Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance as his running mate despite fierce resistance from establishment Republican donors and advisers, including Rupert Murdoch and Kellyanne Conway, whose primary concern, at first glance, was the same one that caused a transatlantic media panic after Vance’s appointment: his foreign policy.
Foreign affairs is a convenient flashpoint for MAGA Republicans to accuse of violating sensible bipartisan consensus, but the rift between Vance and the GOP mainstream runs much deeper than a debate about who controls what slice of black soil east of the Dnieper.
The rift between Vance and the Republican establishment is generational: on one side is the continuation of the Reagan-Bush coalition — evangelical Christians, economic elites, and national security hawks — and on the other is the coalition led by Steve Bannon in the mid-2010s — working- and middle-class Midwestern America.
It’s tempting to rely on depicting the competing interests of these factions to explain what the Republican establishment is upset about with Vance. But this approach is wrong; it portrays Vance as merely a representative of his tribe, someone without agency. Treating Vance as merely an unknown ignores the ideological dimension of the MAGA-establishment rift, as well as Vance’s own policy contributions and his vision for the Republican Party.
What is this vision, and how does it conflict with the Republican establishment?
Rather than relying on the unfinished rhetoric that often accompanies the MAGA movement, the best way to understand Vance’s political vision is to examine his professional and policy track record. There’s one area where Vance has demonstrated his instincts and fundamental principles to the general public: technology.
Technology is what got Vance into politics. In 2016, Peter Thiel, who helped launch Vance’s political career, helped him transition from corporate law to venture capital. During his six-year career in venture capital, Vance was primarily an early-stage and seed-stage investor. These investors typically “discover” startups at their youngest stages and often work closely with founding teams to turn ideas into viable businesses. What’s striking is that Vance was keen to discover startups in places that Silicon Valley doesn’t pay attention to, particularly in the Midwest.
It is well known that Vance has built a network with right-wing VCs such as Peter Thiel, David Sachs and Marc Andreessen, and that their support contributed greatly to his 2022 US Senate run. It is not entirely clear how much political influence this group has on Vance, but they share intellectual influence. One of the most commonly cited figures is Curtis Yarvin. However, we do know that there is a strong conviction between Vance and this VC network, namely antipathy to the monopolies of big tech companies such as Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
Concerns about the undue influence of big tech companies have been one of Vance’s top priorities, and he has repeatedly spoken out against the industry’s growing influence in American public life. Last week, he argued before a Senate committee that the push for new AI regulations “is a product of pressure from incumbents, and it benefits incumbents, not American consumers.”
Vance doesn’t just want to reduce the influence of big tech companies in Washington, he also wants to break them up altogether, and he has publicly supported Lina Khan, Biden’s appointee to chair the Federal Trade Commission, whose aggressive antitrust policies are premised on dismantling the economic and political power of big tech companies.
Vance and the network’s views are unusual among venture capitalists, as they are in direct opposition to their interests as investors. Venture capitalists invest in startups with the goal of making a profit in one of three ways: by having another private investor buy out the shares, by having the startup go public, or by having the startup be acquired by a larger company. Of these three routes, the vast majority of successful startups are acquired through acquisition, and the largest acquirers of technology startups tend to be large technology companies.
This seemingly confused position is central to understanding Vance’s vision for the Republican Party.
In short, Vance and his closest allies in the venture capital world are pursuing a policy agenda that directly undermines their primary source of revenue. Without big tech acquisitions, much of Silicon Valley’s venture capital ecosystem would wither. From this perspective, Vance and his network’s antipathy toward big tech seems puzzling, unless one assumes that their position is guided by more than just self-interest.
This seemingly troubling position is central to understanding Vance’s vision for the Republican Party and the broader ambitions of the MAGA movement. It rejects the contemporary tendency in American conservatism to shy away from regulatory intervention, especially when it would deal a fatal blow to financial markets that have become dependent on the success of big tech companies. More than half of the S&P 500’s gains in 2023 have come from the “Magnificent Seven” technology stocks.
Vance is willing to sacrifice “objective” economic performance, which for decades has been seen as the greatest good by the American conservative establishment. To what end? Consumer choice, freedom, and individual autonomy. This is a Jeffersonian vision for the Republican Party.
This vision recalls America’s earliest post-revolutionary political divide, between Jefferson and Madison. Jefferson’s ideal America, as he famously saw it, was a nation of independent, self-sufficient farmers — a nation with self-sufficient farms — with a positive conception of liberty at its heart, opposed to monarchs and moneylenders suddenly taking over the lives and livelihoods of their subjects.
Jefferson’s intuition is in direct conflict with the logic of urbanization, specialization, and financialization. Mainstream Republicans have accepted this fact in exchange for nominal wealth and growth, which has forced citizens to place their fate in the hands of faceless, mindless institutions, whether banks or government bureaucracies. The big tech platforms were merely the latest iteration of this compromise.
Vance and the MAGA Republicans present a fundamental challenge to this consensus. Technology is only the tip of the iceberg. Dig beneath the surface of most of MAGA’s challenges to the Washington consensus and you find a Jeffersonian impulse. If there is an ideological consistency to MAGA’s concerns – immigration, manufacturing, foreign policy – it is to reverse the transfer of economic and social power away from the American heartland and to de-internationalize and simplify the sources of American prosperity.
The Jeffersonian tradition of liberty — the ideal of a nation taking its own destiny into its own hands — is deeply rooted in the American psyche, but for decades it failed to find political expression. Now it is being resurrected.
