J.D. Vance, our Opus Dei Vice President
Joe Conason has an appropriate analogy for Vice President J.D. Vance’s de facto campaign speech for the far-right German Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the election that is being held today:
The comparison between the KKK and the AfD is all too appropriate, and not only because the German party echoes the racist rhetoric of thugs in white hoods. Back when Nazi spies in this country spent millions to subvert the United States during the years before World War II, their "German American Bund" forged a firm alliance with the Klan. It was a time when many American politicians, especially in the South, openly described the KKK as a legitimate expression of "the voice of the people." No doubt Vance would have been among them.
Today, the AfD members elected to public office in Germany don't hesitate to exploit anti-immigrant hatred and racial bigotry against both Muslims and Jews. No less an authority than the U.S. State Department — during the first Trump administration — repeatedly reprimanded the vile racism of AfD figures in its annual reports on human rights in Germany.
"While senior [German] government leaders continued to condemn anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim sentiment," the State Department noted in 2018, "some members of the federal parliament and state assemblies from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party again made anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim statements."1 [my emphasis]
Vance associates himself with the hard-right Opus Dei group and its social outlook, which could be described as a highbrow version of “respectable callousness.” Michael Sean Winters in the National Catholic Reporter describes the Opus Dei approach adopted by Vance this way:
Vice President JD Vance's comment to Sean Hannity about the hierarchy of love demonstrated why he and other prominent converts to Catholicism are so problematic. Vance told Hannity he was invoking "a very old school, and I think it's a very Christian concept by the way, that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world."
What followed was a window into the way so much of contemporary Christian life is deranged. Rory Stewart, a former aide to British Prime Minister Tony Blair who now teaches at Yale, tweeted, "A bizarre take on John 15:12-13 — less Christian and more pagan tribal. We should start worrying when politicians become theologians, assume to speak for Jesus, and tell us in which order to love ..."2
Winters cites an encyclical from the conservative Pope Benedict XVI to argue that Vance’s stunted view of Christian social perspective is Unclear On The Concept: “Vance, and the policies he is defending, does not start with grace and gratitude. He is not just ethically wrong. He doesn't understand the faith to which he converted.”
Bradley Onishi last year analyzed the difference in Vance’s Opus Dei outlook and that of the conservative Protestant-evangelical perspective represented by people like former Vice President Mike Pence. He explains that one Catholic philosopher with whom Vance has identified itself is the “postliberal” Patrick Deneen who in a May 2023 event:
… called for something more radical than January 6th: a complete toppling of the current American order. “I don’t want to violently overthrow the government,” he said. “I want something far more revolutionary.” Deneen proposes an “aristopopulism,” in which the virtuous elite provide order and structure to public life in order to ensure the flourishing of the ordinary citizens who cannot provide it for themselves.3
Conason, Joe (2024): Vance In Munich: Like A German Urging Americans To Embrace The Klan. National Memo 02/16/2025. <https://www.nationalmemo.com/jd-vance-racism> (Accessed: 2025-23-02).
Winters, Michael Sean (2025): The deeper problems with JD Vance's theological riffs. National Catholic Reporter 02/05/2025. <https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/ncr-voices/deeper-problems-jd-vances-theological-rifts> (Accessed: 2025-23-02).
Onishi, Bradley (2024): J.D. Vance Will Be A More Extremist Christian VP Than Mike Pence. Rolling Stone 07/27/2024. <https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/jd-vance-extremist-christian-vp-mike-pence-1235069117/> (Accessed: 2025-23-02).
Or maybe it is National Socialism dressed up with a cross. Someone was posting about 'Deutches Requiem' by Borges that apparently saw the Nazis as the destroyers of the moral worldview of Judaism (and Christianity). And this is honestly what I see in Vance. I do not see someone even remotely influenced by current Catholic teaching. He seems to know nothing about it, has not embraced even parts of it, and has hopped to something that is a reaction to current Catholic teaching, a kind of aristo-catholicism as stated here. Maybe Vermuele is also influenced by the same thing, as is Bannon. They would like to destroy the church as it currently exists, which is an (obviously very flawed) international institution that now has many doctrines which have come to embrace radical egalitarianism rejecting nationalism, racism, ethnocentrism, (but not sexism--so not very egalitarian!) and also a preferential option for the poor. This is not even about 'conservatives' vs. 'liberals' since both Benedict and John Paul II were both critics of capitalism, and did not reject some of the key fundamentals of Vatican II. So we'll have to see how that goes over time. Francis was in a very fractured situation, trying to do battle with these forces which desperately wanted him gone or dead.
And for what? It's all crazy but they do make money off of it.
One thing that is nuts about this period is that you have these large populations of people who believe none of these ideologies. These ideologies are arcane and bananas. You can rule over them by grabbing the coercive power--but can you change their entire perspective to mirror the ideologies you want? You can mobilize them to support leaders who will destroy the world to push the ideologies--they can get control over institutions, etc. But now the question is whether they can shift the thinking of all these people into the direction they want things to go. Or maybe confuse people so intensely that they cannot access the things they believe about equality or human dignity or human rights or freedom, muddy the waters until these ideas are forgotten. Can you destroy the enlightenment itself? That seems a tall order. At most, they can simply throw the world into such chaos that there is no means to make these ideas real. That seems possible I suppose. If anything about historical materialism is true--do our material foundations dovetail with these anti-humanist perspectives? I would say no--they don't. Our material conditions have not changed so much that the value of the individual seems irrelevant and we will look with ardor upon a small bunch of would-be aristocrats to lead us. The would-be aristocrats aren't organizing our world in any way that makes them *necessary*. They are more unnecessary than ever, in fact, as far as I can tell. They are more like a criminal gang on top of what is necessary. So there's an open question whether that's sufficient for any lasting social changes on the structural level. It works in some societies like Russia because they fell into a gangland war, the gang-lords were able to grab control. Will it work in all societies in a lasting way? I guess we'll see.