J. D. Vance and the Fission in American Right

No politician in today’s world speaks about the working class as much as U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance. He rarely lets an occasion pass without mentioning that he is a son of that class, that he sees the world through its eyes.

In his book Hillbilly Elegy, published ten years ago, he movingly narrated to Americans his childhood in a family belonging to the world of the “hillbilly”: the hard-working, marginalized, and despairing inhabitants of rural mountain regions in America. He spoke of his family’s move from extreme poverty in the mountains of Kentucky to work in the steel mills of Ohio, tracing in his narrative the cycles of family breakdown, unemployment, and drug addiction in that milieu. Between its lines lingered the smell of a specific kind of “class struggle”: resentment toward the liberal and leftist elites of America’s eastern and western coasts; an existential negativity toward cosmopolitanism and globalization.

J.D. Vance managed to breach the walls between classes. He “rose” through education when he was able to enroll at Yale Law School. After graduating, when he worked in venture capital, he “breached” the elite club, yet from his own standpoint as a “sustained proletarian,” according to his way of weighing things. He is the “upwardly mobile” figure who does not want to forget the stumbling members of his class. His class struggle, however, does not end with “Workers of the world, unite.” Absolutely not. Rather, it is something closer to: “Workers of America, turn your backs on the world as much as you can.”

Nor can the Vanceian working class be reduced to what is described as “white” in contrast to African American and other non-white laboring people. In Hillbilly Elegy, he defined himself as a son of the mountains, of Scots-Irish origins, adding: “I may be white-skinned, but I do not identify with Anglo-Saxon Protestants.” He is the organic intellectual, the degree-holder and author of the elegy from the standpoint of a class without university degrees.

Vance’s actual political life began with this autobiography. At that time, Vance had not yet announced his conversion to Catholicism. He devoted his recently published book to the story of that conversion, noting that his break with evangelicalism and return to the Church of Rome came under the influence of his wife, Usha, who guided him down that path, while she herself continued to hold fast to Hinduism and its rituals. His conversion to Catholicism, however, does not cancel out his opposition to the approach of the current pope.

When he published his memoir-elegy ten years ago, Vance was not one of Trump’s devotees. At the time, he did not hesitate to compare him to Adolf Hitler and questioned his fitness to govern the country. He would later regret that position. As for Trump, he has assumed for himself the posture of a monarch perplexed over whom to hand the succession to after him: Vance or Marco Rubio. Trump enjoys playing on the rivalry between the two men.

Vance is generally seen as the “philosopher” of this troupe. The joke is that when Vance opposed Trump’s determination to proceed, alongside Israel, with strikes against Iran this winter, Trump revealed that his vice president “disagreed with him philosophically on this matter.” In fact, Vance’s rejection of war on Iran does indeed carry traces of his reading of both Saint Augustine and the conservative French anthropological thinker René Girard.

If America is, in Vance’s view, the equivalent of Augustine’s “City of God,” then it must not drain itself in the wars of the “earthly city.” It must learn from the fate of Rome. As for Girard’s theory of “mimetic violence,” Vance has retrieved it in his own way. America must stop mimicking the confrontational position of Ukrainians and Europeans toward Russia, and stop mimicking Israel’s eliminationist — and highly costly — position toward Iran.

Vance is among the strongest opponents inside the Republican Party of providing military and financial aid to Kyiv. He is even among those who openly call for territorial concessions to Russia in Ukraine. This was before we saw him, in the aftermath of the electronic signing of the American-Iranian memorandum of understanding, rebuking Israel and consecrating the image of its global pariah status, were it not for Trump’s “mercy” toward it.

What Vance says echoes a whole section of the American right convinced that Israel dragged America into war. This opens a debate over the “antisemitic” character of Vance’s position among some Jewish circles, which see this kind of discourse as promoting a form of antisemitism classified under the heading of the “power libel”: the accusation that Jews mislead great empires and drive them into faltering wars.

This year had already opened with controversy over Vance’s position on Holocaust Remembrance Day, when he sufficed with speaking about human brutality without naming the Nazis, and without mentioning Jews by name either. Even so, the Zionist right has not yet moved systematically to level the charge of antisemitism against Vance. In reality, it is difficult to recall the way Vance behaved with Volodymyr Zelensky while categorically excluding this background.

At root, the Trump-supporting populist right in America combines “philosemites” — those who link the salvation of the world to support for Israel — with open antisemites such as Nick Fuentes. These open antisemites did not hesitate to support Israel’s war in Gaza, yet they later shifted to blaming Israel for dragging America into an unnecessary, ill-fated, and highly costly war against Iran.

When he published his memoir-elegy ten years ago, Vance was not one of Trump’s devotees. At the time, he did not hesitate to compare him to Adolf Hitler and questioned his fitness to govern the country.

The crisis with Iran has not yet run its course. Yet the American-Israeli failure to bring down the regime, despite the severe damage inflicted on a large portion of its leadership, despite the weakening of its nuclear project, and despite the American failure to deal with Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, is pushing more and more toward a split within the global populist right over Israel, after long years in which that right existed as a kind of “Likudnik International.”

At this moment, the Likud government in Israel and those loyal to it are still trying to determine how far the discourse of rebuking Israel within the American right can go, extending even to renewed fears over military support itself, which remains vital for the Hebrew state.

Months before the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks, Israel finds itself having moved beyond Western isolation defined by European coldness toward it. It now finds itself in a doubled “Ukrainian condition”: European estrangement and American rebuke. This stands in contrast to the European embrace of Ukraine, matched by an American coldness toward it that has been recalibrated, and whose original image is now carried only by Vance.

In America, it will not take long before the disagreement explodes between the worldviews of Vance and Rubio regarding the world outside the United States, from Cuba to Iran, passing through Israel. Vance is indeed turning into an ideological adversary of Israel within the global right — an adversary speaking primarily from the standpoint of the “hillbilly working class” against the liberal elites of America’s coasts.

By contrast, the question remains whether this kind of adversarial relationship will push Israel to become, more and more, the representative of the “hard right in the Global South.” For while it faces isolation in the Global North, it is still viewed as a model ethno-religious nation-state, equipped with advanced security technology and highly developed surveillance tools — from India’s Bharatiya Janata Party to the populist right in Brazil and Argentina, passing through currents of Israelophilia in Africa and among Arab Likudniks.

* This article is translated to English from AlQuds.