The vice president of the United States is a man who wrote a memoir about the place that formed him, cashed the checks from Peter Thiel’s venture fund, and now sits atop a coalition that asks the working class to trust a “virtuous elite” to steer society in the correct direction — with, apparently, a bit of esoteric steering when the public cannot be trusted to know what it wants. This is what the conservative movement now calls building a future for the common man.
Corinne Cowan’s National Review piece JD Vance’s Coalitions Are Coming to Blows traces the emerging tensions between the “tech right” and right-wing populists. She fairly describes the fault lines: the data-center moratoria, the public-opinion polls, the deeper anxiety that the things Silicon Valley builds might disrupt the American way of life. She even notes — and this is worth pausing on — that the populist right worries about the spiritual deprivation of free-market capitalism, not merely the material. The question she poses is the right one: whether cultural preservation and GDP are different metrics of human flourishing.
It is a shame the movement answering that question has decided the answer is a network of billionaires and their preferred vice president, operating the levers of state while telling the rest of us not to worry because they are the elite who will “enlighten” our interests.
Consider the data center. The source offers two polling numbers — 63 percent of Americans think AI is moving too fast, and 70 percent oppose data-center construction in their local area — and the piece does not press them far enough. The server farm rising where the machine shop stood is not a symbol; it is the thing itself. The draw on the water table for cooling, the acre of concrete that replaces the ground that held water, the tax abatements that shift the burden onto the county that already lost its employer. The men who built it will never live near it. The people who live near it are told it is reindustrialization. But when your town gets a data center, what it gains is twenty full-time jobs and a industrial building that employs no one who lives down the road. The town next door got the prison. The town after that got the distribution warehouse. All of them lost the tax base that used to come from things that employed people who bought houses, sent kids to the public school, and joined the volunteer fire department. The data center is the latest form of the same extraction the old mills practiced: take the resources, leave the community to pay the cost.
Cowan writes that the New Right’s populists are concerned with the “livelihood of the average American.” The base is telling them, in numbers, what it thinks. The response is to form a network that “unites financiers and the MAGA base” — meaning the base’s actual preferences get mediated through the elite’s priorities. The people who built the place are being told that the men who will profit from replacing it know what is best for it.
Let me concede the point: Cowan is not wrong to observe that the populist impulse, on its own, rarely produces intelligent policy. Populism can rally Americans and turn energy into action, but it tends to be reactive and easily manipulated by the next demagogue who can name an enemy. The problem is not the diagnosis that a movement needs some coherent direction. The problem is that the direction chosen is aristopopulism — the idea that a wise and virtuous elite should guide the interests of the working class, because the working class cannot be trusted to know its own good.
This is not a conservative idea. It is not a Catholic idea. The mechanism has been tried before by men who believed they alone saw the shape of history. The Chamber of Commerce Republican who told the Main Street hardware store that free trade would be good for it while the zoning board voted to rezone the lot for a big-box retailer. The free-market ideologue who preached that the market would provide while the family farm was consolidated into the third corporate farm in the county. The “local control” party that handed every Main Street to the private-equity rollup. The name changes each time, but the mechanism is always the same: a small group of people who are certain they are right, operating with the power of the state, while the rest of the society is treated as raw material to be shaped.
A Catholic convert sits in the room with the men who publicly feud with Pope Leo XIV. Patrick Deneen — who helped shape Vance’s thought — belongs to a tradition that takes transnational Catholic authority seriously. The institution that shaped Vance’s conversion is the institution his coalition is willing to break, and he has chosen loyalty to the boss over fidelity to the thing that formed him. This is not a policy disagreement. It is a man abandoning the institution that gave him his moral vocabulary.
I traded agricultural futures in Chicago. I know what happens when a small group of people in a room believes they see the true shape of the market while the grower who woke up at four in the morning to check his pivots is treated as a price-taker. The trader’s conviction is always that he is smarter than the man in the field, and he frequently is — about the spread between the March and May contracts. He is not smarter about what the land needs, what the community needs, what the family needs. But the system is arranged so that his knowledge is the only knowledge that matters.
That is what the “virtuous elite” framework does. It takes one kind of intelligence — the kind that can calculate, forecast, and strategize inside a closed system — and treats it as the only intelligence that governs. It does not matter whether the system is a commodities exchange or a data-center buildout or a national birth-rate policy designed by men who have never changed a diaper. The premise is the same: the people on top know better, and the people on the bottom will be led toward a good they did not choose.
Cowan notes that Vance’s ally Chris Buskirk, through the Rockbridge Network, aims to unite financiers and the MAGA base. She quotes Rousseau’s Social Contract — the role of the “legislator” is to “enlighten” the interest of the common people with the wisdom of the few. And she notes that Peter Thiel’s essay “The Straussian Moment” defends esotericism and closed-door operations as necessary for steering society.
This is the fusion that the post-liberal right has made with the tech right: the post-liberals want a virtuous elite to impose a moral order; the tech right wants a virtuous elite to drive disruption. Both agree that the elite should be virtuous, wise, and closed-door. Both agree that the ordinary institutions of democratic life — the town meeting, the co-op, the parish council, the union local — are inadequate to the task of guiding society. Both agree that the answer to concentrated corporate power is concentrated state power.
They could not be more wrong.
A conservatism that has abandoned subsidiarity — the principle that decisions belong at the lowest competent level, that the family and the town and the co-op come before the corporation and the bureau — is not a conservatism at all. It is a managerial order with a conservative vocabulary. The post-liberals diagnose the dissolution of community and prescribe a state that will restore it by force. The tech right diagnoses the stagnation of innovation and prescribes an elite that will disrupt it by force. Neither trusts the people they claim to serve.
The counter-model is the one my co-op lives every day: widely distributed ownership, democratic governance at the level where people actually know one another, and a skeptical eye on any power that claims to act for your own good without asking your consent. It is the electric co-op that lit rural Wisconsin because the investor-owned utilities would not come. It is the credit union that gives a farmer a loan the bank would not make. It is the small parish that the diocese closed and the laity reopened, because the building belonged to the people who prayed in it.
That is the distributed answer. It centralizes nothing. It does not need a virtuous elite to enlighten anyone. It needs the people who live in a place to decide what that place needs, and the legal and economic structures that let them act on that decision.
The aristopopulists will tell you this is hopelessly idealistic, that the working class cannot be trusted to know its own interests, that someone has to steer. I have heard that before, from every floor of the building I left. I came home to a county that is poorer, older, and emptier than it was when I left, and I have watched the elites who were going to save us — the C&NW, the paper company, the golf resort, the venture capitalist — extract what they came for and leave the rest of us to pay the tax bill.
The vice president owns the same story I do, except he sits in the room with the people who run the extraction. He would say he is in there to help. The history of elite steering suggests that what he will do is help them steer it more smoothly, and call it populism.