Front Burner - The ‘New Right’ wants revolution. Can J.D. Vance deliver it?

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

By ideas, dollars and in personal connections, Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance is intimately tied to an amorphous ideological movement known as the “New Right.”Some of its major players, which include billionaires and tech elites, want to gut the US’ institutions and upend democracy in what they see as necessary, radical action to reverse the tyranny of liberalism. So what is the New Right? How far would JD Vance be willing to go to advance its ideas in the White House? Or do Vance’s allegiances lie elsewhere? Matthew Sitman is a writer based in New York City and co-host of the podcast Know Your Enemy.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey, it's Jamie Poisson. If you enjoyed today's episode and you want to hear more, you can follow the FrontBurner feed and stay up to date with whatever's happening in news, politics and culture in Canada and around the world. So in the last decade or so, we've seen many incarnations of American conservatism and the Republican Party. There was the Republican Party of John McCain or Mitt Romney, which was then followed by a party built around the personality of Donald Trump.

But when it comes to what's next, for years now, there's been a group of tech elites and billionaires who want to steer conservatism in a much more radical direction. This movement is known as the New Right. It's broad, but a lot of it has to do with dismantling or overhauling U.S. institutions to roll back what they see as the tyranny of liberalism. And a few weeks ago, it appeared to get its biggest win ever when Trump chose Ohio Senator J.D. Vance

as his running mate, a guy who has repeated key new right talking points. We are in the late Republican period. If we're going to push back against it, we have to get pretty wild and pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with. Vance has name-checked its thinkers and owes his rise, at least in part, to their cash. So what is the new right, exactly? Is J.D. Vance their guy who is willing to do their bidding or just a political chameleon? And what would it mean to have Vance one heartbeat away from the presidency? For more, I am joined today by Matthew Sittman. He's a writer in New York City and co-host of

the podcast Know Your Enemy, a leftist guide to the conservative movement. Matt, hi. Thanks so much for coming on to FrontBurner. Thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure to be speaking with you and a Canadian audience. I'm really excited for some of our Canadian listeners to know your enemy, of which there are a number. So thank you so much for having me. Great.

And then hopefully after this, there will be even more. That's the plan. Yeah, that is the plan. Okay. So to understand whether or not J.D. Vance is really the new right movements guy, right? I think first we have to unpack what the new right is, right? And how would you define this admittedly pretty amorphous movement? How would you explain it to someone that doesn't know

very much about it? Right. Well, you know, the term new right is one that has gotten used again and again, kind of by the right about themselves and some of the journalists who write about them for decades. So it is mildly confusing. This is the new, new, new right in some ways. They need a new name, basically. Yes, I agree. But there are different terms that have been used to describe this new right, such as post-liberal, sometimes even Catholic integralism, a kind of theocracy isn't quite the right word. But there have been terms like that, that also have been used to describe this cohort of thinkers and funders around J.D. Vance that you mentioned. And I would say maybe the best

way to define it for listeners would be something like, you mentioned someone like Mitt Romney, right? The Republican Party of George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Mitt Romney, you know, a kind of mix of libertarian economics, traditional moral values, so-called, and kind of aggressive foreign policy posture, whether toward the Soviet Union or the war on terror. And that kind of mix, that synthesis, that fusionism, as it often was called on the right, you know, that is what Trumpism and kind of the new right is trying to replace. So they're more nationalistic and less libertarian, less free market when it comes to economics, more nationalist, right? More concerned with deleterious effects of trade deals on American workers, the kind of moving beyond the recitations of the free market, libertarian, tax cuts and deregulation and free trade catechism. That's one component. And, you know, that's partly why Trump won, I think, in 2016,

some of those economic populist notes. But I think beyond that, that's probably the least troubling part of their vision. Yeah, give me some of the more extreme ideas here. Yes, I think one reason I mentioned a term like post-liberalism, it's like, well, what is their gripe with liberal democracy? Is it the liberalism part with the individual rights and protections provided by liberalism or named and articulated by liberalism? Or is it the democratic part? After January 6th, their kind of, I should say, at least casual relationship to the will of the majority of voters was clear. So the more troubling parts are like, which individual rights do they want to get rid of, right of voters was clear. So the more troubling parts are like,

which individual rights do they want to get rid of, right? When they're railing against liberalism and liberal individualism, well, whose rights and which rights are they really talking about? And then of course, their relationship to democracy, as we see, is very attenuated and strange. Not only, you know, someone like J.D. Vance, a person who went all in on Trump's lies about his massive landslide victory being stolen from him in 2020, but Vance is someone who, as we know, thinks if you have more children, you should get more votes. So what kind of democracy is this? And those are the really troubling parts. Like, those are very unclear. People listening might have heard of something called Project 2025, which is kind of this wish list of policies for a second Trump presidency, right? And it's been put out by this conservative think

tank called the Heritage Foundation. And I just wonder if you could explain to me a little bit, what is Project 2025? And what does it have to do with new right ideas? Yes, Project 2025, well, you can read it in document form put out by the Heritage Foundation. And it is a kind of radical plan to overhaul the federal government. There are different aspects of it. And, you know, Trump has been backing away from Project 2025 because it is radical and people do hear about it and think, my goodness, like, this is crazy. So Trump, in his weird way of having decent political instincts sometimes, more than someone like J.D. Vance, who, you know, the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, has a new book,

either just out or about to come out, talking about the revolution needed. I think it's titled By Dawn's Early Light, like the revolution needed to take back Washington, to defend like the American people against Washington. And, you know, the kind of administrative state, deep state, even. J.D. Vance wrote a forwarder introduction to that book. So Vance has been very particularly tied to this project 2025. And what it seeks to do is there's a number of substantive aims, things they want Trump to do, you know, policy-wise that the executive branch can do.

But probably most, the part of it that's gotten the most attention and in some ways might be the most worrisome is their plans to radically overhaul who works for the federal government by changing the classification of key, you know, bureaucratic positions, people who work in the administrative state, positions that are now considered kind of neutral experts, right? People who just know a lot about social security or federal lands out West, like things that you have to learn and study about discrete particular kind of topics that require expertise and in which ideally the federal government provides reliable expert information on to replace them with basically Trump loyalists, Republican loyalists. And so

it's a plan to staff the federal government and to execute certain plans once they kind of get that power. And Vance has directly addressed this too, right? Like I'm thinking of this clip of him in 2021. I actually have it right here. He says, I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts, because you will get taken to court, and then when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it. And so just to be clear, when people are talking about Project 2025 and

the ideas of Project 2025, is that the new right? I would say that's one manifestation of it. The circle of people around J.D. Vance in particular, both the intellectuals and some of the funders, someone like Peter Thiel, someone like Curtis Yarvin, a kind of radical, I don't even know how I would describe Curtis Yarvin. Maybe he wouldn't shy away from the term monarchist, I think, or looking for a Caesar-type figure. He wrote under the name Moldbug. So these are people like that. But there's also professors like Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Denis, my old teacher in grad school, actually.

Or Sourabh Amari, who's the editor of Compact magazine and someone who writes a lot about how he thinks the right should embrace, you know, a kind of new economic nationalism and populism. But someone like Zohar Bamari, he's talking a lot about economics now. But a few years ago, kind of in a almost programmatic statement for these kind of new right thinkers, one of the things he wrote is that for him, he says the aim is, quote, to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square reordered to the common good and ultimately the highest good. Capital H, capital G, meaning God, right? This is essentially a religious vision for the United States and something like the federal bureaucracy, right, with these neutral experts, people who might stand in the way of illegal or unwarranted actions by the Trump administration, people who might simply know things that prove that this fundamentally new direction, whether that is along the lines of racial and ethnic composition of the country or the religious and moral kind of orientation of our institutions and public policy. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income. That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. You talked about Peter Thiel there as well. So this is the former CEO of PayPal. You know, liberalism is exhausted.

One suspects that democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted. We have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton window. Just tell me a little bit more about the role that he has played in Vance's rise to power. Yeah, this is really key, actually. Vance, like me, is an adult convert to Catholicism, or was received into the church as an adult, I should say. And so he wrote an essay about this in 2020 for a magazine called The Lamp called How I Joined the Resistance. And it's his account of becoming Catholic. He says in that essay that at one point during his time at Yale Law School, Peter Thiel gave a talk there. And Vance is very open that going to that talk and meeting Peter

Thiel changed his life. And there are two main reasons for that. One, as you've been suggesting, Peter Thiel became a major kind of backer of Vance's career, both in terms of some of the early sort of venture capital startup kind of things that Vance was involved with before he became a candidate for office. And in fact, Teal gave a ton of money to Vance's Senate campaign in Ohio in 2022, I think $15 million. But the other key thing is, it was through Peter Thiel that Vance discovered another significant influence on him, the figure that actually led him to becoming Catholic, which is the late French literary theorist, René Girard, who was a longtime professor at Stanford,

where, as you know, Thiel was a student, and that kind of led him to becoming Catholic. But all that is just to say, again, that Vance, this isn't my words, this is Vance's words, that meeting Peter Thiel was one of the most important things that ever happened to him in his life. Right. How do you think Vance's upbringing, you know, he talks a lot about his difficult upbringing in Ohio. How do you see that history playing into, you know, what he believes today and his strengths and quick rise as a politician? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. And I want to be careful how I say this, because J.D. Vance and I are almost the same age. Me too. Yeah, us too. We basically are the same age. We grew up in not entirely dissimilar places, right? Places that you

might call blue collar, red America, right? The quote unquote, white working class. Those are my roots too. And so when I read something like Hillbilly Elegy, there are parts of it I find very moving. Like J.D. Vance had a genuinely terrible childhood in many ways, right? His mother was an addict who threatened to kill herself and him at one point in a car, right? He did have a series of men kind of pass in and out of his life as a child and adolescent. And those are hard things and I'm not mocking them or making light of them. But I think to answer your question, Vance is someone who, when I reread Hillbilly Elegy recently, you see that every time this kind of father figure comes into his life, one boyfriend

of his mom's, for example, had an earring. So Vance got an earring. One of them liked to fish. So J.D. Vance would go fishing with him. His biological father eventually returns to his life, having kind of reformed himself and become a, embraced Pentecostal or charismatic Christianity, quit drinking, cleaned himself up. And Vance got into that for a while, right? Would go to church with him. And so you see Vance kind of trying on different identities over and over again as a kid, but then even going to the military, going into the Marines, that was a new identity. Then going to Yale Law School, right? That was a new, a very new and radically different context for him. This is a guy who's had to fit in to these constantly shifting situations, in part because of his life circumstances,

but has always been kind of looking for himself too. And I think in some ways where he's landed with Trump, I mean, Trump is the ultimate father figure, the ultimate daddy, right? And when you look at how Vance was chosen, say the other finalists, at least from people I've spoken to who would know, were it was Vance and Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota. Do you know what separated Vance from those two? I think you're going to say January 6th. Yes. Do I think there were problems in 2020? Yes, I do. Do I think it was a problem

that big technology companies working with the intelligence services censored the presidential campaign of Donald Trump? Yes. If I had been vice president, I would have told the states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors. And I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there. Vance was the one who said he, if he had been vice president on January 6, he would not have done what Mike Pence would have done. Instead, he would have said, no, I'm not accepting the Democrat slate of electors from certain states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. Send them back. He wanted multiple slates of electors sent. And then he said Congress would

have sorted it out as if the results of the 2020 election were not exhaustively litigated across dozens of court cases, including by Trump appointed judges, right? The idea there was no debate is ridiculous. But where I'm going with that is Marco Rubio voted later that day on January 6th to confirm the election results. And Doug Burgum basically hasn't said much about it. So Vance was the one who was willing to kind of prostrate himself to Trump to kind of go along with the lie to just kind of, he wanted, this is my maybe cynical interpretation, but he wanted daddy's approval, you know, and he got it. And he is the vice president pick of Trump because he was most

toadyish, the most willing to kind of bend the knee and do what Trump wanted. So is what you think might be happening here is that he's not necessarily like a true believer when it comes to these new right ideas, but that he is sort of coreless and pliable? Is that what you would take away from that? Yes. So, you know, it's always difficult to say, I don't think someone believes this or that that they're saying. And I don't know that about Vance. And that's not really my argument. I'm saying I don't think this is this or that that they're saying. And I don't know that about Vance. And that's not really my argument. I'm saying, I don't think this is a man with a moral center. I don't think he has a very confident or strong sense of who he really is. And you see that not

just in the changes he's made. I've changed views of mine politically, sometimes radically over the years. The reason I find Vance so dangerous and one reason he just bothers me so much is he's a man willing to say anything. And so maybe to give you an example of the kind of more menacing dimension of Vance, if listeners haven't caught on to that part by now, he said, for example, that Joe Biden was, and this is an exact quote, he uses the word intentionally, Joe Biden was, quote, intentionally killing MAGA voters in Ohio by flooding their communities with fentanyl. If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl? And man, it does look intentional. It's like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn't vote for him. This is a man who I know J.D. Vance is not stupid. I know he's an intelligent person. He graduated from Yale Law School, after all. And so I find it hard to believe that Vance truly deep down believes that Biden, Joe Biden, is intentionally targeting and killing Republican voters in Ohio by flooding their communities with drugs. And I just think a person who is willing to say that is really almost beneath my contempt because I'm from a place like this. And I know the people in places like Ohio and the parts of Pennsylvania I grew up in.

I know they're struggling and I know whatever else you might say about what needs to happen to help them poisoning their minds with these lies about Biden murdering them, you know, about a massive landslide election being stolen from Trump. You can go down the list, right? Poisoning their minds in this way is the one thing I know will not help the people that J.D. Vance claims to be defending and protecting. Right. Maybe worth noting here, this is also a guy that once called Trump America's Hitler, right? Right. He's also done a real 180 on that. Now, one thing I did want to ask you about is like these ideas, a lot of these ideas that Vance has been putting forward that have come from these kind of new right thinkers. How popular do you think these ideas really are?

Yeah. See, I don't think they're actually that popular. There might be a fairly radicalized now and committed 10% of the country, 15% of the country that really loves kind of the unfiltered, uncut JD Vance, the guy who calls people without children, women without children, especially sociopathic cat ladies, childless cat ladies. We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made. And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. Most people don't like that. This is why Tim Walz, we're recording this on Tuesday, August 6th,

and Tim Walz has just been named the Democratic vice presidential nominee by Kamala Harris. And, you know, Walz pioneered the weird critique of J.D. Vance in the Republican Party. Well, it's true. These guys are just weird. And, you know, they're really think it should be easier in this country to start a family and have kids and, you know, have maternity leave, paternity leave, you know, a health care system that doesn't make the cost of having children, you know, so exorbitant, so on and so forth. You can believe all that and just think, what the hell's going on with this guy talking about sociopathic childless cat ladies, right? Like, there even are things that if you squint could maybe be the basis of a more popular Trumpism or Republican Party platform, but the way they deliver it, the contempt, the actual anger and rage, which to mention Hillbilly Elegy again, the kind of simmering anger and rage, again, not always unjustified, kind of in that book, really stood out to me. And you hear that same anger when Vance is talking about the elites, the childless cat ladies, right?

And Trump himself, just to add, has never been that popular. He's never won more votes than his Democratic opponent in an election, right? His approval rating when he was president never crossed 50 percent. Like this is not a guy who really has a majority at his back. Vance is not someone who's speaking a popular like populist message that a lot of people in this country love. And that's why, you know, why they're so skeptical toward democracy. The normal ways you achieve power and enact your priorities in America, winning political power through popular support. That's not something they're very good at.

You mentioned Walsh before. Based on what we know about Walsh and Vance, what would you predict that vice presidential debate is going to look like? Play that out a little bit for me. Oh, man. I mean, I'm looking forward to it. It's going to be fun to watch. Yes, yes. I've been pleasantly surprised by how poorly J.D. Vance has fared so far. You know, his approval ratings, like no one has ever been picked to be the VP for a campaign and have their numbers tanked so quickly. I also think it's very fair to say that nobody has had a joke about them having sex with the couch go so viral.

Right. But it does speak to, I think, Vance's genuine weirdness, his strangeness, his fixations, right? Like, it's not normal to fixate on the bodies of, like, trans kids or women you don't know, right? It's just not. That's not normal. And I think most people are creeped out by it. And I think, actually, one of the most interesting contrasts, should they debate, you know, it's not clear if J.D. Vance will be willing to debate Tim Walz. But if he does, Walz models a very different kind of masculinity. I'm indebted to my friend Moira Donegan, a columnist for The Guardian, who just was talking about this some today. You know, Wals is a different kind of masculine model for people, right? It's cheerful. He's still protective and kind of manly in the best sense of, right? He was

the football coach who started the Gay-Straight Alliance at his high school, right? So he kind of used his position as a football coach to say, you're not going to bash gay kids in my school. These are not radical messages. The right's going to try to portray Wallace as some radical leftist who actually hates rural America. But this is a guy, again, a football coach who goes to the state fair and there are these pictures of him holding little piglets, right? Yeah, like this is just seems like a decent guy who wants to help people. Very normal. Yeah. Yes. Not weird. He's not weird. Yeah. Yes. And so I think that contrast will be center stage, so to speak, if there is a vice presidential debate. flop if Trump loses the election. We're still talking about people with money and influence here. And how else might we expect them to push their agenda going forward here? That's a really good question. I don't know. I do think they found an unusually receptive avatar,

both in Trump and then in Vance. I mean, Vance really is the guy who took everything they were saying. Like Vance was very online. You know, he read Moldbug. He's read Patrick Deneen, right? He's met Peter Thiel. Vance really is their guy. But you know what? I do feel confident saying this. These people are users. You know, Donald Trump is a user. Who hasn't Donald Trump kicked to the curb? Who wouldn't Peter Thiel kick to the curb? If Vance proves to be a loser, if he kind of flames out and maybe he stays on as the senator in Ohio and just is their guy in the Senate for a long time, that's very possible. But I think it's also possible that because these people are kind of amoral, rich guys just seeking to get their way,

if Vance isn't useful to them, he'll get kicked to the curb too. And then maybe he'll wake up and think about what he's done and said. Okay. Matt, thank you so much for coming on. Great to have you. Thank you so much. It was my pleasure. All right, that is all for today.

I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.