JD Vance speaking in Detroit, MI in 2024. Credit: Flickr/GageSkidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)
JD Vance has been many things to many people over the decade he’s been in the public eye. From the critical “Trump whisperer” of 2016 to a “post-liberal Catholic” convert to his Peter Thiel-backed Senate campaign to vice president in 2025, Vance’s career over the last decade may seem jarring and disjointed — but there are threads that carry through it all.
The ‘voice of the Rust Belt’
JD Vance became a household name in 2016 with his bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which chronicled his impoverished Appalachian upbringing, his stint in the Marines (including deployment in Iraq), his work for Peter Thiel and finally his time at Yale Law School. The book made him a darling of the liberal media during the first Trump administration. The Washington Post called him “the voice of the Rust Belt,” and he became a regular commentator on CNN, NPR and the opinion pages of The New York Times, where he often made clear that — despite his criticisms of Trump at the time — he remained a conservative Republican.
“Hillbilly Elegy,” and its 2020 film adaptation, present a deeply conservative and caricatured view of Appalachia specifically and poverty in the United States more broadly. The overarching narrative frames Vance as pulling himself up by his bootstraps while blaming working-class people’s “cultural and moral rot” for social ills like poverty, addiction and underdevelopment.
Appalachian people of all stripes have criticized the book’s portrayal of their region — depicting it as solely white, reactionary and unsalvageable — while many liberals embraced it as an easy scapegoat for Donald Trump’s 2016 election.
Conversion to Catholicism
In 2019, Vance converted to Catholicism, describing himself as a “post-liberal” Catholic. The political dynamics within the Catholic Church, especially in the U.S., are complex, but in short, there has been a sharp rise in recent years of relatively young and more conservative converts. This contrasts with historical trends, where progressive elements — including figures like Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day and the draft-card-burning Catonsville Nine — played a larger role, despite the Church’s reactionary currents.
Vance has refrained from aligning with any specific tendency among post-liberal Catholics but has shared stages with Patrick Deneen, who advocates for “regime change” by stacking government branches with reactionary Catholic operatives. His use of theology to justify reactionary politics echoes Catholic integralism, promoted by Yale Law professor Adrian Vermeule, which envisions an “integrated” Church and state. These strategies bear more than a passing resemblance to groups with historical ties to 20th-century fascist and anti-communist movements, notably Opus Dei, a covert network of reactionary Catholics credited with converting many high-level judges.
These movements are more complex than the largely Protestant evangelical “Christian nationalism” that has dominated media coverage in recent years. Vance, Vermeule, Deneen and other post-liberal Catholic thinkers in the U.S. often clash with Pope Francis and more progressive factions within the Church.
Agent of venture capital
Vance’s successful 2022 Senate run in Ohio can largely be attributed to the $15 million donated by Peter Thiel, the arch-conservative founder of surveillance company Palantir Technologies and a central figure in the so-called “PayPal Mafia.” As previously reported in Liberation News:
“Thiel jump-started Vance’s career by giving him a top role at his venture capital firm Mithril Capital. One could say Vance owes his entire political career to Thiel. In fact, during Trump’s 2016 campaign, Vance was an outspoken ‘never Trump’ Republican. It wasn’t until 2021, after a meeting at Mar-a-Lago between Trump, Vance and Thiel himself, that Vance warmed to Trump.”
After receiving the vice presidential nomination in 2024, Vance publicly urged Thiel to “get off the sidelines” and fund the Trump-Vance ticket. Thiel — and Silicon Valley venture capitalists broadly — see Vance as a means to deregulate the tech sector, particularly artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies, and roll back existing taxes.
Marc Andreessen, a long time Democrat who switched to Trump in the most recent election and author of the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” cited Biden’s proposed 25% tax on unrealized gains for households worth over $100 million as his “last straw,” claiming it would mean that “venture capital just ends. Firms like ours just don’t exist.”
On March 18, Vance spoke at the Andreessen Horowitz American Dynamism Summit, promising, “We’re going to cut your taxes, we’re going to slash regulations, we’re going to reduce the cost of energy so you can build, build, build.”
Vice President JD Vance
It remains to be seen how these trends will play out in practice. The factions of the so-called “New Right” — from Silicon Valley futurists to post-liberal Catholic integralists — are not monolithic and contain internal contradictions. But there are also synergies, and Vance serves as an avatar uniting many of these forces.
The Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the federal bureaucracy align with the goals of reactionary neo-monarchists like Thiel associate Curtis Yarvin, Silicon Valley technocrats, libertarian advocates of corporate sovereignty and traditional conservatives intent on undoing the New Deal and civil rights reforms. These groups may disagree on what should replace liberal democracy — a Catholic theocracy, corporate fiefdoms managed by venture capital firms or a centralized technocracy led by figures like Elon Musk — but they unite in their opposition to the current system.
These contradictions will sharpen as the Trump administration grapples with governance. Reactionary fantasies are easy to speculate about but harder to execute. But most Americans do not want these alternatives — they want a rational, humane system: a socialist system. It is now up to us to fight for it.
