Down the Online Reactionary Rabbit Hole

These days, Vance likes to rail against elites who have neglected hardworking people like the ones he encountered during his summer excursions to stay with his grandmother in Kentucky. He’d like you to believe that this “populism” is his organic reaction to what he saw as a young man in deindustrialized Appalachia, a region that — as he quite accurately said in his speech at the RNC — was devastated as “jobs were sent overseas and our children were sent to war.”

But regarding Vance’s trajectory, nothing could be further from the truth. As Vance grew up, attended law school at Yale, worked as a venture capitalist, and wrote his breakout bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy, his organic reaction to those early experiences was to finger-wag the “hillbillies” for their alleged culture of poverty. This culture, he wrote in Hillbilly Elegy, ran “far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy.” He said that “too many young men” were afraid of “hard work.” He praised right-wing think tank ghoul Charles Murray for his writings on inner-city poverty and said that Murray’s observations would apply just as well to what he saw in rural Kentucky.

In other words, during this phase of his life, Vance’s economic views were about the furthest thing imaginable from “populism.” Nor, as it turns out, were his cultural values particularly conservative. Vance’s transgender friend and classmate from Yale, Sofia Nelson, shared a trove of past communications between the two with the New York Times. They show, for example, Vance sending a note of preemptive apology to Nelson since she thinks of herself as a “gender queer radical pragmatist” and he’d referred to her as a “lesbian” in Hillbilly Elegy. She told him it was quite alright — if he’d used the former phrase, no one would have known what he meant. Still, he wanted her to know the description had come from “a place of ignorance.” He also called Trump a “demagogue” and said that “the more white people vote for Trump, the more black people will suffer.”

This was around the same time he was more notoriously musing to another friend in a Facebook message that he “went back and forth” between seeing Trump as a “cynical asshole” like Richard Nixon and seeing him as “America’s Hitler.”

At the time, there was nothing surprising here. These are the attitudes you’d expect from a Yale graduate living in San Francisco and working as a venture capitalist — deeply unsympathetic to poor people but cosmopolitan enough to come down on the progressive side of the culture war. Conservative on core policy issues but wary of the wild-card demagoguery of Trump.

So how did he become a self-styled right-populist who now frames the people he scorned as “welfare queens” in Hillbilly Elegy as victims of deindustrialization and neoliberal neglect, and who simultaneously leans so hard into the right-wing side of the culture war that he found a way to make a wildly popular policy like the child tax credit sound deeply unappealing? (He framed it not as helping people with kids but using the tax code to “punish” people who didn’t have children.) Was he visited by the ghosts of those “welfare queens” in Kentucky, like Scrooge being visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past? Was he suddenly overcome with shame about both his economic and cultural politics, for no discernible reason, like the town drunk having a religious experience and becoming a pastor?

And how is it that his actual views on economic policy have shifted so little as his rhetoric has become so much more populist?

The cast of strange characters Vance has been hanging around over the years — like Aimee Terese and the “monarchist” Curtis Yarvin, both underground reactionaries known only to the tragically online — provide a significant clue. So does the fact that his time as a venture capitalist put him in contact with one Peter Thiel. Vance’s first venture capital job was at Thiel’s Mithril Capital. Thiel almost single-handedly funded Vance’s original campaign for the 2022 Republican nomination for Senate and brokered a crucial early meeting between Vance and Trump where they “made peace” after Vance’s years of public and private antipathy for the former president. Thiel, too, has an affinity for fringe online reactionaries. He has also been a patron of, for example, Yarvin.

Whatever one thinks about the Democrats using the line of attack that Trump and Vance are “weird,” there’s no denying that a great many of Vance’s comments over the years have been very weird. I seriously doubt that even the most conservative people Vance encountered as a young man in Kentucky, for example, would nod along to his notorious description of Kamala Harris — a married woman with two step-kids! — as a “childless cat lady.” Talking about using the tax code to “punish” the childless is the sort of thing even savvy politicians on the GOP’s far right usually know better than to say. But in the Thiel-funded world of online right-wing eccentrics where Vance rubs shoulders with the likes of Yarvin and Terese, comments like this are seen as “based.”

If you hang out with ordinary people in culturally conservative parts of the country and tell them, as Vance told an interviewer a couple of years ago, that we’re in a “late Republican period” where extreme measures might be called for, implicitly drawing an analogy to Augustus ending the Roman Republic and making himself emperor, you’re going to get a lot of confused looks. If you tell the same thing to Claremont Institute interns with Roman statues in their Twitter profile pictures, they’ll eat it up. And let’s not even get into the book Vance blurbed a couple of years ago calling for making teachers’ unions illegal (very populist!) and praising bloodthirsty Chilean and Spanish dictators Augusto Pinochet and Francisco Franco for knowing how to deal with the “unhumans” on the Left.

In full view of the company he’s kept these last few years and the arc of his political evolution, it’s pretty clear: Vance’s current rhetorical posture is not the result of his early experiences in Kentucky. Instead, it was grown in the petri dish of edgy online right-wing discourse.

A “Populism” a Tech Billionaire Could Love

This hypothesis explains a lot about the distinct lack of policy nutrition in Vance’s newfound “populism.”You know what would actually help the victims of de-instustrialization in Kentucky? Giving them free health care, giving their kids free daycare, and making it easier for them to organize labor unions. Vance is opposed to all three. In fact, his particular specialty seems to be contorting himself into a rhetorical pretzel to give pseudopopulist explanations for his opposition to these actually-populist policies.

Medicare for All? A giveaway to “the professional class,” Vance declares. After all, it would mean the government paying doctors’ salaries.

Free state-sponsored daycare for those who want it? “Class war against ordinary people,” he claims with a straight face, backing this up with a poll showing that 44 percent of people who didn’t go to college, and only 35 percent of those who do, have a preference for a family model where one parent stays home with the kids.

The Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO) Act, which would undo some of the features of American labor law that make it harder for American workers than their counterparts in comparable nations to organize unions? According to Vance, it solidifies the “shop-by-shop” structure of American labor organizing, when sectoral bargaining would be better. Never mind that, in countries where sectoral bargaining gets the goods for workers, that’s because powerful labor unions represent workers’ interests at these sector-wide bargaining tables — whereas Vance’s stance on labor issues would make it harder for American workers to unionize.

When we examine his actual policy positions, Vance’s “populism” appears to have nothing to do with actually helping the people he threw under the bus in Hillbilly Elegy. Some of his policy preferences are objectively far more boss-friendly and anti-populist than even thoroughly mediocre Democrats like Chuck Schumer — who, unlike Vance, actually supports the PRO Act.

Vance didn’t even want to antagonize business interests with a tough railway safety bill after the derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, destroyed the lives many people he represents in the Senate. After an initial show of support for railway regulations, he compliantly weakened the proposed bill at the request of industry lobbyists.

The ideology Vance is spouting has no meaningful connection to the interests of the citizens of East Palestine or the hillbillies of Kentucky. It’s the pseudopopulism of an Ivy League–educated tech bro who was radicalized by the influence of a bunch of deeply strange (and, in some cases, very openly racist) online discourse goblins who orbit around Peter Thiel.

Why would Vance want to raise Thiel’s taxes to give the hillbillies health care and daycare? Why would he want to make it easier for them to organize unions?

He just wants to be “based.”