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The Curious Candidacy of JD Vance
I never had the privilege of attending Yale Law School, but I had the fascination of observing it at close range for many years: First, as a college student living in a dormitory across the street; then as an agent of the university’s alumni fund trolling for high-value targets; then as partner to a dean reviving the fortunes of one of Yale’s fabled secret societies; and, most recently, searching for faculty allies as, at the request of William F. Buckley’s siblings, I helped to launch the Buckley Institute. (The law school, unlike some of Yale’s other graduate schools, never succumbed to full wokery.)
Long-term scrutiny of Yale Law School (YLS) yields two first impressions that, over time, harden into durable facts. First, it is a notably small school, less than one-fifth the size of Yale College, which is itself one-fifth the size of a big state school. (In the current semester, for the purpose of reference, there are more Buckley Fellows in the undergraduate college than there are students in the law school.) And second, that YLS is an astonishingly powerful institution, exerting the kind of cobwebbing continental influence that few elite institutions have exerted since the Illuminati were said to have disbanded.
It is generally observed, for instance, that YLS graduates dominate the legal profession. Four graduates currently serve on the Supreme Court — Thomas, Alito, Sotomayor, and Kavanaugh. Scores more serve as federal judges, senior partners at big firms, deans and professors at law schools, state attorneys general, prosecutors, and DOJ officials. What is less widely known is that YLS graduates are marbled through the upper strata of government, business, education, finance, and media, as well. (As of this month, you can add philanthropy to that list. YLS Dean Heather Gerken has just assumed the most prestigious post in the industry, the presidency of the Ford Foundation.) In a graduating class of 200-some students, few YLS students stand out. They are all stars, and more than a few of them will become nationally famous.
During the previous century, three YLS graduates served as president of the United States — Taft, Ford, and Clinton. The man most likely to become our next president is also a YLS graduate — JD Vance. He leads in the early primary polls for 2028, and, of course, he would fill any vacancy that might occur in the interim. (I am neither a physician nor a bookmaker, but I note with interest that the incumbent is the second-oldest man ever to hold the office; that he is a virtual poster boy for MAHA’s campaign against life-shortening aspects of the American diet; and that his idea of exercise is driving an electric cart around a golf course doused with lightly regulated weedkillers.)
I belabor these points as a preface to this point: JD Vance was not a star at YLS. He graduated in 2013 with neither academic distinction (his grades, as he generously described them, were “fine but not fantastic”) nor particularly bright prospects. He spent a few years in the practice of law, forgettably. He spent a few years in the practice of venture capital, again forgettably. (That particular forgettability was in one way remarkable. His sponsor was Peter Thiel, the Midas-touched investor next to whom young associates tended to get rich quickly.) And then, at the age of 32, Vance hit the number. He published a memoir establishing himself as the political metaphor for his day: He became, overnight, America’s best-known Working-class White Male. When his book, Hillbilly Elegy, was made into a motion picture by Hollywood A-lister Ron Howard, starring Glenn Close in the performance-of-a-lifetime as Grandma Vance, young JD Vance became nationally famous.
The rest of the story is better known. In just three years, the newly famous memoirist took up politics, declared himself a Never Trumper, reconfigured himself on first contact with the electorate as an Always Trumper, launched a campaign for Senate from his home state of Ohio, won the seat in 2022, and was soon thereafter picked to be vice president. If he were to succeed the incumbent sometime in the next year, JD Vance, just turned 41, would become the youngest president in the history of the country. As his critics have noted, the presidency would be his first real job.
The Vance campaign could be — probably will be — the most startling story in our long and startling political history.
That is the case against JD Vance, and many people will find it dispositive.
I don’t. What I see is a bright young man at the front end of a growth spurt. The trajectory of his political career could be inked in as early as next year, when the 2028 campaign will begin in earnest. The Vance campaign could be — probably will be — the most startling story in our long and startling political history. If you’re an even semi-regular reader of these pages, you wouldn’t want to miss it.
Here are some notes to start your file:
One of the benefits of a small school is that students can’t hide in Row 47 of the lecture hall. Every YLS student gets called on, and every student must learn to make fluent and preferably strong arguments for complex positions taken under the pressures of time and competitive circumstances. It’s a critically important forensic skill for every public figure in our soundbite culture. Few have it (see, egregiously, K. Harris). Vance has it. You saw it in his debate with Tim Walz. You saw it in his Oval Office beatdown on Volodymyr Zelenskyy. You saw it when he served as White House point man during the shutdown. (RELATED: The Global Censorship Cancer)
Vance is almost uniquely qualified for the first primary — the race to win the incumbent’s endorsement. Vance (like Clinton) is the son of a dysfunctional parent, and he describes his early life this way: Mom “cycled through boyfriends, switching partners every few months.” “[W]ith partying came alcohol, and with alcohol came alcohol abuse.” “Mom was in the hospital, the result of a failed suicide attempt.” “The never-ending conflict took its toll. Even thinking about it today makes me nervous.” “[A]ll I wanted to do was get away from it — to hide from the fighting.”
The son of an addicted parent learns to sense tension building. He learns to deflect it or defuse it — or to pay the price for failing to do so. He learns, as political operatives would put it, to read the room.
Vance (again like Clinton) married up. JD’s YLS classmate, Usha Chilukuri, was a star. Following a stellar academic career at Yale and Cambridge, she won coveted clerkships, first at the Circuit Court of Appeals in D.C. and then at the Supreme Court. She was then hired as an associate by the first-tier law firm, Munger, Tolles and Olson, founded by Warren Buffett’s business partner, billionaire superlawyer Charlie Munger. Usha soon became a partner in the litigation department and the principal breadwinner for her new family with JD Vance, with whom she had three children in five years. For Usha Vance, an archetypal high-performing, second-generation Indian American, failure does not seem to be an option.
In 2019, JD Vance, who had grown up Protestant in down-at-the-heels Middletown, Ohio, and then married a Hindu, became … a Catholic. That conversion could not have gone down smoothly with his Chilukuri in-laws, or with his hillbilly relatives, or with his new friends in Hollywood. To me, it bespeaks both a serious intellectual journey and a serious spiritual commitment. It could be the act of a fully formed adult, a man fully recovered from a desperately disadvantaged childhood. (RELATED: J.D. Vance Proclaims Christ as ‘The Way, the Truth, and the Life’)
So suppose, if you would, that over the next year, JD Vance can disentangle himself gently from the Candace Owens fringe of his party. Suppose, further, that he can effect a fusionist reconciliation between the populist and more settled factions of his movement. And suppose, finally, that he can embrace the patriotic agenda of the incumbent while abjuring a narrow and narcissistic personal style.
Might he then be ready for his first real job?
Neal B. Freeman is a longtime contributor to The American Conservative.
READ MORE:
Why Democrats Can’t — and Won’t — Replicate MAGA
Vance Would Best All Three Top Democratic Candidates in 2028, Poll Says
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