The Strangers - by Peter Jamison (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist's eye-opening account of the ascendant antidemocratic right and the acolyte it hopes to place in the presidency.

In just a few years, adherents of once fringe ideas on the right have come to play a leading role in American society and politics--and found an advocate at the apex of power. In The Strangers, Peter Jamison chronicles the apprenticeship and arrival of J. D. Vance, as he left Yale Law School for Silicon Valley, returned to his native Ohio, joined the Roman Catholic Church, and overcame his once-strenuous objections to Donald Trump to become a full-throated advocate of populism and nationalism, eventually in the White House itself. As Jamison shows, Vance's rise cannot be separated from the mentors and interlocutors he's found along the way, including the post-liberal political theorist Patrick Deneen, the technological accelerationist and billionaire Peter Thiel, the heterodox Catholic monk Edmund Waldstein, and even the neo-monarchist provocateur Curtis Yarvin. As different as they are, these figures share an opposition to democratic and Enlightenment values, and a conviction that the time has come to destroy the American ruling class from within and replace it with a new elite.

At The Washington Post, Jamison shared a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the January 6 insurrection and his reporting on Vance's career. In The Strangers, he combines intimately reported scenes with the revelation of previously undisclosed documents, meetings, and financial deals to expose a closely knit vanguard of reactionary political operatives, intellectuals, and tech investors who are supplanting the institutions of "Movement Conservatism" as Washington's unelected power structure.

About the Author

Peter Jamison is a reporter on The Washington Post's political enterprise and investigations team. He was part of a team of Post journalists awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for public service for coverage of the 2021 attack on the Capitol. In 2020 and 2022, his stories were selected for the Best American Newspaper Narratives anthology, and he has twice been a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists. Before joining the Post in 2016, he covered the mayor's office for the Los Angeles Times and police and courts for the Tampa Bay Times.