JD Vance’s populist persona leaves pro-worker groups skeptical

There’s a popular idea in political discourse known as the horseshoe theory. The idea is that if you map ideologies on a horseshoe-shaped spectrum, the far right and the far left are actually more closely aligned than the centrists on either side.

There’s a popular idea in political discourse known as the horseshoe theory. The idea is that if you map ideologies on a horseshoe-shaped spectrum, the far right and the far left are actually more closely aligned than the centrists on either side. It’s not exactly a serious academic theory, but it can be a useful image when party orthodoxies are going through the kind of upheaval that we’ve seen, particularly on the American right, over the past decade. And nowhere is that upheaval more apparent than in the ascendancy of Ohio Republican Sen. JD Vance, the self-styled Appalachia populist — with a Yale law degree and a deep rolodex of Silicon Valley billionaire supporters — who is now running to be Donald Trump’s vice president. Vance, who is 39, is widely viewed as the vanguard of a Millennial far right that ostensibly champions blue-collar workers and chastises greedy executives (a view that Democrats and labor advocates dispute, but more on that in a moment). And he has repeatedly run afoul of the Reagan-era Republican dogma that has long made the party popular with deep-pocketed business leaders. Vance caught flak from Republicans earlier this year for complimenting Biden’s top antitrust crusader, FTC chair Lina Khan. (She’s “one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job,” Vance said at a conference in February.) Vance has even teamed up with Wall Street’s No. 1 nemesis, Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, on legislation that would crack down on big banks.