Vance Is Not the Reagan of the New Right

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, September 09, 2026

 

In a famous Passover joke, a blind man is given matzah, the famously unleavened bread of the Hebrews, runs his fingers over it, and says, “Who writes this stuff?”

 

In the much older parable of the blind men and an elephant, a bunch of blind men encounter a pachyderm and each thinks they’ve encountered something different. One feels the trunk, and thinks it is a snake. Another puts his hands on the side and believes he’s encountered a wall. A third is sure the leg is a pillar.

 

I really didn’t appreciate until this morning when I started reading up on it that there is a diversity of opinion about what the fable is supposed to mean. There’s a Jain tradition that says the moral of the story is that different perspectives can all be true. I don’t think this is right. The different perspectives can all be honest or sincere. But the elephant is not a snake, or a wall, or a pillar. The elephant is an elephant. And in fairness, that’s closer to the most common interpretation: Be careful of thinking you understand something in full when you only have partial knowledge.

 

The Sufi mystic Rumi has a fun variation. In his version, the men aren’t blind—they’re in a dark room. They make the same mistakes blind men would. But Rumi says, “If there had been a candle in each one’s hand, the difference would have gone out of their words.”

 

Interestingly, the Japanese have a proverb about the blind men and the elephant that idiomatically refers to the inability of ordinary men to grasp the actions of a great man.

 

We’ve seen a lot of people try to explain Donald Trump with reference to this idea, if not the proverb. You establishment hacks can’t see the genius behind his moves, but that’s because you can’t appreciate his greatness. We’ll hear versions of this at the Trump-a-palooza in Dallas this week, I am sure.

 

On Vance and the Vanceguard.

 

But I don’t want to explore this. I’d rather look at how something similar is playing out with J.D. Vance.

 

My friend—and despite our disagreements, he really is a friend—Michael Brendan Dougherty offers something of a blind man and the elephant argument about Vance and Ronald Reagan. He runs through myriad factions of the right and their different interpretations of the Gipper. For some, he was an unwavering limited-government, free-trading, classical liberal. For others, he was a pragmatic statesman who favored protectionist policies when necessary. He was for gun rights. No, he signed a gun control bill as governor. He was an uberhawk who defeated the Soviet Union. No, he was an appeaser who got suckered into pointless summitry with the Soviets. “People pick their own Reagan to admire or abominate — and they can make that image one of a compromiser of principles or a fanatic fool devoted to the wrong ideas,” Michael writes.

 

He implies there’s something similar going on with Vance, a politician he admires greatly. I can hardly disagree, to the extent that people—people I admire and people I don’t—see different things in Vance. And how could they not? I don’t just mean his story arc from harsh critic of the dysfunction of lower-class white culture to defender of a new class of victims. Nor do I mean his transformation from Never Trumper golden boy to Robin to Trump’s Batman. (Holy metamorphoses …!).

 

Michael is very frustrated with the way people use terms like postliberal, nationalist, integralist, etc., in disparaging ways about Vance and his faction of the GOP. I can understand his frustration to some extent. Though louche and invidious terminological promiscuity is hardly exclusively a sin among critics of the new right. I’ve spent 30 years railing against people weaponizing the term “neoconservative,” with exactly zero success. Indeed, Vance himself has a long record of malicious misuse of the term to delegitimize or diminish the supposed  neocon influence on the party.

 

More to the point, it’s not the fault of Vance’s critics that people call him a postliberal. Vance has said he considers himself part of the “postliberal right.” When he was a senator, he told fellow postliberals that he was “explicitly anti-regime.” Now, I will give Vance the benefit of the doubt that he meant the Biden administration. But since we’re dinging the misuse of terms, it’s worth noting that in America the “regime,” as committed postliberals will acknowledge, is not a presidential administration but the constitutional order, or republican system of government. Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, surely knows this. Though his defenses of Donald Trump’s attempt to steal an election  suggest perhaps a more troubling understanding of the American regime. Vance’s association with “nationalism” isn’t as strong, but reasonable people can look at his speeches to Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatives as evidence that he sees himself as a nationalist as well. Hazony himself certainly thinks that’s the case.

 

Never mind that nationalism and (serious) postliberalism have some profoundly irreconcilable propositions at their core. Certainly, Catholic integralist postliberalism is one of the oldest and most coherent forms of “globalism” ever put forward.

 

But that’s okay. Michael’s whole point is that politicians can contain contradictions and people can glom onto the facets they want to see.

 

I think the reason Michael’s comparison of Vance to Reagan largely fails is that, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see a lot more consistency in Reagan than can be gleaned in the career of Vance. Yes, Reagan tactically zigged and zagged in his dealings with the Soviets, but no one doubts that his fundamental strategic goal was “We win, they lose.” Yes, he compromised with political realities on trade, but rhetorically and, again, strategically, he was a free trader. His protections for Harley-Davidson—the Reagan-was-a-protectionist crowd’s favorite example—were temporary by design. “It was like giving a boxer a few extra weeks of training before a fight,” he later explained. Indeed, his tactical concessions to a Democratic-majority Congress laid the “groundwork for a long-term free-trade legacy,” as Colin Grabow and Scott Lincicome explained in National Review.

 

“Contemporaneous critics of Reagan’s trade policies might be excused for failing to see the long game he played, but contemporary observers’ similar bouts of myopia deserve no such forgiveness,” they write.

 

Hindsight is never actually 20/20, but there are things we can see clearly about Reagan now that make a lot of Michael’s blind men and the elephant version of Reagan much less persuasive. And there were things we could see at the time, too. Reagan was a kind and congenial president. His detractors often struggled to see it, but voters saw it fairly plainly. His sunny disposition and fundamental decency played a big part in how he earned the “Teflon president” nickname. Reagan very occasionally had sharp elbows, but he didn’t believe in demonizing enemies or immigrants for political gain.

 

Whether you think Vance is a postliberal, a nationalist, or simply a more mainstream principled conservative political pragmatist, one thing you can’t persuade me—or many others—of is that he’s a Reaganesque politician in this regard. His big tent has a large and welcoming opening for edgelord Twitter addicts, traffickers in antisemitic bilge, and other fever-swampers, not to mention the aforementioned postliberals and nationalists who applaud “anti-regime” red meat. He encouraged the demonization of Haitian immigrants: “don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing.” He rhetorically tilts to a form of nationalism that ranks heritage Americans and descendants of combatants—on either side!—of the Civil War above more recent arrivals. That is not how Reagan talked—or thought—about America.

 

Whether it’s just the need to impress his boss, or a sign of his online addictions, or pure pragmatic surrender to the nastiness of our politics, or the epiphenomena of some deeper phenomenological grievances and resentments, Vance embraces the idea that politics is mean and that meanness is self-justifying. Some of his fans can’t see it because fish don’t know they’re wet. Some do see it, but write it off as the price of politics in pursuit of the noble and necessary goal of purging what Michael describes as “an excess of liberal ideology in our ruling class and their institutions.” And some just love the meanness on its own terms.

 

(Intriguingly, Michael says that “it’s precisely Vance’s commitment to [a Christian] orthodoxy in its appropriate sphere that prevents him from embracing the regnant asphyxiating and false political dogmatism” of our age. Maybe. But, from where I sit, Vance’s orthodoxy has some things to say about bearing false witness, kindness to strangers—including immigrants—and just wars that Vance doesn’t necessarily listen to when inconvenient.)

 

What’s interesting to me is that Marco Rubio doesn’t seem to see politics the same way as Vance does. Some observers have noted that Rubio is a convert to the same policy prescriptions as Vance and yet doesn’t attract nearly the same vitriol. Michael is right when he says that some of Rubio’s “most fervent supporters think he’s lying about all this.” When I took notice that Rubio had hired Nate Hochman, a very smart and talented young man sadly ensorcelled by new right ideas, Hazony commented that people like me were missing the point. “Vance, Rubio, and [Sen. Eric] Schmitt are on the same team. They share a generally nationalist conservative worldview and so draw staffers from the same ecosystem in DC. The big ideological gap is between these NatCons and the Ted Cruz - Nikki Haley wing,” Hazony wrote.

 

More’s the pity. But the interesting thing is that, as far as I can tell, very few people in the nationalist/postliberal world are clamoring for Rubio, but lots of rank-and-file Republicans are. Rubio is preferred by Republicans in head-to-head matchups and he’s generally more popular inside and outside the party. Maybe some of this can be attributed to the fact that Vance is more closely tied to a blisteringly unpopular president. Maybe it’s because Rubio, partly thanks to his portfolio and partly thanks to his manifest competence, has a more obvious record of success, while Vance has to take blame for everything thanks to the thanklessness of the vice presidency itself. And maybe it’s because Rubio doesn’t come across as someone who relishes being mean and doesn’t come across as angry, which may be why he’s not participating in Trump-a-palooza this week.

 

Michael and Hazony’s argument that Rubio is on their team is meaningful, but I’m not entirely sure the full meaning is to their liking. Vance is the chosen candidate of the very online, very angry, and very hostile factions of the right. He’s the choice of Kevin Roberts, Turning Point USA, and, at least until recently, Tucker Carlson—the same Carlson who Vance can’t bring himself to meaningfully criticize, even as Carlson seeps ever deeper into the antisemitic and paranoid swamp.

 

This is the same Carlson who told Donald Trump not to pick Rubio as a running mate because Rubio was a “neocon” and therefore America’s intelligence community would assassinate Trump to get a President Rubio. He also told Trump that Rubio would undermine Trump so that Rubio could navigate us into a nuclear war. Finally, he told Trump he had to pick Vance.

 

It may be true, sadly, that Rubio completely agrees with Vance on trade, industrial policy, and the like. I don’t think they see eye to eye on foreign policy. But I could be wrong about that. My point is that Vance represents a faction and a theory of politics that Rubio does not, and they attract different factions because of it. And that difference matters a lot, however they might fill out some policy questionnaires.

 

We’re all in the dark about what these men actually believe, Michael included. But we don’t need a candle to see that they represent very different approaches to politics—and the regime.