The MAGA Metamorphosis

J. D. Vance, Tech Moguls, and the Postliberal Right

If your media feeds are anything like mine, you've noticed a digital storm brewing around Donald Trump's choice for Vice President, J. D. Vance—and justifiably so. With MAGA poised to reclaim the Whitehouse, Vance is gearing up to usher in a new era of American politics.

Make America Great Again’s original architect, Steve Bannon, called Vance the St. Paul to Trump’s Jesus. “This movement has needed someone like J. D.,” he said. He’s the one public intellectual that we have who’s in office, and it’s incredibly powerful.” 

It would seem that Vance’s incredible power comes from his role as a rallying point for three formidable forces: working-class MAGA, tech moguls, and a group of innovative intellectuals working to equip populism with a more sophisticated ideology.

J. D. Vance was born in Ohio in 1984. After high school, he joined the military and served as a combat correspondent before graduating from Yale Law School. He worked briefly as a lawyer before moving to San Francisco's tech scene. First, he joined the biotech company Circuit Therapeutics. Then, he was recruited to Mithril Capital to work alongside PayPal mafia alum Peter Thiel.

Vance emerged from his brief career in venture capital with pro-tech and pro-cryptocurrency views, and the connections he gained in the industry would become instrumental in his rapid political rise. Thiel and PayPal consigliere David Sacks funded his Senate campaign in 2022.

More recently, Sacks threw his weight behind Trump by fundraising for his campaign and rallying tech and crypto executives to the MAGA cause. At a $300,000-per-seat fundraising dinner held at Sacks’ home, an informal poll was held about who Trump should choose as his running mate.

According to two people at the event, Vance was strongly backed by the most influential figures at the table.

Donald Trump's June fundraiser at the home of David Sacks (Left).

At some point during Vance’s relentless run of achievement, he found time to write a bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, about his poor early life and the struggles of America’s white working class. Its release coincided with the 2016 presidential elections, and Hillbilly Elegy became a way for Americans to grapple with Trump’s surprise win.

Vance was staunchly anti-Trump when he wrote Hillbilly Elegy, which greased the wheels of the high-end cultural machinery that launched his book into the mainstream. At the time of its release, the American culture business was divided between an older, more liberal left and the ascendant Woke identitarians. This period was fraught for artists because political tripwires were hidden all over the cultural landscape.

To understand the industry's climate at the time, consider the case of Academy Award-winning documentarian Errol Morris. As an old liberal with economically leftist views, Morris assumed his peers would welcome a head-on analysis of the MAGA movement. He created a brilliant documentary about the 2016 election called American Dharma, where he interviewed Steve Bannon and critically examined his role in Trump’s campaign.

The documentary followed the same artistic formula Morris had used to great acclaim in films about war hawks Robert S. McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld. But this time, placing Bannon under his critical microscope proved ruinous. Morris was savaged for giving Bannon a platform. He was ostracised from the industry, and American Dharma was buried in the mass artistic graves of the 2010s.

I recommend supporting American Dharma’s independent release here. It’s well worth a watch. You can also see his full interview with Reason here.

All this to say that if Vance hadn’t publicly denounced Trump, Hillbilly Elegy would be rotting in a ditch next to American Dharma, and you wouldn’t be reading about J.D. Vance here today. Instead, Hillbilly Elegy found a breathtaking path through the minefield by appealing to the economic left’s moral sensibilities while remaining palatable to the identitarians because Vance could be used to separate the white working class from Trumpism.

Director Ron Howard’s production company, Imagine Entertainment, bought the rights to Hillbilly Elegy at auction and adapted it into a Netflix film. The film softens the political themes that brought the book into the spotlight and presents Vance as a distinctly American against-all-odds success story.

Whether through blind luck or shrewd politicking, Hilbilly Ellegey navigated the complicated political world of Hollywood to secure Vance valuable real estate in the public consciousness - an asset that wouldn't have been lost on Trump, who has a keen sense for mythos.

According to two anonymous sources, when Trump first met Vance at his Mar-a-Lago resort, he confronted him about the denunciations. Vance immediately apologised, claiming he’d bought into media lies. Trump reluctantly accepted the apology saying he should have known better because he wrote Hillbilly Elegy, implying his story aligned with the MAGA perspective. It's fair to say he saw the film and hadn’t read the book.

Vance since publicly segued from his anti-Trump stance by claiming “he didn’t quite get Donald Trump” before he was “red-pilled,” referring to his intellectual baptism into postliberal thought.

"Red pilling" is a concept that first memed out from postliberal blogger Curtis Yarvin (featured above), formerly known as Mencius Moldbug, who is rumoured to be friends with Vance. It’s used to suggest someone has seen through the propaganda of leftist academia and "fake news" to view the world as it truly is. The term’s use spans from punkish teens rejecting the mainstream to a high-minded academic rejection of the post-war liberal consensus.

The term originates from the film The Matrix, where the main character faces a choice: take the blue pill and continue living as he always has, or take the red pill to reveal the truth about the artificial reality (the Matrix) in which he naively lives. The creators of The Matrix, the Wachowski sisters, who were once the Wachowski brothers, were heavily influenced by postmodern thinker Jean Baudrillard, who is typically associated with the Woke identitarian left.

While the leftist identitarian becomes “woke” to a world dominated by the interests of white heterosexual men, the rightist postliberal "red pills" into a cultural landscape controlled by leftist institutions. In an odd turn of events, postmodern thinkers like Baudrillard and Foucault are being adapted and adopted by the postliberal right, leading some to use the term "the Woke right" to describe this new movement.

As a student of memetics, I’m interested in the interplay between postliberalism’s elite academic wing, which I call suit-and-spectacles postliberalism, and a more eclectic side made up of self-employed or anonymous thinkers who innovate wildly at the edges of its hivemind. I call this digital conglomeration theorycel postliberalism, taking one of its self-deprecating terms derived from “incel” (involuntary celibate).

Both sides feed memetically from each other, though the academics are somewhat insulated from the wilder, sometimes overtly racist parts of the movement and will likely reject the notion there’s a relationship.

Vance has said he’s “plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures,” and a review of his podcast appearances and speeches reveals he harvests ideas from both sides of the movement.

J. D. Vance with postliberal thought leader Patrick Deneen

Postliberal thought is underpinned by a range of sometimes obscure foundational texts, including works by Trotskyist-turned-conservative philosopher James Burnham, Samuel Francis, Carl Schmitt, René Girard, Jacques Ellul, and Alexis de Tocqueville, among others. The entire canon of the theoretical left is also fair game to be broken down for spare parts, as illustrated by postliberal thought leader Patrick Deneen's remark, "We can draw from Marxist analysis without reaching Marxist conclusions."

Describing postliberalism straightforwardly isn’t possible because it’s a movement in flux. It comprises many thinkers with often conflicting ideas that continually clash and evolve to absorb new insights and revelations.

Intellectual movements are perhaps better thought of as a stew of ideas, where individual ingredients break down, change, and come together over time to form a more cohesive and identifiable dish.

Some core ingredients simmering in the postliberal brew are…

• A belief that the socially liberal (left) and economically liberal (right) political parties of the West form a single ideological “regime” that is responsible for all manner of social pathology.

• A belief that there is no such thing as a neutral institution - Values inevitably permeate any human organisation.

• A drive to proactively assert moral values through the state - individual rights are subordinated to communitarian values.

• A belief that Woke ideology isn’t an aberration of liberal democracy but an inevitable result of its philosophical shortcomings.

• A belief that an elite ruling class is a naturally occurring phenomenon. They see no point in fighting or mystifying this fact and think we should embrace it while working to ensure elites are worthy of their station.

Some ominous early fissures are forming between its technologically progressive and religiously conservative elements, which will likely be irreconcilable as the movement gains momentum and a problem for Vance’s allegiances.

Last year, I sat down with Professor Eric Kaufman in London to talk about the suit-and-spectacles postliberalism he writes about and relate it to the theorycel activity I observed online. I filmed our discussion and turned it into a short film, which has been behind a paywall until now. Given its newfound relevance, I decided to make it public. Free subscribers, please thank our paids who make this work possible.

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I predict we'll see Vance's postliberal pedigree show itself most clearly in his approach to American institutions. He takes the regime change idea seriously and views the permanent bureaucracy, universities, NGO sector, and Woke capital (politically motivated corporations) as the collective enemy of the people.

The cultural machinery I described earlier has now been set to dismantle the mythology it helped Vance create.

Anti-Trump NGOs have begun their oppositional research to paint him as “too damn weird,” and we’re likely to see postliberalism framed as fascistic conspiracy fodder, tagged as mis/dis/mal information in the coming months.

This reaction is unwise; the left would do well to take this movement seriously and ditch their reliance on raw power to win intellectual battles. Vance has already used postliberal frames to rationalise and sell policy prescriptions to a fed-up public that seems to like what they hear. His stated goal is to revolutionise the American cultural and political landscape, and a counter-elite of intellectuals, influencers, and tech moguls has gathered around him to help. They have alternative channels for their ideas that now surpass the reach of the cultural left’s legacy machinery.

As Errol Morris said about Bannon after his film’s de-platforming, “He is organising a radio show, podcast… he’s not gone away,” confused as to why his peers thought de-platforming was a viable response to MAGA’s first iteration. Now, as Bannon sits in jail, marinating in mythos, thousands of podcasts are doing his work, and a far more palatable J. D. Vance has stepped into his former intellectual leadership position.

Vance now stands before the MAGA movement as an embodiment of their blue-collar meritocratic values, with first-hand experience of their struggles. But just like a young Hillbilly Vance emerged from his career chrysalis a cultivated power player, the MAGA movement is undergoing a similar metamorphosis as tech interests and sophisticated ideologies move in to reshape it.

MAGA is evolving, and it’s coming for the institutions.

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Sources include:

• J.D. Vance on Woke Capital - Clairmont Institute

• J. D. Vance - Jack Murphy Live

• Hillbilly Elegy Clip - Be Somebody (2020)

• The Cathedral, Red Pill, Left, & Right - Keith Knight

• Patrick Deneen with Intercollegiate Studies Institute - Regime Change and the Future of Liberalism

• Patrick Deneen with Reset DOC - The Rise of Populism Comes from the Failure and Success of Liberalism

• Patrick Deneen with The Theology Pugcast - Episode 258

• Patrick Deneen with Irreverend - Regime Change

• Yoram Hazony with Unherd - The case for National Conservatism in the UK

• Yoram Hazony with The Hoover Institution - Rediscovers Conservatism

• Yoram Hazony with Natcon - After the Revolution - What Happens Next

• Chris Rufo with The Manhattan Institute - The Blueprint for Recapturing the Public Universities

• Sohrab Ahmari with Natcon - Neoliberal Nowhere-Land

• Academic Agent - Smashing the Boomer Truth Regime

• Ron DeSantis with Forbes - Vows To Kneecap ESG

• Curtis Yarvin with Justin Murphy - The ruling class affectations of some leftists