Originally Published: August 1, 2024 10:28 a.m.
Weeks after Sen. JD Vance's (R-OH) introduction at the Republican National Convention, few people seem excited about the would-be vice president. Liberals, arrayed around Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign, are happy to dub him "weird;" Donald Trump himself downplayed the choice on Wednesday, saying that, historically, the vice presidential pick has "virtually no impact."
But amid mockery from Democrats and gloom from some Republicans, there's a group of right-wing scholars and influencers that's "jubilant" about Vance's selection. It's the Claremont Institute, a California think tank with deep ties to the senator that serves as a center for Trumpist intellectuals.
Known since Trump's election for its alignment with the former President and current GOP candidate, Claremont has become infamous in some circles for its provocative attitude and for the belief, espoused by some of its officials, that the country is mired in a "cold civil war." It's taken some steps, like making John Eastman — the attorney who would go on to play a central role in Trump's 2020 Stop the Steal scheme — the founding director of its "Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence," that lead some observers to believe its preparing for constitutional collapse; it's also played to more mainstream elements of modern conservatism, like working on Project 2025.
But where Vance and Claremont meet is less in the preparation for a coming cataclysm and more in the belief that, over the past decades, the fundamental break with America's Constitution has already taken place. Their outlook combines the assertion that the culture war is irreconcilable with a belief that executive branch regulatory agencies — entities such as the Federal Reserve, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Federal Trade Commission — act without the consent of the people. They support tough measures — both in substance and with often explosive rhetoric — to address these perceived problems, and are willing to break with longstanding conservative movement orthodoxies to roll the country back to what they regard as the original, uncorrupted version of the American Republic.
Vance elucidated that alignment in remarks he gave at a Claremont Institute event held last December.
There, after hitting now-standard GOP talking points deriding the Trump prosecutions as political, Vance took things a step further: A future Republican administration should appoint DOJ attorneys to "investigate the corruption in our own government. Maybe we should be appointing people to the Department of Justice who actually take a side in the culture war," he said.
Later, Vance added that Republicans should be less rigid in how they view unions. Some unions oppose diversity initiatives — the GOP should support that, he suggested. On public sector unions, Vance had another thought.
"You know what union I really like?" Vance said at the event. "The Fraternal Order of Police."
Beyond appearing at various Claremont events, Vance has also written for the non-profit's magazine. At least four members of his staff — including his chief of staff and communications director — received Claremont fellowships, TPM found.
Ryan P. Williams, Claremont's President, told TPM in a series of text messages that he regards Vance as a potential vehicle for deep structural — even constitutional — change.
"We agree with Senator Vance and his Claremont alum staffers that American constitutionalism has strayed far from its principles and needs a serious correction if we are to save it from collapse or illegitimacy — or both," Williams wrote. "Ultimately the people ought to rule in America, not an oligarchy of unaccountable 'experts' and bureaucrats."
Williams told TPM that a mutual acquaintance who was a Claremont fellowship alum introduced him to Vance at a small gathering in Newport Beach, California while Vance was running for the Ohio Senate seat that he later won. Williams said he was struck by Vance's focus on the bigger issues underpinning "our current crisis," and on "the deeper institutional and structural problems of American government and how to bring about lasting reform to advance the common good."
"He knows that retail politics should serve those bigger goals," Williams wrote, rather than "cheap talk about them serving mere electioneering."
Those bigger goals — structural changes — take a few forms.
Williams told TPM that one would be "re-constitutionalizing the administrative state," ending what he described as a "jayvee Congress" promulgating laws that give rise to regulations without popular control determined by electoral politics. In that line of thinking, the administrative state is a form of despotism, imposing bureaucratic decisions on people without any form of popular legitimacy.
In his speeches and writings, Vance has aligned himself with another view, put forth by some Claremont associates: identifying the structural elements of progressive institutions that rely, in some way, on the government, and then using federal power to curtail that.
It's the kind of extremely hard-nosed, militant tactics that also define Claremont, underpin its association with Trump, and lead to cries that it envisions a more authoritarian form of governance. Vance, in a November 2021 talk whose title could have been written in the early 20th Century ("The Universities Are the Enemy"), argued that universities exist to legitimize progressive ideas and train young people to hate America; the same year, Vance told a Claremont audience that a university's endowment was "ammunition for the left," and argued that a future Republican administration should not allow "people who are driving this country into the ground" to receive tax breaks, subsidies, or liability protections from working at universities or nonprofits.
More recently, Claremont Institute Chairman Tom Klingenstein repeated the idea, demanding that Republicans threaten university endowments that, in the view of the political right, generate the foot soldiers of the left.
"This was given to them because they were working for the public good insofar as they were educating American students about America," Klingenstein said at the National Conservatism Conference in July. "Clearly, this is no longer true."
All of these arguments are made in the intentionally provocative, often apocalyptic language of the online right. It's a very Claremont style: Michael Anton, a Claremont senior fellow, continues to draw attention for his 2016 essay "The Flight 93 Election." There, he argued that voters should support Trump because they faced a choice: die or "charge the cockpit."
A Trump-Vance victory in 2024 would mean that Claremont, for possibly the first time ever, has a real advocate in the cockpit. When asked what that would mean for the institution, Williams demurred.
"This is no time to admire ourselves in the mirror. Lord knows we've got a lot of work yet to do."
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