Politico Listed Six Thinkers Who Shaped J.D. Vance's Worldview. I Know Two of Them. (UNLOCKED)

And I've got some thoughts about those two!

Two weeks ago, after J.D. Vance was announced as Donald Trump’s running mate, Politico put out an article by Ian Ward called “The Seven Thinkers and Groups That Have Shaped J.D. Vance’s Unusual Worldview.” That’s thinkers and groups because Ward decided to throw in the entire Claremont Institute. The six “thinkers” are Patrick Deneen, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, René Girard, Sohrab Ahmari, and Rod Dreher. The five who are still alive are Deneen, Thiel, Yarvin, Ahmari, and Dreher. And as I was looking at that list, I had an odd and uncomfortable realization.

I have some level of personal acquaintance with a full 40% of the guys who Politico regards as Vance’s five biggest living influences.

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So as not to bury the lede here, my perspective on J.D. Vance is that I very deeply despise J.D. Vance. Some of that’s about Hillbilly Elegy, and some of it’s about the emptiness of his more recent “populist” posturing.

I wrote about the latter for the Daily Beast in 2022, and I’m working on an article about Vance’s political evolution for Jacobin right now, so for the moment, I’ll just note that “knowing two of the five guys who are supposed to be big influences on J.D. Vance” isn’t exactly a point of pride for me. But I do have very different feelings about the two guys in question.

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Five names down the Politico list, we get to Sohrab Ahmari.

After a description of the twists and turns of his political evolution, Ward writes:

He has since moved rightward, embracing Trump and becoming a chief advocate for a new style of “working-class conservatism” that has its roots in the tradition of Catholic social democracy — which Ahmari describes, half-jokingly, as “pro-life New Dealism.”

I’ve debated Sohrab twice—once on the “Catholic” half of that package and once on the “social democracy” half. My own view is that social democracy is a nice start, but the ultimate goal should be a more basic transformation of the economic basis of our society, and I think the egalitarian values that motivate this project are incompatible with social conservatism.

In both conversations, he impressed me as an interesting and thoughtful interlocutor. Since then, despite our deep and numerous disagreements, he’s been nice enough to publish me in Compact several times and he’s even in my Capital class. I genuinely like the guy.

One of the things I like about Sohrab is that, whether I agree or disagree with him about any particular subject, I never doubt that he’s sincere.

So, for example, when he says the GOP should be more pro-labor, he actually means it. Hence, he thinks Republicans should stop opposing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, better known as the PRO Act. It’s a package of reforms that would undo some of the features of American labor law that make it far more difficult for American workers to organize unions than it is for their counterparts in comparable countries.

As Ward correctly notes in Politico, Sohrab is also fan of J.D. Vance. I wish he weren’t! But, to his credit, Sohrab has pressed the Senator a bit when he’s interviewed him about the mismatch between his opposition to the PRO Act and his alleged pro-worker populism.

After all, the PRO Act has hundreds of House and Senate cosponsors, many of whom could hardly be mistaken for fire-breathing leftists. Chuck Schumer supports it. Vance doesn’t.

Here’s how Sohrab has described that interaction:

When I pressed him on this point for a New Statesman profile in March, Vance noted that he supports a regime of sectoral bargaining like the ones that prevail in continental Europe, rather than shop-by-shop organising bequeathed by the New Deal. He also noted that, as it is, the existing, mainstream labour movement is irreconcilably hostile to Republicans and that more trust-building is needed before a comprehensive rapprochement can take place.

The second of those rationales strikes me as grimly funny. Vance’s legislative scorecard from the AFL-CIO currently sits at 0%. In other words, there were zero times in 2023 when he voted labor’s way. And he isn’t willing to make it easier for workers to organize unions because the unions that already exist are, for some strange reason, “hostile to Republicans.”

The first rationale is incoherent. In countries where sectoral bargaining has delivered the goods, this reflects the power of the unions on the workers’ side of those sector-wide bargaining tables. How are we supposed to replicate that result in conditions where private sector unionization hovers a bit over 6%?

And let’s talk about that “shop-by-shop” structure of American labor law. As things stand, for example, American workers aren’t allowed to go on strike over issues that aren’t part of bargaining between the strikers and their employer—not even in support of other workers on strike against the same employer. Does Vance want some really sweeping overhaul of American labor law that would change all that? If so, why wouldn’t he at least support the PRO Act as a modest first step in this general direction? In what other area of policy does he refuse to support things that would go some distance toward his political goals but not all the way?

Be serious. No Senator works that way, and Vance most certainly doesn’t.

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All of this is to say that, on those issues where Sohrab’s views most obviously diverge from standard-issue American conservatism, I see very little evidence that he has shaped Vance’s worldview. And that’s a shame.

On other hand, if J.D. Vance ends up a heartbeat away from the presidency, I’d be pretty disturbed by the idea that he had been influenced by the other person I know on Politico’s list.

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According to the article:

Vance has said he considers [Curtis] Yarvin a friend and has cited his writings in connection with his plan to fire a significant number of civil servants during a potential second Trump administration. “There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said on a conservative podcast in 2021, adding: “I think Trump is going to run again in 2024 [and] I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

In 2022, I did an in-person debate with Yarvin in Chicago. The debate itself went for two hours and change. The night before, we shared an Uber ride, which mostly consisted of him monologuing and occasionally pausing to ask me a question (usually about whether I’d read whatever he was monologuing about). We had a similar conversation in the back of a car driven by an event volunteer on the morning of the debate. At one point, he asked me if I believed in “the blank slate theory.” I said “no”—I’ve written several times about why I don’t think egalitarians need to deny that “human nature” is a thing or that it has a dark side—and he cut me off to monologue some more before I could elaborate. (Put a pin on this moment!) Finally, when we got to the venue, I watched him joke around with his fans over coffee and donuts just before we got started. True to his edgelord persona, a joke he told at least twice in my presence was that the subject of the debate was going to be “whether it was really six million or more like five point five.” (See Matt McManus’s deep dive on Yarvin in Commonweal for examples of this kind of thing popping up in his print ouvre.) What I’ve just described doesn’t add up to much of an acquaintance in the greater scheme of things, of course, but it was more than enough to get the man’s measure.

Yarvin is most notorious for calling himself a “monarchist,” though he gets pretty shifty and evasive when asked to explain what he means by this edgy-sounding description. Depending on the audience and context, he might insist that all he means by “monarch” is a strong executive with enough of a mandate that they can substantially reshape American politics—like FDR during the phase of the New Deal when Congress was willing to rubber-stamp just about anything he put in front of it. Or, in a different mood, he might start talking about how we need a figure who can play the same role in the American Republic that Augustus played in Rome. (If your Roman history is a bit rusty, Augustus closed out the republican period of Roman history, created the position that we now think of as “emperor,” and left it like a family heirloom to his wife’s son Tiberius.) Whatever exactly Yarvin has in mind, it seems safe to say that he’d regard the sweeping executive power-grab Bush and Cheney initiated after 9/11 as being no more than a good start.

Certainly, he’s contemptuous of democracy. One of his basic theses is that “the Cathedral”—he means, more or less, academia and big media—is ultimately responsible for shaping public opinion. There are points where this can sound like an odd echo of Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent model of how propaganda works, but Chomsky deeply believes in the ability of ordinary people to reason, deliberate, and govern themselves, and so he wants to expand the parameters of debate on key questions like economics and foreign policy. Yarvin takes for granted that the public is a horse that needs a rider.¹ He just wants one that matches his ideological preferences.

Vance has certainly had moments where he sounds a bit Yarvian (even when he’s not referencing the man by name). From the New York Times:

“We are in a late republican period,” Mr. Vance said in 2021, stressing the need to counter what he described as the political ruthlessness of the left. “If we’re going to push back against it, we have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

Seemingly going further than just emptying out the civil service, he told Ben Domenech the same year, “If we're going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class.”

In this worldview, not having a “ruling class” isn’t an option.

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All of this could just be empty edgelordism on Vance’s part. At the end of the day, the man might just be a regular Republican with a distasteful weakness for “based” rhetorical flourishes. (See here for a vastly more disturbing example.) But I want to substantiate my claim above that any genuine influence that Curtis Yarvin has exerted on the man who might become Vice President in January would be disturbing.

I suppose I could leave it at “Yarvin is a self-described ‘monarchist.’” Even if you don’t accept my wild-eyed radical socialist ideas about democracy extending to the workplace, one might hope a baseline commitment to democracy as a form of government would be a requirement for anyone aspiring to the number two spot in the American state. Whatever you think of socialism, in other words, monarchism seems pretty hard to square with what used to be called “Americanism.”

But my own experience of Yarvin is that I came into my encounter with him knowing about the “monarchism,” and I ended up being repulsed by how upfront he was about his racism.

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Yarvin claimed, early in our debate, that America has promoted democracy around the world—a claim usually made by neoconservatives who think it’s a good thing. Yarvin, as far as I can tell, accepts the neocons’ premise and switches the value judgment. I pushed back in exactly the way you’d expect. He accused me of having a Howard Zinn view of history—which I’m pretty comfortable with, since I’ve always admired Zinn—and we spent quite a bit of the debate arguing about America’s history of overthrowing left-wing governments in Latin America.

Yarvin is someone who’s happy enough to explain what he thinks, make reading recommendations, and try out witty one-liners illustrating his conclusions, but has very little taste for actually listening to someone’s objection or counterargument and responding to the specifics. That alone made all this frustrating. When I brought up the overthrow of democratically-elected socialist Salvador Allende, for example, Yarvin deflected with something about how Allende was much less culturally “Chilean” and more “American” than Pinochet. I suppose this was supposed to be a “gosh, makes you think” bit of counterintuitive reframing, but of course it has absolutely nothing to do with Nixon and Kissinger’s well-documented scheming to overthrow Allende and what that might say about the relationship between democracy and American foreign policy.

But the really jaw-dropping part was about Haiti.

I mentioned something about the various coups the U.S. has backed there over the years (possibly including the overthrow of Moïse in 2021) and various other forms of meddling like the State Department being revealed in Wikileaks cables to have lobbied Haiti’s government against raising the country’s minimum wage to the princely sum of $5 a day. Yarvin’s response was to pour derision on the idea that imperial interference can be blamed for Haiti’s problems rather than the innate features of Haiti’s people. Similarly, the many positive effects of social democracy in the Nordic countries I’d cited at other points in the debate were merely evidence of the superior character of those peoples. “When I think of a nation, I think of a people,” he said, and pointed out that just about every writer a couple hundred years ago took it for granted that there were such things as stable “national characters.” (I’d note that there are a lot of things everyone thought a couple hundred years ago that would be nearly universally dismissed today. This is called progress, and it’s a good thing.) Swap out the populations of Haiti and Sweden, or Haiti and Japan, he insisted, and the Swedes or Japanese would do just fine in Haitian circumstances. Haitians are simply the kind of people who need to be ruled by a strongman a la the Duvaliers or chaos will ensue.

He claimed in a podcast appearance after our debate that, whatever I pretended to think while the cameras were rolling, I’d told him in the car that I agreed with him about race. Apparently, he thinks “some ‘races’ are genetically inferior to others” and “the blank slate theory” are the only possible options.

At one point, the moderator gave Yarvin an out to make all this sound slightly less insanely racist by asking him if he thought this poor national character was genetic or merely cultural.

Yarvin demurred that he didn’t know how to test for that distinction.

As it happens, Sohrab had asked me earlier that week to write something for Compact on calls for US intervention in Haiti. What I ended up writing, as I sat in my brother’s backyard in Los Angeles the afternoon after the debate, gave me a chance to work out some of my anger about that conversation by explaining exactly how Haiti’s miserable conditions had come about in the first place:

The hostility of the great powers to the new republic of freed slaves had consequences that reverberate to this day. To wit, Haiti’s slaves had to quite literally pay for their freedom. An indemnity deal struck between the country and France in 1825 required the Haitians to pay massive reparations to their former owners for all the “property” lost in the revolution.

Even when the United States invaded and occupied Haiti in 1915, the debt wasn’t canceled. Instead, a new deal was struck seven years into that occupation, transferring the remains of the debt to the National City Bank of New York (now Citibank). It took up a major share of Haiti’s GDP every year until it was finally paid off—in 1947. Anyone who tries to tell a story about the origins of Haiti’s crushing poverty, crime, and inequality that doesn’t feature this history is peddling fairy tales.

Ten years after the debt was finally paid off, Haiti was saddled with the dictatorship of “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and then his son “Baby Doc.” American officials sometimes expressed discomfort with the absurdly corrupt, authoritarian, and violent Duvalier regime, but they nevertheless propped it up with arms and various forms of material support for standard Cold War anti-communist reasons.

After “Baby Doc” was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1986, the first democratically elected president of Haiti was Jean-Bertrand Aristide. One of his campaign promises says everything—he talked about raising the Haitian people from “misery to poverty.” He was overthrown in a 1991 coup. It’s a matter of public record that some of the coup-plotters had been on the CIA payroll for several years beforehand, though the agency itself may not have had direct involvement or prior knowledge of what was coming; the United States actually restored Aristide a few years later. In 2004, he was overthrown again. This time, US Marines “escorted” him out of the country during a new round of chaos and violence on the island. Aristide himself insists that he was kidnapped. His political party, Lavalas, was repeatedly excluded from subsequent elections.

Is 2004 ancient history? How about 2017—the year the last group of foreign troops left the island? How about the assassination of Moïse and his replacement by Henry in 2021?

So:

Does J.D. Vance sympathize with Yarvin’s brainrot about “national characters”?

Does he agree that there are entire “peoples” who are innately incapable of enjoying the same freedoms as Americans and Swedes?

Perhaps not.

But I sure wish someone would ask him.

1. As I emphasized in my initial write-up of the debate for Jacobin, there’s more overlap on this point between Yarvinism and technocratic liberalism than proponents of either ideology might like to admit.