“We are done sacrificing supply chains to unlimited global trade, and we’re going to stamp more and more products with that beautiful label, ‘Made in the USA.’ We’re going to build factories again, put people to work, making real products for American families made with the hands of American workers. Together we will protect the wages of American workers and stop the Chinese Communist Party from building their middle class on the backs of American citizens. Together we will make sure our allies share in the burden of securing world peace. No more free rides for nations that betray the generosity of the American taxpayer.”
JD Vance’s pithy summary of the Republican programme he accepted as Donald Trump’s vice-presidential nominee in Milwaukee is instructive as a critique of previous US globalising policies. It represents a sea change in attitudes that extends in good part to both Republicans and Democrats. And it draws on a serious body of conservative political, policy and intellectual ideas from recent years.
Vance’s background as a hillbilly from the decaying steel town of Middletown, Ohio, who became a Marine, went to college, studied law at Yale and then became a venture capitalist in California gives him insight into the popular and elite worlds clashing in this election. The two worlds straddle both parties, notwithstanding their radical political polarisation. How they are to be united is a major issue in the campaign.
In an informative Politico essay, Ian Ward lists among the thinkers and groups who have influenced Vance: Peter Thiel, the Californian venture capitalist who financed his Senate campaign; Curtis Yarvin, the neo-reactionary blogger who says American democracy has degenerated into a corrupt oligarchy and needs a monarchical CEO or dictator to debug it of liberalism; René Giraud, the French Catholic philosopher and literary critic; the heterodox writer Sohrab Ahmari, who promotes a new type of Catholic social democracy and working-class conservatism; the Claremont Institute, a Trumpist think tank opposing “wokery” on gender and race; and the Orthodox Christian writer and blogger Rod Dreher.
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Top of Ward’s list, though, is the Catholic political theorist Patrick Deneen, now of Notre Dame University, and author of the influential book Regime Change, Towards a Postliberal Future, published last year. His new order would be grounded on conservative and religious values, not individual rights. He supports tariffs and manufacturing incentives, foreign policy isolationism and wants limits on immigration, same-sex marriage, gender-affirming care and abortion.
Deneen says: “what I would propose are things that were once recognisably, probably, at the heart, formerly, of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party I grew up in. I’m an Irish-Catholic guy. My grandmother had a picture of the Pope and John F Kennedy up on her kitchen wall. And that’s the kind of world I grew up in, but that party doesn’t seem recognisable to me any more.” Joe Biden shares that heritage, of course, but Deneen and others say it has deserted the party now.
His book proposes Machiavellian means to attain the Aristotelian end of a post-liberal order. Regime change will require “the peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class”, making way for a new order in which “existing political forms remain the same” but are informed by “a fundamentally different ethos”.
The new regime would be led by conservative elites who share the values of non-elites and govern in their interests. Deneen calls the resulting alliance between postliberal elites and conservative populists “aristopopulism – populism with a feudal touch” inspired partly by the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville’s critique of early US democracy, but also by Burkean visions of a stable social order in which subalterns know their place. It should span government, academia, media, entertainment and other cultural institutions.
Deneen’s critique of liberalism is founded on the Irish-American family communalism he grew up with. He says it is “a philosophy, broadly of relationality, but of seeing ourselves primarily as ... creatures who are embedded in contexts and histories and traditions, and kind of deep webs of relationships that expand from the home outward”. He counterposes that to the dominant US liberal elite philosophy of atomised individualism.
If Trump wins, the stage is set for a severe shock inspired too by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a detailed action plan for reactionary change. The shock would resonate through Europe, energising Meloni, Orban, Farage and Le Pen. The deep contradictions involved in any such right-wing regime change include plans to cut the public spending that sustains left-behind working-class communities and to curtail their independent trade unions. Alternative left-wing – and liberal – efforts to engage workers must also tackle the material and spiritual conditions diagnosed here to show Vance’s regime change is not for them.