A new book by University of Notre Dame Press argues that Vance postliberal victimhood politics represents one of the most consequential reversals in modern American conservatism: a politician who once lectured working-class communities about personal responsibility has recast himself as their tribune against malign elites, deploying the very grievance culture he once condemned.
Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, by Reason senior editor Stephanie Slade, is due for publication in September 2026, priced at $30.00. Writing for publications including The New York Times and America in addition to Reason, Slade has spent years tracing the ideological fault lines inside the American right.
From Fox News Asset-Seizure Calls to the Republican Ticket
Slade’s account opens with Vance’s September 2021 appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight, when he was still a long-shot candidate for the Republican Senate nomination in Ohio. Vance proposed that the federal government seize the assets of the Ford Foundation and the Gates Foundation, redistributing them to communities he argued had been harmed by their policy agenda. The Detroit News reported at the time that the proposal extended to both foundations.
Reason noted then that Republicans, including Carlson himself, would almost certainly oppose any equivalent targeting of conservative organisations by a Democratic administration, an irony Slade deploys to frame what she sees as the selective constitutionalism of the emerging Dissident Right.
The manoeuvre worked. Poll numbers improved, Trump’s endorsement followed, and Vance won the primary before taking a Senate seat. By 2024 he was on the presidential ticket.
Vance Postliberal Victimhood Politics and the Hillbilly Elegy Contradiction
Slade’s central exhibit is the distance between two versions of Vance. In his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, Rust Belt decline was a story of cultural degradation: too many people, Vance argued, had convinced themselves that all blame lay elsewhere and all responsibility for their welfare resided with others. He quoted his grandmother’s injunction directly: ‘Never be like these fucking losers who think the deck is stacked against them.’
By 2022, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Vance’s opening lines told a different story entirely. Middletown, Ohio had been ‘devastated by the policies of the Democrats,’ he said. Washington had decided America no longer needed to manufacture anything, and the good-paying jobs were shipped abroad.
The shift was not merely rhetorical. When CNN anchor Dana Bash challenged Vance over claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were stealing and eating residents’ pets, he was unrepentant. ‘If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people,’ he said, ‘then that’s what I’m going to do.’
Slade reads this trajectory through the framework developed by sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning in a 2014 journal article on campus call-out culture. Their model distinguished a ‘culture of dignity,’ in which status derives from treating others with respect, from a ‘culture of victimhood,’ in which status accrues to whoever can demonstrate the most severe grievances. Vance, she argues, has applied the same competitive victimhood logic to electoral politics: white, working-class, Christian Americans become an oppressed group; immigrants and coastal elites become their oppressors; and a righteous state becomes the instrument of redress.
The analogy is pointed. In a 2016 Atlantic essay titled ‘Opioid of the Masses,’ Vance had compared Trump’s candidacy to ‘cultural heroin,’ a false euphoria that promised easy solutions while demanding nothing of voters. Eight years later, Slade writes, he was dealing the drug himself.
Postliberalism, Catholicism, and the Limits of State Power
The book’s later sections situate Vance within the broader postliberal intellectual project, which holds that the liberal order associated with the American founding is morally bankrupt. Its prominent advocates include Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule, and journalist Sohrab Ahmari.
Slade is careful to note that Catholic opposition to postliberalism is itself substantial. Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s representative to the United States, argued in a 2025 speech that postliberalism, whatever its critique of the liberal moral vacuum, ends up attempting ‘to impose in an authoritarian way a single code of behavior’ on society. He also criticised interpretations of ordo amoris that place country above all other obligations, a passage Slade reads as a direct reference to Vance.
James Patterson, now associate professor at the Institute for American Civics at the University of Tennessee, co-authored a recent book, Why Postliberalism Failed, critical of the tradition. His work is discussed on the Law and Liberty Podcast alongside Slade’s argument.
Slade’s conclusion is unsparing: by paving the way for greater concentrations of state power in the name of protecting the aggrieved, Vance and the postliberals risk enabling tyrannies they have not yet imagined. Whether that argument lands with the Republican primary electorate ahead of 2028 is the test Vance’s political trajectory has yet to face.
