Anne McElvoy
29 September 2024 12:00pm
In a large rambling garden on the river in the British university city of Cambridge my host is showing me the meadow of cows across the water, grazing as students cycle by.
“JD loves this spot,” observes James Orr, an associate professor of religion at the university with a vigorous part-time role as best British friend and intellectual mentor to the outspoken Republican vice presidential candidate, JD Vance.
Plenty of political acolytes like to claim they have met the White House hopefuls as the race heats up.
But Dr Orr can truly claim deep personal and professional kinship: the entire Vance family spent time here on their vacation last year, at the residence Dr Orr calls a “conservative kibbutz”.
This included Usha, Mr Vance’s wife, who did a graduate degree in law at the university, their three children and her parents.
We meander through a huge garden that looks like a scene from a Russian estate in Tolstoy – industrious gardeners and a sprawl of dacha-like buildings. I joke that I fancy a writing retreat.
“Jordan Peterson came here to write his book on God not long ago,” Dr Orr replies. “I helped a bit with the proofs and footnotes – though Jordan’s mind is pretty firmly made up about things – even The Almighty!”
The outspoken Canadian thinker is one of a stream of starry international Right-wingers eager to spend time with Dr Orr. They are attracted in part by his erudition – his university profile page tells us of his expertise in “Abrahamic monotheism” and “early movements in German phenomenology” – and that’s the lighter end of the output.
The other side of his life is the fiery world of a new brand of Right-wing politics, which unites traditionalism and concern for faith and family with viral media techniques – MAGA for millennials with a longer political horizon than Donald Trump at 78 or Kamala Harris at 60.
Dr Orr acts as a bridge between biggest names from the US and European believers in a post-liberalism world. He hosted the libertarian Trump-backer Peter Thiel for a debate, which yielded a student protest petition to his faculty. It doesn’t seem to bother him.
Vance fears ‘upstaging the big man’
I had come to see Dr Orr for Politico’s Power Play podcast, to explore Mr Vance’s appeal in Europe. What I discovered however was a movement very firmly focused on ensuring that whatever happens in November, he has a close-knit network of transatlantic conservatives who believe in him. They want him to provide the next generation of leadership on the Right and turn the tide against the economically and socially liberal dominance they believe has hollowed out a sense of belonging. And it is not just a one-shot support group for “JD”– it’s a plan for resilience if the Trump bandwagon falters.
It is a recipe for the afterlife of the Trump phenomenon and perhaps something more distinctive according to Dr Orr.
“To have someone sitting in the Vice President’s office with that kind of perspective… It’s something we’ve never seen in my lifetime, it’s between Reaganism and what I like to think of as Vance-ism”.
None of this sounds like it would be a surprise for Mr Vance to hear – it feels like a pretty coordinated message. Whether the Republican ticket flies or fails this time, Mr Vance is sticking around, honing his own gospel.
Another strong supporter is Rod Dreher. I speak to him while he is in Hungary (he’s a prolific American conservative commentator, who now lives in Budapest, home of the populist Hungarian leader Viktor Orban) and tells me that he has the same hopes – but adds that when he congratulated Mr Vance by text, the cautious reply was that the Veep hopeful “did not want to upstage the big man”.
Trump, it is rumoured, has been rocked by some of Mr Vance’s propensity to attract limelight.
Mr Vance and Dr Orr text regularly: he calls his Cambridge friend his “UK Sherpa” and they even met for lunch in the Senate the day before Mr Vance was nominated as Trump’s running mate.
Dr Orr is by turns charming and booming, with a shock of swept back blonde hair and the confident manner of his elite Winchester school background (he was a pupil with Rishi Sunak, the now ousted British Conservative prime minister). Dr Orr met Mr Vance after the publication of Hillybilly Elegy, the vice-presidential candidate’s memoir of growing up in rural Ohio, which powered his rise to the Senate and now to the dizzying (and hardly risk-free) role as Trump’s running mate.
“I got to know JD about five years ago through some mutual friends, and we hit it off immediately, mainly because we had common religious interests. He was thinking a lot about religion at the time: he had just converted to Catholicism the year before,” Dr Orr says.
His wife Helen is a well-known Anglican vicar (and podcaster) from the more traditional end of the Church of England and her heavy festive robes hang on the back of the vestibule door.
When the Vance clan visited last summer, JD changed one of his kids’ diapers on the porch table.
“He’s a super hands-on dad,” Dr Orr laughs, “There we were discussing some point about religion and politics intensely and he just got on with the dad job on the side”.
‘He saw in the Left that compassion can become indulgence’
When I ask Dr Orr what he has gleaned about his friend’s worldview, my host shifts smoothly into the script of a political disciple.
“His thinking is a sort of triangulation between the sort of the old Left and the old Right. He understands the language of virtue and the importance of virtue and discipline and order and stable homes that emanate from the Right.
“But he also detected in that a kind of harshness — a reluctance to see the sort of tragic consequences of bad behaviour. He also looked at the Left and could see a commendable commitment to compassion for the marginalised, but one that was just a sort of compassion without end — a compassion that could very quickly lapse into a sort of indulgence.
“He sees in Christianity and particularly Catholicism as balance between that stress on individual fragility, failure, fallibility and a kind of redemptive dimension”.
It all sounds very high-minded and a long way from the raucous tone of the present election contest and Mr Vance’s eager embrace of evident conspiracy theories (the alleged pet-eating immigrants and attacks on “childless cat ladies”). Does this courteous Englishman ever feel his intellectual companion has sold out to the divisive, pot-boiling tone and often crassness of the Trump campaign?
“He’s remarkably articulate,” Dr Orr says of Mr Vance, “but he takes no prisoners. He’s extremely consistent, but he’s got that sharp edge — which is frankly needed these days in presidential politics and when stakes are as high as they are. But there’s definitely a gap between that and how he is in private, where he’s very mild, very self-effacing, not somebody who makes much of himself at all, very reflective, very quiet — an intellectual.”
If you’re not one of the initiated, Mr Vance’s philosophy does sound like a bit of a contrary muddle – part free-speech libertarianism influenced by the Silicon Valley tycoon Mr Thiel, for whom he worked in venture capital and who has since been his biggest donor, part-zealous devotee of religion and community with spiritual overtones.
“I think there is a sort of link between the “tech bro” side of JD and the “trad bro” side of JD,” explains Dr Orr – who is shaping up as a spin-doctor the longer we talk. “He’s an intellectually serious person, (but) in the cut and thrust of presidential politics… he has developed a much sharper and more pugilistic manner…
“I think it’s actually [reflective of] an increasing frustration on his part at the immovable quality of the regime that he sees himself to be up against.”
The “regime” description of opponents is a reminder that beneath the courtesy and erudition, there’s a sense of a battle being waged – and no holds barred. Even the bating of the “childless cat ladies” is explained by a higher purpose than just being provocative or base-pleasing.
“Beneath that there is this emerging concern about this demographic twilight that’s looming,” Dr Orr says. “We don’t really know quite how to talk about it. I think it’s a tragedy that’s becoming such a polarising, partisan issue, because I think the risk of human extinction is something that should concern us.”
This is arguably demographic doom-loop thinking, but it may well be an idea that catches the wider imagination, as birthrates trend downwards in the US with damaging economic consequences.
What ‘Vance-ism’ can offer the world
It covers such a wide range of talking points that Vance-ism feels a bit like an overstuffed pincushion of ideas, aversions and quirks. There is, however, a solid view of America’s role in the world emerging – and it is very different from the one that plays today.
Mr Dreher reckons that Mr Vance will be the natural heir to the MAGA movement in its foreign policy stance – a reluctance to continue the war in Ukraine and departure from the Reagan doctrine of pro-active American involvement in global conflicts.
Both Dr Orr and Mr Dreher believe that if Mr Vance is Vice-President, he will take a far greater role than predecessors in shaping how the US approaches global poly-crises, along the lines last seen when Dick Cheney was alongside George W Bush.
Dr Orr recoils at my charge that this is isolationism, telling me that his protege is “aggressively pro-Israel” – and defending the intention to push for an early end to the war in Ukraine, even if that means ceding influence to Russia.
Whether he gets to wield this influence in the next four years is uncertain – the polls are simply too close to predict what will happen.
If Ms Harris triumphs, that would leave Mr Vance with his Senate seat and more time for theological chats with his British cheerleader. Could that be the end of the journey towards greater power for the Hillybilly graduate turned Washington power player? An entry in the long annals of Veeps-who-never-made-it? Both of my interviewees are fiercely determined that won’t be the case.
“He’s absolutely the dauphin,” insists Dr Orr.
For a new breed of nationally-oriented folk on the Right, their hero is more than just the bearer of the Trump torch. As the millennial generation breaks into the front ranks of American politics, he has the memes and messages of his own and an international base behind the “advance Vance” plan.
For Democrats, progressives and cat ladies, that might well be the next nightmare.
Anne McElvoy is host of the Power Play interview podcast for Politico. Listen to the full conversation here
The post Faith, family, free speech – JD Vance’s mentor on why his man is the future of the Republicans appeared first on The Telegraph.
