I think it was 2019 when I first interacted with Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio). I had just finished my judicial clerkship and begun my career in media. J.D., just a few years older than me, was already a bestselling author and a tech venture capitalist. We were both interested in some of the energetic and ascendant elements of the Trump-era Right, and had followed each other on social media accordingly. We messaged about meeting up on the sidelines of the first-ever National Conservatism Conference (“NatCon 1”), held in Washington D.C. in July 2019. I don’t think we actually met up amid the fracas, but J.D. gave a memorable speech.
We have also taken a similar path when it comes to former President Donald Trump. J.D. and I were both critical of Trump during the 2016 election but quickly came around as we saw the great achievements he secured in short order. We became vocal proponents of a more pragmatic, nimble, and dynamic Right—a Right, that is, which rejects the dog-eared playbook of yesteryear, and which prefers prudent statecraft to blindly following abstract dogma. We have been influenced by many of the same people and count a number of the same people as friends.
It is somewhat surreal to watch a friend be coronated as a major party’s vice presidential nominee. But J.D. is not merely a spokesman for our particular corner of the American Right. Rather, he is an authentic voice for all those tens of millions of forgotten Americans who have been sold out by globalism and left in a cloud of dust by neoliberalism’s “free movement” of goods, labor and capital. (Anyone who thinks neoliberalism has been “free” ought to walk around a town like Steubenville.) And he is the best possible voice for frustrated Millennials and Gen Z-ers who have inherited a country, following decades of Boomer malpractice, where the social fabric is tattered and the American Dream of upward economic mobility is all but dead.
Our current predicament may seem dire, but J.D. was made for this moment. Out of the new American Right’s motley band of brothers, vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance has emerged as the chosen one—the one uniquely capable of giving voice to an entire disaffected generation or two and permanently transforming America’s cultural and political landscape.
Ultimately, as the now-clear heir to the throne in a post-Trump Republican Party, J.D. Vance will have a unique opportunity to effectuate transformative change in American political life by scrambling arbitrary old political lines and building a durable, generational coalition of the broader center. J.D. Vance’s Republican Party—and the broader movement he will soon lead— can usher in a new American epoch of cultural restoration, civilizational sanity, and material prosperity.
https://www.newsweek.com/chosen-one-opinion-1927305