“It’s the great privilege of my life that I’m deep enough into the American elite that I can indulge a little anti-elitism,” Vance said in one of his first major interviews in 2016, on the heels of the publication on Hillbilly Elegy.
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? 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.
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). 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. 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.
The details of this plan differ between the various writers and thinkers that have influenced Vance — people like the Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, the internet philosopher Curtis Yarvin and the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel. But taken together, their prescriptions amount to a kind of three-step plan for the New Right’s project: Identify a member of the New Right elite who can tap into the energies of an ascendant right-wing populist movement, ride those energies to political power, and then carry out a top-down transformation of American society along illiberal lines. It is, in effect, a plan to accomplish through elite rule what even the MAGA movement has failed to accomplish through democratic control: The creation of a social order built around conservative values, even if those values remain broadly unpopular with the American people.
In fact, Vance has articulated his own political strategy in terms that closely echo those found in the pages of the New Right thinkers who have influenced him.
“One of the ways in which I’m very much populist is that I think people need to have elected representatives [who] try to channel their frustrations into solutions that will make their lives better,” Vance told me when I interviewed him in his Senate office in December 2023. “One of the ways I’m very much not a populist is that I think every populist movement that has ever existed has failed unless it’s captured some subset of the people who are professionally in government.”
He added: “You can’t just run a political movement purely with voters — you need voters, you need bureaucrats, you need lawyers, you need business leaders, you need the whole thing.”
As Vance hits the campaign trail, parsing this blueprint is essential for understanding his political trajectory — and what underlies his support for Trump. Given his past criticisms of Trump, Vance’s new-found affection for Trumpism and the MAGA movement has been chalked up to a “moral collapse” or rank opportunism. But read against the ideas found in the writings of the conservative intellectuals close to Vance, it begins to appear like something else: the first step in a much broader plan.
On a summer evening in 2023, Vance strode into a marble-lined ballroom at the Catholic University of America, where a crowd of 250 had gathered for the launch of a new book by the Catholic philosopher Patrick Deneen, a political theorist at the University of Notre Dame, hosted by the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Vance, then just a few months into his first term as a United States senator, made a beeline for Deneen and wrapped him in a big hug, both men smiling as they greeted each other like old friends.
That hug served as a vivid metaphor for Vance and the New Right’s embrace of Deneen’s work as a kind of intellectual roadmap for their emerging political movement — a process that Deneen spoke to me about at length for a POLITICO Magazine profile in 2023.
In his breakout book Why Liberalism Failed, published in 2018, Deneen argued that small-L liberalism is inevitably self-destructive; that a political system predicated on the expansion of individual rights and autonomy will eventually undermine the collective institutions — like family, organized religion and local communities — that make political life possible in the first place.
In his next book, Regime Change, Deneen doesn’t embrace the term “illiberal” but lays out a vision of an ideal “postliberal order” that would jettison liberalism’s protection of individual rights in favor of a social order that promotes “the common good” — a purportedly objective set of social conditions, borrowed from Catholic social teaching, that “undergird human flourishing.” According to Deneen, liberalism’s phony commitment to egalitarianism currently provides cover for a corrupt (and left-leaning) elite to pursue its own interests at the expense of the interests of the downtrodden (and right-leaning) masses. In Deneen’s postliberal order, by contrast, a new ruling elite would foster collaboration between “the few” and “the many” in pursuit of the common good. This new order would look the same and be governed by the same institutions as the current one, but it would be infused by a “fundamentally different ethos.”
In practice, Deneen’s policy prescriptions for fostering the common good would be even more far-reaching than Trump’s: sweeping protectionist trade measures to promote domestic industries; aggressive trust-busting of corporate monopolies; a robust “pro-family” welfare policy to promote the formation of traditional families; strict limits on abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
The crux of Deneen’s book is his plan for the transition from the liberal order to the postliberal order. This “peaceful” transition, Deneen argued, would not happen on its own. It would require the creation of “a new elite” — a “self-conscious aristoi” (or aristocracy) who could enter the halls of government, academia and the media, take them over and repurpose them toward conservative and illiberal ends. While drawn from the upper echelons of society, this new elite would effectively act as class traitors: Having replaced the old, corrupt liberal elite, they would ally with and rule in the interests of the “many,” using their power to foster conservative values like “stability, order [and] continuity.” Deneen calls this political arrangement “aristopopulism” — an alliance between a “genuinely noble elite” (the “aristoi”) and the populist masses, working together to replace secular liberalism with a postliberal system grounded in a “forthright acknowledgment and renewal of the Christian roots of our civilization.”
Vance — whose background and biography make him a living embodiment of Deneen’s “aristopopulist” vision — has not hid his interest in Deneen’s ideas. During a panel discussion at the launch event for Deneen’s book, Vance — appearing alongside Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts — identified himself as a member of the “postliberal right,” adding that he “sees[s] his role and his voice” in Congress as “explicitly anti-regime.”
In response to a question from the moderator about how he balances the interests of “the few” and “the many” in practice, he answered like a card-carrying member of Deneen’s new elite: “Things in American society are so tilted toward the ‘few’ that I just focus on the ‘many,’” he said, “and let the rest of it figure itself out.”
Curtis Yarvin’s ideas do not garner formal discussions in the marble-lined halls of America’s universities, but they are no less influential in the intellectual ecosystem that has shaped Vance’s worldview.
Yarvin rose to prominence on the online right in the early 2000s as the leading voice of the “neo-reactionary” movement — or what came to be called “NRx” — while blogging under the pseudonym “Mencius Moldbug.” The premise of the movement, which Yarvin unspooled in his signature meandering and irony-laden prose style, was that “democracy is bunk” — both as a philosophical system and as a principle for organizing modern society.
According to Yarvin, America in the 21st century is no longer a democracy in any meaningful sense. Instead, it has degenerated into a corrupt oligarchy run by an interconnected network of academics, media elites and government bureaucrats that Yarvin calls “the Cathedral.” Although most Americans have carried on believing the elections and the popular will continue to be the source of political power and legitimacy, Yarvin argues that the real decision-making in America — including the critical power to determine what is true and what is false — rests with the Cathedral, regardless of who occupies the White House or which party holds a majority in Congress. (At the National Conservatism Conference in 2022, Vance gave a speech titled “The Universities are the Enemy” that was effectively a layman’s explanation of “the Cathedral.”)
To a point, Yarvin’s critique of this system can sound like a more traditional libertarian or conservative critique of the “administrative state” or “the deep state” — the notion that a set of unelected bureaucrats have usurped power from the sovereign American people. But unlike traditional conservatives, Yarvin does not advocate for a return to small or limited government. Instead, he argues that America needs a “national CEO, [or] what’s called ‘a dictator’,’’ who could implement a type of centralized American monarchy, run on the model of a Silicon Valley tech start-up. (Yarvin’s model for this style of leadership is, half ironically, FDR, whose presidency he as described as “a personal executive monarchy.”) Yarvin has laid out an extensive (though not always clear) playbook explaining how a democratically elected president could claim monarchical power — a process that would involve a smartphone app to organize voting, reinforced by police forces in red armbands.
Here and elsewhere, Yarvin’s plans diverge sharply from Deneen’s — and neither Deneen nor Vance have endorsed the explicitly monarchic parts of Yarvin’s vision. But they share one essential element: Like Deneen and Vance, Yarvin believes that the transition away from progressive liberal democracy will be led by a self-conscious cadre of conservative elites who gain power through an alliance with the popular masses — yielding, in Yarvin’s vision, to the rule of a single “national CEO.”
Yarvin’s description of this dynamic is much stranger than Deneen’s. Borrowing from the universe of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Yarvin describes American society as divided into several classes: “Elves,” (the highly educated ruling class); “hobbits,” (the average middle-class red-state American) and “dwarves, orcs and zombies” (the working- and lower-classes). These groupings, Yarvin has written, describe different roles in society, not races or fixed classes: The elves are the people who run the powerful institutions of politics and culture, while the hobbits just “want to grill and raise kids.” (“These roles tend to be hereditary, but do not need to be,” Yarvin has written.)
The elves are almost uniformly liberal, but Yarvin believes that mixed in among the elves are “dark elves” — reactionary elites like Yarvin who oppose “the regime,” sympathize with the plight of the hobbits and understand democracy for what it really is: a cover for a corrupt oligarchy. The only way to realize a “pro-hobbit” regime, Yarvin argues, is for hobbits to form an alliance with the dark elves to defeat the normal elves, and then to allow the dark elves — and eventually a single dark elf — to rule on their behalf.
This is, in effect, a more extreme description of Deneen’s “aristopopulism” in dorkier terms. On a popular conservative podcast in 2021, Vance cited Yarvin — whom he has called “a friend” — in support of his view that a second-term Trump should “fire every mid-level level bureaucrat and every civil servant in the administrative state and replace them with our people,” thereby allowing conservatives to “seize the administrative state for our own purposes.” (Yarvin has recently distanced himself from Vance, calling him “a random normie [politician] whom I’ve barely even met.”)
Vance’s citation of Yarvin has attracted much attention since he landed on the top of the Republican ticket — especially Vance’s suggestion that Trump should ignore the Supreme Court if they step in to block the mass firings. But the public scrutiny has overlooked one critical part of Vance’s plan. When Vance is talking about installing “our people” in the government, it’s fair to assume that he’s not talking about enlisting the hobbits. He’s talking about promoting the dark elves.
All of these threads come together in the thinking of Vance’s primary political patron and close personal friend Peter Thiel.
Thiel and Vance met in 2011 after Vance attended a talk by Thiel at Yale Law School — an encounter that Vance later called “the most important moment of my time at Yale.” Vance later went to work for Thiel’s venture capital firm, Mithril Capital — the VC company is, fittingly, named after Lord of the Rings — and later founded his own fund with Thiel’s backing. Along the way, though, Thiel became a sort of tutor to Vance, introducing Vance to the intellectual influences shaping the politics of Silicon Valley’s right-leaning cohort.
One of those influences was the Austrian libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises and two of his American disciples, Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. That trio formed the core of a group of thinkers known as the “paleolibertarians”: For von Mises, Rothbard and Hoppe, real political freedom required shrinking — and eventually abolishing — the centralized state, making way for an “anarcho-capitalist” system governed exclusively by markets and the forces of social competition.
Even as libertarians gained political momentum and support throughout the 1970s, the paleolibertarians remained relatively marginal on the right, and their followers knew that the program wasn’t popular enough to gain widespread support. By the 1990s, Rothbard in particular had given up on building a broad-based electoral movement based purely on libertarian principles. Instead, he began calling for libertarians to devote their energy to a new style of “right-wing populism,” based on an alliance between libertarian intellectual elites and the middle- and lower-class masses who felt oppressed and disillusioned by contemporary American life. “This two-pronged strategy is (a) to build up a cadre of our own libertarians, minimal-government opinion-molders, based on correct ideas; and (b) to tap the masses directly, to short-circuit the dominant media and intellectual elites,” Rothbard wrote in a 1992 essay titled “Right-Wing Populism,” which the writer John Ganz has called “the Ur-Text of Trumpism.”
Over time, this coalition would consolidate behind “inspiring and charismatic political leadership … who will be knowledgeable, courageous, dynamic, exciting and effective in mobilizing and building a movement,” Rothbard wrote. (The rabid anti-communist Joseph McCarthy offered one historical example of what this leadership might look like, Rothbard argued — but looking to the future, he pinned his hopes on Pat Buchanan.) Once this movement had concentrated power under its charismatic leader, it could seize political control from “the unholy alliance of ‘corporate liberal’ Big Business and media elites,” dismantle the American state and usher in a new hyper-libertarian order.
Under this new order, Rothbard presumed, a natural elite — the people who could win out in a world of unfettered competition — would inevitably rise to the top.
Although the paleolibertarians’ goal was in theory the opposite of a strong centralized state or reactionary monarchy, it nevertheless proved attractive to thinkers with authoritarian inclinations, in part because it espoused a frank skepticism of liberal democracy. For the paleolibertarians, democracy existed to protect markets, and once it had ceased to do that, it became expendable. (Yarvin, for instance, has cited Rothbard and Hoppe as major influences, as have key figures on the alt-right.) This view had a decisive influence to Thiel, who has spoken at an organization founded by Hoppe, and who infamously declared in 2009 that he “no longer believe[d] that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
On the surface, Deneen, Yarvin and Thiel want different things — a postliberal order grounded in Catholic social teaching; a monarchy styled after a tech startup; a stateless techno-libertarian paradise in which the only rights are property rights. But they are united both by their opposition to liberal democracy and by their fundamental elitism — their shared belief that America is and always will be run by elites, but that it is currently ruled by the wrong type of elite. Their goal is not to abolish elite rule but to replace America’s current elite with a purportedly different, more conservative one, and they share a blueprint for doing so. Implicitly recognizing that their ideas are not popular enough to win broad-based political support, they advocate for an alliance between reactionary elites and the alienated masses, channeling popular frustration against the democratic order they hope to eventually replace. The “hobbits” are the engine of this transformation, but they are never its leaders.
Forging this alliance, all these thinkers agree, will take time — but the crucial first step is identifying and cultivating a new conservative elite. This new elite must be made up of people who are steeped in elite culture and reactionary ideas but who understand “the people” and can credibly claim to govern on their behalf. They must have one foot in the world of the elite and one foot in the heartland. They must think like elves but be able to talk like hobbits.
In other words, they must look like JD Vance — and their first task is to build a bridge between the elite reactionary circles and the right-leaning masses.
“Maybe the most important role that I have to play from the New Right’s perspective is to help build institutions and to get people engaged in politics who weren’t previously engaged in politics,” Vance told me when we spoke earlier this year, referring to his role in founding a handful of new institutions devoted to the nationalist-populist cause.
“It’s definitely an interesting thing,” he said, “but it’s going to take a long time.”
Source Agencies
