Donald Trump chose JD Vance as his running mate despite fierce resistance from establishment Republican donors and advisors, including Rupert Murdoch and Kellyanne Conway. Prima facie, their chief concerns mirrored those seen in the transatlantic media panic following Vance’s appointment — namely, his foreign policy.

Foreign affairs are a convenient flashpoint to denounce MAGA Republicans as breaking with sensible bipartisan consensus. However, the rift between the establishment GOP and Vance goes far deeper than debates about who controls what patch of black soil east of the Dnieper.

Vance’s rift with establishment Republicans is a generational one. On one side of this rift sits the continuation of the Reagan-Bush coalition: evangelical Christians, economic elites, and national security hawks. On the other side stands the coalition masterminded by Steve Bannon in the mid-2010s: working- and middle-classes of the American heartland.

It is tempting to fall back on describing the divergent interests of these camps to explain what the GOP establishment finds so objectionable about Vance. This treatment is wrong – it casts Vance as a mere representative of his tribe, without agency. Treating Vance as a mere cipher ignores the ideological dimensions of the MAGA/establishment rift, Vance’s own policy contributions, and his vision for the GOP.

What is this vision? How does it conflict with the Republican establishment?

 Rather than rely on the inchoate rhetoric that often comes with the MAGA movement, the best way to understand Vance’s political vision is to examine his professional and policy record. There is one area where Vance has offered the public a sense as to his intuitions and first principles – technology.

Tech was Vance’s on-ramp into political life, with Peter Thiel — who would later launch Vance’s political career — helping Vance transition from corporate law to venture capital in the first place in 2016. During his six-year career in VC, Vance was primarily an early- and seed-stage investor. These investors are typically the ones who “discover” startups at their youngest phases, often partnering closely with founding teams to turn their ideas into a viable business. Tellingly, Vance’s preoccupation was discovering startups in places Silicon Valley didn’t look, particularly the Midwest.

That Vance networks with right-leaning VCs like Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Marc Andreessen is well-known — and that their support was instrumental in his 2022 US Senate bid. The extent of the political influence this circle has on Vance isn’t fully known, although they do share intellectual influences – one of the most commonly cited being Curtis Yarvin. However, we know of one concrete conviction between Vance and this VC network: antipathy towards big tech monopolies like Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Concern regarding the undue influence of big tech is one of Vance’s major preoccupations, and he has repeatedly expressed opposition to the industry’s growing influence in American public life. Only last week he spoke out at a Senate committee arguing that the push for new AI regulations was “under duress from the current incumbents… to the advantage of those incumbents and not to the advantage of the American consumer.”

Vance does not just want to roll back big tech’s influence in Washington — he is open to outright breaking up these businesses. He publicly supports Lina Khan, the Biden-appointed Federal Trade Commission chair whose aggressive antitrust agenda is predicated on breaking big tech’s economic and political power.

The views of Vance and this network are unorthodox among VCs, because they directly contrast with their interests as investors. VCs invest in startups with an eye to making money in one of three ways: by having another private investor buy out their stake, having the startup make an initial public offering, or by having the startup acquired by a larger company. From among these three routes, the overwhelming majority of successful startups are acquired — and the largest acquirers of tech startups tend to be big tech firms.

This seemingly messy position is at the heart of understanding Vance’s vision for the Republican party

In short: Vance and his closest supporters from the VC world are pursuing a policy agenda that directly undermines the main source of their returns. Without big tech acquisitions, much of the Silicon Valley VC ecosystem would wither away. In this light, Vance and his network’s big tech antipathy seems inexplicable — unless we assume that their stand is guided by more than mere self-interest.

This seemingly messy position is at the heart of understanding Vance’s vision for the Republican party, and the broader ambitions of the MAGA movement. It rejects the modern tendency in American conservatism to recoil from regulatory intervention, especially when it would deal a mortal blow to financial markets that have become dependent on big tech’s success  — over half the S&P 500’s gains in 2023 came from just the “magnificent seven” tech stocks.

Vance is willing to sacrifice performance in “objective” economic indices that have been regarded as the greatest goods by establishment American conservatism for decades. To what end? Consumer choice, freedom, and individual autonomy. It is a Jeffersonian vision for the Republican party.

This vision harkens back to America’s earliest political division post-independence, Jefferson and Hamilton. The former’s ideal for America was famously a land of independent yeoman farmers – a nation of self-sufficient homesteads. There was a positive conception of freedom at its core, against both monarchs and moneylenders abruptly stealing citizen’s lives or livelihoods.

Jeffersonian intuitions are in direct tension with the logic of urbanisation, specialisation, and financialisation. The establishment Republicans had made peace with this fact, in exchange for putative wealth and growth. The trade-off was citizens having to place their fates in the hands of faceless and intention-less institutions, whether that be banks or government bureaucracies. Big tech platforms were just the latest iteration of this compromise.

 Vance and the MAGA Republicans are presenting a fundamental challenge to this consensus. Tech is but the tip of the iceberg. Scratch beneath the surface on most of the MAGA challenges to the Washington consensus and you can find a Jeffersonian impulse. If there is any ideological throughline to MAGA’s preoccupations — migration, manufacturing, foreign policy — it is to reverse transfers of economic and social power from the American heartland, to de-internationalise and simplify the roots of American prosperity.

The Jeffersonian tradition of freedom — the ideal of a citizenry of owners, their fates placed in their own hands — is deeply embedded in the American psyche. However, it has not found a political expression for decades. It is now coming back.