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In 2015, when Donald Trump launched his bid to take over the GOP, he threw the pundits for a spin.
It wasn’t just liberals who were baffled: Conventional conservatives — me included — were equally dumbfounded.
Attack free trade? Defend entitlements? How dare he question our orthodoxies?
Yet the more he did, the more he boosted his appeal, especially among the working- and lower-middle-class Americans who would eventually propel him to the White House.
By selecting JD Vance as his 2024 running mate, Trump has sent a clear signal that populism is here to stay; that there is no going back to the pre-Trump, country-club GOP of the likes of Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney.
The 39-year-old senator from Ohio knows firsthand the misery that has characterized downscale America for the better part of two generations.
He’s angry about it all, but has learned how to channel that into a mature and surprisingly bipartisan model of reform.
Put another way: Vance is the perfect vice-presidential nominee to translate Trumpian energies into enduring reforms and thus help forge a new American center that is broadly protectionist in economic matters and respectful of ordinary Americans’ desire for cultural stability — but crucially, without an overly doctrinaire social conservatism.
Vance wasn’t always where he is now intellectually.
In 2016, he published “Hillbilly Elegy,” his memoir of growing up in a dysfunctional Appalachian family.
Coinciding with Trump’s rise, the book proved an immediate hit among liberal elites trying to understand the sentiments fueling it.
Soon, however, the window of sympathy closed, and Democrats and their media allies spent the next eight years trying to undo the election’s outcome via lawfare.
Vance’s own interpretation of his kinfolk’s suffering was congenial to the establishment right and left in that moment, since he seemed to suggest that it was ultimately the result of working class people’s own individual failures of virtue — rather than, say, decimation of good union jobs and dignified industrial areas thanks to free trade.
He ended the book preaching a message of individual self-help, the kind of thing right-of-center columnists and think-tankers love to hear.
But then his diagnosis evolved.
In 2019, he converted to Catholicism, and he began peppering his talks with Catholic social teaching, with its emphasis on the role of social structures in promoting the public good and giving working people a fair shot.
This didn’t mean abandoning individual virtue, or promoting the progressive view that everything turns on structural forces, but recognizing that individual choices are, in part, conditioned by how we organize markets.
This was a wisdom embedded in his own upbringing, too.
As he told me for an interview with The New Statesman this year, his “Mamaw,” his grandmother who raised him and anchored his values, supported ideas like collective bargaining and Social Security — even as she hated people who didn’t toil for a living.
“My grandma’s politics [was] a sort of hybrid between left-wing social democracy and right-wing personal uplift, and there is virtue to both of these world-views,” he said
Dogmatic conservatives deride this combination of views as “anti-conservative,” while the left calls it “extreme.”
Yet Vance’s views are only anti-conservative if you equate conservatism with the “freedom” of corporations to ship jobs to hostile countries, hollowing out US manufacturing capacity.
And it’s extreme if you think “moderation” means going along with the left’s increasingly bizarre ideas about gender, family, policing and drug use, not to mention open borders that undercut the wages and social services of the poor.
Vance disagrees with both camps, yet he’s also supremely nimble and pragmatic as a politician.
In the Senate, he has repeatedly teamed up with Democratic colleagues to promote sensible reform bills.
These include a measure, cosponsored with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), to claw back compensation from bankers whose institutions fail; a railroad-reform bill promoted with Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) in the wake of the East Palestine disaster; and a bill to lower insulin prices, crafted alongside Sen. Rafael Warnock (D-Ga.), among others.
He has also readily adopted the Trumpian line on abortion — no further national restrictions, maintain access to the abortion pill — in view of public opinion.
For a long time, what we call the “center” has been the agendas of free-market fundamentalists on the right and extreme cultural liberalism on the left.
Vance represents a generational opportunity to align our political center with where the American majority actually is.
Sohrab Ahmari, a former Post op-ed editor, is a co-founder of Compact magazine. Twitter: @SohrabAhmari