In 2016, JD Vance famously branded President Donald Trump “cultural heroin” and privately wondered whether the man might prove “America’s Hitler.” By 2022, that same critic had transformed into Trump’s most effective lieutenant. By 2024, he stood as the vice presidential nominee.
Ideological recognition, not mere political conversion, clearly drives this rapid arc. Vance has locked into the exact intellectual space that Spain’s Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera carved out in the 1930s: a national-syndicalist synthesis that rejects both liberal capitalism and Marxist materialism while retaining the collectivist, hierarchical, and anti-individualist instincts of the European extreme Left. In other words, instead of fostering the class struggle the classical Left has always promoted, it believed in conciliation across classes through a political thought that even Freud himself could not have explained.
This underlying ideology, Falangismo, never operated as a simple carbon copy of Italian Fascism. Jose Antonio — son of the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera — founded the Falange Española in 1933 immediately after a transformative trip to Rome. Just 10 days before his movement’s founding rally at the Teatro de la Comedia, he met with Benito Mussolini, later branding himself “the disciple who goes to see the master.” He even penned the prologue to the Spanish edition of Mussolini’s writings and hung a large, autographed photograph of the Duce in his office alongside a portrait of his own father. Yet, while he deeply admired fascism’s assault on parliamentary liberalism and its power to mobilize the masses, Jose Antonio demanded a distinct Catholic overlay that the secular Italian model lacked.
National syndicalism — vertical unions that subordinated both capital and labor to the state — provided this necessary economic framework. The resulting system proved fiercely authoritarian and anti-Marxist in its rejection of class warfare, yet remained openly hostile to “finance capital,” speculative markets, and the broader liberal order. Jose Antonio frequently praised the revolutionary energy of socialism while denouncing its materialist conclusions. Speaking in Valladolid in March 1935, he declared that communism contained recoverable elements — “its abnegation, its sense of solidarity” — that a national movement should seize while discarding its anti-religious and anti-patria core. This statement exposes the core method: a selective seizure of left-wing energies, stripped of universalist and secular premises. Because both fascism and communism sprang from the same post-liberal matrix of Sorelian myth, anti-parliamentarism, and the conviction that the individual exists only for the organic whole, the ideological extremes naturally met.
That post-liberal matrix long predated the 1930s. Mussolini began his career as a socialist editor, while the early Nazi program explicitly mixed racialism with anti-capitalist demands for the nationalization of trusts and the abolition of unearned income. Nazism ultimately supplied the German racialized variant of this impulse, while Falangismo provided the Spanish Catholic version. Even Mussolini’s Lateran Treaty with the Vatican succeeded precisely because Italian society remained overwhelmingly Catholic. The Falange simply made this religious element explicit and nonnegotiable from the start. In every case, the decisive break with Marxism occurred not over the Left’s collectivism, but rather over its internationalism and its hostility to nation and faith. Contemporary commentators stubbornly refuse to face the historical irony that the “extreme right” of the interwar period represented a heresy of the extreme Left in both its origins and its economic instincts. While both systems rejected the open society, one sacralized the nation and the other the class. Horseshoe theory records an undeniable historical fact rather than offering a mere metaphor.
Vance’s trajectory maps onto this historical pattern with brutal precision. As a critic in 2016, he correctly saw that Trump’s appeal was merely palliative rather than curative. Over time, however, the older Vance concluded that the liberal order itself — globalized markets, elite cultural hegemony, and the permanent administrative state — constituted the underlying disease. His subsequent conversion to Catholicism supplied the rigorous religious framework that raw American populism lacked.
WHY DEMOGRAPHIC NATIONALISM IN THE SOUTHWEST WILL DEMAND REUNION WITH MEXICO
Today, Vance continues his alliance with Tucker Carlson and publicly refuses to throw him “under the bus” despite their supposed “policy disagreements.” To me, this partnership and Vance’s recent simplistic approach to the disastrous midterm election results actively recreate the Falangist synthesis in real time. Vance prioritizes national unity over class, elevates authority over institutional procedure, and hijacks left-wing critiques of capital by stripping away their universalist and secular conclusions. Whether Vance recognizes this lineage remains irrelevant, because ideologies travel by structural affinity far more than by conscious citation. The modern Falangista requires neither blue shirts nor a yoke-and-arrows emblem. Instead, he requires only a diagnosis of liberal failure, a pre-Second Vatican Council Catholic or post-Protestant sense of ordered hierarchy, a willingness to subordinate economic freedom to national cohesion, and an instinct that the real enemy is not the socialist who wants to nationalize industry, but the classic liberal or conservative who “wants to dissolve the nation.”
On those exact terms, the distance between the Teatro de la Comedia in 1933 and the modern “Republican” coalition is far shorter than today’s populist elite will ever have the courage to admit. In his eagerness to torch the Western order, Vance has mistaken an old European pathology for a new American dawn.
Jose Lev Alvarez is an American–Israeli scholar specializing in international security policy. A multilingual veteran of the IDF special forces and the U.S. Army, he holds three master’s degrees and is completing a Ph.D. in Intelligence and Global Security in the Washington, D.C., area.