The Seven Thinkers and Groups That Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual World View

JD Vance represents something genuinely unusual for the MAGA movement: A national Republican who is deeply enmeshed with the elite world of the conservative intellectual movement — or what’s sometimes termed for convenience as “the New Right” or “the dissident right.”

As Vance himself confessed earlier this year, he is “plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures.” His transition from Never-Trump conservative to MAGA firebrand was influenced by his relationships with a handful of niche conservative writers and thinkers. Among them are people who push for post-liberal regime change, some who pine for the cultural conservatism of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, and one outright monarchist. This cohort espouses a variety of sometimes competing viewpoints, but they are bound together by the belief that the liberal project of “progress” — especially in the form of economic liberalization, technological advancement and the leveling of social hierarchies — has in fact been a mistake.