J.D. Vance’s speech last night at the Republican National Convention was a landmark in American politics. It sealed the realignment of American politics. When Vance said the GOP henceforth would be not on the side of Wall Street, but of the “working man,” in one sense, he effectively announced the end of Reaganism.
But that’s not quite true. In his era, forty years ago, Reagan spoke for the common man, and won the common man’s allegiance. Reagan stood for old-fashioned American patriotism, and for advocating common sense values against an out-of-touch elite in both the Democratic Party and among country-club Republicans. Reagan was the right man for his time.
Times have changed. American needed Reagan’s free market entrepreneurialism and his robust, confrontational foreign policy to break the spell of statist sclerosis and national paralysis. The problems America faced in 1980 are very different from the problems it faces today. As Vance recalled, the free-trade fundamentalism ended up creating globalism, and with it the collapse of America’s industrial might. It also allowed Wall Street to run wild—abetted, please note, by the Clinton Democrats—wreaking havoc on the stability of working-class lives.
The Democrats had no real response to this. Nor did the standard-issue Republicans. The Democrats committed themselves to a left-wing cultural revolution, while doing relatively little to address the material conditions of American life. The Republicans fell back on Zombie Reaganism, as if the solutions of 1980 were evergreen truths. And both parties, especially the GOP, became devotees of permanent war, both hard and soft. The Republicans acted under the guise of ‘spreading democracy’ as a cover for naked U.S. hegemony; the Democrats did too, adding cultural leftism to the mix (e.g., pressuring other countries to accept LGBT dogmas).
That’s over now. Donald Trump knocked holes in the wall of complacency and denial in 2016, and stands to clear even more ground if he is re-elected. And given his brilliant choice of Vance, Trump has not only chosen the most articulate and credible possible advocate of his sensibilities, but laid the groundwork for the permanent restructuring not only of American conservatism, but of America itself. Because Trump chose J.D. Vance, Trumpism will long outlast its founder. Trump resisted the pleas of media mogul Rupert Murdoch to choose someone tamer and more controllable as his running mate, and in so doing, passed the torch to a fighting tribune of the new MAGA generation.
Last night in Milwaukee, Vance emerged as the Ronald Reagan of the Millennials. He came across as patriotic and optimistic, but not sentimental. The anecdotes he shared about his rough childhood were not only factually true, but told mythical truths about what America is, and what she might be again.
The Vance story that will befuddle and alarm Europeans is his tale of finding 19 loaded handguns in his Mamaw’s house after she died. Vance framed this as a sign that though his tough old working-class grandmother was old and infirm, she was determined to defend her house by violence if necessary. The ABC News commentators freaked out over this. Europeans probably did too.
Not me, and not a wide swath of America. I come from the rural South, a place where most people are armed, and consider it not only a right, but a responsibility. Urban American liberals, like most Europeans, consider guns to be frightening, full stop. In J.D. Vance’s America, guns are what good people use to stop bad people from wreaking havoc. We look at the would-be Trump assassin, and think not, “It’s terrible that he had a gun,” but rather, “If only the armed defenders of the president had been doing their job, they could have taken him out before he fired a shot.”
What Europeans (and U.S. liberals) don’t get about the American character is that violence is bred in the bone. Ours is a nation whose character was forged by the frontier experience—for better or worse. At lunch in Budapest this week with a retired international banker, an American, he expressed doubt that Europe will be able to compete economically. Why? Because Europeans, in his view, lack the entrepreneurial, risk-taking impulse that comes naturally to Americans. That same independent, self-sufficient mentality is also behind the American devotion to gun rights.
I grew up around guns, in a hunting culture. I bought my first shotgun at age 10. My father taught me how to use it safely, and we hunted together. This was common for rural boys (and girls too—my sister was a homecoming queen and hunter who knew how to shoot, and how to skin a deer). We are all taught to treat guns with great care. The gun violence of the American ghettos was alien to us. We believed we needed guns to protect ourselves from criminals, especially given that out in the country, the sheriff is far away.
Granted, it’s unusual that Mamaw had 19 loaded pistols in her house, but we from J.D. Vance’s America would think of that as merely eccentric, and relatable. In American cities wracked by violent crime, especially since the Black Lives Matter riots, there are no doubt a lot of ordinary people who never thought of owning a gun who bought them to protect themselves and their families, having lost faith in the ability of the government to do so.
Vance also spoke of America not as a country of ideas alone, but most of all, as a nation of people. He told a moving story about seven generations of his family being buried on an Appalachian mountainside.
“That is a homeland. That is our homeland,” he said. “People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.”
He added, “I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from.”
I know this man personally, and I believe him. You can read in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy about his devotion to that hard-living Mamaw, and the grit she bequeathed to him, but I’ve heard him speak personally of the reverence he has for her. Bonnie Vance cursed like a sailor, and, as he said last night, threatened to run over with her car a druggie that teenage J.D. was hanging out with. If you ever saw her at the country club, she would be cleaning toilets. But that old woman gave America a new Reagan—a man who, if Trump is re-elected, will only be in his mid-forties when Trump’s term ends, and who will be in place to define the next era of American politics.
I don’t know if J.D. Vance has never read Renaud Camus, the French thinker behind the Great Replacement idea, but what Vance spoke of last night was fighting that very thing. The American Left will no doubt denounce his convention address as a “blood and soil” speech, in the same way they have falsely construed Camus’s writing as racist and xenophobic.
But if you read Camus’s political speeches—translated into English and published last year in Enemy of the Disaster—you will understand that the Great Replacement has very little to do with race. Here, in the words of a French theorist, is the enemy he shares with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance:
In the Great Replacement now underway, there are the replacers, the replacees, and the replacists. And the replacists are themselves the unlikely combination of two forces that one would have thought as remote from one another as possible, whose foot soldiers do not always even know that they are allied, but whose interests are in fact highly complementary and convergent, to such a point that the cordial relations between them, what one might call their objective alliance, to use the vocabulary of another era, have up till now rendered them invincible, all-powerful.
I am of course here referring to profit and the search for profit, on the one hand, the purely managerial conception of the world and the management of the human park, economism, financialization, Davos, and davocracy, this administration of the works by Great Financiers, banks, multinationals, robots, business, Big Tech; and, on the other, antiracism or, more specifically, the second antiracism, the one that is no longer, like the first, the necessary and eminently moral protection of a few threatened races, but the hatred of all, the pseudo-scientific negation of their existence and the desire to eradicate them, to suppress all differences between them, to merge them.
It is certain that Mamaw wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what the Frenchman is talking about. But he’s talking about her, and the other ‘Deplorables’ that the Ruling Class, as Vance put it, wish to neutralize in their quest for control. Here in Europe, they are everywhere. These Brusseloids—the Eurocrats, the Soroses, the Schwabs, the von der Leyens—wish to end nations, peoples, traditions, religions, and anything that stands in the way of creating the global hegemony of a frictionless market. Only Viktor Orbán and like-minded nationalist conservatives stand in their way.
Be of good cheer: If the Trump-Vance ticket wins in November, as seems ever more likely given the feebleness of Joe Biden, European nationalist conservatives will have a powerful new ally in Washington. European elites are quaking in their Louboutins at the prospect that the jig may soon be up.
When I last saw J.D. Vance, we drank beer and ate sausage at a pub in Munich, where he had come to the Munich Security Conference this past spring. He was feeling out of sorts because nobody there among the Western national security and foreign policy elites wanted to hear what he had to say about the need to end the Ukraine war with a peace deal, before things spiraled out of control. I felt bad for him. He was right, of course, but the same elite mentality that led America to the foolish war in Iraq—in which Vance served as a U.S. Marine—was still at work in the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, keeping the Davocratic war machine well-oiled with taxpayer dollars and the blood of Ukrainians, clanking away.
Now, from a hardscrabble childhood in Middletown, Ohio—Hollywood couldn’t make that up—comes a young man trained by elites at Yale Law School, who came to see that a man he once despised—Donald Trump—was actually right about these people who rule over us. Now this talented country boy favored by fortune is poised to use the skills the Ruling Class taught him to dismantle their manor house. Here in Europe, populists, nationalists, and dissident conservatives fighting a lonely battle against the Brussels powerhouse should take heart: after this fall’s election, the MAGA Americans are coming to help make Europe—the real Europe—great again.
J.D. Vance: The Reagan of the Millennials
U.S. Senator from Ohio and 2024 Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance on stage during the third day of the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on July 17, 2024.
Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP
J.D. Vance’s speech last night at the Republican National Convention was a landmark in American politics. It sealed the realignment of American politics. When Vance said the GOP henceforth would be not on the side of Wall Street, but of the “working man,” in one sense, he effectively announced the end of Reaganism.
But that’s not quite true. In his era, forty years ago, Reagan spoke for the common man, and won the common man’s allegiance. Reagan stood for old-fashioned American patriotism, and for advocating common sense values against an out-of-touch elite in both the Democratic Party and among country-club Republicans. Reagan was the right man for his time.
Times have changed. American needed Reagan’s free market entrepreneurialism and his robust, confrontational foreign policy to break the spell of statist sclerosis and national paralysis. The problems America faced in 1980 are very different from the problems it faces today. As Vance recalled, the free-trade fundamentalism ended up creating globalism, and with it the collapse of America’s industrial might. It also allowed Wall Street to run wild—abetted, please note, by the Clinton Democrats—wreaking havoc on the stability of working-class lives.
The Democrats had no real response to this. Nor did the standard-issue Republicans. The Democrats committed themselves to a left-wing cultural revolution, while doing relatively little to address the material conditions of American life. The Republicans fell back on Zombie Reaganism, as if the solutions of 1980 were evergreen truths. And both parties, especially the GOP, became devotees of permanent war, both hard and soft. The Republicans acted under the guise of ‘spreading democracy’ as a cover for naked U.S. hegemony; the Democrats did too, adding cultural leftism to the mix (e.g., pressuring other countries to accept LGBT dogmas).
That’s over now. Donald Trump knocked holes in the wall of complacency and denial in 2016, and stands to clear even more ground if he is re-elected. And given his brilliant choice of Vance, Trump has not only chosen the most articulate and credible possible advocate of his sensibilities, but laid the groundwork for the permanent restructuring not only of American conservatism, but of America itself. Because Trump chose J.D. Vance, Trumpism will long outlast its founder. Trump resisted the pleas of media mogul Rupert Murdoch to choose someone tamer and more controllable as his running mate, and in so doing, passed the torch to a fighting tribune of the new MAGA generation.
Last night in Milwaukee, Vance emerged as the Ronald Reagan of the Millennials. He came across as patriotic and optimistic, but not sentimental. The anecdotes he shared about his rough childhood were not only factually true, but told mythical truths about what America is, and what she might be again.
The Vance story that will befuddle and alarm Europeans is his tale of finding 19 loaded handguns in his Mamaw’s house after she died. Vance framed this as a sign that though his tough old working-class grandmother was old and infirm, she was determined to defend her house by violence if necessary. The ABC News commentators freaked out over this. Europeans probably did too.
Not me, and not a wide swath of America. I come from the rural South, a place where most people are armed, and consider it not only a right, but a responsibility. Urban American liberals, like most Europeans, consider guns to be frightening, full stop. In J.D. Vance’s America, guns are what good people use to stop bad people from wreaking havoc. We look at the would-be Trump assassin, and think not, “It’s terrible that he had a gun,” but rather, “If only the armed defenders of the president had been doing their job, they could have taken him out before he fired a shot.”
What Europeans (and U.S. liberals) don’t get about the American character is that violence is bred in the bone. Ours is a nation whose character was forged by the frontier experience—for better or worse. At lunch in Budapest this week with a retired international banker, an American, he expressed doubt that Europe will be able to compete economically. Why? Because Europeans, in his view, lack the entrepreneurial, risk-taking impulse that comes naturally to Americans. That same independent, self-sufficient mentality is also behind the American devotion to gun rights.
I grew up around guns, in a hunting culture. I bought my first shotgun at age 10. My father taught me how to use it safely, and we hunted together. This was common for rural boys (and girls too—my sister was a homecoming queen and hunter who knew how to shoot, and how to skin a deer). We are all taught to treat guns with great care. The gun violence of the American ghettos was alien to us. We believed we needed guns to protect ourselves from criminals, especially given that out in the country, the sheriff is far away.
Granted, it’s unusual that Mamaw had 19 loaded pistols in her house, but we from J.D. Vance’s America would think of that as merely eccentric, and relatable. In American cities wracked by violent crime, especially since the Black Lives Matter riots, there are no doubt a lot of ordinary people who never thought of owning a gun who bought them to protect themselves and their families, having lost faith in the ability of the government to do so.
Vance also spoke of America not as a country of ideas alone, but most of all, as a nation of people. He told a moving story about seven generations of his family being buried on an Appalachian mountainside.
“That is a homeland. That is our homeland,” he said. “People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.”
He added, “I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from.”
I know this man personally, and I believe him. You can read in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy about his devotion to that hard-living Mamaw, and the grit she bequeathed to him, but I’ve heard him speak personally of the reverence he has for her. Bonnie Vance cursed like a sailor, and, as he said last night, threatened to run over with her car a druggie that teenage J.D. was hanging out with. If you ever saw her at the country club, she would be cleaning toilets. But that old woman gave America a new Reagan—a man who, if Trump is re-elected, will only be in his mid-forties when Trump’s term ends, and who will be in place to define the next era of American politics.
I don’t know if J.D. Vance has never read Renaud Camus, the French thinker behind the Great Replacement idea, but what Vance spoke of last night was fighting that very thing. The American Left will no doubt denounce his convention address as a “blood and soil” speech, in the same way they have falsely construed Camus’s writing as racist and xenophobic.
But if you read Camus’s political speeches—translated into English and published last year in Enemy of the Disaster—you will understand that the Great Replacement has very little to do with race. Here, in the words of a French theorist, is the enemy he shares with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance:
It is certain that Mamaw wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what the Frenchman is talking about. But he’s talking about her, and the other ‘Deplorables’ that the Ruling Class, as Vance put it, wish to neutralize in their quest for control. Here in Europe, they are everywhere. These Brusseloids—the Eurocrats, the Soroses, the Schwabs, the von der Leyens—wish to end nations, peoples, traditions, religions, and anything that stands in the way of creating the global hegemony of a frictionless market. Only Viktor Orbán and like-minded nationalist conservatives stand in their way.
Be of good cheer: If the Trump-Vance ticket wins in November, as seems ever more likely given the feebleness of Joe Biden, European nationalist conservatives will have a powerful new ally in Washington. European elites are quaking in their Louboutins at the prospect that the jig may soon be up.
When I last saw J.D. Vance, we drank beer and ate sausage at a pub in Munich, where he had come to the Munich Security Conference this past spring. He was feeling out of sorts because nobody there among the Western national security and foreign policy elites wanted to hear what he had to say about the need to end the Ukraine war with a peace deal, before things spiraled out of control. I felt bad for him. He was right, of course, but the same elite mentality that led America to the foolish war in Iraq—in which Vance served as a U.S. Marine—was still at work in the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, keeping the Davocratic war machine well-oiled with taxpayer dollars and the blood of Ukrainians, clanking away.
Now, from a hardscrabble childhood in Middletown, Ohio—Hollywood couldn’t make that up—comes a young man trained by elites at Yale Law School, who came to see that a man he once despised—Donald Trump—was actually right about these people who rule over us. Now this talented country boy favored by fortune is poised to use the skills the Ruling Class taught him to dismantle their manor house. Here in Europe, populists, nationalists, and dissident conservatives fighting a lonely battle against the Brussels powerhouse should take heart: after this fall’s election, the MAGA Americans are coming to help make Europe—the real Europe—great again.
READ NEXT
Pogroms for Palestine and the Perils of Individualism
French Distributors and Booksellers Shut Out Right-Wing Star’s Autobiography
Trump and the Elite Replacement Paradox