I think it was 2019 when I first interacted with Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio). I had just finished my judicial clerkship and begun my career in media. J.D., just a few years older than me, was already a bestselling author and a tech venture capitalist. We were both interested in some of the energetic and ascendant elements of the Trump-era Right, and had followed each other on social media accordingly. We messaged about meeting up on the sidelines of the first-ever National Conservatism Conference (“NatCon 1”), held in Washington D.C. in July 2019. I don’t think we actually met up amid the fracas, but J.D. gave a memorable speech.
We’ve remained in touch ever since. He published two op-eds at Newsweek during my tenure as opinion editor. We have remained active with national conservatism and both spoke at last week’s NatCon conference (“NatCon 4”). We are two of the founding advisory board members for American Moment, which seeks to “identify, educate, and credential” young New Right leaders. We have both been active with American Compass, a think tank that aims to reorient conservative economics away from doctrinaire libertarianism. We both spoke at the Restoring a Nation Conference in Steubenville, Ohio, in Oct. 2022; we got dinner before his keynote speech, nerding out on public policy. Like a true American, J.D. downed two Miller Lites.
We have also taken a similar path when it comes to former President Donald Trump. J.D. and I were both critical of Trump during the 2016 election but quickly came around as we saw the great achievements he secured in short order. We became vocal proponents of a more pragmatic, nimble and dynamic Right — a Right, that is, which rejects the dog-eared playbook of yesteryear, and which prefers prudent statecraft to blindly following abstract dogma. We have been influenced by many of the same people and count a number of the same people as friends.
It is somewhat surreal to watch a friend be coronated as a major party’s vice presidential nominee. But J.D. is not merely a spokesman for our particular corner of the American Right. Rather, he is an authentic voice for all those tens of millions of forgotten Americans who have been sold out by globalism and left in a cloud of dust by neoliberalism’s “free movement” of goods, labor and capital. (Anyone who thinks neoliberalism has been “free” ought to walk around a town like Steubenville.) And he is the best possible voice for frustrated Millennials and Gen Z-ers who have inherited a country, following decades of boomer malpractice, where the social fabric is tattered and the American Dream of upward economic mobility is all but dead.
Our current predicament may seem dire, but J.D. was made for this moment. Out of the new American Right’s motley band of brothers, vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance has emerged as the chosen one — the one uniquely capable of giving voice to an entire disaffected generation or two and permanently transforming America’s cultural and political landscape.
Trump would be wise to give J.D. an outsize role on the campaign trail, and an even more outsize role in the presidential administration that is to come. In J.D. he will find someone who is not merely a talented communicator with an inspiring personal biography. He will also find someone who is highly thoughtful and has his finger squarely on the pulse of America’s economic and cultural ailments — and, perhaps most importantly, a keen sense of what public policy can actually do to tangibly improve Americans’ everyday lives.
Vice President J.D. Vance will help advance a trade agenda and economic statecraft that meaningfully prioritizes the interests of places like Steubenville — not Wall Street. He will pursue policies that enable others to rise up through the economic ranks and live their own American dreams — just as he did. He will advance a realistic foreign policy that views every geopolitical issue and every global hotspot through the prism of the American national interest and the American way of life.
Ultimately, as the now clear heir to the throne in a post-Trump Republican Party, J.D. Vance will have a unique opportunity to effectuate transformative change in American political life by scrambling arbitrary old political lines and building a durable, generational coalition of the broader center. Just as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and the post-Berlin Wall neoliberal “Washington consensus” helped define the parameters of “consensus” American political life in their own times, so too can J.D. Vance’s Republican Party — and the broader movement he will soon lead — usher in a new American epoch of cultural restoration, civilizational sanity and material prosperity.
J.D. Vance is only 39 years old. He has been Trump’s vice presidential nominee for less than a week. But to set the bar any lower would be a disservice to his prodigious talent.
To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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