How J.D. Vance Abandoned His Tough Love for the White Working Class

That change has hardly gone unnoticed among rural people.
“Peter Thiel has spent millions of dollars convincing the American media that
J.D. Vance has something to say about rural America,” Matthew Hildreth, the
executive director of RuralOrganizing.org, told us. “But rural Americans don’t
need J.D. Vance to write our elegy, we need politicians who will stand up to
corporations like Purdue Pharma who are exploiting our communities every chance
they get.” 

To be fair, Vance has undertaken some legitimately populist
efforts in the Senate, including joining with Elizabeth Warren on bills that would target the executives
of big banks when they fail. But his critique of corporate America is
selective, to put it mildly. In fact, Vance is a leading light of the “new right,” a group of conservative politicians and
intellectuals who believe we are in the midst of a civilizational collapse and
the answer is for conservatives to reject their prior belief in small
government as they mount a comprehensive assault—wielding the power of
government—on all the major institutions of public life. Vance has expressed admiration for the way Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán seized control
of state universities, for example, which Vance believes is the appropriate way
to undo left-wing influence there. 

At a basic level, the new right is proposing not to
eliminate elite control of institutions but to replace the current elite with a
new one, much as Trump’s project to “drain the swamp” actually means simply
replacing one class of Washington insiders with another, more corrupt one. If
the Trump-Vance government takes over America’s universities like Orbán did,
they won’t be holding national plebiscites to decide what books history majors
will have to read. Some group of government elites will do it. Perhaps with
Vance’s supervision.