Opinion | The Intensification of JD Vance

Since JD Vance got more political and decided to run for office, making sense of exactly the kind of politician he is and will be has been a challenge. There are different modes of Mr. Vance as a public figure. He has been the populist intellectual who works with Elizabeth Warren and also the tech podcast right-winger who talks about America as being in the “late republican period.” He can be the lawyerly professional on a Sunday show or the guy, when asked what makes him happy, who talks about anger.

Onstage as Mr. Trump’s vice-presidential nominee, he’s a blunt instrument, the attack dog going hard about illegal immigration and hammering Kamala Harris.

In his speaking over the past couple of years, and more recently, his emphasis has often been structural, ideological and hard-core. Visible in a lot of arguments from self-described national conservatives, the loose movement influential with the next wave of Republican politicians and academics, is a picture of America as fractured, declining and overcomplicated — that everything is so messed up in such a dense, decades-piled-up way that only a kind of big bang could fix it.

That vision is a hallmark of the Trump era but can become more academic and theoretical in the national conservative point of view. When Mr. Vance was asked in an interview about which historical figures he looks to for inspiration, he talked about post-World War II Charles de Gaulle.

Throughout much of the past decade of politics, you can find the idea of a society hopelessly in stasis and unable, because of ossified systems or financial interests, to deal with catastrophic changes that might ultimately threaten basic reality, like climate change and artificial intelligence. The national conservatives, like Mr. Vance, cite fertility and immigration as our existential problems.

Mr. Vance talks a lot about the decline in American manufacturing and the increase in trade over decades and the state of the border and the inflow of drugs into the United States today as growing out of financial incentives and the disregard that people in power had for the rest of the country. “We believe that a million cheap knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job,” he said in Nevada recently.