For nearly a decade the Lyin’ King has unleashed a firehose of lies and “alternative facts” [hat tip, Kellyanne Conway] on his followers and anyone caught in the crossfire. But now, the Big Top is beginning to collapse. Crowds are drifting away. Checking phones. Staring blankly.
In desperation, the Lyin’ King ratchets up the racism, the misogyny, the xenophobia— and in barely coherent rants, threatens one tough, nasty day of violence to stop shoplifters, and promises revenge and retribution on his enemies. He speaks passionately of America as a post-apocalyptic, crime ridden country, though no one has ever seen it. Exactly where is this “hellscape of blood, death, and suffering on a scale once unthinkable” mixed with smoke and fires and sharks and lawless mobs? Charlie Warzel writes in The Atlantic: “Imagine that, instead of Donald Trump’s, you were looking at the [Facebook] feed of a relative. What would you say or do? Whom would you call?”
The Lyin’ King is deflating. Diminishing. It’s only a matter of time—due to advancing age or diminished abilities or newly unsealed criminal evidence that he conspired to overturn the 2020 election—before he’s done.
But his heir is watching. After anointing him at the Republican Convention, the Lyin’ King beamed upon his cub: “JD, you’re going to be doing this for a long time, so enjoy the ride.”
Which is where we begin.
If elected, one thing is certain: Trump will be preoccupied with settling scores of grievances. This will give the “heartbeat-away-president” Vance free rein to recreate American society in his image.
On the day he was baptized into the church, Vance was interviewed by Rod Dreher for The American Conservative.
“My views on public policy and what the optimal state should look like are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching. I saw a real overlap between what I would like to see and what the Catholic Church would like to see.”—JD Vance
What does Vance want to see?
Answers are strewn along the path of Vance’s journey to redemption. His first and most critical feat will be to flip the governing order of the United States from one that respects individual rights to one that submits to Christian nationalist ethics and behavior. Christian nationalism seeks to erode and eliminate the distinction between church and state. It is not a religion. It is a political ideology called out by major religious organizations like Baptist Joint Committee, Interfaith Alliance, National Council of Churches, and nonprofits like the Freedom from Religion Foundation.
On the campaign trail, Vance radiates an extreme conservative post-liberal order. In many ways, he has been saying that it's time for everyone to fall in line and do things the way Vance and his beliefs envision. This post-liberal order Vance ascribes to rehabilitates right-wing Catholic authoritarianism and echoes the methods employed by dictators in Europe and South America during the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Post-liberalism embraces the very thing Ronald Reagan warned about in 1986: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” Vance’s government would impose a top down moral code of behavior on American citizens crushing individual rights of women and vulnerable communities. The designs of Christian nationalism in all its forms are anti-democratic and un-constitutional. Christian nationalism would erase any separation of church and state, which the Supreme Court hasn’t already undone.
I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.
Post-liberalism marches straight into the dungeon of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, where the Grand Inquisitor rebukes Jesus for preaching free will. Vance aligns himself with the Grand Inquisitor. He is all about communal good over individual liberty, and along with the aims of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, he plans to wield state powers to achieve his ends. Vance is not the persona we saw on the debate stage with Tim Walz on Tuesday night. He is on a militant mission and is doing his best to hide it. At a recent tent revival in Eau Claire Wisconsin, 2000 people cheered the incitement of evangelist Mario Murillo:
“We are going to prepare for war… I’m not on the Earth to be blessed; I’m on the Earth to be armed and dangerous.”
Post-liberalism, a controversial Catholic-inspired political philosophy, is thoroughly explained by Jonathan Liedl in this National Catholic Register article: “JD Vance Is a Catholic ‘Post-Liberal’: Here’s What That Means — And Why It Matters.” Post-liberalism is a political philosophy that seeks to move beyond the dominant liberal paradigm of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It challenges core tenets of liberalism, including its strong focus on individual rights and freedoms. Vance has aligned himself with this philosophy.
Post-liberalism explains why CPAC and American conservatives are fascinated with Viktor Orbán. Rod Dreher, who interviewed JD Vance on the day of Vance’s baptism, has since moved to Budapest Hungary. According to his Substack “Notes from the Middle Ground,” Damon Linker reports that his old friend Dreher is helping foster the convergence between the Republican Party and Orbán’s Fidesz Party. Dreher was instrumental in arranging Tucker Carlson's visit to Hungary in 2021 and finds Orbán's brand of right-wing populism appealing, including his ban on teaching gender studies in Hungarian universities and restricting LGBT content in schools. Governor Ron DeSantis clearly took note in Florida.
Orbán’s influence extends across a spectrum of right-wing extremists and libertarians. In their view, democracy is obsolete. Its utility is reduced to an “illiberal” form of democracy” picking and choosing the parts that work for authoritarian autocracy. Orbán claims that equal treatment of women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities undermines the natural order of white heteronormativity. Immigration, he argues, weakens a nation by diluting its purity.
Linker laments that his old friend Dreher has become an Orbán apologist, sanitizing the racist language of Orbán’s orations about immigration. Linker urges his old friend to use his voice “to explain why your allies on the right must repudiate the racist and xenophobic anti-liberalism for which Viktor Orbán has now unambiguously made himself a leading spokesman.”
Will JD Vance do that? It seems unlikely, especially where Haitians are involved.
Vance is attacking secular American society itself. In 2021 he said in an interview:
“Conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing. We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power.”
Compromise.
That’s the same word found in the covertly recorded assertion of a certain Supreme Court Justice at the Supreme Court Historical Society's annual gala.
“There can be a way of working, a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised.”—Justice Samuel Alito
Can’t be compromised.
Liberal filmmaker Lauren Windsor’s recording was condemned by the Historical Society, but she may well have done democracy a favor by goading Alito into admitting that the nation needs to return to a place of “godliness,” liberalism be damned. Alito may not be alone. It appears JD Vance has several post-liberal allies on the Supreme Court.
Heather Cox Richardson, in her Substack “Letters from an American,” has been tracking JD Vance closely. She writes that on Saturday, September 28, Vance spoke at an event hosted by right-wing evangelical leader and self-described prophet, Lance Wallnau. Wallnau is a member of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement that seeks to end the separation of church and state and place the United States under religious rule. Wallnau has been promoting and popularizing “Seven Mountain Dominionism.” The Seven Mountain Mandate seeks to control seven key areas of society: Religion, Family, Education, Government, Media, Arts, and Entertainment, Business. That pretty much covers everything. At this late September event, Vance declared:
“American children… can’t add five plus five, but they can tell you there are 87 different genders.”
No kidding. Eighty-seven genders. Of all the areas of society to control, Vance is strangely fixated on gender.
At the same event, Wallnau claimed that Kamala Harris practices witchcraft. Fun fact: When the printing press was invented in the 15th century, the bible was the number one best seller. Number two was a salacious work of nonfiction called “Hammer of Witches.” The work, written by a clergyman of the Dominican order, passed itself off as a theological treatise depicting women as intellectually inferior and sexually insatiable. It prescribed methods of torture and execution for accused witches and spread the persecution of women for centuries.
St. Augustine, Patron Saint
In Vance’s conversion story published in The Lamp, A Catholic Journal of Literature, Science and the Fine Arts, he explicitly cites the importance of post-liberal perspectives like those in St. Augustine’s The City of God. Vance writes, “It was the best criticism of our modern age I’d ever read.” This is a stretch. Augustine condemns the debauchery of Roman elites causing the moral decay and downfall of Roman society. Augustine’s descriptions hardly parallel American life. Augustine was denouncing things like pagan rituals, prostitution, castration, and drunkenness as part of religious rites. He was criticizing the worship of gods known for their immoral behavior, such as Jupiter’s adulteries and rapes in Roman myths. How does that mirror our modern age? Apparently enough for Vance to presume to save our modern age from Roman-style debauchery whether we want him to or not.
It seems that Vance conveniently overlooks Augustine’s earlier work, Confessions, where Vance’s patron saint reflects on his internal struggles during his conversion:
“Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo”
Roughly translated: “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” As a post-liberal, Vance wants all the rest of us to skip this spiritual ambivalence and march to his orders. Now. Vance is all about state authority rather than individual introspection.
Years ago, there was a playground joke about a Catholic running for president. If elected, John F. Kennedy’s first act would be to outfit the Statue of Liberty with a rosary made of bowling balls and chains. Today, the post-liberal movement is gaining traction in Catholic and other conservative intellectual circles, and with someone like Vance just an election-win away from the second-highest office, the impact could be far greater than an oversized rosary.
If elected, Trump will be busy settling scores while Vance will be busy reshaping American society in the image of right-wing Christian nationalism.
Will we allow it? Don’t.
If elected, we may not be able to stop him.
Back to the Big Top. Its collapse is inevitable, for one reason or another. Lyin’ King Trump will continue to roar for the next few weeks. And if by chance he wins—thanks to an antiquated Electoral College system designed in 1787 to give southern slaveholder states disproportionate influence in presidential elections—his cub Vance could very likely put teeth into that roar.
Post election scenario: Project 2025 rings the White House doorbell. Vance gladly ushers them in. Trump won’t mind. After all, no one else has assembled the thousands of loyalists he will need to run an authoritarian government.