J.D. Vance’s theory of Trumpism is no match for the practice

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 civilisation, 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.

For example, contrary to the big ideas of Mr Vance, Mr Trump has recently been threatening to destroy a civilisation. Mr Vance, a veteran of the Iraq war, has been an advocate of isolationism. As he put it during the last presidential campaign, “America doesn’t have to constantly police every region of the world.” A war with Iran seemed to him a particularly bad idea. It was not in America’s interest and would mean “a huge distraction of resources”; war between Israel and Iran was “the most likely and the most dangerous scenario” for starting a third world war.

But it turns out that in putting “America first” Mr Trump did not mean to stop policing the world. He meant to use force wherever he thought right, without regard for resources, allies or global stability, let alone grand strategy. Mr Vance has been left to argue that war in the Middle East makes sense this time because America has “a smart president, whereas in the past we’ve had dumb presidents”. This formula, though childish, has the advantages of both flattering Mr Trump and leaving him holding the bag. Meanwhile, some anonymous source made sure to inform the New York Times that among all Mr Trump’s advisers Mr Vance was “the stark exception” to oppose the war. And Mr Vance has stepped in to act as chief negotiator, the best of his bad options. If he fails, he can blame Iran. And he avoids the possibility that the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, whom Mr Trump has recently talked up as his possible successor, might do it and succeed.

Mr Vance’s recent foray to Hungary, to support the doomed prime minister, Viktor Orban, was more ill-advised. It ended in rejection of his biggest idea of how the world should work. For Mr Trump, all politics is personal: he likes Mr Orban because Mr Orban flatters him. For Mr Vance, things are more abstract: while standing beside Mr Orban in Budapest on April 7th, Mr Vance declared that, under Mr Orban and Mr Trump, Hungary and America represented nothing less than “the defence of Western civilisation”. They stood for the idea “that we are founded on a certain Christian civilisation and Christian values that animate everything from freedom of speech to rule of law, to respect for minority rights and protection of the vulnerable.”

Does it seem odd that a “post-liberal” would wreathe himself in liberalism’s achievements? This is a key move of the New Right, and it is sleight-of-hand: Mr Vance is correct that Western civilisation is rooted in Christianity, but he skips past the decades Christians spent killing each other over doctrinal differences before Enlightenment thinkers ushered religion into the realm of private life, freeing political speech and scientific inquiry from religious dogma. This sleight-of-hand usefully licenses those in power to redefine liberalism’s protections on their own terms, deporting protesters for the wrong kind of speech or declaring that certain minorities, such as Muslims, “don’t belong in American society”, as one Republican congressman recently put it.

Mr Vance’s theory, convenient as it is for the populist right, has a flaw: it does not correspond to the reality of governance by the populist right. Mr Orban’s idea of “rule of law” was to steer public money to favoured oligarchs, pack the courts with accommodating judges and rewrite electoral laws to benefit himself; his idea of freeing speech was to put allies in charge of the news media. This may sound familiar to Americans; the stagnation of Hungary should be a warning to them. As Mr Vance returned home on April 12th, after his detour to Islamabad to negotiate fruitlessly with Iran, Mr Trump revealed that his own “Christian values” were not so Christian as to prevent him from posting an image of himself as Christ, or from attacking the pope. The same day, Hungarians demonstrated how much credence they gave Mr Vance’s gasbaggery about civilisation by overwhelmingly voting Mr Orban out.

Mr Vance is so obviously smart, yet can spout such nonsense that one wonders sometimes whether he respects his listeners’ own intelligence. In Budapest, while extolling Mr Orban as a “profound leader” and a “model to the continent”, Mr Vance said he was not telling “the people of Hungary how to vote” and attacked “bureaucrats in Brussels” for having the gall to interfere in the election. Unless Mr Trump gets religion soon about civilisational uplift, Mr Vance’s gift for righteous hypocrisy will face an even more severe test over the remainder of this president’s term.

On the other hand, Mr Vance, a reformed blogger, has asserted so many provocative theories, such as that “childless cat ladies” were immiserating America, that it can be hard to tell how attached he really is to any of them. He has reversed himself once already on some of the biggest, including whether it is a good idea for Mr Trump to be president. ■