The Strangers: JD Vance and the Rise of the New Reactionary Elite [9780374618490]

Overview

A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist’s inside account of the MAGA movement’s heir apparent and his inner circle’s decade-long project to define and empower a radical “New Right.”

In just a few years, once-fringe ideas and personalities on the right have come to play a leading role in American politics—and found an advocate at the apex of power. In The Strangers, The Washington Post’s Peter Jamison chronicles the apprenticeship and arrival of JD Vance as he left Yale Law School for Silicon Valley, returned to his native Ohio, joined the Roman Catholic church, and overcame his previously strenuous objections to Donald Trump. Along the way, Vance achieved a dizzying political ascent and became the foremost spokesman for a new movement of far-right nationalists, first in the Senate, and then in the White House itself.

Using previously undisclosed scenes and correspondence, interviews with Vance’s friends and associates, and extensive, on-the-ground reporting, Jamison shows that Vance’s rise cannot be separated from the mentors and interlocutors he found along the way. They include Peter Thiel, the billionaire techno-futurist and democracy skeptic whose patronage launched Vance in business and in politics; Usha Chilukuri, the gifted and driven law-school classmate who became Vance’s concierge to the Ivy League elite—and, eventually, his wife; Oren Cass, a former Mitt Romney aide who rejected decades of Republican orthodoxy for an economic populism focused on the right’s working-class voters; and a tightly knit circle of conservative Catholics who reject the tenets of Enlightenment liberalism, and who want the state to promote their traditionalist vision of sexual morality and gender roles. As different as they are, many of these figures share a fierce opposition to the social and political assumptions that governed post–Cold War America—and a conviction that the time has come to dismantle the ruling class from within and replace it with a new elite.

At The Washington Post, Jamison shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the January 6 insurrection. In this book, he travels from the industrial cities of Ohio to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary to deliver a deeply reported account of an unlikely scourge of the establishment—the American politician who has arguably engaged more deeply with illiberal ideas than anyone else who has attained such high office. Ranging across the galvanizing issues of Donald Trump’s second term—the nearly unbridled rollout of AI, the scapegoating of immigrants, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the unprecedented use of the federal government to reward friends and punish enemies—The Strangers exposes many of the key forces shaping our politics. Here is the definitive portrait of the vanguard of right-wing political operatives, reactionary intellectuals, and staggeringly wealthy tech investors who are supplanting the institutions of Movement conservatism to become Washington’s new power structure.