There is no doubt that the J. D. Vance of Hillbilly Elegy has changed. While news outlets will be tempted to tell this story of Vance’s transformation as a simple parable of power’s corrupting effects, there is a more illuminating account of what happened to Vance: namely, his own.
In 2020, Vance wrote an essay about his conversion to the Catholic faith: “How I Joined the Resistance.” Hillbilly Elegy has often been hailed as essential reading for “anyone wanting to understand Trump’s rise.” Vance’s 2020 essay might be the same for anyone wanting to understand the shifting currents in conservative Christianity and politics. Vance’s journey toward religion—the first millennial on a major party ticket—is the same that is and will be trekked by many millennial and Gen Z Christians of a political orientation.
Vance’s essay in The Lamp, a small but important outlet for American Catholicism’s best cultural and intellectual insights, first tells the tale of the Ohioan’s journey towards atheism. To compensate for the loss of faith that bound him to his community, his family, and especially his Mawmaw, Vance briefly flirted with libertarianism: “having lost my cultural conservatism, I would become even more economically conservative” (in a farseeing essay for Mere Orthodoxy back in 2018, Charlie Clark picked up on all of this, arguing that the Vance of Hilbilly Elegy was “preaching a kind of neo-bourgeois morality”).
This libertarianism that Vance would later break with was an economic program of tax cuts, Social Security cuts, and what he refers to as “neoliberal economic orthodoxy.” Filling in the blanks here with his memoir, it is clear that this earlier Vance was something of a Reaganite conservative (at least on economic matters). He was suspicious of East Coast elites making paternalistic policies to deal with the people of the Rust Belt, whether that be setting restrictions on payday loans or implementing bleeding heart welfare policies. In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance wrote that the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful was “the expectations that they had for their own lives.” And he warned that policymakers in Washington, D.C. were the problem here, telling people “it’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.”
Some conservatives (even religious conservatives like myself) still hold to the same economic outlook Vance did in his 2016 memoir. Some of us even hold to that economic program of tax cuts, Social Security cuts, and a suspicion of even the best-intended of regulations for reasons we find consonant with the Christian faith. But it’s important to note that J. D. Vance abandoned that outlook for religious reasons. While Vance blasts his journey to atheism as “both conventional and boring,” the truth is that his journey to Catholicism and a certain set of politics is becoming increasingly conventional as well—in ways that students of both politics and religion would be foolish to ignore.
But to tell this story properly requires giving it a proper villain. There is one woman more than any who sums up the set of values most inimical to the values that Vance would eventually come to embrace (namely those of traditional Christianity): Ayn Rand. She figures several times into Vance’s narrative as the “philosopher whose atheism-cum-libertarianism told me everything I wanted to hear.” This is nothing new: Flannery O’Connor (a favorite of ‘trad’ Catholics, as well as all people of good taste) once told a friend that “the fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get” and that she ought to throw a copy she found “in the nearest garbage pail.”
Perhaps surprisingly to some today, many of the Reagan Revolution’s brightest intellectuals shared in O’Connor’s rejection of Rand. William F. Buckley attempted to purge her from the conservative movement alongside the antisemitic Birchers. Buckley saw her purportedly “Objectivist'' philosophy as “a vessel for a kind of misanthropic anarchy,” one which the Republican Party was better off without. For his part, Russell Kirk argued that Rand had “put the dollar sign in place of the cross.” And another “Man of the Right” (as he preferred to be called), Whittaker Chambers insisted that “a voice can be heard… from almost any page of Atlas Shrugged… commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!” Reagan himself did not so much reject Rand as he was rejected by her. Rand denounced his “connection with the so-called ‘Moral Majority’” as an “unconstitutional union” that threatened capitalism and in her last public remarks smeared Reagan for his “God, family, tradition swamp.”
And yet, much of this history is forgotten or misremembered, as I have argued in the pages of National Affairs. Many of today’s young conservative Christians view the Reagan Revolution in the same terms as Buckley, Kirk, and Chambers viewed Ayn Rand: overly individualistic, libertarian, and obsessed with economic growth over religiosity and family formation. The 2018 manifesto “Against the Dead Consensus” is representative of attitudes currently in fashion: it accused “warmed-over Reaganism” for paying “lip service to traditional values,” surrendering “to the pornographization of daily life, to the culture of death… too often bow[ing] to a poisonous and censorious multiculturalism.”
Up until the 2024 Republican National Convention, it might have appeared that the Christian voices on the New Right had the better of the argument. Those looking for a vibrant, avowedly Christian form of politics felt, as Vance himself experienced, the need to reject the normie conservatism of their parents and their parents’ parents. In fact, for all its attacks on my own political tribe, Senator Josh Hawley’s National Conservatism speech remains one of the more interesting articulations of Christian Nationalism, arguing (rightly I believe) that, without our Christian heritage, the character and vibrancy of celebrated American freedoms like religious liberty and free speech would be far more meager. Christianity, even a self-described “Christian nationalism,” can and should continue to play a salutary role in public life.[1]
And yet, the world of postliberalism and the New Right changed overnight this summer. After nearly a decade of sniping from the sidelines[2] and arguing (with mixed success) that Trump’s rise equalled their mandate for leadership, the postliberals have finally found themselves in a real position of power: J. D. Vance is the Republican vice presidential nominee. Until 2024, postliberals like Pat Deneen had to settle solely for presidential admiration from Democrats (ironically, it was Barack Obama—and not Donald Trump—who praised Why Liberalism Failed as “thought-provoking”). Now, postliberals have a bent ear in the highest halls of power.
But, even still, postliberalism’s triumph with Vance’s apotheosis might prove more bane than boon. If the Trump-Vance ticket prevails in November, postliberals will no longer be able to pass the buck and lay the blame for society’s ills at the feet of the Reaganites. Being in the political minority is easy; governing is far harder.
Already, we are seeing postliberal politicos strain under the burden. Sohrab Ahmari—who once found it easy to dismiss David French and “Zombie Reagnaism” as overly procedural and pragmatic—is now busy carrying water for Vance’s embrace of the abortion pill. Where Reaganites and Buchananites once decried pornography as degrading and “raw sewage” from official party documents and platforms, the same Republican National Convention that hailed Vance is in complete moral disrepair, suffering decadence far worse than that subjected to postliberalism’s most withering critiques of the “old conservative consensus.”
The convention that raised Vance to the highest heights has razed the party’s pro-life platform, celebrated Satanism, normalized pornography, and embraced same-sex marriage—not exactly a reassuring sign of Vance’s and postliberalism’s promise that “social conservatives will always have a seat at the table.” Perhaps that table will be in Eric Trump’s metaphorical basement of low-priority policies? For the country’s sake, we should pray not.
In the wake of Reaganism’s greatest political victories, much of a subsequent generation of conservative Christians learned to blame Reaganism for society’s greatest failures. With postliberalism’s greatest political victory looking ever more inevitable, a series of political questions have begun to emerge: will the emerging generation of conservative Christians come to blame postliberalism in similar ways?
If Vance and other young Christians embraced postliberal streams of the faith in order to “join the resistance,” what happens when the resistance finally comes into power? Could the “fractious men” and “economic dissidents” who once flocked to postliberalism rediscover a compelling Christian politics in older, classical conservative sources? Could they find, between an individualistic libertarianism and a technocratic postliberalism, still richer accounts of political life? Will the next political movement—post-post-liberalism—mark a return to the fusionism of yesteryear or its further abandonment?
Only time will tell. As the saying goes, “history never repeats itself, but it often rhymes.”
[1] Worse, I fear, if such a public role for Christianity is stymied by party mechanisms, cultural censures, and shifting mores, what will continue to emerge from the cracks below will be the worst forms of a racialist, post-Christian populism (a concern that I believe is shared by the most promising of the postliberal writers).
[2] Postliberalism’s roots go back much further (e.g., the communitarian movement kickstarted in the 20th century by Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Walzer, and others), but as a political movement with elected representatives in Congress it seems fair to date its advent to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the windfall that proved for the postliberal intellectuals who were able to attach themselves to Trump’s coattails.