Is JD Vance trying to rethink the Republican Party?

The year was 2022 and JD Vance was on the campaign trail. Just a month before his election to the U.S. Senate, Vance spoke at a two-day conference in October at Franciscan University.

The conference, organized by Sohrab Ahmari, featured a slate of conservative Catholic public intellectuals prepared to discuss the question, "Has America's liberal consensus enriched and empowered a narrow elite — but failed the nation and its people?"

"It's not easy to be on the vanguard of a new Republican Party when so many people are getting rich off doing things the old way," Vance said . There, a local Cleveland newspaper reported , Vance mused, "In some ways our task is to take the very corrupt American ruling class and replace it with something better."

The conference represents one of the philosophical spaces Vance has lived in, the postliberal right — where some conservatives are rethinking the role of the state. Postliberal thinkers generally want the state to have a bigger role in promoting moral values, and think the common good should sometimes outweigh individual civil liberties.

Postliberalism — which is sometimes called national conservatism — is a philosophy and not a comprehensive list of policies. And it is different from classical liberalism, which emphasizes free markets and holds individual, civil liberties as paramount. Classical liberalism is a political theory that can be found among Republicans and Democrats.

Postliberalism has caused something of a rift in the conservative movement, particularly among religious conservatives. Evangelical Christian and New York Times columnist David French has critiqued postliberalism for multiple reasons, while defending classical liberalism as protecting the rights of all members of society.

"When post-liberals magnify the power of the state, they risk degrading the dignity of the individual," French wrote in The Dispatch . "When they trust the wisdom of rulers, they neglect their own fallen nature." He argues classical liberalism both recognizes human dignity and mortal fallenness.

Vance's changing ideas about politics

Postliberal thinkers frequently write for publications like Compact Magagzine and First Things. Ahmari and Matthew Schmitz founded Compact Magazine — the place where critics of liberalism from the left and the right meet. First Things is edited by R.R. Reno and is an ecumenical publishing home for religious conservatives. Not all writers for First Things fall under the postliberal umbrella, but some do.

Then there's also the Postliberal Order — a group newsletter run by a couple of professors who say "the liberal ordering of the world is exhausting us."

"What is needed ... is regime change — the peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class and the creation of a postliberal order," wrote University of Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen in his 2023 book "Regime Change."

Deneen, arguably the foremost intellectual advocate of this populist-oriented movement, calls it "common good conservatism."

Fiscally, this is not the Republican Party of 2012. Less inspired by the father of capitalism, Adam Smith, and taking a page more from Ahmari and Oren Cass, postliberal economic policy focuses on workers. It is pro-union, decidedly against monopolies and open to tariffs.

The movement focuses on increasing jobs in American manufacturing and limiting immigration. The vision Deneen embraces includes policies that encourage couples having more children. Rather than advocating for limited government, this vision supports a government that advances socially conservative positions in law.

Vincent Phillip Muñoz, a political science professor at Norte Dame, has disagreed with Deneen's worldview in the conservative magazine The National Review .

"The principles that animated the American Founding — human equality, natural rights, government by consent, religious freedom — do not stand opposed to orthodox religious beliefs and practices," wrote Muñoz. He said attempts by the government to make people "pious or pure" will lead to oppression.

Instead of postliberalism, Muñoz said there should be more efforts to look toward America's founding documents and see limited government as a solution.

It would be an overstatement to suggest Vance follows in lock step with Deneen, but it is clear Deneen has had some influence on him. Fellow Republican Sens. Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio have also found Deneen intriguing.

Vance said he saw himself as "explicitly anti-elitist, explicitly anti-regime" in a conversation with columnist Christine Emba and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts about Deneen's argument against liberalism.

And at an event where Deneen spoke about his latest book "Regime Change," Politico reported Vance "made a beeline for Deneen and wrapped him in an enthusiastic hug."

Vance's intellectual development

With Rust Belt roots and a rags-to-riches backstory, Vance did not follow the typical journey from college student to venture capitalist. He almost failed high school, before joining the U.S. Marines and going to a state school. Then, he got into Yale Law School and eventually wrote his memoir "Hillbilly Elegy."

The memoir was something of a window into the rural support for former President Donald Trump. At the time, Vance was a critic of Trump, something that would shift later on.

But Vance's memoir also offers insight into his intellectual development. He talks about how the Marines taught him life skills and also how he would look toward his father's church to understand the impact of religion on communities. When he got to Ohio State University in 2007, he said he called himself an atheist, according to an he wrote in the Catholic journal The Lamp . He said much of his atheism was because he wanted to fit in.

Vance said he had "a brief flirtation with libertarianism" and had "a dogged commitment to neoliberal economic orthodoxy." But over time, Vance changed — "the first crack in my proverbial armor," he said, was reading St. Augustine on Genesis. After meeting venture capitalist Peter Thiel and thinking about the problems of the modern age, Vance said it led him to write his memoir "Hillbilly Elegy."

Later, he again returned to St. Augustine and read his words about "the debauchery of Rome's ruling class," as Vance put it. He thought it was "the best criticism of our modern age." Soon after he read a book by Cass published in 2018 and had the insight that the American focus on consumption was misguided.

"And indeed it was this insight, more than any other, that ultimately led not just to Christianity, but to Catholicism," said Vance, adding the idea of virtue he saw in Catholicism that situated virtue in the context of a broader community attracted him. But his conversion was not all intellectual — it also stemmed from how he saw Catholicism helping him become a good father and husband.

In 2019, the same year he converted to Catholicism, Vance spoke at the National Conservatism Conference. There he drew distinctions between conservative politics and libertarian politics, and said he believed political power needs to be used to solve societal ills.

"We live in an environment that's shaped by our laws and public policy, and we cannot hide from that fact anymore. I think the question conservatives confront at this key moment is this: Whom do we serve? Do we serve pure, unfettered commercial freedom? Do we serve commerce at the expense of the public good? Or do we serve something higher? And are we willing to use political power to actually accomplish those things?"

Vance said it was a time for choosing, quoting Ronald Reagan. And he said he chooses his children and "the civic constitution necessary to support and sustain a good life form."

Vance and National Conservatism

Vance would return to the National Conservatism conference in 2021 and deliver a speech entitled "The Universities are the Enemy." His political career was burgeoning and he expressed more strongly some of the same core ideas about the use of political power he did in his 2019 speech.

"So much of what we want to do in this movement and in this country, I think, are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions, specifically the universities, which control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity, that provides research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country," Vance said. "If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country, and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country."

Describing his public policy views as aligned with Catholic social teaching, Vance said social conservatism needs to see itself as larger than issues like abortion — "it has to have a broader vision of political economy, and the common good." He suggested the relationship between social conservatives and market libertarians in the Republican Party has not had many upsides for social conservatives.

Vance would continue to appear in this orbit of thinkers skeptical of "warmed-over Reaganism," favorable toward tighter borders and committed to advancing social conservatism through policy and culture.

As this evolution was ongoing, Vance walked back some of his earlier comments about Trump. He told Fox News he regretted being wrong about Trump and thought he was a good president. Trump ended up endorsing Vance ahead of the Ohio Republican primary for U.S. Senate in 2022.

During his 2022 Senate run, Vance was vocal about who influenced him. There was René Girard, a Catholic philosopher, and he also spoke about Yoram Hazony, a prominent advocate for national conservatism. He made his pitch to Ohio voters that he would champion the working class, drawing on his own background. And he won his race, after first winning Trump's endorsement.

He became one of Trump's closest allies in Congress. He also found friends and allies in Sens. Rubio, Hawley, Mike Lee and Tom Cotton, and then became a contender for vice president.

This metamorphosis was captured in a 2024 profile Schmitz published of Vance in First Things . Schmitz noticed some religious conservatives shifted their approach to politics and described Vance as "perhaps the most eloquent champion of a new Christian approach to politics — one that is less conventionally conservative, and more populist."

The two influences on his populism were his "Mamaw" and his understanding of a Christian moral and economic worldview, Vance told Schmitz.

"When we think about Christian conservatism, we think of sanctity of marriage, sanctity of life," said Vance. "Of course these things are important and I certainly believe the church's teachings on all of these things. And yet, there's an entire Christian moral and economic worldview that is completely cut out of modern American politics, and I think it's important to try to bring that back."

While there are those like Vance who believe embracing postliberalism will yield better conditions for the working class (and also think it's a better pitch to those voters), there are others like Andrew T. Walker, associate dean in the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who think it's necessary to resist the tide of postliberalism.