JD Vance’s hillbilly malady threatens smaller nations

Analysis: It was Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance’s insider memoir of the white working class, that propelled him to the fore among those blue-collar rust belt Americans who felt so deeply disaffected with the institutions of US government, business and media.
The book detailed how his family could never fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism and poverty so characteristic of their part of America – and how he himself still carries around those demons. The publisher called it an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream.
When he promoted his book at the height of Trump’s 2016 election campaign, it was almost as if he was contesting Trump’s claim to the loyalties of middle America. “Trump is cultural heroin,” he wrote. “I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place,” he said on radio.
So his announcement as Donald Trump’s running mate poses an intriguing question: will the 39-year-old Ohio senator “champion the hardworking men and women of our Country”, as Trump put it in a post on his Truth social media network today? Will he be “strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond”?
Or will Vance go far beyond what Trump envisages, in advancing the bold libertarian ideology of his mentor and funder, Peter Thiel?
The billionaire Thiel was, of course, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He’s better known on this side of the world for using NZ as a bolthole, in his political battle to escape the constraints of US and EU regulation.
He was controversially granted NZ citizenship by the John Key Government, allowing him to avoid the requirements of the Overseas Investment Act and buy an estate at Damper Bay near Wānaka for $13.5m. “I believe in New Zealand,” he said.
(Thiel has been seeking to build a four-building, grass-roofed luxury lodge there. But just six weeks ago, the Environment Court declined his appeal.)
As Matt Nippert once wrote in the NZ Herald, Thiel sketched out a vision of technology enabling a world post-government – a vision broadly shared by PayPal’s other founders, Tesla’s Elon Musk’ LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and YouTube’s Steve Chen. As their influence grew they would become known as the ‘PayPal mafia’.
Most of that group have concentrated their ‘new right’ attentions on US politics, but Thiel has always looked global in both business and politics. In the UK, for instance, he’s recently secured a £330m (NZ$700m) National Health Service data contract, warning the British public they need to be freed from their “Stockholm syndrome” dependency on the NHS. “Highways create traffic jams, welfare creates poverty, schools make people dumb and the NHS makes people sick.”
In 2016 (the year after taking up NZ citizenship) Thiel endorsed Trump at the Republican Convention.
This morning, Trump returned to the Republican Convention to accept the GOP’s nomination to head the Republican presidential ticket.
Trump had earlier phoned Thiel to remind him that he had backed two of Thiel’s protégés, Vance and Blake Masters, in their Senate races last year. Thiel had given each of them more than US$10m; both were personally close to him. Vance is a former employee of Thiel’s Mithril Capital.
According to James Pogue in Vanity Fair, their ‘new right’ ideas are going to shape the future of the American right – and that was written before Vance was elected first to Senate, and now named as vice presidential candidate.
When Trump called Thiel, he said he wanted the same financial commitment.
But Thiel turned him down; Trump told him he was “very sad, very sad to hear that”.
A month ago, Thiel conceded that “if you hold a gun to my head”, he’d vote Trump. But today at the convention in Milwaukee, Thiel wasn’t there to endorse him. Indeed, Thiel’s support has been wavering – and perhaps that was a small factor in Trump’s decision to name Vance on his ticket.
Thiel’s long since given up on government and mainstream politicians to deliver his vision: a stateless world free of regulation or limits on human enterprise. He gave an interview last year to Atlantic staff writer Barton Gellman, that the magazine headlined, ‘Peter Thiel is taking a break from democracy’.
Gellman wrote that Thiel was “the purest distillation of Silicon Valley’s reigning ethos”, and democracy was one of his many, many disappointments. In the interview, Thiel promised he wouldn’t be giving money to any politician in the next presidential campaign – including Trump. But to Thiel, Vance isn’t a politician. He’s more like a son.
While at Yale, Vance attended a talk by Thiel about technological stagnation and the decline of American elites – a talk Vance described as “the most significant moment” of his time at Yale.
“If technological innovation were actually driving real prosperity,” Vance said, “our elites wouldn’t feel increasingly competitive with one another over a dwindling number of prestigious outcomes”.
Thiel’s biographer Max Chafkin described Vance as an “extension” of Thiel.
President Joe Biden, speaking to media at Joint Base Andrews today, said JD Vance was “a clone of Trump on the issues”.
Both are clearly wrong.
The question, which the world may watch with some trepidation, is whether Vance can broker a compromise between the Maga nationalism of Trump, and the stateless libertarianism of Thiel. According to Vanity Fair, Vance is a venture capitalist who is young enough to be exposed to dissident online currents, but also shaped by the most deeply traditionalist thinking of the American right.
“Great choice,” tweeted Elon Musk, after Trump’s announcement.
At Founders Fund, a venture capital firm backed by billionaire Peter Thiel, partner Delian Asparouhov posted: “It’s JD Vance. We have a former tech VC in the White House. Greatest country on earth baby.”
Pogue has interviewed him. “Vance believes that a well-educated and culturally liberal American elite has greatly benefited from globalisation, the financialisation of our economy, and the growing power of big tech,” he writes. “This has led an Ivy League intellectual and management class – a quasi-aristocracy he calls ‘the regime’ – to adopt a set of economic and cultural interests that directly oppose those of people in places like Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up.
“To Vance – and he’s said this – culture war is class warfare.”
Vance described two possibilities that many on the new right imagine – that the system of government will either fall apart naturally, or that a great leader will assume semi-dictatorial powers.
The right-wing ideologies of Trump and Thiel may seem hard to reconcile – nationalism and the end of the state are surely on two completely different sides of right-wing philosophy?
But what they share is a profound disdain for central government, as it exists in Washington D.C. and around the Western world. And by proxy, they reject such multilateral institutions as the United Nations, Nato and the World Trade Organization.
Europe and Nato are watching worriedly to see whether a Trump presidency will again retrench, when US support is needed most in the Ukraine-Russia conflict – and now Trump has promoted one of the strongest critics of US involvement. “I got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” Vance told Steve Bannon in 2022.
He shocked Nato allies at this year’s Munich Security Conference by calling for US retrenchment from Europe, but pointedly said it was necessary so that the US could pivot to Asia to deal with China.
He’s rejected any international constraints on Russia and Israel to stop them prosecuting their wars. And indeed, he’d like to free the hand of the US president to mount his own unilateral military action against drug cartels in Mexico and, indeed, against China if deemed necessary.
Vance has supported Trump’s aggressive use of tariffs against China and other US trading partners, and will back renewed trade wars. Last year he opposed US trade recognition for Vietnam, arguing it would “embolden and advantage the Chinese and Vietnamese communist parties”, and hurt American industries and their workers.
He’s made no secret of his desire to use government policies to rebuild industrial jobs across the deindustrialised Midwest, Politico reports, through tools such as tariffs and trade barriers – two of Trump’s favourite weapons. “You’re going to see a much more aggressive approach to protecting domestic manufacturers,” Vance says.
A small trading nation like New Zealand can’t use might to protect its economic and security position; it is reliant on the rules-based order enforced by multilateral organisations.
That leaves it vulnerable to Trump and Vance’s enthusiasm for renewing trade wars, and dismantling multilateral rules.
Politico’s Ian Ward interviewed Vance in April, and wrote that he’s deeply sceptical of the system of laws, norms and multilateral institutions established in the years following World War II to mitigate global conflict and facilitate international economic activity.
“As Vance sees it, this system has enriched economic elites while harming working-class people who are rooted in older industrial economies — all while failing to deliver on the ultimate goal of liberalising non-democratic countries like China and Russia.”
In place of the rules-based international order, Ward writes, Vance wants America to chart a new, more nationalistic system where individual nations are solely responsible for their own security and economic wellbeing, and more insulated from global economic and military entanglements.
He wants a new and insular American Empire whose citizens are freed of reciprocal obligations.