DISCLAIMER: This article was first published on September 2, 2024
J.D. Vance, the controversial Ohio Senator and Donald Trump’s running mate in the 2024 election has once again found himself at the center of a political storm. His recently revealed foreword for the book associated with “Project 2025,” led by Kevin Roberts, is raising eyebrows and causing significant concern among political commentators and the public alike.
The foreword in question is troubling due to its underlying tone and content. According to a report from The New Republic, Vance’s foreword appears to advocate for a much more authoritarian approach to governance, emphasizing the need for “tough measures” to preserve what he describes as American values. Critics argue that his rhetoric echoes dangerous authoritarian tendencies, aligning closely with the broader goals of Project 2025, which has been described as an attempt to drastically reshape American government under a future Republican administration.
A snippet from JD Vance’s Foreward:
As Kevin Roberts writes, “It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”
We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.
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The continued use of violent rhetoric, such as J.D. Vance’s call to “circle the wagons and load the muskets,” dangerously escalates the potential for political violence, a reality we have already witnessed on both the right and the left. Such language, which evokes imagery of armed conflict, not only normalizes the idea of violence as a political tool but also emboldens individuals who may take these words literally, leading to real-world consequences. This type of rhetoric further deepens divisions and stokes fear, creating a volatile environment where the line between metaphor and incitement becomes dangerously blurred. The implications of such language are particularly concerning given the current polarized climate, where both sides of the political spectrum have experienced and contributed to acts of violence, often fueled by similar inflammatory statements.
This isn’t the first time Vance’s political evolution has sparked controversy. His transformation from a Trump critic to one of the former president’s staunchest allies has been well-documented. In a striking contrast to his earlier views, Vance once referred to Trump as a “demagogue” and expressed deep concerns about the direction in which Trump was leading the country. However, as we’ve written before, Vance’s change of heart came when he saw Trump’s success as a reflection of broader economic dissatisfaction among voters, leading him to support Trump’s policies despite his earlier misgivings.
Adding to the controversy, Vance’s alignment with Trump and the far-right has cost him support internationally. His memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which initially brought him into the national spotlight, has been dropped by its German publisher due to his shift toward what they describe as “demagogic, exclusionary policies.” The publisher, Ullstein, cited Vance’s deepening ties with Trump as the primary reason for no longer supporting the translated version of his book. This incident underscores the broader backlash Vance is facing as he moves further to the right.
Vance’s rhetoric and political maneuvers seem to have alienated not only international audiences but also many within his own party and former circles. His controversial stances and the stark change from his earlier positions have raised questions about his motivations and the implications of his foreword in the new book, which is being seen as a possible blueprint for a more authoritarian future under a Republican administration.
As Vance continues to navigate the treacherous waters of modern American politics, his actions and statements will likely remain under intense scrutiny. The foreword to Project 2025’s associated book is just the latest example of the troubling path he seems to be charting, one that has many observers deeply concerned about the future of American democracy under leaders like Vance.
Here’s the full foreward from JD Vance via New Republic:
In the classic American film Pulp Fiction, John Travolta’s character, recently returned from Amsterdam, observes that Europe has the same consumer goods as America, but there it’s just a “little different.” That’s how I feel about Kevin Roberts’s life. He grew up in a poor family in a corner of the country largely ignored by America’s elites—but his corner was in Louisiana and mine in Ohio and Kentucky. Like me, he’s a Catholic, but unlike me, he was born into it. His grandparents played an outsized role in his life, just as mine did. And now he works far from where he grew up, just a few steps from my office, in Washington, DC: he is the president of one of Washington’s most influential think tanks, and I’m a US senator.
Now he has written the book you hold in your hands, which explores many of the themes I’ve focused on in my own work. Yet he does so profoundly, with a readable style that makes accessible its real intellectual rigor.
Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism. The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. Yet it is Heritage’s power and influence that makes it easy to avoid risks. Roberts could collect a nice salary, write decent books, and tell donors what they want to hear. But Roberts believes doing the same old thing could lead to the ruin of our nation.
If you’ve read a lot of conservative books or think you have a good sense of the conservative movement, I suspect the pages that follow will be surprising—even jarring. Roberts understands economics and supports basic free market principles, but he doesn’t make an idol out of decades old theories. He argues persuasively that the modern financial corporation was almost entirely foreign to the founders of our nation. The closest eighteenth-century analogue to the modern Apple or Google is the British East India company, a monstrous hybrid of public and private power that would have made its subjects completely unable to access an American sense of liberty. The idea that our founders meant to make their citizens subjects to this kind of hybrid power is ahistorical and preposterous, yet too many modern “conservatives” make such an idol out of the market that they ignore this. A private company that can censor speech, influence elections, and work seamlessly with intelligence services and other federal bureaucrats deserves the scrutiny of the Right, not its support. Roberts not only gets this at an instinctive level; he can articulate a political vision to engage in that scrutiny effectively.
Roberts sees a conservatism that is focused on the family. In this, he borrows from the old American Right that recognized—correctly, in my view—that cultural norms and attitudes matter. We should encourage our kids to get married and have kids. We should teach them that marriage isn’t just a contract, but a sacred—and to the extent possible, lifelong—union. We should discourage them from behaviors that threaten the stability of their families. But we should also do something else: create the material circumstances such that having a family isn’t only for the privileged. That means better jobs at all levels of the income ladder. That means protecting American industries—even if it leads to higher consumer prices in the short term. That means listening to our young people who are telling us they can’t afford to buy a home or start a family, not just criticizing them for a lack of virtue. Roberts is articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics: recognizing that virtue and material progress go hand in hand.
My childhood was not, by any objective measure, easy. Neither was that of Kevin Roberts. Both of us were negatively impacted by family instability, and both of us were saved by the resilience of the thick network of family—grandparents, aunts, uncles—that is often the first and most effective component of our social safety net. Both of us saw how a factory leaving a town could destroy the economic stability that provided the foundation for those families. And both of us learned to love the country that gave both of us and our families second chances, despite some bumps along the way. In these pages, Kevin is trying to figure out how we preserve as much of what worked in his own life, while correcting what didn’t. To do that, we need more than a politics that simply removes the bad policies of the past. We need to rebuild. We need an offensive conservatism, not merely one that tries to prevent the left from doing things we don’t like.
Here’s an analogy I sometimes use to articulate what the previous generation of conservatives got right and wrong. Imagine a well-maintained garden in a patch of sunlight. It has some imperfections of course, and many weeds. The very thing that makes it attractive for the things we try to cultivate makes it attractive for the things we don’t. In an effort to eliminate the bad, a well-meaning gardener treats the garden with a chemical solution. This kills many of the weeds, but it also kills many of the good things. Undeterred, the gardener keeps adding the solution. Eventually, the soil is inhospitable.
In this analogy, modern liberalism is the gardener, the garden is our country, and the voices discouraging the gardener were conservatives. We were right, of course: in an effort to correct problems—some real, some imagined—we made a lot of mistakes as a country in the 1960s and 1970s.
But to bring the garden back to health, it is not enough to undo the mistakes of the past. The garden needs not just to stop adding a terrible solution, though it does need that. It needs to be recultivated. The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems—we are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach. As Kevin Roberts writes, “It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”
We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.
—J.D. Vance
Featured image via Political Tribune gallery
