J.D. Vance is heir to a more radical politics than Trumpism

Back in the 1980s conventional wisdom held that America was moving rightward under Ronald Reagan. But that is not what Patrick Buchanan saw when he surveyed the country as Reagan’s presidency was coming to a close. In his autobiography, „Right from the Beginning”, published in 1988, Mr Buchanan, a Republican stalwart who had worked for Reagan and Richard Nixon, lamented that the „once-Christian country” had abandoned the Judeo-Christian values he was raised on as a Catholic.

His critique might ring a bell. A secular leftist movement with „its own methods for punishing heretics and policing orthodoxy”, Mr Buchanan wrote, was imposing its values by obsessing over perceived racism, sexism and environmental harm, spreading socialism, censoring speech and teaching young Americans to despise their history. Mr Buchanan inveighed against „an absurd ‘trade war’” to restrict Asian products as „an act of almost terminal stupidity for the West”. Following the lead of the editor William F. Buckley, also a Republican and a Catholic, Mr Buchanan saw free trade as essential to America’s struggle with the Soviet Union.

De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.

Then the Berlin Wall fell. When Mr Buchanan mounted his insurgent campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996, he spiked his cultural conservatism with economic populism. He condemned the North American Free Trade Agreement as betraying American workers and urged tariffs on Japan and China. He was now promoting an isolationist foreign policy—he called it „America first”—that included a „security fence” to stop illegal immigrants. „They’ve got no right to break our laws and break into our country and go on welfare,” he thundered.

That history is useful to understanding the most significant conversions so far of America’s protean vice-president, J.D. Vance. Having likened Donald Trump to heroin, Mr Vance was suspected of opportunism when he saw the light before campaigning for a Senate seat, which he won in 2022. His political conversion makes more sense in view of the religious one, to Catholicism, that he underwent around the same time. Since descending on his golden escalator in 2015, Mr Trump has campaigned on a reheated version of Buchananism, itself a revival of the right-wing Catholic politics between the two world wars.

One takeaway from Mr Vance’s latest book about himself, „Communion”, is that he is the heir of Mr Buchanan more than of Mr Trump. That makes him a true radical, intent on a complete transformation of society. Ever the pragmatist, Mr Trump has no interest in the grand ideas that enchant Mr Vance and guided Mr Buchanan. Mr Trump believes in tariffs and walls, but his isolationist politics has proved no match for his yen to project power globally, just as his commitment to Judeo-Christian values did not stop him from posting an image of himself as Christ-like.

It is hard to imagine Mr Trump citing, as Mr Vance does and Mr Buchanan did, a papal encyclical from 1891, Rerum Novarum, to argue for higher wages and unionisation. Mr Vance also sounds much less like Mr Trump than Mr Buchanan when he condemns the fusion of the Republican Party with conservative Christianity for prioritising low taxes over factory jobs; when he accuses both parties of „casting aside the Christian inheritance of our civilisation”; or when he laments „our worship at the altar of commerce” (isn’t that altar stamped with the Trump logo?). Mr Trump says he has already brought forth a golden age. Mr Vance, 41, casts himself as leading a long struggle to save the world from liberalism.

But unlike Mr Buchanan, Mr Vance may not mean any of it. Given how many times he’s changed his answers to big questions, he seems strangely untroubled by whether he may be wrong yet again. Whether as anti-Trumper or Trumper, atheist or believer, striving elite or scourge of elites, Mr Vance never evinces doubt. When it comes to J.D. Vance, J.D. Vance’s faith does not waver. This makes it hard to guess which ideas he is committed to. He has said that Republicans „need to be really ruthless” in using power; in „Communion” he writes that politics is „a dirty business” in which „you have to make compromises and shape the public narrative”. Is he referring to malicious fables about immigrants, like his claims that Haitians in Ohio were eating their neighbours’ pets? Or is he referring to his narrative about himself? Which narratives are proof of ruthlessness, not conviction?

Faith surpassing understanding

His account of America’s fall from theocracy is certainly unpersuasive. Oddly, for a book about faith in public life published during America’s 250th anniversary, America’s vice-president does not discuss its founding ideas about religion’s role in government. He instead makes such risible claims as, „In modern American politics, it’s become passé to talk about God”, noting that back in the day John Kennedy „invoked God three times” in his inaugural address. Does this proudly millennial vice-president know how to use Google? He could have discovered that Joe Biden, a devout Catholic, invoked God four times in his own inaugural. Has he forgotten when Barack Obama led a grieving congregation in „Amazing Grace”, a simple, stirring public act of faith the likes of which Americans have never witnessed from Mr Trump—or Mr Vance?

Some things have changed since Mr Buchanan’s era. He believed „no conservative reformation” could succeed without the „recapture” of the Supreme Court. Led by Leonard Leo, a Catholic, the conservative Federalist Society has since helped install a conservative—and Catholic—court majority. Americans should probably be comforted the vice-president is nevertheless so worked up about the same sorts of concerns as Mr Buchanan, and Mr Buckley before him. Maybe politics is ever thus, and the republic is not going to hell. Its problems certainly do not include a dearth of sanctimonious blowhards, in any event.

© 2026 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.