The Economist: “Vice-President J.D. Vance loves big ideas, or at least the idea of big ideas. Unlike President Donald Trump, he reads books and even writes his own, and he talks, authentically, like a diploma-carrying member of the elite they both ostentatiously disdain. He aligns himself with the ‘post-liberal right’, a term so highfalutin one struggles to imagine Mr Trump using it.”
“Mr Vance serves as the chief emissary between the Trump White House and the intellectual ‘New Right’, the agglomeration of pointy-heads, Silicon Valley potentates and podcasters with big ideas of their own for saving Western civilization, as Mr Vance, apocalyptically, likes to describe his mission.”
“It is heady stuff. It must also, on some days, prove vexatious, for it has led Mr Vance to cast himself as the chief ideologist of a movement, MAGA, whose essence is that it has no ideology. MAGA is committed instead to the instincts, impulses and glory of one man. As a result, Mr Vance’s theories of governance keep taking a beating from Mr Trump’s practice.”
