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On July 29, 2021, JD Vance appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show back when he was still a Fox News host. Like Carlson, Vance had once opposed Donald Trump, and like Carlson, he had transformed into a prominent Trump supporter and a rabid participant in the culture wars. “We are effectively run in the country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs,” he told Carlson, “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to name Kamala Harris (and Pete Buttigieg, and AOC) as his prime examples of the childless leaders who should be excluded from positions of power.
For years, Vance has played a key role in the elite echelons of the New Right, which can be described, loosely, as the intellectual wing of the Trumpified GOP (including many of the people in charge of Project 2025). This mixed-up group of intellectuals, activists, politicians and influencers is made up of a wide array of characters, who hold to a variety of belief systems and sometimes have divergent policy goals.
But the one instinct that Vance and the rest of the New Right share is a deep skepticism about modern feminism and gender equality — or what the New Right calls “gender ideology.” Overt chauvinism that seeks to roll back much of feminism’s gains is one of the most obvious unifying threads of this varied movement, and Trump’s choice of Vance anoints and entrenches it into the culture-war side of the MAGA movement.
Vance appears to be a decent family man — someone who supports traditional conservative values, and is even willing to buck conventional GOP norms by supporting strong pro-family policies. But a quick perusal of his thoughts on women and gender reveal some unusual opinions that lie outside the American mainstream, beyond a stray comment about cat ladies.
Vance is staunchly opposed to abortion, and has suggested that it is wrong even in cases of rape and incest. He has compared the evil of abortion to that of slavery, and opposed the Ohio ballot measure ensuring the right to abortion in 2023. He also was one of only 28 members of Congress who opposed a new HIPAA rule that would limit law enforcement’s access to women’s medical records. He has promoted Viktor Orban’s pro-natalist policies in Hungary, which offer paybacks to married couples that scale up along with the number of children (a new Hungarian Constitution that banned gay marriage went into effect in 2012, so these benefits only serve “traditional” couples). Vance opposes same-sex marriage. During his 2022 Senate campaign, he suggested the sexual revolution had made divorce too easy (people nowadays “shift spouses like they change their underwear”), arguing that people in unhappy marriages, and maybe even those in violent ones, should stay together for their children. His campaign said such an insinuation was “preposterous,” but you can watch the video yourself and be the judge.
In all of this, Vance fits squarely within (and identifies with) the faction of the American New Right that typically refers to itself as “postliberalism.”
Patrick Deneen, a professor at Notre Dame, captured the basic outlook on gender and feminism among this cohort in his 2018 hit Why Liberalism Failed. Deneen’s argument is that liberal modernity is based on an irreparably individualistic view of human nature, which leads to a culture that values autonomy over community and family life. “Liberalism posits that freeing women from the household is tantamount to liberation,” he wrote, “but it effectively puts women and men alike into a far more encompassing bondage,” because work outside the home is submission to the forces of market capitalism. Somewhat bizarrely, in the postliberal mind, even gay marriage — people coming together and uniting legally into family units — becomes a form of social dissolution, because it is based on individual choice rather than traditional moral forms.
Vance is an admirer of Deneen’s work and was a featured speaker at the launch of his most recent book, Regime Change, at Catholic University in May 2023. Vance spoke highly of Deneen’s book, identified personally with postliberalism and the New Right, and declared himself to be “anti-elitist” and “anti-regime.” He has picked up on the populist language used by the postliberals, who speak in all-or-nothing terms like the “ruling class,” “replacing the elites,” “using Machiavellian means to Aristotelian ends,” or “searing the liberal faith with hot irons.”
The most important figure in American postliberalism is Harvard professor Adrian Vermeule, whose 2022 book Common Good Constitutionalism describes a mode of constitutional thinking that would make it much easier for conservatives in the United States to legislate morality. Under Vermeule’s conception, judges could rule against a given law — say a law allowing marriage equality, or abortion in another state — by appealing to his “Common Good” standard.
Vance is also friendly with the Claremont Institute, an election-denying “nerve center” for the broader New Right movement. He gave a speech at their newly opened “Center for the American Way of Life” in 2021 where, revealingly, he declared that the conservative movement should be about something simple: “I think that we should fight for the right of every American to live a good life in the country they call their own, to raise a family and dignity on a single middle-class job.”
The Claremont cohort is home to, or friendly with, some of the most extreme anti-feminists and misogynists in the movement, such as Scott Yenor, a professor at Boise State and a fellow with Claremont’s Center for the American Way of Life. He courted controversy in 2021 for calling career-oriented women “more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome than women need to be.” Or Jack Murphy, a stalwart of the Manosphere, who once declared that “feminists need rape,” and was a fellow with Claremont in 2021. Many of the leaders at the Institute, including Yenor and the president, Ryan Williams, are also part of a newly formed and pro-patriarchy fraternal organization, the Society for American Civic Renewal.
As for Vance’s comments about miserable cat ladies, they sound like the tamer musings of far-right extremists like Costin Alamariu, whose 2018 book Bronze Age Mindset popularized the concept of “the Longhouse,” a disparaging description of a political culture dominated by women, or Stephen Wolfe, who similarly rails against a “gynocracy” society where women have outsize control in his 2023 book The Case for Christian Nationalism and believes that in the ideal state women would not have the right to vote.
Vance’s mentor Peter Thiel, who is also well-connected in the New Right world, has expressed similar views about women’s suffrage, writing in a 2009 essay, “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.”
National Conservatism is the big tent, umbrella organization where the New Right comes together. Vance has been a speaker at all three of the four National Conservatism conferences that have taken place in the United States since 2019 — including the meeting in D.C. earlier this month, where he gave the final keynote address at a VIP dinner on the closing day. Whereas the first big NatCon conference seemed like an upstart, fringe affair, this year, Chris DeMuth, a former American Enterprise Institute president who is one of the conference’s key leaders, opened the conference by declaring: “A revival of faith, family, and fertility are not far right, they are the new mainstream!” Vance, for his part, gave a speech titled “America is a Nation,” which touched only lightly on questions of gender, merely echoing DeMuth’s call for a renewal of the American family. Patrick Deneen was pleased.
Back in 2022, writer James Pogue went to NatCon 2 and profiled the rising New Right for Vanity Fair. Pogue detailed an interview that Vance did in September 2021 with Jack Murphy, where Vance said he was convinced the liberal order was about to collapse, and was hoping for something dramatic from Trump. When Pogue asked Vance directly why what he had in mind for the country was not in fact a fascist takeover, Vance explained that if what he had in mind worked, “it will mean that my son grows up in a world where his masculinity — his support of his family and his community, his love of his community — is more important than whether it works for fucking McKinsey.” Fair enough, but I worry about what this means for our daughters, especially in MAGA’s masculinist, zero-sum world.
Trump lost women by 15 points in 2020; if he has any hope of moving back into the White House he’ll need to make up at least a bit of that ground. But if he hoped the vice presidential pick would help with that he may be sadly mistaken. While Trump’s sexism has manifested as a crude machismo, Vance, along with his New Right fellow-travelers, is about to introduce voters to a more conceptual take on sexism — one which many women, and indeed many men, might find even more alarming.
