In 2016, JD Vance famously branded President Donald Trump “cultural heroin” and privately wondered whether the man might prove “America’s Hitler.” By 2022, that same critic had transformed into Trump’s most effective lieutenant. By 2024, he stood as the vice presidential nominee.
Ideological recognition, not mere political conversion, clearly drives this rapid arc. Vance has locked into the exact intellectual space that Spain’s Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera carved out in the 1930s: a national-syndicalist synthesis that rejects both liberal capitalism and Marxist materialism while retaining the collectivist, hierarchical, and anti-individualist instincts of the European extreme Left. In other words, instead of fostering the class struggle the classical Left has always promoted, it believed in conciliation across classes through a political thought that even Freud himself could not have explained.
