The key to Vance is that the dude doesn't actually "believe" any of this. I find no reason to believe that he truly believes much of anything.
There is no reconciling the absolute contradiction (as you note) between Hillbilly Elegy and his current identity politics. There is no reconciling the circa 2022-24 embrace of Vance by the Silicon Valley boys with his current economic "ideas" (excepting the AI speech, as you note).
How does one explain his marriage? How does he one day explain his current politics to his adult children? None of it maths out. He is a LARPer, a troll, a chameleon.
He has said enough shit at this point that any arguments he makes in 2028 will be easily refuted by his own words. He will be limited by an inability to deviate from any Trump policy while he is still VP. Vance will be the easiest punching bag in the history of U.S. Presidential politics. If the Democratics can't manage to nominate a candidate able to destroy this clown...we deserve that ominous fate.
Trouble is, the Democrats never nominated anyone who could destroy Trump. Their three nominations seem to be a political science project to determine exactly how bad a candidate could be and still beat Trump. For people who believed (rightly!) that Trump was a fundamental danger to US democracy, the Democrats didn't put much care into picking a challenger. Will Democrats do any better in 2028?
That's the issue, isn't it? He's a good Yale boy, a scion of the meritocracy: a competent and replaceable product of his patrons, well able to execute on his orders, but kept on a tight leash. The neck that sticks out gets chopped off. Isn't it the case that his patrons have other Vances in the bank, ready and willing to step in if he goes off-script? When you get right down to it, wouldn't he, a decade earlier, have been woke?
Maybe, maybe not. His early associations with Peter Thiel and Amy Chua were risky at the time. And some of his positions aren't entirely wrong. While it would be silly to believe that the fentanyl crisis was introduced on purpose, recall what Herbert Hoover said about food relief to the Soviets: "Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!" Didn't he say this for a reason, as a response to the contrary position? If Hoover hadn't been in the room, might they not have chosen to starve the Reds out? Clearly some wanted to.
I don't recall any shortage of "coastal liberals" (having once been one myself) willing to say, about fentanyl and the general problem of deaths of despair, things to the effect of "good, there'll be fewer rednecks". It just wasn't a priority. These are the people who inflicted that wacky Texan Bible hick on us, who were racist enough to believe Obama's publisher about where he was born, and so on... they're just not a credit to the republic, and we'd be better off without them. The rank-ordering of demographics as subjects of the government just *is* a feature of American politics now, in the subtle and far-reaching sense as well as the overt sense of demographic targets, diversity statements, etc., and some kind of white Kendi is a logical consequence of that.
The low point for the Harris "campaign" was her pathetically inelegant inability to answer a question about how she would differ from Biden. I am actually looking forward to watching Vance answer the 2028 version of that question. He has years to prepare! But charisma will be required. I don't expect him to shine any brighter than Harris.
This a great analysis of his current rhetoric and I agree completely about how grating it is, but at the end you seem a bit too confident about how things will turn out if he becomes president. If you look internationally, lot of right-wing populists in today are pretty good at using this kind of grievance based rhetoric while doing contradictory things in reality. For example Orban railing against the EU or immigration while happily taking EU funds and using immigrants on work visas to build factories. Never underestimate the capacity of rightoids to treat their electorate like suckers.
In addition, Vance may have actually convinced himself of this worldview but implementing pro-Appalachian nationalistic socialism is not a viable strategy for the current Republican coalition. Vance doesn’t have the same biomechanical connection to the base as Trump, which likely means that members of Congress will be likelier to challenge him if he tried to deviate too hard from standard Republican policies. There is a reasonable case to make that Vance will continue pander to the chuds on rhetoric and will give in to Republican interest groups on policy more often than not. Not 100% confident on this of course and I still really hate the grievance politics he seems to represent.
2028 seems likely to a choice of between Newsom, who will probably not live up to his current Abundance-pilled rhetoric and Vance, who is likely to govern somewhat closer to standard Republicanism than his Appalachian Kendi rhetoric suggests. In either case it will be interesting to see if in a post-Trump environment rhetoric and ideas will be more or less relevant compared to interest groups in either coalition.
I think that the lesson of Trump's second term is that those interest groups are pretty toothless on the Republican side once a leader wants to go in a different direction. Vance doesn't have Trump's charisma, but like I say here he has a hold on the conservative intellectual class, and he's actually ideological. He's gone out of his way to elevate and appoint postliberal types. Among the influencer space, there is no longer much pro-market rhetoric or sentiment at all. As president, I think Vance would probably be awful on economics, in some ways worse than the modal Democrat.
I agree that the big question of a Vance term is whether having more ideological rigor but less charisma will make him more or less powerful within the party. I think there is a reasonable argument that he would be weaker but I guess we’ll see. Also this whining against foreigners thing is kind of one note and will be stale on its own by 2028. I think he will have to partially pivot to something else, he could go darker with more Christian nationalism/more explicit white identity politics or start talking more like a normie depending on the mood by then. You capture his current rhetoric really well in this article but I don’t think he can stick exclusively to this stuff in a presidential campaign.
So much of the last 10 years has been "X won't govern the way he campaigns" only to find that X governs exactly like he campaigns, and then some.
That goes for both Trump and Biden, and you should assume it will be the same for Vance (and probably Zohran too).
The "X won't govern the way he campaigns" line has always existed to give conservatives cover to support politicians who violate every conservative principle. "It's all populist posturing, they'll never do it" After 10 years it would be better to abandon this line, if only so as not to be seen as a complete sucker when, once again, it turns out to be wrong.
I've often thought this way too, that Vance might actually govern more like a normal (for a post-Covid) Republican than his rhetoric suggests. He is either a damn fool who believes what he actually says, or the most cynical of political operators.
Either way, not someone we want to be in the Oval Office. But I suppose a lot of normie Republicans will be able to convince themselves that he just talks like Tucker Carlson, but will govern like Mitt Romey. But I have my doubts about that.
What’s unique about Vance is how instinctively unappealing his orientation is completely outside his actual issue positioning. One thing Ezra Klein said that’s stuck with me is Zohran seems to be motivated by his sympathies and not his resentments. Vance is exact opposite: he doesn’t even seem motivated to help rural whites, only seems to be motivated by anger towards non-whites. Even tho Zohran does occasional billionaire bashing, I find him bizarrely more appealing than both class leftists like Bernie or woke leftists like AOC. He has some terrible issue positioning but he doesn’t seem to hate people who disagree.
I really wonder if Vance can have appeal with swing voters with Trump positions but without trumps charisma.
In presidential elections, voters tend to pick whoever is the opposite of the last guy. My hope is that Democrats pick someone with a Reagan-esque sunny optimism to contrast with Vance.
"But I was always a poor fit for the contemporary conservative movement, since I care about ideas and what’s true, and very little about personal relationships or what is fashionable. I was attracted to the right because I like free markets, optimism, seeing man take control of his own destiny, and individual responsibility. I hate victim culture, blaming others for one’s problems, demagoguery, and placing identity concerns over truth."
"Sure, I was once racist just like them, but at least there were other aspects to my intellect and personality!"
=
"I'm a bigot too, but my capitalism idolatry makes me better than the others!"
ftfy
"Vance seems to have cast a spell over rightists, and they have trouble understanding that this guy is the personification of nearly everything they once claimed to hate. Partly, it’s culture war brain rot."
No, it's power. Plain and simple. Demagoguery and other fascist strategies work. Especially in the social media landscape that is not gatekept and curated like legacy media and it works very well against the weak and complacent opponents of the liberal elite. Vance has adopted these strategies to gain and maintain power, as has the Republican Party under Trump. They opened Pandoras Box and unleashed the Plague into the political system. They'd rather destroy the Republic and Democracy than losing power. In the end, they are just nihilists with bottomless greed for power. They must be stopped and these strategies need to be contained once again. The old tacit agreements on the pursuit and maintenance of political power need to be re-instituted and fortified again.
If Vance's style is to co-opt the language of victimhood and grievance politics of the left, then that plague was already in the political system. I really don't understand people who frame the rise of Trump as something novel in our politics and his political opponents as principled opposition. Steve Bannon and other populists are not wrong when they say that we would not be where we are today without major collective failures on the part of elites through the War on Terror, the Iraq War, unchecked illegal immigration, the failed drug war, a quarter century of endless wasteful deficit spending, the subprime mortgage and the 2008 financial crisis, COVID, the rise of China, and deindustrialization. Even if you think Trump is Hitler and right-wing populism is cancer, clearly the old paradigm of center-left "Third Way" liberalism and the pre-Trump center-right Buckleyite establishment of our elite culture were perfectly fine with driving America off a cliff in the most polite and principled way possible.
The inner feminist in me that Hilary Clinton destroyed is reawaken every time Vance speaks about women. I don’t even mind right wing gender stuff but there’s something about Vance that is more viscerally bothersome to me than trumps views on women.
This is because Trump actually likes women and you can tell it sort of gets his rocks off when an attractive woman (to a 79 year old man) like Noem or Bondi or Grabbard saunters around him doing what is traditonally a "man's" job. They just need to dress and look how he wants them to or he'll start to think poorly of them.
Vance and the rest of the Socon crowd come across as having a particular kind of disdain for the feminine. They have a need to beat down and control women. In their minds women must be submissive to men. Women must be mothers.
While Trump could care less if a woman wants to work or stay home and have kids.
This is the Socons' glaring weakness versus Trump. Trump believes in nothing but himself, which makes him flexible to change his positions on a dime. But the Socons actually believe in things, and thus have an imperative to push for and defend these things. And since most Americans, a fair number of conservatives included, don't agree with them, their chances of winning without Trump are not good.
This is actual critical thinking. I admire those who are willing to reexamine their priors. He sees right at the heart of the deep poison corrupting our politics. The next question is: Now what?
This is great analysis. What was especially telling was the hypothetical removal of Vance's hostility to immigrants and realizing that he has nothing else to say.
Brilliant dissection of the victimhood parallel. The zero-sum immigration framing really is identical to Nation of Islam's "black capitalism" rhetoric from the 90s, and I dunno how more people dont see it. Back when I worked in policy circles, the shift from "bootstraps conservatism" to grievance-based identiy politics felt like watching a mirror image emerge. The comparisons to Kendi's disparate impact logic are particularly sharp and uncomfrotable for anyone who spent decades pushing back on that exact framework.
"One thing that is truly frustrating here is that I appear to be one of the only people out there able to make the connection between Vance’s thinking and the worst pathologies of the left."
Bryan Caplan has argued that the right is united by only one issue---contempt for the left. This is also Caplanesque:
"Vance detests Democrats and wokeness, so that trumps everything else in their minds."
And this:
"If a movement claims to believe in principles like free markets and individual responsibility while embracing Vance – whose worldview stands in direct opposition to them – one can question how much they ever really believed in these ideas in the first place. Or any ideas at all really, aside from racial resentment."
I think this is the right analysis. Something I definitely underestimated during the 2020s was the growing demand for Republican Wokeness. I think a lot of republicans saw the social power minorities had and envied it. They wanted the same kind of reflexive deference and grievance politics, a reason why their failures could never be their fault, even if large parts of it it didn't make any sense. JD is effective at filling that demand and giving them the victimhood they crave, with the bonus of feeling like they're taking that social power away from liberals.
Scott wrote a post ages ago (before the Trump rise), where he specifically called this kind of social power out as something Donald Trump and Curtis Yarvin didn't have, and desperately wanted. It's strange to read it over a decade later and look back at how much it applies today. I couldn't have imagined how badly the new right would want this kind of social power and the lengths they were willing to go to in order to get it.
I think the biggest difference with Vance specifically is that the Republican party has fewer guardrails against people like him actually being in control. Kendi was always strong as a cultural figure, but he wasn't able to directly shape policy in the way that someone like Vance is. Trump seems to be an increasingly demented meat-puppet with no real policy goals, and when Vance gets his turn at being shadow-president we'll presumably see what a Kendi administration (but for whites) would have been like if the Democrats had ever allowed it.
Very much agree with RH here on Vance. I am of the opinon that Republicans basically take most of their cues from whatever Democrats were doing 10-20-30 years ago. Since the Democrats embraced the victim mentality and race hustling some times ago, it became inevitable that at least some Republicans would eventually follow suit.
Vance is simply a consummate politician, changing his message and persona in ways that he believes will further his political career. He has come far in the short amount of time since he wrote Hillbilly Elegy. Whether he will continue to advance politically remains to be seen.
1960s civil rights legislation provides the potential for "Woke " policies in the US of the 21stcentury. >90 %of immigrants to the US are non white who can and will benefit from Affirmative action etc. during their lifetimes unlike JD Vance himself and every other single cis het white male who was born in the nation.Of course the irony is that he is the only member of his immediate family with no potential to benefit from civil rights legislation.
Mr. Hanania, you are an upper-middle-class Palestinian-and-other person who hears JD Vance staying on message and...finds it terribly gauche. Of course, listen to Zohran Mamdani hammering "affordability" while standing next to Grimace at a McDonald's ice cream dispenser and you will understand that he is trying to make a place for his issue by repeating, repeating, repeating. Vance's humble proposition is that the uncool, unconnected whites...the Floyd R. Turbos still struggling to crawl out of the bottom of the deplorable basket...are in need of representation. When you say that this stuff give you the ick, I align you with wildly anti-indigenous-anything techno autists like your supposed nemesis Curtis Yarvin. Or maybe a techno-utopian like Marc Andreessen. These are real people, you may have no affinity for them...may in fact plausibly be afraid of them. But they exist, and JD is trying to get them back in a place of centrality. And maybe steal a cookie or two for them.
The key to Vance is that the dude doesn't actually "believe" any of this. I find no reason to believe that he truly believes much of anything.
There is no reconciling the absolute contradiction (as you note) between Hillbilly Elegy and his current identity politics. There is no reconciling the circa 2022-24 embrace of Vance by the Silicon Valley boys with his current economic "ideas" (excepting the AI speech, as you note).
How does one explain his marriage? How does he one day explain his current politics to his adult children? None of it maths out. He is a LARPer, a troll, a chameleon.
He has said enough shit at this point that any arguments he makes in 2028 will be easily refuted by his own words. He will be limited by an inability to deviate from any Trump policy while he is still VP. Vance will be the easiest punching bag in the history of U.S. Presidential politics. If the Democratics can't manage to nominate a candidate able to destroy this clown...we deserve that ominous fate.
Trouble is, the Democrats never nominated anyone who could destroy Trump. Their three nominations seem to be a political science project to determine exactly how bad a candidate could be and still beat Trump. For people who believed (rightly!) that Trump was a fundamental danger to US democracy, the Democrats didn't put much care into picking a challenger. Will Democrats do any better in 2028?
That's the issue, isn't it? He's a good Yale boy, a scion of the meritocracy: a competent and replaceable product of his patrons, well able to execute on his orders, but kept on a tight leash. The neck that sticks out gets chopped off. Isn't it the case that his patrons have other Vances in the bank, ready and willing to step in if he goes off-script? When you get right down to it, wouldn't he, a decade earlier, have been woke?
Maybe, maybe not. His early associations with Peter Thiel and Amy Chua were risky at the time. And some of his positions aren't entirely wrong. While it would be silly to believe that the fentanyl crisis was introduced on purpose, recall what Herbert Hoover said about food relief to the Soviets: "Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!" Didn't he say this for a reason, as a response to the contrary position? If Hoover hadn't been in the room, might they not have chosen to starve the Reds out? Clearly some wanted to.
I don't recall any shortage of "coastal liberals" (having once been one myself) willing to say, about fentanyl and the general problem of deaths of despair, things to the effect of "good, there'll be fewer rednecks". It just wasn't a priority. These are the people who inflicted that wacky Texan Bible hick on us, who were racist enough to believe Obama's publisher about where he was born, and so on... they're just not a credit to the republic, and we'd be better off without them. The rank-ordering of demographics as subjects of the government just *is* a feature of American politics now, in the subtle and far-reaching sense as well as the overt sense of demographic targets, diversity statements, etc., and some kind of white Kendi is a logical consequence of that.
The low point for the Harris "campaign" was her pathetically inelegant inability to answer a question about how she would differ from Biden. I am actually looking forward to watching Vance answer the 2028 version of that question. He has years to prepare! But charisma will be required. I don't expect him to shine any brighter than Harris.
This a great analysis of his current rhetoric and I agree completely about how grating it is, but at the end you seem a bit too confident about how things will turn out if he becomes president. If you look internationally, lot of right-wing populists in today are pretty good at using this kind of grievance based rhetoric while doing contradictory things in reality. For example Orban railing against the EU or immigration while happily taking EU funds and using immigrants on work visas to build factories. Never underestimate the capacity of rightoids to treat their electorate like suckers.
In addition, Vance may have actually convinced himself of this worldview but implementing pro-Appalachian nationalistic socialism is not a viable strategy for the current Republican coalition. Vance doesn’t have the same biomechanical connection to the base as Trump, which likely means that members of Congress will be likelier to challenge him if he tried to deviate too hard from standard Republican policies. There is a reasonable case to make that Vance will continue pander to the chuds on rhetoric and will give in to Republican interest groups on policy more often than not. Not 100% confident on this of course and I still really hate the grievance politics he seems to represent.
2028 seems likely to a choice of between Newsom, who will probably not live up to his current Abundance-pilled rhetoric and Vance, who is likely to govern somewhat closer to standard Republicanism than his Appalachian Kendi rhetoric suggests. In either case it will be interesting to see if in a post-Trump environment rhetoric and ideas will be more or less relevant compared to interest groups in either coalition.
I think that the lesson of Trump's second term is that those interest groups are pretty toothless on the Republican side once a leader wants to go in a different direction. Vance doesn't have Trump's charisma, but like I say here he has a hold on the conservative intellectual class, and he's actually ideological. He's gone out of his way to elevate and appoint postliberal types. Among the influencer space, there is no longer much pro-market rhetoric or sentiment at all. As president, I think Vance would probably be awful on economics, in some ways worse than the modal Democrat.
I agree that the big question of a Vance term is whether having more ideological rigor but less charisma will make him more or less powerful within the party. I think there is a reasonable argument that he would be weaker but I guess we’ll see. Also this whining against foreigners thing is kind of one note and will be stale on its own by 2028. I think he will have to partially pivot to something else, he could go darker with more Christian nationalism/more explicit white identity politics or start talking more like a normie depending on the mood by then. You capture his current rhetoric really well in this article but I don’t think he can stick exclusively to this stuff in a presidential campaign.
So much of the last 10 years has been "X won't govern the way he campaigns" only to find that X governs exactly like he campaigns, and then some.
That goes for both Trump and Biden, and you should assume it will be the same for Vance (and probably Zohran too).
The "X won't govern the way he campaigns" line has always existed to give conservatives cover to support politicians who violate every conservative principle. "It's all populist posturing, they'll never do it" After 10 years it would be better to abandon this line, if only so as not to be seen as a complete sucker when, once again, it turns out to be wrong.
I've often thought this way too, that Vance might actually govern more like a normal (for a post-Covid) Republican than his rhetoric suggests. He is either a damn fool who believes what he actually says, or the most cynical of political operators.
Either way, not someone we want to be in the Oval Office. But I suppose a lot of normie Republicans will be able to convince themselves that he just talks like Tucker Carlson, but will govern like Mitt Romey. But I have my doubts about that.
What’s unique about Vance is how instinctively unappealing his orientation is completely outside his actual issue positioning. One thing Ezra Klein said that’s stuck with me is Zohran seems to be motivated by his sympathies and not his resentments. Vance is exact opposite: he doesn’t even seem motivated to help rural whites, only seems to be motivated by anger towards non-whites. Even tho Zohran does occasional billionaire bashing, I find him bizarrely more appealing than both class leftists like Bernie or woke leftists like AOC. He has some terrible issue positioning but he doesn’t seem to hate people who disagree.
I really wonder if Vance can have appeal with swing voters with Trump positions but without trumps charisma.
In presidential elections, voters tend to pick whoever is the opposite of the last guy. My hope is that Democrats pick someone with a Reagan-esque sunny optimism to contrast with Vance.
"But I was always a poor fit for the contemporary conservative movement, since I care about ideas and what’s true, and very little about personal relationships or what is fashionable. I was attracted to the right because I like free markets, optimism, seeing man take control of his own destiny, and individual responsibility. I hate victim culture, blaming others for one’s problems, demagoguery, and placing identity concerns over truth."
That's basically me.
"Sure, I was once racist just like them, but at least there were other aspects to my intellect and personality!"
=
"I'm a bigot too, but my capitalism idolatry makes me better than the others!"
ftfy
"Vance seems to have cast a spell over rightists, and they have trouble understanding that this guy is the personification of nearly everything they once claimed to hate. Partly, it’s culture war brain rot."
No, it's power. Plain and simple. Demagoguery and other fascist strategies work. Especially in the social media landscape that is not gatekept and curated like legacy media and it works very well against the weak and complacent opponents of the liberal elite. Vance has adopted these strategies to gain and maintain power, as has the Republican Party under Trump. They opened Pandoras Box and unleashed the Plague into the political system. They'd rather destroy the Republic and Democracy than losing power. In the end, they are just nihilists with bottomless greed for power. They must be stopped and these strategies need to be contained once again. The old tacit agreements on the pursuit and maintenance of political power need to be re-instituted and fortified again.
If Vance's style is to co-opt the language of victimhood and grievance politics of the left, then that plague was already in the political system. I really don't understand people who frame the rise of Trump as something novel in our politics and his political opponents as principled opposition. Steve Bannon and other populists are not wrong when they say that we would not be where we are today without major collective failures on the part of elites through the War on Terror, the Iraq War, unchecked illegal immigration, the failed drug war, a quarter century of endless wasteful deficit spending, the subprime mortgage and the 2008 financial crisis, COVID, the rise of China, and deindustrialization. Even if you think Trump is Hitler and right-wing populism is cancer, clearly the old paradigm of center-left "Third Way" liberalism and the pre-Trump center-right Buckleyite establishment of our elite culture were perfectly fine with driving America off a cliff in the most polite and principled way possible.
The inner feminist in me that Hilary Clinton destroyed is reawaken every time Vance speaks about women. I don’t even mind right wing gender stuff but there’s something about Vance that is more viscerally bothersome to me than trumps views on women.
This is because Trump actually likes women and you can tell it sort of gets his rocks off when an attractive woman (to a 79 year old man) like Noem or Bondi or Grabbard saunters around him doing what is traditonally a "man's" job. They just need to dress and look how he wants them to or he'll start to think poorly of them.
Vance and the rest of the Socon crowd come across as having a particular kind of disdain for the feminine. They have a need to beat down and control women. In their minds women must be submissive to men. Women must be mothers.
While Trump could care less if a woman wants to work or stay home and have kids.
This is the Socons' glaring weakness versus Trump. Trump believes in nothing but himself, which makes him flexible to change his positions on a dime. But the Socons actually believe in things, and thus have an imperative to push for and defend these things. And since most Americans, a fair number of conservatives included, don't agree with them, their chances of winning without Trump are not good.
2028 is the Democrats' election to lose.
This is actual critical thinking. I admire those who are willing to reexamine their priors. He sees right at the heart of the deep poison corrupting our politics. The next question is: Now what?
This is great analysis. What was especially telling was the hypothetical removal of Vance's hostility to immigrants and realizing that he has nothing else to say.
Brilliant dissection of the victimhood parallel. The zero-sum immigration framing really is identical to Nation of Islam's "black capitalism" rhetoric from the 90s, and I dunno how more people dont see it. Back when I worked in policy circles, the shift from "bootstraps conservatism" to grievance-based identiy politics felt like watching a mirror image emerge. The comparisons to Kendi's disparate impact logic are particularly sharp and uncomfrotable for anyone who spent decades pushing back on that exact framework.
Great post. This is a key point:
"One thing that is truly frustrating here is that I appear to be one of the only people out there able to make the connection between Vance’s thinking and the worst pathologies of the left."
Bryan Caplan has argued that the right is united by only one issue---contempt for the left. This is also Caplanesque:
"Vance detests Democrats and wokeness, so that trumps everything else in their minds."
And this:
"If a movement claims to believe in principles like free markets and individual responsibility while embracing Vance – whose worldview stands in direct opposition to them – one can question how much they ever really believed in these ideas in the first place. Or any ideas at all really, aside from racial resentment."
I think this is the right analysis. Something I definitely underestimated during the 2020s was the growing demand for Republican Wokeness. I think a lot of republicans saw the social power minorities had and envied it. They wanted the same kind of reflexive deference and grievance politics, a reason why their failures could never be their fault, even if large parts of it it didn't make any sense. JD is effective at filling that demand and giving them the victimhood they crave, with the bonus of feeling like they're taking that social power away from liberals.
Scott wrote a post ages ago (before the Trump rise), where he specifically called this kind of social power out as something Donald Trump and Curtis Yarvin didn't have, and desperately wanted. It's strange to read it over a decade later and look back at how much it applies today. I couldn't have imagined how badly the new right would want this kind of social power and the lengths they were willing to go to in order to get it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130424233301/http://squid314.livejournal.com/354385.html
I think the biggest difference with Vance specifically is that the Republican party has fewer guardrails against people like him actually being in control. Kendi was always strong as a cultural figure, but he wasn't able to directly shape policy in the way that someone like Vance is. Trump seems to be an increasingly demented meat-puppet with no real policy goals, and when Vance gets his turn at being shadow-president we'll presumably see what a Kendi administration (but for whites) would have been like if the Democrats had ever allowed it.
Very much agree with RH here on Vance. I am of the opinon that Republicans basically take most of their cues from whatever Democrats were doing 10-20-30 years ago. Since the Democrats embraced the victim mentality and race hustling some times ago, it became inevitable that at least some Republicans would eventually follow suit.
And now the dawn of the conservative snowflake!
Vance is simply a consummate politician, changing his message and persona in ways that he believes will further his political career. He has come far in the short amount of time since he wrote Hillbilly Elegy. Whether he will continue to advance politically remains to be seen.
1960s civil rights legislation provides the potential for "Woke " policies in the US of the 21stcentury. >90 %of immigrants to the US are non white who can and will benefit from Affirmative action etc. during their lifetimes unlike JD Vance himself and every other single cis het white male who was born in the nation.Of course the irony is that he is the only member of his immediate family with no potential to benefit from civil rights legislation.
It never ceases to amaze me how his North Star seems to be that brown-skinned immigrants are bad and are poison to American society.
Except for his wife and kids!
Mr. Hanania, you are an upper-middle-class Palestinian-and-other person who hears JD Vance staying on message and...finds it terribly gauche. Of course, listen to Zohran Mamdani hammering "affordability" while standing next to Grimace at a McDonald's ice cream dispenser and you will understand that he is trying to make a place for his issue by repeating, repeating, repeating. Vance's humble proposition is that the uncool, unconnected whites...the Floyd R. Turbos still struggling to crawl out of the bottom of the deplorable basket...are in need of representation. When you say that this stuff give you the ick, I align you with wildly anti-indigenous-anything techno autists like your supposed nemesis Curtis Yarvin. Or maybe a techno-utopian like Marc Andreessen. These are real people, you may have no affinity for them...may in fact plausibly be afraid of them. But they exist, and JD is trying to get them back in a place of centrality. And maybe steal a cookie or two for them.
Why can't he do that without lying all the time?
It's a shame Williamson's argument was mostly condemned.
www.nationalreview.com/corner/working-class-whites-have-moral-responsibilities-defense-kevin-williamson/amp/