From Palin to Vance: A Brief History of "Real American" GOP VP Flops
When John McCain tapped Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, the GOP was anxious to introduce her as a conservative archetype. She was a mother to a large family but committed to serving in politics as an anti-feminist, a believing Christian opposed to abortion, a fit athlete and rugged outdoorswoman who represented the true American antagonists of the supposed latte-sipping coastal elites.
The Christian right was thrilled. Not only was Palin a Christian, she was a charismatic evangelical unafraid to talk about her faith, even if outsiders didn't understand the gifts of the spirit. Even when she wasn't talking about religion, charismatic Christians nonetheless instantly recognized her demeanor and her cadence as one of their own. She was, they believed, anointed. They celebrated her "Christian warrior spirit." She quickly gained a starring role in dreams and revelations of self-appointed prophets, as God's instrument in the spiritual wars they claimed (and still do) rage in America.
The Christian right was ecstatic because they were confident Palin wasn't going to water things down for the unchurched masses. They would defend her, even if things got weird. And they did get weird, at least from the perspective of the majority of Americans who were unfamiliar with the ideas of spiritual warfare, prophecy, and dominionism (which are commonplace in the charismatic world). Videos surfaced of her discussing God's plan and the end-times at church, and of a controversial Kenyan preacher laying hands on her, casting out witchcraft spirits and preaching dominionism and the prosperity gospel. As mayor of Wasilla, she adopted barely secularized "biblical" materials for governance created by the Institute in Basic Life Principles, the ministry run by the controversial evangelist Bill Gothard.
Palin's candidacy, although a failure, served a purpose by paving the way for Donald Trump's unabashed embrace of charismatic Christianity (particularly through his spiritual advisor, the televangelist Paula White, cut from a similar mold as Palin), and the increasing dominance of charismatic "apostles" and "prophets" in Christian nationalist politics. However misguided by the McCain camp, her candidacy had the electoral purpose of energizing the Christian right, which was less than enthused with McCain himself.
By contrast, Trump's selection of JD Vance has only one evident motive: energizing the weird fascistic tech bros of Silicon Valley and their online fans. Trump assumes (probably correctly) that he has his white evangelical base locked up. Even though leaders are still seething about being shut out of the platform drafting process, they will come home to him in the end.
The vast world of evangelicalism is bonded together through churches, other religious organizations, a highly disciplined political infrastructure, and robust religious television and radio. Palin really did resonate with voters immersed in that world. Vance's world is one of tech billionaires, far-right conferences about patriarchy, and fringe authoritarian online celebrities in his corner of the internet. They're well-known to each other and to people who spend a lot of time online, but they lack the broader infrastructure that the Christian right has.
It has taken very little time for Vance's "shillbilly" shtick to be exposed for its transparent opportunism. And now the writers and journalists who have been covering the world of tech venture capitalism and its assorted fascism-curious "thinkers" are bringing us close, terrifying looks at Vance's friends, many of whom make a witchcraft-chasing pastor from Kenya seem like a relatively tame oddity.
In the New Republic, Gil Duran lays out the dizzyingly bizarre views of Curtis Yarvin, a friend of Vance and his patron Peter Thiel. Yarvin, who once wrote under the totally "I'm not a freak" pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, is, according to Duran, "the chief thinker behind an obscure but increasingly influential far-right neoreaction, or NRx, movement, that some call the 'Dark Enlightenment,'" which "openly promotes dictatorships as superior to democracies and views nations like the United States as outdated software systems. Yarvin seeks to reengineer governments by breaking them up into smaller entities called 'patchworks,' which would be controlled by tech corporations." Yarvin's views, and his influence on Vance, were also reported in 2022, when Vance was running for Senate. But now that he is on the national stage, it is much, much harder to dismiss as hard to follow (which it is) and therefore unimportant (which it is not).
Much easier to grasp in its retrograde simplicity is this movement's deeply embedded misogyny. For that, Laura Field, a political theorist whose forthcoming book on this New Right will be the essential guide to this cast of characters and their anti-democratic beliefs, has you covered. Field wrote this week in Politico specifically about the grotesque misogyny of Vance and his friends. It goes well beyond his "childless cat ladies" comment (which has just earned a rebuke from Jennnifer Aniston, speaking of mainstream versus fringe).
Field catalogs some of "the most extreme anti-feminists and misogynists in the movement," who use terms like "Manosphere" to describe their own spaces where they can say things like "feminists need rape." They decry the "gynocracy," or a society in which they believe women wield too much control, with some arguing that women ideally shouldn't be allowed to vote.
One of the movement's other popular "thinkers" has used the pseudonym "Bronze Age Pervert" to author a bizarre book called Bronze Age Mindset, which, according to Field, "popularized the concept of 'the Longhouse,' a disparaging description of a political culture dominated by women."
Palin crashed and burned because there was no there there, but also because she could not connect with voters outside the Republican evangelical base. Vance may have the Yale law degree and the best-selling book, but so far he's been an empty suit on the campaign trail, devoid of Trump's star power. But very soon, even people who don't spend their days online will become familiar with how wildly outside mainstream American culture his influences are, and how he's surrounded by weirdos using pseudonyms to write fascistic online manifestos to end democracy and impose a patriarchy. We have recently seen what happens when mainstream media and popular culture reacted to Project 2025. Vance is about to get that treatment.