JD Vance’s Post-Liberal Populism Reaches the Point of Diminishing Returns

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, April 15, 2026

 

JD Vance may not worry about the political capital he wagered on Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose party suffered a catastrophic defeat at the polls this week. Perhaps the vice president believes there will be few lasting costs associated with his failed effort to boost Orbán’s “post-liberal” project, but nothing was gained from it. Indeed, Vance’s investment in that enterprise never made much practical sense.

 

Orbán was never overtly warm to American national interests. Rather, his government advanced the objectives of Vladimir Putin’s regime inside the European Union in ways that were often at odds with Donald Trump’s policy goals. In the wake of the Israeli pager attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon, according to the Washington Post’s reporting, Orbán’s foreign minister floated an intelligence-sharing relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Orbán might be a “great guy” in Vance’s estimation, but he was hardly a friend to the United States.

 

What’s more, Orbán’s successor, Péter Magyar, is no left-winger. He was not opposed to the European Union as a supranational institution, but he is hostile to its lax immigration policies. Magyar is similarly vocal in his opposition to culturally progressive social politics, leading the Western left to fret that Hungary has merely traded one reactionary authoritarian for another. But Magyar is an Atlanticist who supports the NATO alliance. At present, so, too, is Donald Trump. The president’s effort to drag the Atlantic Alliance into the U.S.-Israeli campaign aimed at bringing Iran to heel betrays his interest preserving a nimble, united NATO capable of sustained power projection. Maybe that’s why Trump has so far expressed only support for Orbán’s replacement.

 

Of course, Vance’s enthusiasm for Orbán-style “illiberal democracy” is an ideological pursuit, not a practical one. But it’s increasingly difficult to identify any political advantages in the vice president’s crusade. Conversely, the downsides are becoming increasingly hard to ignore.

 

At a recent right-wing confab populated disproportionately by the unrepresentative and radicalized consumers of political infotainment, for example, Vance yoked a political millstone around his own neck.

 

In his response to one wide-eyed interlocutor, Vance recalled a story in which he was confronted over his opposition to Ukraine’s defensive war against Russian invaders by a Ukrainian American. Vance praised his own steadfast refusal to countenance criticism. “This person got really agitated at me because I was saying that we should stop funding the Ukraine war,” the vice president related. “And I still believe that, obviously. And it’s one of the proudest things I’ve done in this administration is we’ve told Europe that, if you want to buy weapons, you can, but we’re not buying weapons and sending them to Ukraine anymore.”

 

What a ponderous thing to say. By Vance’s own admission, his own preferred policy, which he advocated repeatedly and plainly — cutting off Ukraine — is not the policy of the administration in which he serves. Arguably, Kyiv is more globally integrated today than at any point in its history as a sovereign entity, and Ukraine’s soldiers are making gains on the battlefield — victories due, in part, to U.S. initiatives.

 

To whom is a line like this supposed to appeal? Maybe Vance presumes that he’s channeling the unarticulated zeitgeist that secretly prevails among Republican primary voters, but evidence of that is hard to find. Recent surveys indicate that most Republicans sympathize more with Ukraine than Russia, and providing arms to Ukraine remains a plurality proposition among those who identify with the GOP.

 

Perhaps Vance is pushing his chips in on the notion that dyspeptic populist podcasters and their listeners will form the nucleus around which a broader right-wing coalition will accrete.

 

At that same conference, Vance identified the comedian and broadcaster Theo Von as someone he would recommend young people listen to as they embark on their path to political maturity. Vance himself sparred with Von last year over the degree to which the podcaster had become beholden to a variety of conspiratorially antisemitic shibboleths. Vance’s intervention was unsuccessful. Von continues to peddle the anti-Jewish paranoia that is currency online but remains deeply antisocial almost everywhere that interpersonal engagement is practiced.

 

It’s not clear what wisdom young conservatives are supposed to glean from a depressive polemicist whose political philosophy is closer to that of self-described socialists like Senator Bernie Sanders. Indeed, it’s hard to see what immediate political advantages Vance believes he will draw from ingratiating himself with a contingent of broadcasters who seem to have no constituency among self-described Republicans — at least, not when it comes to the biggest questions in public life.

 

The podcasters have spent every waking moment since the outbreak of the war against the Islamic Republic of Iran condemning that enterprise in a most vitriolic and uncompromising fashion. But six straight weeks of monotonous anti-war advocacy has had no measurable effect on how Republican voters view this war.

 

A CBS News/YouGov poll from March 2-3 found that 85 percent of Republicans backed “military action against Iran.” Two weeks later, the same pollster found that 84 percent of Republicans still supported the war. Two weeks after that, 81 percent of Republicans still approved of the president’s performance in relation to Iran. In addition, about seven in ten Republicans said the war makes GOP voters feel safe, proud, and confident, and just 12 percent of Republicans wanted to see Congress circumscribe the president’s ability to further prosecute the war.

 

Take any poll you like. None indicate that the anti-war posture assumed by the podcasters — and Vance himself, as his Fox News confession attests — enjoys the support of a majority of GOP voters. Surely, Republican voters hear what these supposedly popular political commentators are saying about what is right now the most salient issue in American public life. They’re just not listening to them.

 

Any prudent investor would recognize the point at which throwing good money after bad reaches the point of diminishing returns. Vance has committed great sums of his own political capital in advancing the “post-liberal” cause with which he once associated himself. He has little to show for the effort, save his own losses. It’s time to cut bait.