Amid February’s legal chaos, the vice president continued his record of dubious constitutional theories with new tweets broadly defending the president’s executive orders by sweeping claims that “interference” of the judiciary cannot impede the executive’s ability to govern. Of course, broad statements like these can be presented after the fact to mean almost anything — but by analyzing Vance’s political influences, we can tell what he probably means by them. Let us examine the ideological composition of Vance’s wing of the Republican party, and what has led these once-conservatives to ironically embrace executive power with such reckless abandon.

Vance, rather uniquely, aligns openly with “New Right” intellectuals. Among the movements he frequently affiliates himself with is postliberalism, so named by its nominal founder Patrick Deneen. A political theorist at the University of Notre Dame, Deneen believes liberalism produced social failure and should be replaced by a more communitarian system less concerned with individual rights and strict constitutionalism. A unique figure, he blends illiberal capitalism with anachronistic political Catholicism. On one hand, he resembles the classical conservatives of nineteenth century Europe: the state, he reckons, is an institution integral to all of society which ought to act with broad authority in pursuit of the “common good” of traditional Catholic morality — not, as liberals claim, a strictly political body with the sole purpose of guaranteeing certain liberties to the individual. But in the United States, unlike in Europe, the whole political tradition is descended from constitutional republicanism. Any theory which dissents from it cannot, therefore, rightly be called traditionalist: there is a reason why Deneen’s politics are called “post-liberal”, not “pre-liberal”. 

Vance holds the postliberal disregard of constitutionalism, and regularly makes it known: as early as 2021 he supported the Trump agenda of co-opting the federal government regardless of judicial opposition, saying Trump should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat … (and) replace them with our people”, and “When the courts try to stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did (when he famously defied the Supreme Court’s ruling in 1832’s Worcester v. Georgia) and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it’.” This view of judicial and constitutional nullification is an anomaly in American history. Therefore, Vancian politics are not conservative — in radically splitting from the constitutional tradition which defines American conservatism, they are revolutionary to an almost Leninist degree.

Here, another one of Vance’s influences enters our story. Professor Adrian Vermeule, constitutional law expert at Harvard University, an avowed integralist postliberal and exponent of a “common-good” constitutional theory derived from the regime of interwar Austrian dictator Engelbert Dollfuss, took to Twitter amid the blocking of Trump’s various actions by federal judges with the opinion that judicial meddling with “legitimate acts of state” constitutes a violation of the separation of powers. Vance, of course, retweeted promptly. Later that day, Vance parroted Vermeule in his aforementioned post, making the claim that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power”. As the theories of Deneen and Vermeule demonstrate, though, “legitimate” is no legal quantity for the postliberal — supposedly, it’s derived from objective morality. In practice, this can only mean legal infallibility for the executive so long as they pursue the morally correct conduct. This view, too, is a historical anomaly in America. Worse than president Jackson’s previously-mentioned 1832 attack on the courts, it rejects constitutional limits on the executive not just opportunistically, but as a matter of principle.

Vance, a Yale law graduate, is not stupid. Neither is Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, a Duke grad, or Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, a Juris Doctor from GW law. It may be easy to attribute Trump’s distaste for the Constitution to authoritarian tendencies in personality, rather than politics — but it’s decidedly less easy to do the same for them. Where Trump himself totally lacks ideology, his administration is staunchly ideological. It follows a very specific doctrine — Counter-Enlightenment, in all its many forms — with very specific policy propositions. In my first article, I analyzed the economics of this ideology, and their resemblance to feudalism. In my second, its trade policy — which reeked of mercantilism. Now, considering its legal theories, I conclude they embody the third of those three great evils against which our forefathers rebelled in 1776: that of absolutism, of the supreme, infallible executive. Political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, the father of this hypothetical executive, once called it Leviathan, a name inspiring Biblical awe — now, in our denial, we seem to pretend like it’s nothing out of the ordinary. We can debate precisely how dire the straits are; indeed, there are still reasons to be optimistic. But it can hardly be argued that the renewed presence of these three ideas, all alien to the American political tradition, is something normal.