But only last week did the full force of Vance’s spiritual reversal become apparent: “I think our people hate the right people,” he told The American Conservative magazine.

“Our people” might be understood broadly as the Republican base, while those he sees as worthy of contempt might be understood broadly as leftists and members of the coastal elite. Reached for comment, his campaign press secretary affirmed that “JD Vance strongly believes that the political, financial and Big Tech elites…deserve nothing but our scorn and hatred.”

By suggesting that antipathy toward the correct out-group is itself a moral imperative, Vance was engaging a powerful political current that has recently resurfaced within the conservative movement. He is not the first to be swept up in it…

Students of intellectual history may be picking up a hair-raising resonance. The new illiberal conservatives have (sometimes quite explicitly) taken a page out of the book of Carl Schmitt, an anti-modernist, pro-authoritarian German political philosopher known for insisting that the core distinction of politics “is that between friend and enemy.”

It’s occasionally said that Schmitt’s ideas were meant to be descriptive, not normative. Yet he plainly believed that blowing up constitutional limitations on the executive and withholding mercy from the out-group were the legitimate province of a sovereign state. Democracy, he once wrote, “necessarily involves first homogeneity and secondly—if necessary—the elimination or annihilation of heterogeneity.”