The Weird Intellectual Roots of J.D. Vance’s Hatred for “Cat Ladies”

I was called a “childless cat lady” once. It was in response to an article I wrote last year about the authoritarian ideology coming out of the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank. I told my kids; they thought it was funny. I didn’t tell my cat because I don’t have one. So when I saw J.D. Vance’s comment about “childless cat ladies” running the Democratic Party I was hardly surprised. He is nowhere near as original as he seems. He belongs to a movement, often referred to as the “New Right,” that is far more complex and extreme—and, yes, weird—than most people understand.

On the face of it, Vance appears to be living a lie. On the one hand, he carries the aura of meritocracy. He’s a Yale Law School graduate and a former junior private equity associate; he had a transgender friend; he married the daughter of South Asian immigrants; and he was once sensible enough to have called Trump “morally reprehensible,” a form of “cultural heroin,” and “America’s Hitler.” On the other hand, he is a hillbilly and a man of the people, he claims to speak for the forgotten white working class, he appears to be a sincere convert to Catholicism, and he demands that our political leaders be free of the malign influences of billionaires—like the private equity titans who funded his own political career.

Vance explains it all as a matter of changing his mind. Many people, finding this explanation preposterous, put it down to hypocrisy jacked up with ambition. But the contradictory sides of J.D. Vance fit together neatly once you understand something about the movement he represents.

In the article that earned me my first “childless cat lady” accolade, I pointed out that the roots of the New Right’s ideology lie in a particular interpretation of the work of the midcentury political theorist Leo Strauss. To cut a long story short: The New Right’s understanding of Straussianism makes a crucial distinction between what he calls “exoteric” and “esoteric” communication. The “exoteric” stuff is what you tell the little people who are thought to be simpleminded and religious by instinct. “Esoteric” messages are what you tell your fellow leaders and allies in private as you prepare to rule over the herd (for their own good, of course).

Leaders of the New Right, such as Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, the architect of Project 2025, and Christopher Rufo, the mastermind of the “critical race theory” hysteria, present themselves as members of a new intellectual elite—even as they cast themselves as representatives of ordinary folk. (Roberts, in conversation with Ted Cruz in 2022, commented that “driving big trucks is one way we can defeat cultural Marxism in America.”) Yet they are unabashedly elitist, and this is a key part of the New Right movement to which Vance belongs. They manufacture lies for the little people, but they do it all in service of some greater truth, at least in their own minds. Vance evidently sees himself as a member of this club, which may explain why he is so comfortable portraying himself as a wholesome hillbilly despite having gone to Yale and become a Silicon Valley elite.

As I also pointed out in my essay on Claremont last year, another key figure in that New Right tradition is German political theorist Carl Schmitt. The most important thing to know about Schmitt was that he was a Nazi; the second-most-important thing is that he was profoundly anti-liberal. He saw the attempt to ground a state on the ideas of “individual rights,” the rule of law, and rational policymaking as a horrible betrayal of the calling of politics. All that mattered was standing up for “the nation”—that is, a particular people who shared common blood and lived on a designated soil—and doing whatever it took to defeat its internal foes. A proper leader, he suggested, must rise above the law. Schmitt adored Hitler for that reason. The men of the New Right adore Trump for essentially the same reason.

Vance articulated a version of this blood-and-soil anti-liberalism at the Republican National Convention. Noting that some of his ancestors were buried in a cemetery in Kentucky, he said he hoped that seven generations of his family would be buried there as well, even if “they would die fighting to protect it. That is the source of America’s greatness.”

When Vance kissed the ring of the man he once tagged as “America’s Hitler,” then, it wasn’t because he had changed his mind about Trump. It’s because he, with the help of his New Right friends like Roberts (whose new book features a foreword, which TNR obtained this week, by Vance), came to appreciate better the virtues of an authoritarian leader.

This helps explain the contradictions that run through Vance’s political career—how someone who owes his venture-capitalist riches and Senate seat to a few billionaire benefactors can pretend to champion the little guy. In the New Right worldview to which Vance subscribes, hierarchies of power are a fact of life. There will always be those at the top in society, and there will always be a mudsill; the powers that be are ordained of God. The only real question is whether the top ranks are staffed with the woke cat ladies of the left or the manly trad men of the New Right.

Thus, laboring in Washington on behalf of the private equity and tech titans who have ascended to the throne of the modern economy isn’t an act of hypocrisy on the part of an ambitious politician. It is a sacred act of duty to uphold the order of being. In Vance’s world, power, God, and money are all on the same side, and lies are just another way of speaking a deeper truth.