Who are the far right in the USA? Deep breath. They’re neo-Nazis, neo-monarchists, neo-confederates, neo-reactionaries and Lost Cause cranks, white nationalists, nativists, violent misogynists of the “Manosphere”, anti-abortion fanatics, Silicon Valley libertarians, scientific racists, rebranded eugenicists, homophobes, transphobes, goldbugs, conspiracy theorists, QAnon-ers, vaccine deniers, anti-Semites, Islamophobes, Kahanists, paramilitary militia members, Three Percenters, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Minutemen, Sovereign Citizens, Groypers, Birchers, Klansmen and about a thousand other things. The extreme right in the US is as various as it is large, drawing on long histories of hate, some stretching back almost to the founding of the country.
Many on the far right are several of the above, none are all. Far from being a homogenous bloc, the right is as fractious and fratricidal as any other part of the political spectrum. As long as mass politics have existed in the country, the far right has been an important political force, sometimes forming their own parties, sometimes exercising their leverage over one or both of the major parties. In the 1920s, more than half of the members of the Indiana legislature were members of the KKK, who controlled both the state Democratic and Republican parties.
Since the 1960s, parties have been more circumspect in courting far-right votes, but those votes have not disappeared. Political scientists today estimate that about one in 10 voters identify as white nationalists. The Democratic Party, once the home of the proudly racist “Dixiecrats”, reinvented itself as a multiracial liberal party. Republicans absorbed most of these extreme-right voters through coded appeals like Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”, rather than naked bigotry. Sometimes these appeals were extremely crude, sometimes subtle, but the party elders had the political smarts to understand what was deniable and what was not.
This arrangement had begun fraying long before JD Vance arrived on the political scene. The Republican Party has moved steadily right since at least the 1990s, with this trend accelerating in the 2010s, ideologically driven by well-funded think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and Claremont Institute. As restive primary voters turfed out centre-right establishment figures, more and more extreme replacements had to be found. This sent a clear message to other Republicans: move right or perish. Trump may have seemed a shocking break from the past, but an even more extreme shift happened at the level of political staffers, and Republican youth organisations. Young Republicans, the people who are slowly becoming state and national politicians, are now extremely online, consuming a diet of far-right media, and remaking the party in their image.
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Vance’s rise has been swift, from Yale Law School student to venture capital fund manager and author to Senator to vice-presidential candidate in a little over a decade. He just turned 40. The country’s first millennial candidate on a major party ticket has a net favourability rating of -9, by some distance the most unpopular vice-presidential candidate in recent history.
What is it that makes this man so repellent to wide swathes of the public? The answer may lie in the moniker that Vance found himself almost immediately saddled with: “weird”. No surprise when one of his first actions was to embark on a crusade against “childless cat ladies” who were supposedly dooming the nation. There’s no denying that Vance’s communication style is awkward and unsettling, but there is something darker underneath this that voters are detecting, egged on by Democratic communications teams. Rather than speaking in the classic coded language of law and order or getting “tough on welfare”, Vance surfaces the strange, sometimes openly hateful language of the fringe right. Vance has regularly appeared on podcasts with fringe-right figures, agreeing with hosts on the “purpose of the postmenopausal female” being to help raise grandchildren, arguing that Trump should purge the civil service, and criticising, somewhat risibly, waves of Irish, German and Italian immigration in the 19th century.
Like those Republican staffers, Vance’s age is the key factor in his bizarre public pronouncements. He doesn’t come from old school Reaganite stock. His career, in finance and politics, was launched by Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of Palantir who has spent years attempting to mainstream his idiosyncratic techno-libertarian views through spending liberally and grooming candidates for office. Thiel is just one of Vance’s political inspirations, among a rogues gallery of obscure figures of the right. As evidence emerges of his connections with a Holocaust denier, conspiracy theorists and other extremists, it’s no surprise that he seems weird to the average Michigan suburbanite.
If Vance tanks the ticket, he won’t be the first. The electoral record of Trump-picked extremist candidates is abysmal. Blake Masters, Kari Lake and Adam Laxalt are just three Trump choices who lost eminently winnable races for the party. Win or lose, however, Vance represents something bleak in the American political imagination, and something that won’t go away with one defeat in November.
Jack Sheehan is a writer based in New York