The Forebears of JD Vance and the New Right

The ascension of Ohio Senator JD Vance from, as he was dubbed by much of the American media, white working class-whisperer author of Hillbilly Elegy to Donald Trump’s 2024 nominee for vice president has made him a standard-bearer of a rising brand of illiberal, antidemocratic conservatism that has quickly built visible power on the American right. 

Few of Vance’s politics are truly new. His anti-immigrant nativism is reminiscent of the Know-Nothing party; his nuclear family-oriented cultural and economic politics — and his views on “childless cat ladies” — are in step with long-held preferences of conservative Christian voters and less-Christian GOP politicians. It is Vance’s relatively new embrace of antitrust industrial policy, and rhetorically, American manufacturing workers, that have been the most puzzling to many of those who have watched his political evolution and the rise of the “New Right.” Is this populism? Is it something like social democracy? What does worker-friendly conservatism mean? 

The spectrum of modern American politics, as it’s usually understood, ranges from free-market orthodoxy on the right to social democracy and the welfare state on the left. But Vance’s rhetoric and political bedfellows — such as American Compass founder Oren Cass and Compact magazine founder Sohrab Ahmari, among others — signal that Vance is positioning himself as the frontman of an American movement that, like far-right movements in Europe, pairs conservative cultural politics with an active government role in shaping markets and economic policy. To hear Vance tell it, he was once a standard Republican with “a dogged commitment to neoliberal orthodoxy.” But then he met the Christian billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel — himself a nationalist quasi-libertarian who has led the right-wing charge against Big Tech, and whose ideas about the moral failings of elite striving for success were formative for Vance at Yale Law School — converted to Catholicism, and began to rail against the economy and culture that, in his view, liberal elite-dominated politics have created. 

Right-wing discomfort with the moral and cultural consequences of market capitalism is not new. Nearly a century ago, another generation of American conservatives, distrustful of the economic changes around them, also invoked “tradition” to counter what they saw as the extreme forces of their time: industrial capitalism, communism, and fascism. They were known as the Agrarian-Distributist movement, and like members of today’s right-wing movements, they also found themselves accused of harboring unsavory ideologies. That movement’s origins and dissipation helps us understand the historical precedents and intellectual genealogy of today’s resurgent right.

In 1930, a group of Southern literary scholars and writers, including the poets and essayists John Gould Fletcher, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren, published a collection of essays titled I’ll Take My Stand. The book pushed back against industrialization and urbanization, calling instead for a “return” to localism, agrarianism, and smallholding modeled off the Old South of their imagination. They believed it possible to separate plantation slavery from the South’s true culture; according to historian and Agrarianist Frank Lawrence Owsley, they were “demanding a fair hearing for the fundamental cause of the South — now that slavery can no longer befog the real issue.” Willing to sideline the existence of actual slavery for the specter of enslavement under industrial capitalism and communism, Agrarians sought an alternative to both. They worried that by disconnecting workers from land and agriculture, industrialization threatened the moral fabric of society. 

The authors of I’ll Take My Stand were 12 men with 12 visions of the traditional society to which they wished to return; their political philosophy was incoherent. Agrarianism sought a hierarchical, quasi-aristocratic society — “I suppose this is Jeffersonian,” Allen Tate wrote — where each man had a smallholding that allowed him to provide for himself and his family. In its adherence to private property, it avoided the pitfalls of collectivism and communism; in maintaining a social hierarchy and man’s (almost always man’s) connection to land and production, it avoided the alienation of industrialization. None of the authors themselves lived the lives of a smallholder or subsistence farmer. If they had, they might have thought differently about the aesthetic and cultural freedoms they imagined possible in such a life.

I’ll Take My Stand was put forth as a Southern regional philosophy, but it had grander ambitions. “I think we … were a little more aware of the world movement towards reaction than I’ll Take My Stand indicated,” Tate wrote three years after the book’s publication. Putting their principles forward first as a regional movement was, he wrote, strategic. From the beginning, he felt that agrarianism’s Achilles heel was that the United States, apart from the South, did not truly have a history of the type of “traditional” society the movement desired. 

In 1933, the New York publisher Seward Collins started a magazine to serve as a mouthpiece for these very different sorts of critiques of industrialism than those being put forth by the era’s ascendant Left. In his editorial note for the American Review’s first issue, Collins explained that its purpose was to:

give greater currency to the ideas of a number of groups and individuals who are radically critical of conditions prevalent in the modern world, but launch their criticism from a ‘traditionalist’ basis … It should be obvious that a periodical aiming to bring these groups and individuals together is particularly needed in this country, where tradition took little root before it was overridden by the disruptive forces that are now threatening Western civilization.

The American Review was not a particularly well-run magazine, and Collins not a particularly good publisher. His failure to pay writers promptly nearly severed the Agrarians’ relationship with the magazine several times. (“I would like to point out to you that you cannot possibly hope to make a success of the American Review without the fullest possible courtesy to those who are likely to stand by you in what I think is going to be the coming struggle in this country — the struggle between fascist agrarianism and industrial communism,” Arkansas poet John Gould Fletcher wrote after months of no payment and no response from Collins.) But the publication served its purpose. It forced the Agrarians to put to paper a positive — not simply reactionary — vision of their political prescriptions. And it connected the American Agrarians to their counterparts elsewhere, providing a forum for the development of right-wing thought across continents. 

It was in the company of the American Review that the Agrarians first encountered the British writers Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, proponents of a philosophy dubbed “Distributism.” Both Catholics by the end of their life (Chesterton converted from Anglicanism), Chesterton and Belloc were able to situate their philosophy comfortably within Catholic teaching and what they understood to be Christian orthodoxy: equal distribution of property and a hierarchical structure of society. Belloc, in his 1912 book The Servile State, wrote that “industrial society as we know it will tend towards the re-establishment of slavery,” and he recommended a reversal of his era’s “Pagan economic society” to the Christian “Distributist” state of Middle Age monasticism, a “distributive system … guaranteed by the existence of co-operative bodies, binding men of the same craft or of the same village together, guaranteeing the small proprietor against loss of his economic independence, while at the same time [guaranteeing] society against the growth of a proletariat.” 

Belloc and Chesterton each had essays in the first edition of the Review, and Collins asked Tate to review their respective books, The Servile State and The Outline of Sanity. “Great God, how could we have missed all this?” Tate wrote to Collins upon receiving the books. “It is all pure gospel.”

The established practice of monasticism gave the Distributists an aesthetic and a set of values to strive for: self-sufficiency, asceticism, and a devotion to beauty and higher orders of thinking. Theirs was a politics, as they framed it, with a precedent in the European context. Unable to locate their politics in any usable sort of American tradition — the Southern tradition had been defeated, and its real-world associations were with enslavement, anti-democratic impulses and cultural backwardness — the literary scholars who formed the Agrarian “movement” struggled. Agrarians viewed themselves as traditionalist reactionaries, but it was never entirely clear what tradition they were drawing on, or to what tradition they wished to return. They had started with a Southern regionalism, but few remained committed to it after the publication of I’ll Take My Stand. The Europeans had Catholicism, and, perhaps more importantly, a history of societies organized around Catholicism and monarchism to draw upon for traditional credibility. But “we are not Catholics, and we cannot use Catholicism for our own ends,” Tate wrote. “We are fated to use what our own tradition offers us.” 

That didn’t stop them from trying. The New York historian Herbert Agar soon became a spokesman for the movement and the Agrarian most committed to putting the philosophy’s ideals into political practice. Agar had spent several years living in England, where he became enamored by Distributism. He was a frequent contributor to the American Review, and upon his return to the United States, Tate brought him into the Agrarian fold. He was the human link between the Agrarians and Distributists that made their alliance a reality. 

It was the Great Depression, the time of the New Deal. Agar and other Agrarian-Distributists criticized the New Deal for its band-aid approach to fixing problems that they saw as fundamental to industrial capitalism and collectivism. Agar began putting together a symposium, Who Owns America?, a follow-up to I’ll Take My Stand that the group hoped would be a starting point for Agrarian-Distributist influence on establishment American politics. The book, published in 1936, opened with an introduction tearing down “monopoly capitalism.” That system was un-American, per Agar, for promising to give freedom to American laborers while subjecting them to the whims of the labor market and deep boredom. Monopoly capitalism also imperiled “a stable family life” and the chance “to do creative work,” to “enjoy responsibility,” and to “live in an atmosphere of equality.”

Just as this political effort began in earnest, Seward Collins gave an interview to a communist magazine in which he expressed sympathies for Hitler, Mussolini, and fascism. In the interview, he implied to journalist Grace Lumpkin that the Agrarians were also fascist sympathizers. Just a decade earlier, this may not have been so controversial — in the 1920s, many mainstream American commentators and journalists expressed a fascination with the rise of Mussolini and fascist Italy. But by the 1930s, Mussolini, Hitler, and fascism were poisonous to any serious political movement in America.

The interview caused significant coalitional problems for the Agrarians. Tate exchanged letters with Lumpkin in the New Republic, writing “I am so deeply opposed to fascism that I should choose communism if it were the alternative … Both are slave-states, but the aim of fascism must be realized by force, while the aim of communism, ideally at least, looks toward order and consent.” Lumpkin replied that “any honest examination of the theoretical basis of fascism by you and your group should make you uncomfortable at the similarity,” and wrote in another letter to Collins in the New Republic that she would leave Tate “with genuine regret and sadness as he goes about with his butterfly net busily recapturing Southern traditions.” The Agrarians, like conservatives before and after them, struggled to distance themselves from the racist and fascist elements of their movement — in part because racism and a romantic vision of American slavery was fundamental to their project. The boundaries were porous; the communication with people whose ideas they publicly denounced was frequent. Tate’s and other Agrarians’ close personal relationships with Collins continued even after Tate publicly denounced his fascist sympathies.

The split between fascist-sympathizing Agrarian sympathizers and those — like Agar — who sought to bring about Agrarianism democratically became more and more pronounced. Collins argued that democracy and reactionary agrarianism could not coexist; instead, he believed, monarchism was preferable to a watered-down, democratic agrarianism. Agar, in the introduction to Who Owns America?, wrote that the contributors’ common ground was “a belief that monopoly capitalism is evil and self-destructive, and that it is possible, while preserving private ownership, to build a true democracy in which men would be better off both morally and physically, more likely to attain that inner peace which is the mark of a good life.” 

Who Owns America? was the Agrarian-Distributists’ last hurrah. The American public — including, ironically, the very farmers and working men that the movement sought to “save” — was simply not attracted to the philosophy. Stringfellow Barr, reviewing the book for the Virginia Quarterly Review in 1936, wrote that while American agriculture was caught up in capitalism’s cycles of debt, it wasn’t necessarily against its own wishes — “the American farmer dearly loves a mortgage.” In the decades since, historians and scholars have given a variety of reasons for the movement’s downfall. In 1941, historian Thomas J. Pressly’s “Agrarianism: An Autopsy,” published in the Sewanee Review, enumerated the charges against the Agrarians: confused and contradictory ideas, conflation of the subsistence farming tradition they sought with the Old South’s commercialized agriculture, failure to reach the common man. More recently, historian Paul Conkin wrote that it was the “last significant … battle against either socialist or corporate forms of collectivism,” and that it was their struggle against “every trend in American life” which doomed them. My own opinion is that it was Agrarianism’s lack of a convincing American tradition of order, hierarchy, and smallholding — as well as its tainted association with fascism and the Confederacy — that doomed the movement. It didn’t help that a movement meant to support the working man and farmer found it difficult to escape the elite circles from which it rose. 

Today’s populist, illiberal right is often explicitly Christian, and often — like Vance — explicitly Catholic. It struggles less with the problem of democracy than its forebears did; many of its politicians, adopting a populist aesthetic and rhetoric, explicitly favor less democracy. Rather than reaching back to the Old South or pre-industrial feudalism, Vance and his counterparts on the New Right seem to envision America’s industrial age — families organized around a single breadwinner employed at a factory or a mine — as the ideal to emulate. They seek welfare and social insurance policies that incentivize marriage and single-breadwinner nuclear families; they speak fondly of midcentury trade unions and autoworkers’ unions. It is a reactionary traditionalism that recalls the “good old days,” and is aligned with similar theocratic movements in Hungary and Austria. But while it is in some ways more explicitly extreme in its political views, more religious, and, due to its presence in a mainstream political party, potentially more powerful than Agrarianism, it ultimately could be done in by the same internal contradictions — and unsavory alliances — that doomed that earlier movement to the margins of American history.