Back in June, while on tour to promote his recently published memoir, Communion, Vice President JD Vance made a stop at the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California. Sitting on a dais in a replica of the White House’s East Room, he lamented the fate of the 37th president, comparing his downfall to President Donald Trump’s interregnal legal troubles at the hands of an irate “deep state”—a mixture of MAGA paranoia and not entirely unfounded suspicions that Nixon may have come out worse in an internecine power struggle—and joking that if Watergate had happened today, it would have been little more than a twelve-hour news cycle. He also noted that he, Trump and Nixon were all “hated by the media.” “I’ve always liked Richard Nixon,” he said.

Who knows, maybe he’s right: whatever its gravity in the moment, Watergate and its subversion of constitutional legitimacy now look almost quaint. It was shocking when Nixon made his notorious claim to David Frost in 1977 that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” After Trump v. United States, that opinion has become law. And Vance is certainly right that the media really does hate him. With the exception of the increasingly revanchist Bishop Robert Barron, who fawned over Communion’s “fundamentally Augustinian arc,” reviews of Vance’s second memoir were almost uniformly scathing. Jessica Winter seems to have written her New Yorker piece from somewhere between the ceiling and the chair she was continually leaping out of, so outraged was she by Vance’s gall: “It’s hard to imagine a reality-based conversation about the intersection of Catholic ethics and immigration policy with a man who campaigned for the Vice-Presidency by spreading calumnies about Haitian immigrants eating the pet cats and dogs of their neighbors in Ohio.” James Butler was a little more surgical, if no less vexed, in the London Review of Books, plowing through the book’s many curiosities and contradictions to demonstrate how Vance instrumentalizes his newfound faith: “Christianity can be ethically difficult and politically unsettling, difficulties Communion mostly seeks to evade,” Butler wrote. “Should it cease to be useful, or if evasion is no longer possible, perhaps Vance will find his way to another conversion.” And in a recent video, New York Times opinion writer Jamelle Bouie called Vance the Nixon of the Groypers, a non-movement conservative attaching himself to a movement for mutual benefit. “This guy is fundamentally insincere and fundamentally opportunistic,” said Bouie. “He is whoever he needs to be.”

Opportunism is the byword for any politician, really, and it is understandable why it might be particularly tempting to employ in Vance’s case, given the conspicuous reversals that dot his recent career, most notably cozying up to and then working for a president he once referred to as “America’s Hitler”—and not, since we know that this must be specified in certain corners of MAGA world, in a good way. But opportunism also suggests a contrast, or at least a distinction, between inner character and outward activity, a deeper truth sacrificed on the altar of expediency. In the case of JD Vance, to assume that distinction both jumps the gun and misses the mark. Like Nixon himself, there is little to suggest that working through and sloughing off the contradictions of the surface would, even under ideal conditions of perfect transparency, reveal anything not already available, an authentic self beneath the performance. Instead, there is only forward motion, endless self-invention as if from scratch, and the offering of himself, of his self, for valuation. With each passing month of his vice presidency, with every new book he publishes, Vance reveals himself more fully: not simply an opportunist, not even just a striver, but a seeker, a self-making self-made man.

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There’s a passage in Garry Wills’s psycho-political case study of Richard Nixon on the ’68 campaign trail, Nixon Agonistes, that could have saved everyone a lot of trouble back in 2016, had they remembered it:

The true significance of nineteenth-century liberalism was not so much that products are tested on the open market of free enterprise, or that truth will triumph in the free market of the academy, as that man himself must be spiritually priced, must establish his value (“amount to something”), in each day’s trading. To experience one’s worth in the real testing place, in the active trading of today’s market, is the sole aim of America’s moral monsters.

For Wills, this liberalism of the “moral market,” and the “self-made men” who participate in it, had survived intact through the upheavals of the twentieth century, and Nixon was its apotheosis: a man incomprehensible outside of the spectacle of party-political life, whose whole being was predicated on the public trading of reputation and performance. All the contradictions of Nixon’s character and policy preferences that would soon unfold—the law-and-order Cold Warrior who would win the Oval Office by violating the Logan Act to extend the Vietnam War, then go on to found the EPA, propose universal health care and basic income, and normalize relations with Communist China and the USSR—winnow down to this single basic, and basically ideologically neutral, function: persist. He was, as Wills famously put it, “the least ‘authentic’ man alive, the late mover, tester of responses, submissive to ‘the discipline of consent.’”

This discipline has over the past century risen to the level of an asceticism, or least an askesis, a formation of the soul. It may look like hedonism, or wanton power-thirst, but it is in fact an ordeal of self-denial and reformation in obedience to a higher power (in this case “the market” or simply “politics”). What gave so many such a thrill about Trump’s 2016 campaign, even for his political opponents, was its deep iconoclasm and anticlericalism, a smashing of the idol of the politician as commodity on the moral market. By contrast to Nixon—and, for that matter, Vance—Trump arrived onto the political scene with a fully formed, comprehensive persona, a mask forged in the fires first of real-estate hucksterism and then reality television, a personality wholly collapsed into media projection. The man, enthusiasts said, could not be bought—this being a mantra of the billionaire politician at least since Ross Perot—but neither could he be swayed: while every other politician looked for an angle, Trump fashioned a cult of consensus smashing. And if Trump continues to demonstrate an obsession with public opinion, he does so less as a commodity on the market and more as a market manipulator, an insider trader looking for any way to put his thumb on the scale, to inflate value and leave someone else holding the bag. Whatever their shared givenness to scandal and vulgarity, then, Teflon Don was the polar opposite of Tricky Dick.

Where, then, to restate the question, does our present-day self-made man stand? Who is JD Vance? If his present employment is anything to go by, then he might, like Nixon, find himself a man out of time, having, as Wills put it, “‘made a self’ in an age when self-made men are not honored for the agony of their creation.” There was the fantastic ascent from obscure rural poverty into the Marines, then academia, first Ohio State then Yale Law. Then there was Peter Thiel and venture capital, where Vance not only made a killing but also forged some of the connections that would eventually bring him into contact with the Catholic post-liberals, with whom Thiel was loosely grouped and for whom Vance is now more or less a standard bearer. Hillbilly Elegy would chart this meteoric rise and enshrine it in myth. The book was a sensation, especially among certain affluent Democrats, who, perhaps sensing the foreshock of the coming upheavals of the MAGA insurrection, were glad to have a well-credentialed former hick who would accept their solicitude, even—especially—if he was a Republican.

But if Communion is anything to go by, guilt roiled in the Vancian heart. The next year, during his short-lived stint as a New York Times contributor, Vance announced that he was “moving home,” telling his patrons in Silicon Valley and Manhattan that his uneasy conscience at joining their ranks had finally overtaken him, and that the time had come for him to bring his talents back to Ohio. A credential-padding move if ever there was one—an image burnisher and stepping stone on the way to higher office, even as the nonprofits he founded supposedly to help deal with the region’s opioid epidemic were plagued by controversy (including suggestions of ties to Purdue Pharma, prime drivers of said epidemic)—but no one seemed to mind, since even in his apparent rejection of the coastal elites, Vance signaled that he was still willing to play their game.

Both Hillbilly Elegy and Communion offer, as memoirs, an illustration of the well of memory that fills up from innocence to maturity and comprises a self, if not a soul. If you’re looking for that, they seem instead like a recitation of obstacles and receptacles that the otherwise undefined self has encountered and made use of, and the various affective reverberations that result, from fear to resentment to a certain amount of pride. And whereas this might seem like a recipe for political disaster, it is in fact extraordinarily effective, allowing anyone within a certain target range to define Vance—the real Vance, which they assume is in there, behind or beneath the changeable performance—according to their own purposes. He is whatever you want him to be: Appalachian country boy, emblem of meritocracy, American patriot, true believer. This, in short, is the opportunism so often ascribed to him.

But throughout the new book there is a mounting sense that there is more to Vance’s project than simple maneuvering. He continues to strive, yes, but is compelled to recast the world to make room for his bottomless yearning—like Wile E. Coyote, who, having run out over a cliff, starts building a bridge. There is, first of all, a certain amount of revision involved. Vance’s father is no longer the absent deadbeat he is characterized as in Hillbilly Elegy, but rather a complex, immensely faithful Christian whose brief appearances in the young JD’s life expose him to a kind of spirituality that will only make sense once the boy has become a man. Other figures remain more or less unchanged in their symbolic status—the heroic Papaw, the hard-nosed Mamaw, the disappointing Mom—but they have been redescribed in a tone suited to the new landscape being constructed. No longer is his voice the cri de coeur of the neglected boy but the grumbling of an older man convinced things would be better if everyone would do as he said. The stories he tells about his youthful fundamentalism are dripping with condescension, even if it’s not always clear toward whom: he praises these evangelical congregations for their community building, and scorns them for their unwillingness or inability to do anything to help their members. His passage through atheism is mostly a speedrun through clichés about the problem of evil and the allure of secular hedonism, and his approach to affirming Roman Catholicism is framed more as a rejection of his previous way of living than an embrace of its truth.

There is one element of Catholic social teaching, which he makes repeated reference to throughout Communion, that Vance seems to find particularly appealing, namely the idea that the pursuit of wealth for individuals should be balanced by a concern for the common good. This is a distinctly Cold War interpretation of the more traditional teaching of the universal destination of goods, which holds that creation in its entirety is intended to benefit all of humanity, and even private property, which the Church has long made allowances for, should be employed to maximally widespread advantage.

Perhaps Vance’s affinity for this idea is particularly pronounced because it chafes against his previous life as a professional moneymaker, but it is also a smart bet. The ever-intensifying boom-and-bust cycle of finance capital has led even many conservatives to question Reagan-era truisms about the free market and its inevitable trickle-down effect. And under Pope John Paul II in particular, an ardent Cold Warrior, this teaching came to represent a kind of moral check on capitalism’s excesses, rather than a counter to its fundamental tendency to acquisition and wealth concentration. Vance spends an entire chapter and several long asides detailing the failures of neoliberalism, and attempting to make the right-wing case for greater economic control by the state and by workers, particularly in the form of labor unions, which he extols as primary engines of the kind of prosperity we associate with the golden age of capitalism.

But to make this case, he also looks to find a way to square his newfound munificence with his increasingly rabid xenophobia, by taking up another aspect of Catholic social teaching, the ideal of social cohesion. And whereas in mainstream doctrine social cohesion—or, as it is more often called, solidarity—is the goal of creating conditions for strangers to treat one another as neighbors, Vance inverts it, treating it as the primary cause for restricting immigration and shunning minorities. He cites a Cato Institute study that found the decline of union power correlated directly with the explosion of immigration in the 1960s and, while disagreeing with the study’s authors about this being a good thing, accepts their conclusion that immigration is antithetical to solidarity. At precisely the moment that Pope Leo XIV emphasizes that the universalism of Catholic teaching is uncompromising and is diametrically opposed to both national and racial chauvinism, Vance argues, as though it were a matter of common sense and not ahistorical invective, that worker dignity depends on what amounts to ethnic cleansing. Of course, he’s willing to make exceptions. He praises Elon Musk, who was born and raised in South Africa, and pauses to wonder at “the hundreds of thousands of jobs that trace directly to his decision to come to the United States.” He also allows for nuance, writing that “a resident of Guatemala City who speaks fluent English [would] contribute more quickly to the United States than a resident of rural Guatemala who can’t even read or write in Spanish,” a curiously condescending perspective for someone who has so forcefully eschewed his urban white-collar success in order to protect the farmer, the manual laborer and other such “little guys.”

The tension seems not to bother him. Indeed, there is something not merely canny but almost mystical about the way he barrels through contradictions. He is a Yale-educated venture capitalist who rails against the elites. He is a fellow traveler of white nationalists who is married to an Indian woman, and together they are raising four mixed-race children. He was received into the Catholic Church in 2019, and immediately began not only adapting his policy opinions to a regime that is in many ways the antithesis of his new religion, but acting as though he—rather than, say, the Vicar of Christ on earth—were the true representative of the faith. That said, he condescended to admire the late pontiff’s plain-spoken tenacity, which suited Vance better than what he described as the mealy-mouthed diplomacy of Vatican officials. “He was the Pope, Donald Trump the President, and I the Vice President. We had different jobs … Better to have an honest conversation than one masked by clichés.”

This is the self-made man not—or not only—as savvy political operator but as self-creator, a strange twist on the Christian ideal of man’s participation in divine creativity. If, as St. Athanasius put it, God became man that men might become gods, the embrace of the universal church seems to have granted Vance license to reshape reality, and the standards to which everyone must adhere, according to his own liking. And while this attitude shapes the entirety of his public persona, it is particularly vivid in his choosing Roman Catholicism, the institution that was, until recently, most associated with hierarchy and obedience, and immediately beginning to try throwing his weight around. It’s one thing for a politician to take the mater si, magistra no position taken by William F. Buckley (though initially formulated by, you guessed it, Garry Wills), it’s quite another to publicly lecture not one but two heirs to the throne of Saint Peter. The formation of conscience and reformation of soul is in Vance’s case therefore a kind of counterreformation, walking the path least trodden, attaching to oneself the identity markers least likely to adhere. In politics and in life, he seems to choose the path most riddled with paradoxes, only to insist that he’s overcome them, and what’s more, they never existed at all. This, ultimately, is what brings him beyond Nixon in the extent of his self-making: Nixon was willing to contradict himself; Vance makes a religion of self-contradiction.

Religion, in its broadest sense, refers less to strict credal adherence and more to institutions and organized practices of piety and self-interrogation. In the absence of a religion—especially if that absence is itself curating, such as when someone adopts one only to distort it beyond recognition—the kind of seeking Vance exhibits can’t but become self-serving and therapeutic. The reference to someone’s “journey” has long since escaped any spiritual context and often consists more in simply renaming one’s surroundings than following any given itinerary. At each stage of Vance’s ascension, he seems to have taken it on as his task in life to adopt a new guise specifically for the purpose of finding it lacking and ready for disposal in favor of a new one. It’s no wonder he never seems satisfied and can’t stop complaining about others’ ingratitude. But perhaps the glaring contradictions between his stated values and the actions of the administration of which he is a top official will be his greatest test, an impossible gauntlet out of which he will finally emerge a distinct person or, failing that, a president.

Image credit: Gage Skidmore (Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0)