Drinking With J.D. Vance

 ‘Israel is a country and a nation that doesn’t hate its own fucking people’

Do you know the old joke about a rabbi, a priest, and J.D. Vance walking into a bar?

Actually, it’s not a joke. It happened to me.

In 2021, I found myself wandering around the Orlando Hilton trying to find a beer to self-medicate after hourslong harangues around the fallen nature of the West, when I bumped into J.D. Vance.

I was trying to fit in with the Catholics and Orthodox (of both Christian and Jewish varieties) who populate the National Conservativism Conference (NatCon), which I was covering for Tablet. I had my kippah on—though I was more than a year away from my conversion beit din—and I remember wondering whether it was helping or hurting my ability to socialize.

See, the “NatCons” are an odd assortment of traditionalists standing for nationalism, free enterprise, public religion, and other “Western values.” Their conferences sort of feel like a continuation of the Thirty Years’ War, spaces where Catholics and Protestants are somehow still in their battle for supremacy. Unlike in history, however, the Jews here had a leg up. Indeed, for all of its many mentions of Christian nationalism, this event was run by one—namely Israeli author Yoram Hazony.

When I finally found the bar, it was a Dennis Hopper-esque scene of the edgy new right. Chris Rufo, the one-man media army, had just launched his anti-CRT crusade and was doing a victory lap over a recent legislative coup. Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air, was entertaining a crowd, as was Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug, a notorious blogger whose views veer from nihilist to monarchist. Just about every contrarian weird Twitter account was there, and if you managed to tie the profile pic to the actual face, it felt as if your timeline somehow showed up in person. Drink glasses were filled and emptied as political views of questionable viability (or even sanity) were floated and shot down.

And then, several drinks in, James David Vance—as of yesterday the vice presidential candidate of the Republican ticket, but back then a candidate for senator from Ohio—rolled up behind me.

Already a star, he was at the conference to speak about universities as the enemy. Vance and I had a messaging history: He’d sent me a note of support when I had a little run-in with the trillion-dollar corporation which makes the laptop I’m typing this on. Since he was one of the few mainstream politicians—as opposed to semi-obscure Catholic integralist philosophers—in attendance, I decided he was the one to talk to.

We settled down at an L-shaped couch nearby, and within minutes the area around us filled up with various conference hangers-on, forming a hooting peanut gallery to our conversation.

I noticed immediately that Vance had to be at least three drinks deep, which could make for a great interview. Unfortunately, I also noticed, as I fumbled to set up the recording app on my phone and LARP at being a real journalist yet again, that I was at least as many drinks deep as he was. As I tried to remember my interview plan, Vance took the reins.

Vance: “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe your book came out on June 28, 2016.”

Me: “That’s incredible recall. That’s right.”

Vance: “Your book and my book came out at the exact same time. The same day.”

Not only did I not remember when Hillbilly Elegy, my interview subject’s famous memoir of his family’s hardscrabble Appalachian upbringing, was published; I didn’t remember when my own book came out.

Vance: “I remember because your book got to The New York Times bestseller list and mine did not. And I remember thinking to myself, ‘holy shit, this guy wrote this great book about Facebook and he’s going to be the book that’s successful and my shitty book, it’s not going to do anything.’ Anyway, your book is good …”

Me: “Yours stayed on the bestseller list much longer than mine did.”

Vance: “Fair.”

What little mental planning I’d done here was totally foiled at this sudden confession, five years after the fact, of a writerly competition between us. What I did have, though, was genuine curiosity about how the Big Important Ideas so seriously being fought over by the Twitter avatars here—ideas about religion in society, about populism—might ever translate into actual politics.

“The particularities in my race are very distinct, and so I don’t draw too many lessons for the specifics of my race from the national conservatives,” Vance told me. “But with that caveat, I can’t think of a single other political movement in America right now that has as much energy as this one.”

I asked him to expound a bit.

“The left is committed to brain-dead Bidenism,” he said (note that this was three years before the president’s disastrously feeble debate performance last month). “Biden’s entire political project is harmonizing various parts of the American left that don’t make any sense. And the American right, at the establishment level, is a series of dogmas that existed 40 years ago and are totally exhausted. And then there’s this thing called national conservatism,” Vance continued, “and it is vibrant and young people are excited about it.”

Hoots and hollers rang out from the peanut gallery. (“This is on the record!” one sharpie darkly warned the others. My iPhone was sitting on the coffee table in plain view.)

And not only young people anymore. In the wake of yesterday’s announcement, much has been made (including in these pages) of the seeming enthrallment of a segment of tech with the ticket that Vance—himself a former tech venture capitalist—is now a part of. My own chats have been lighting up with people fighting about how to understand his views on tech, which some people misunderstand as contradictory. He has, for example, praised Lina Kahn—the head of the Federal Trade Commission who is widely loathed in Silicon Valley. But in fact, Vance points to an emerging split in this space: He is, to use Marc Andreessen’s coinage, pro little tech and anti big tech.

“About three months ago, I gave a speech in Youngstown and the whole speech was me shitting on the power of big technology. After, a guy comes up to me and he says, ‘I really love your speech. The one criticism I had was your point about big tech.’ I thought I was going to hear a classical liberal defense of the private sector again. But what the guy then says is, ‘I agree with what you said about the big tech companies, but you want to break them up. Why can’t we just throw all their CEOs in prison?’”

(A voice from the crowd piped up, presumably having heard this anecdote before. “I thought he wanted to kill them. Wasn’t it ‘kill them,’” “No,” Vance joked, “that was in southeastern Ohio.”)

To riff on another old joke: OK, but is all this … good for the Jews?

Before I could get my exact question right, Vance launched. “Israel is a country and a nation that doesn’t hate its own fucking people,” he said. “I really admire that.”

It’s worth noting this was pre-Oct. 7, which opened up an ugly rift on the right over Israel, with accusations of Jewish war-mongering bleeding into obscene antisemitism. Still, his comments didn’t feel either superficial or transient. Unlike the neocons, from whom he’s staked a far position, Vance’s admiration for Israel is directly tied to the ideas he has about what’s best for America and our future.

“Israel is the only advanced economy in the entire world that has birth rates above replacement level,” he said. “One of the great lessons of Israel for the United States of America is that when you develop a civilization that’s rooted in self-love and patriotism, you don’t have declining birth rates.”

I asked him how religion factored into these views.

“My relatives want Israel to be successful so that when the Second Coming of Christ happens in seven years, there’s going to be a country there ready to absorb it. So yeah, there’s some of that,” he said. “But the actual reason that most middle-class Christian Ohioans love Israel is that Israel is a nation that doesn’t hate itself. That’s it. That’s why I like it. My dad does not wake up saying, ‘I really want Israel to be successful over the United States of America.’ He says: ‘Israel, they care about each other. They love their own country. They’re basically aligned more or less with America.’ And that’s it. And I think that’s a great thing.”

The conversation rambled on as the crowd chimed in with increasingly intoxicated commentary. I circled back to my original question—namely, whether all of the talk of big ideas would ever translate on the ground, to the lives of actual people?

“Does a normal Ohio voter read Yoram Hazony and Mencius Moldbug? No. They’re old people. They live their lives, they support their family, they want jobs,” Vance told me. “But do they agree with the broad thrust of where we think American public policy should go? Absolutely.”

But who are these people? Are they just old dying white people, headed for minority status anyway, or are they—as Vance has argued—the members of a multiracial and multicultural base of Americans? Listening to the tape now, I hear skepticism in my own voice—a doubt that the coalition these people had in mind would ever come together. Vance didn’t share it.

“Translating the impulse of the multiracial, multicultural middle class turned working class—there’s a lot of work to do,” he said. “But the instincts of the middle-class Black voter, the middle-class white voter, the middle-class Latino voter, are the same.”

And what are they?

“We love our country, but we don’t want to live in a shithole.”

It was time for another drink.