The sign on the gate in a backwater of Cambridge, England warns of “dogs running free.” Beyond it is a rambling garden on the River Cam and scattered dachas. It feels like a retreat — and for its owner James Orr and his close friend JD Vance, it has served that purpose.
Orr is a religion professor and a founder of the U.K.’s National Conservative movement, and in an interview with POLITICO’s Power Play podcast, described how he had forged a bond with the Republican vice-presidential contender.
Vance enjoyed Orr’s company so much when they met at conferences, that he visited on vacation with his wife Usha, who had spent a year in the city as a master’s student, along with their children and in-laws. (The libertarian tech billionaire Peter Thiel has also spoken at Orr’s invitation, and Jordan Peterson, the contentious psychologist, lodges from time to time to write books.).
Vance calls Orr his “British Sherpa” — part religious theory coach, part acolyte and keen ambassador for the “JD” worldview. They text regularly and met for lunch in the Senate the day before Vance was nominated as Trump’s running mate.
In a conversation in his Cambridge garden, Orr discussed Vance’s views — on politics, religion and surprising interest in the UK.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you first get to know JD Vance?
I got to know JD about five years ago through some mutual friends, and we hit it off immediately, mainly because we had common religious interests. He was thinking a lot about religion at the time — I think he had just converted to Catholicism the year before.
I had always taken it for granted that he would one day be in politics, but he was a private citizen when I first got to know him. I’d known of him, of course, because I remember a Texan friend of mine pressing “Hillbilly Elegy“ into my hands in October 2016 with the words, “Trump is going to win, and this is why.”
Tell me about JD Vance’s political outlook. What do you think underpins it, especially in the relationship between religion and politics?
One way of thinking about it is that he triangulates his thinking. Not tactically, but his thinking is a sort of triangulation between the sort of the old left and the old right. He understands the language of virtue and the importance of virtue and discipline and order and stable homes that emanates from the right. But he detected in that a kind of harshness — a reluctance to see the sort of tragic consequences of bad behavior.
I think on the other side, he looked at the left and could see a commendable commitment to compassion for the marginalized, but one that was just a sort of compassion without end — a compassion that could very quickly lapse into a sort of indulgence. I think the key to understanding his theological turn is that he sees in Christianity — and particularly Catholic Christianity, rather than the much more evangelical Protestant Christianity of his upbringing — a balance between that stress on individual fragility, failure, fallibility and a kind of redemptive dimension, and Catholic Christianity’s stress on the fact that sin and moral disorder could be a social ill, too.
How much do you think that this intellectual outlook that you describe — and it is there, quite eloquently, in “Hillbilly Elegy” — has had to shift to a more raucous, more aggressive, more divisive tone as a result of Vance becoming a practicing politician and wanting to get on the “Trump Express,” so to speak.
It’s a good point. I’m struck watching him in the media, in speeches: He’s remarkably articulate, but he takes no prisoners. He’s extremely consistent, but he’s got that sharp edge — which is frankly needed these days in in presidential politics and when stakes are as high as they are. But there’s definitely a gap between that and how he is in private, where he’s very mild, very self-effacing, not somebody who makes much of himself at all, very reflective, very quiet — an intellectual.
Indeed, on his visit here last summer, he said “Oh, could you, could you arrange a meeting with Robert Tombs?” — a distinguished historian here in Cambridge and an author of a wonderful book called “The English and their History,” one of the first books in a very, very long time on the history of England. It’s a thousand-page doorstopper, but it was clear that he had read it cover to cover and was talking in sort of glowing terms about Robert. He’s an intellectually serious person.
In the cut and thrust of presidential politics, that’s not always going to come across, and it can sometimes seem as if he has developed a much sharper and more pugilistic manner. I think that’s probably right, but I don’t think that’s attributable to any tectonic shift in his ideological outlook. I think it’s actually [reflective of] an increasing frustration on his part at the immovable quality of the regime that he sees himself to be up against.
There is great interest trans-Atlantically in JD Vance, but one of the first things he said about the U.K. was really disobliging, wasn’t it? It was something along the lines of the U.K. being the only Islamist state to have nuclear weapons. Can you explain that?
He takes a great deal of interest in British politics, and he was very eager to know what had happened in the election — why the Tories had failed so miserably after the gift the electorate had seemed to have handed them in 2019. I ran him through what had happened, and he was absolutely fascinated by it all. I think we talked at one point about the five independent members of Parliament who effectively won on a Gaza ticket, so perhaps that was the context of his remark later that evening, as he was closing the National Conservatism Conference, where he said perhaps it wouldn’t be Iran that became the next Islamic nuclear power but the United Kingdom.
It was said jokingly in front of a few hundred conservatives. He was among friends, and I don’t think he expected it to be picked up and brandished around as an attempt to undermine the special relationship.
It did land quite hard in the U.K. To challenge you a bit on that, James, he did use this language of “Islamist” — something quite extreme and threatening — and put it in the context of Gaza. That does say something about the way he sees the world.
Yes, I think that’s fair. In fact, I’ve encountered in quite a lot of U.S. intellectuals and politicians a kind of tone deafness to the complexities of the dynamics of Islam — not only in Britain but on the European continent. America simply doesn’t wrestle with Islam in the way that we do on this side of the Atlantic. In terms of raw numbers and as a percentage of the overall population, it just doesn’t feature very much, whereas it is a live issue that’s rarely off the agenda in the U.K. and Europe — for good and for ill.
I think American politicians — and JD may be one of them — have a tendency to look over and just see the headlines being dominated as they are by the issues that we have on that front. So there’s a tendency, I think, to caricature the issue. I don’t think he meant it as anything more than a joke and a caricature.
If he were to be in office as vice president to Donald Trump, what do you think his outlook would be toward the U.K. and toward Europe — the trans-Atlantic relationship?
He thinks very highly of [U.K Foreign Secretary] David Lammy. He thinks Lammy is somebody that he could work with. I think they were at a conference together. In fact, he asked me about Lammy and what I thought of him and I said that the caricature of Lammy on the British right was just that that — it’s overstated — and that I thought that Lammy is a wilier operator than most British conservators give him credit for. I think he had a role, for example, in engineering the D-Day fiasco for Rishi Sunak. I think he had got close to somebody on [French President Emmanuel] Macron’s team and had ensured that [U.K Prime Minister] Keir Starmer got an invitation and that the Tories didn’t know about it. That suggested to me that Lammy is a canny operator, or at least his advisers are very canny. So I think JD would get on very well with the British administration and with the Labour government.
I think he is often unfairly character characterized as an isolationist when it comes to foreign policy, and that’s simply not true. He’s a realist of the old school. He takes the Trump line that America should limit its interventionism drastically relative to the kind of high noon of neoconservatives of 20 years ago, but when America punches, it should punch hard and dispositively. He is, as we know, very skeptical of the extent of U.S. support for Ukraine, very worried about the consequences on energy prices for Europe and the increasing dependency on Russia and the failure of sanctions. But when it comes to Israel, he is as aggressively pro-Israel as almost any other Republican politician. So this is not an isolationist in foreign policy. It is somebody who believes in using American power rarely but effectively, and using it when appropriate — not simply walling America off.
Like it or not, I think it is a perfectly rational position to have. I remember that when he came over to London last summer, he said “I’m curious to know if there is anyone in the U.K. who might share my skepticism about what’s going on in Ukraine?” And I thought for a moment, “I’m sure I can find somebody,” but I have to say, after about 24 hours of texting around, I couldn’t find a single person. I thought, “Well, I might be able to put you in touch with [the author] Peter Hitchens.” But it’s striking that there is at least a debate in the United States between the idealists and the realists, and I think his position is a perfectly plausible and rational one. It’s just funny how tight a lockstep there is on this issue in the UK and Europe.
Let’s talk about the Vance family. Family is obviously very much at the center of what he is saying politically, and that may also be the context — however unfortunate — of the “childless cat lady” remark. I think he was trying to say that we need family — or nuclear family, as we used to call it — at the center of our thinking.
The childless cat lady comment is doing the rounds now and again in the loonier corners of the online right, but I think you are right to see that beneath that there is this emerging concern about this demographic twilight that’s looming. We don’t really know quite how to talk about it. I think it’s a tragedy that’s becoming such a polarizing, partisan issue, because I think the risk of human extinction is something that should really worry us all.
I think there is a sort of link between the “tech bro” side of JD and the “trad bro” side of JD. There is a sense that intellectual fertility and civilizational confidence — cultural fertility — is actually tied up with literal fertility. And the demographers think there is an actual, empirical connection, noticing that highly religious communities that are confident about the future tend to have more babies.
I think you put something really well when you talked about the “tech bro” side of JD and the “trad bro” side of JD. They do coexist.
Yes, they do. I think I pinched that from somebody else, but there are these two sides to him. There is the Silicon Valley side — the finance side — and the Catholic-convert side, the social conservative side. I think that speaks to this rather strange coalition that’s emerging on the American right between Elon Musk on the one hand and the more traditional Evangelical or Catholic [conservatives], and the remnants of the religious right on the other.
I think there are some points of contact between them. There is a sense that we need to get our civilizational confidence back. We need to treat human beings as something special, something distinctive, something that shouldn’t be suffocated by bureaucracy or by an overly paternalistic state apparatus.
