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?
This. They nominated Hillary Clinton the first time. Which says something given how unpopular she was. I still think the Clinton campaign boosted Trump specifically *because* they thought he would be easier to beat. "No effing way people will vote for that turd, they'll be FORCED to vote for Hillary and then we'll finally get a woman President!" Same thing the second time around, only it was a minority female who never faced an open primary.
The thing with this is that people say the same things about Trump. i.e. He doesn't really believe that crap about immigrants eating cats, he'll be more of a moderate when he's in power. Turns out Trump 2.0 is ten times as crazy as Trump 1.0 and yes, he believed all the stuff he was saying.
How do we know Vance 1.0 wasn't the fake and Vance 2.0 is the real thing?
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.
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.
"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."
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.
"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.
I'm with you in so far as the origin of this disease lies with the left, because they were actually the first to employ populist demagoguery and identity politics to achieve power. The grievance politics started there. Is it a surprise that the right eventually decided "well, this works, and it's this, or death"?
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?
You are far from being the only person who has noticed the similarities between the ideology Trump and Vance are promoting and the ideologies of the left. I'm pretty sure some "postliberals" really are just leftists who have evolved their social views to be a bit more conservative, or who feel like they can instrumentalize MAGA to achieve leftists ends: specifically undermining the neoliberal consensus. And the conservatives, many of them are rationalizing it as some sort of rhetorical ploy that is a necessity to gain power, or else they are actively changing their views in order to stay in line with the tribe, so they can retain influence. Maybe some of them haven't quite worked out how to rationalize it yet so they don't want to talk about it. They haven't got their story straight yet.
This article was an insightful explanation of the obvious parallels between JD Vance and identity-obsessed charlatans from other groups (particularly those who used to purport to represent urban black Americans). I could not have enjoyed it any more.
When I first heard of you and encountered your opinions (some of which I agreed and some of which I disagreed), you struck me as yet another in a long line of MAGA-fied commentators who could not differentiate the insightful from the noxious. I am not sure there is a person on Earth who has increased more in my esteem than you have, and I truly commend your growth as a thinker.
As such, you sure seem like a classical liberal to me. I was one in 2015, and remain one today. My partisan views have thus shifted (not that either side is very appealing), but my ideological ones have not. It is worth noting that, in 2015, JD Vance was also a classical liberal, and a very insightful one at that. I still recommend Hillbilly Elegy to anyone interested in Vance, but I ask them to evaluate how someone who wrote it could take his current positions such a short time later. I suppose the answer to that can be find somewhere on Air Force 2, and is accordingly disgraceful.
It's the logic of power. You have someone who is not a classical liberal in power, who is very opposed to many core classical liberal ideas. In order to have power and influence, you need to cater to that person's beliefs. In order to be convincing, you need to convince yourself. The human mind is quite effective at changing when it is in it's self-interest to do so.
"Philadelphia even took the step of banning some establishments from using bulletproof glass, which I thought was the perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with food deserts logic. "
The story you link for this has nothing to do with food deserts logic. The establishments being targeted by that regulation were establishments that served alcohol by the shot. Establishments whose business revolves around providing food, healthy or otherwise, were still permitted to use bulletproof glass. That was a (very malicious) vice regulation, not something intended to address food deserts.
I know I keep beating this drum, but I think a very understated point of all this resentment, malaise, zero-sum thinking, etc. across the entire political spectrum is that people just don't believe work is noble anymore and/or they don't really believe working hard will produce enough material benefit to them to make up for the effort of the hard work. I certainly don't believe work is noble. I don't think there is such a thing as "noble" anymore. In a godless universe any statement that this or that is virtuous is just like your opinion, man.
Some of this is spoiled, decadent, boiled frog stuff where we don't appreciate how much less work we have to do than we used to have to do. But some of it is just objective comparable effort to reward stuff. My dad had to work 8 hours a day, and my granddad had to work 8 hours a day, and I have to work 8 hours a day. But my grandmother remembers being driven around in a horse and carriage when she was a kid and meeting my grandfather out in the fields picking cotton, yet she left the world with central AC and a car and cable TV. My dad remembers nearly getting sepsis from an infected foot when he was a kid when he stepped on a nail because they couldn't afford to take him to a doctor. The medieval peasant understands that if he doesn't plow the fields he will starve.
But me? I had a car at age 16 and computer games and Disneyworld trips and so on. Once more, what's my incentive to bust ass exactly? Where is my damn flying car? Where's my robot maid? I have more fun leisure options? All of human knowledges is now at my fingertips at the click of a mouse? Okay, all that's done is *raise* the opportunity cost of me working to live, not made working more worthwhile.
I'm aware this is basically whining. I'm not blaming anybody for it or asking for fairy tale economics to try to fix it. But I think lots of people feel this way and telling them something about working hard so people in 2150 can cure cancer just rings hollow.
If you're content with mediocrity, that's fine. Rewards will go to those who create, innovate, and evolve. Everyone else is welcome to sit home and scroll.
But this is just a statement about what *will* happen (techno determinism) and says 0 about why the rest of us shouldn't throw wrenches in the gears out of spite or short-term self-interest. And we absolutely can and have thrown wrenches in the gears out of spite or short-term self-interest many times before.
So, just to clarify, you're not content with merely not working, you also actively want to hurt those who do (and there are plenty of people who create outside of "tech")? If I got that right, then your bigger problem might be your sociopathy. Worth looking into.
No, I'm saying if I don't see measurable returns for labor that I feel are worth my labor, why shouldn't I do something like form unions, restrict immigration, make the retirement age lower, etc.? Because my living standards will go down in some overall per capita terms? Most unionized workers seem to be having a grand time.
Again, my point is that the techno optimists really don't have a good answer to this other that
A) This would be ignoble.
This is contingent on people agreeing with your definition of nobility
B) Making vague threats about how it will hurt me in the long run
This sounds suspiciously like the vague promises that not doing this will benefit me in the long run (but again, where's my damn flying car?)
I'm not a "techno-optimist." The U.S. has the largest number of millionaires on the planet by a huge margin, the majority of whom do not work in tech. Like you said, living standards are incredible. If there is a "marketing problem" (and this might be the point you're trying to make, although, it's not clear that you're not making the exact opposite one), it's that people no longer want to push themselves to achieve something, and be able to afford that damn flying car. You WILL NOT get the flying car unless you get rich, which is 100% still attainable in America with some hard work, patience, and a little luck. But if you don't even wanna try, then you should stop bitching about what you don't have IMO.
There are no flying cars at all for rich or poor people no matter how hard I personally push myself in my rando life at the moment and this is true for 99% of people. I'm referencing a book. I'm talking about technological stagnation.
I'm well aware stupid regulations and NIMBYism and such are huge reasons for the stagnation, and I am very much in favor of producing an environment more conducive to tech progress to see if we can speed it up. I'm willing to try this anyway. But we each only have one life. If people don't get dramatic returns for labor anymore, it makes sense for them to pursue self-interest in other ways.
Done with this thread as I think it will just become circular.
As you note, historically the reward for working was that it produced a fair chance that you and your entire family would not immediately die horribly. In prior states of the world you might occasionally lose a kid or two to bad luck, but if you made ten and worked hard you'd probably see a few produce grandchildren. Now you get this baseline as a free gift for being born in an abundant time. But do you really want to be prole eating a food stamps diet in a decrepit small apartment, driving a battered Nissan, owning nothing else and going nowhere? If so, cool, you can have that without working very hard, enjoy!
Single task robot maids are available at a reasonable price at your nearest Walmart or with a few clicks on Amazon (vacuum, dishwasher, etc.). For a few dollars more you can get a real live immigrant to do anything the robots can't manage. Would you really work harder if robots were better at folding clothes? Why? And if so, get on it, because the robots are improving rapidly!
Flying cars would be unbearable - consider trying to enjoy nature or a walk in your neighborhood with several dozen helicopters overhead. Consider the accidents. Why not work for enough money that you're not required to compute any long distance in traffic on a daily basis and then enjoy living in a huge country with an excellent road network and direct flights to anywhere you want to go?
"But do you really want to be prole eating a food stamps diet in a decrepit small apartment, driving a battered Nissan, owning nothing else and going nowhere? If so, cool, you can have that without working very hard, enjoy!"
No, what I want, and what most people want is continuously, self-evidently rising living standards *while* spending less of our time on labor than we used to have to do. This is the whole point of productivity - getting more done with less effort. If I have to spend at least 1/3+ of my life doing labor I don't want to do forever no matter what kind of new technology gets invented, frankly, fuck that and I will optimize for gaming the system instead of valiantly serving it. It's about amount of time spent doing labor as much as what kind of labor at this point. Labor isn't hard now. It's fucking boring.
I don't specifically want flying cars. It's just an example. If tech was routinely delivering me obvious recompense for the remaining suffering and inconvenience of life - cures for cancer, cybernetic limbs, gene therapy to cure disease, actual and not "one task" robot maids, delivery drones, etc. it would self-evidently be worth working hard.
I actually did a mental exercise not long ago where I tried to come up with what inventions during my life have saved *me* labor or suffering as opposed to ones that just raise the opportunity cost of labor.
The only things I could come up with are e-commerce, GPS, and mobile banking. (And Sears catalogs have been a thing for 100+ years so e-commerce is really an improvement of degree and not kind). These have definitely reduced the amount of time I waste being lost or waiting in lines at stores. Everything else (Infinity Netflix shows, being able to read any book I want at any time, listen to any song I want, etc.) have just made me resent time wasted on labor more.
For my purposes, labor = necessary tasks I don't want to do
AI looks promising. I have found some ways to use it to automate tedium but it's nothing earth shattering and I still have to sit at work 8 hours every day even if I produce more output with the AI so it's not doing *me* any good there.
100% of my motivation for working hard is saving money to retire early so I can minimize the amount of time in my life I have to keep doing stupid things I don't care about.
You are making the point that you don't want to work because you don't want to work (because it's boring/non-preferred/not directly beneficial to you in an intrinsic sense). Many people share that tautological view. That's why the powers that be both pay you to complete tasks you otherwise would not even start, and make available to you nice things that can be bought with the money.
Technology and modernity are already saving you every day from such fates as:
1) sleeping on the ground exposed to the weather
2) never traveling beyond a ~10 mile radius of your sleeping place on the ground
3) worms eating your brain
4) dead babies being a regular part of your existence
5) tuberculosis, polio, measles, and many more
6) being hungry, looking around and finding literally nothing edible to the point where you waste away and die
7) wrapping yourself in whatever is around to avoid freezing to death
8) random marauders killing and eating your entire family
If your needs are stay alive, eat enough calories, maintain a Netflix account, you can work literally zero hours/day and be fine. If you want more nice stuff, you can trade your labor for it, at a very attractive rate compared to literally any other time and place in the entire history of the human race. It wasn't more fun or easier being an early coal miner or a subsistence farmer. If you don't believe me, you can probably find a way to try either lifestyle for a year and report back.
I don't care either that people in 1233 dealt with plague or famine or that people in 2175 might cure cancer. I only accept this at the intellectual level because I'm not an idiot and I've never been able to will myself into believing delusions.
But *I don't care.*
And most people don't care. It's not rational to care from the point of view of maximizing self-interest (which is what makes markets work). It's *virtuous* to care. This is 100% the point I'm making.
You can certainly coerce/lie to people so they work despite not caring because modernity is contingent on enough people continuing to labor to maintain it, or you can just tell the truth about "this is how it is and how it will always be" but both of these butcher anything about labor being virtuous. Labor is not virtuous. It sucks. It's the same category of thing as sickness and death. I will also 100% get sick and die, but nobody pretends those are noble.
I'm not making up fantasy economics or saying medieval peasants had a better life than I do. I am asking how do you convince people to keep laboring when many (maybe most) of us don't believe useful (for society) labor is virtuous anymore?
I assure you that most people spend zero percent of their time thinking about the nature of virtue (as distinct from tradition, habit, what others expect of them, or how to get things they want for largely unexamined reasons), and that it was ever thus. Work has always been motivated by necessity, coercion, social pressure, or direct rewards, not by some sense of "I am rationally contributing to the long-term greater good based on a deep sense of purpose and meaning." Most people prefer doing something to doing nothing because we are social animals who evolved to stay alive, reproduce, teach our offspring a few things, and contribute enough to the tribe that we're accepted and respected. You convince people to keep laboring by paying them to do it and giving them social validation, and punishing/shunning those who shirk. The results will often fall short of ideal human existence as imagined in a novel or religious text; some people will work intermittently at a Chipotle while very high and not even make a decent burrito. So it goes, but it's not worse than it used to be, and we have a pretty good option set as compared to most other hands that we could have been dealt.
Yes, but this still doesn't answer why I shouldn't maximize self-interest in anti-market ways like unionizing, getting other people to pay off my student loan debt if I can, trying to lower the retirement age for people like myself, using anti-discrimination and affirmative action law to my benefit, and so on. This is the point I'm making. Pro-market people argue I should be a pro-market participant because 1) it's virtuous or 2) I'll get rewards thereby - but I can objectively get better personal rewards by trying to rig markets in my particular favor, protections for me and not for thee.
Anway, I'm for real done with this thread I think. I've said the same thing slightly rephrased like 5 or 6 times now.
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.
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.
I suspect that the working class, of all ethnicities, is effectively a victim of a deliberate effort to filter the best and the brightest out and move them into the educated / skilled classes. This has worked via several routes - the deliberate effort to find academically talented youth in the schools, the filtering in the military by the ASVAB test (which correlates well with IQ) for selecting soldiers for the higher skilled specialties, and the relative openness to establishing your own business, ... The draft of World War 1 and the subsequent road building did in Appalachia - the most capable left, leaving communities that could no longer support themselves when the mines closed. Rural communities have been evaporating residents for generations - typically the most capable. My son-in-law took the Marines as his route out of a his rural community - and you can see that the extended family members who left have done much better than those who stayed. I was trained as a draftsman in high school and worked my way through college as a machinist (pre NC machining) and instrument designer.
But when you have several generations of filtering out a substantial fraction of the most capable, the remaining members of the group are, to some degree, somewhat less capable and adaptive. Giving opportunities to the most capable is certainly very helpful for those able to advantage of the situation, but over time it leaves those left behind worse off.
I expect the renewed interest in the skilled trades will result in the less academic but still capable children of the educated and skilled classes dominating those job categories in the near future.
"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. "
Congratulations. The inner party of the GOP does not believe in free market ideas. What they believe in is 'low taxes for wealthy business owners'. They build a coalition of voters who are willing to go along with that core goal in pursuit of their own ideas. For a long-time, they could count on religious conservatives and gun nuts to deliver majorities. Free market ideologues were useful intellectual window dressing for that coalition (as long as they didn't get sniffy about promising to put people in jail for getting an abortion). After religion faded out, Trump delivered them a new coalition. Trump's working class whites want economic promises that the inner party doesn't love, so they resisted, but in the end Trump delivered on the core goal and has kept delivering for more than a decade so they live with it.
A cabal of tech lords have the idea of re-industrializing America with AI and robots. I'm not sure that Vance style nationalism is optimized for winning an electoral majority for that agenda, but it might be a reasonable strategy for taking over the current GOP as it exists. The tech lords' agenda perfectly consistent with the core goals of the GOP, but its not really clear how useful free market ideologues will be..
This is, unfortunately, sounding a lot like what Marx would say. That the free-market ideology doesn't mean anything, it's just propaganda designed to keep the ruling class in power. And it is true in some sense, that it's instrumentalized on behalf of power. But it's also true that free markets actually do produce better economic outcomes and it's not just about lower taxes. But it's like everyone in the political class just thinks that's insane. The idea of committing to policies that are actually in the common good is anathema to people that trade in political favors. How the heck are you supposed to buy power if you can't rig the system?
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?
This. They nominated Hillary Clinton the first time. Which says something given how unpopular she was. I still think the Clinton campaign boosted Trump specifically *because* they thought he would be easier to beat. "No effing way people will vote for that turd, they'll be FORCED to vote for Hillary and then we'll finally get a woman President!" Same thing the second time around, only it was a minority female who never faced an open primary.
The thing with this is that people say the same things about Trump. i.e. He doesn't really believe that crap about immigrants eating cats, he'll be more of a moderate when he's in power. Turns out Trump 2.0 is ten times as crazy as Trump 1.0 and yes, he believed all the stuff he was saying.
How do we know Vance 1.0 wasn't the fake and Vance 2.0 is the real thing?
As Kurt Vonnegut said, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
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.
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.
"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.
I'm a dinosaur conservative. Independent voter.
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.
"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.
I'm with you in so far as the origin of this disease lies with the left, because they were actually the first to employ populist demagoguery and identity politics to achieve power. The grievance politics started there. Is it a surprise that the right eventually decided "well, this works, and it's this, or death"?
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?
You are far from being the only person who has noticed the similarities between the ideology Trump and Vance are promoting and the ideologies of the left. I'm pretty sure some "postliberals" really are just leftists who have evolved their social views to be a bit more conservative, or who feel like they can instrumentalize MAGA to achieve leftists ends: specifically undermining the neoliberal consensus. And the conservatives, many of them are rationalizing it as some sort of rhetorical ploy that is a necessity to gain power, or else they are actively changing their views in order to stay in line with the tribe, so they can retain influence. Maybe some of them haven't quite worked out how to rationalize it yet so they don't want to talk about it. They haven't got their story straight yet.
Richard --
This article was an insightful explanation of the obvious parallels between JD Vance and identity-obsessed charlatans from other groups (particularly those who used to purport to represent urban black Americans). I could not have enjoyed it any more.
When I first heard of you and encountered your opinions (some of which I agreed and some of which I disagreed), you struck me as yet another in a long line of MAGA-fied commentators who could not differentiate the insightful from the noxious. I am not sure there is a person on Earth who has increased more in my esteem than you have, and I truly commend your growth as a thinker.
As such, you sure seem like a classical liberal to me. I was one in 2015, and remain one today. My partisan views have thus shifted (not that either side is very appealing), but my ideological ones have not. It is worth noting that, in 2015, JD Vance was also a classical liberal, and a very insightful one at that. I still recommend Hillbilly Elegy to anyone interested in Vance, but I ask them to evaluate how someone who wrote it could take his current positions such a short time later. I suppose the answer to that can be find somewhere on Air Force 2, and is accordingly disgraceful.
It's the logic of power. You have someone who is not a classical liberal in power, who is very opposed to many core classical liberal ideas. In order to have power and influence, you need to cater to that person's beliefs. In order to be convincing, you need to convince yourself. The human mind is quite effective at changing when it is in it's self-interest to do so.
You are exceedingly correct, though true individualists won’t themselves do this.
But true individualists don't run for electoral political office. It's just not a job where pure individualists can succeed.
"Philadelphia even took the step of banning some establishments from using bulletproof glass, which I thought was the perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with food deserts logic. "
The story you link for this has nothing to do with food deserts logic. The establishments being targeted by that regulation were establishments that served alcohol by the shot. Establishments whose business revolves around providing food, healthy or otherwise, were still permitted to use bulletproof glass. That was a (very malicious) vice regulation, not something intended to address food deserts.
I know I keep beating this drum, but I think a very understated point of all this resentment, malaise, zero-sum thinking, etc. across the entire political spectrum is that people just don't believe work is noble anymore and/or they don't really believe working hard will produce enough material benefit to them to make up for the effort of the hard work. I certainly don't believe work is noble. I don't think there is such a thing as "noble" anymore. In a godless universe any statement that this or that is virtuous is just like your opinion, man.
Some of this is spoiled, decadent, boiled frog stuff where we don't appreciate how much less work we have to do than we used to have to do. But some of it is just objective comparable effort to reward stuff. My dad had to work 8 hours a day, and my granddad had to work 8 hours a day, and I have to work 8 hours a day. But my grandmother remembers being driven around in a horse and carriage when she was a kid and meeting my grandfather out in the fields picking cotton, yet she left the world with central AC and a car and cable TV. My dad remembers nearly getting sepsis from an infected foot when he was a kid when he stepped on a nail because they couldn't afford to take him to a doctor. The medieval peasant understands that if he doesn't plow the fields he will starve.
But me? I had a car at age 16 and computer games and Disneyworld trips and so on. Once more, what's my incentive to bust ass exactly? Where is my damn flying car? Where's my robot maid? I have more fun leisure options? All of human knowledges is now at my fingertips at the click of a mouse? Okay, all that's done is *raise* the opportunity cost of me working to live, not made working more worthwhile.
I'm aware this is basically whining. I'm not blaming anybody for it or asking for fairy tale economics to try to fix it. But I think lots of people feel this way and telling them something about working hard so people in 2150 can cure cancer just rings hollow.
If you're content with mediocrity, that's fine. Rewards will go to those who create, innovate, and evolve. Everyone else is welcome to sit home and scroll.
But this is just a statement about what *will* happen (techno determinism) and says 0 about why the rest of us shouldn't throw wrenches in the gears out of spite or short-term self-interest. And we absolutely can and have thrown wrenches in the gears out of spite or short-term self-interest many times before.
So, just to clarify, you're not content with merely not working, you also actively want to hurt those who do (and there are plenty of people who create outside of "tech")? If I got that right, then your bigger problem might be your sociopathy. Worth looking into.
No, I'm saying if I don't see measurable returns for labor that I feel are worth my labor, why shouldn't I do something like form unions, restrict immigration, make the retirement age lower, etc.? Because my living standards will go down in some overall per capita terms? Most unionized workers seem to be having a grand time.
Again, my point is that the techno optimists really don't have a good answer to this other that
A) This would be ignoble.
This is contingent on people agreeing with your definition of nobility
B) Making vague threats about how it will hurt me in the long run
This sounds suspiciously like the vague promises that not doing this will benefit me in the long run (but again, where's my damn flying car?)
It's a marketing problem.
I'm not a "techno-optimist." The U.S. has the largest number of millionaires on the planet by a huge margin, the majority of whom do not work in tech. Like you said, living standards are incredible. If there is a "marketing problem" (and this might be the point you're trying to make, although, it's not clear that you're not making the exact opposite one), it's that people no longer want to push themselves to achieve something, and be able to afford that damn flying car. You WILL NOT get the flying car unless you get rich, which is 100% still attainable in America with some hard work, patience, and a little luck. But if you don't even wanna try, then you should stop bitching about what you don't have IMO.
There are no flying cars at all for rich or poor people no matter how hard I personally push myself in my rando life at the moment and this is true for 99% of people. I'm referencing a book. I'm talking about technological stagnation.
https://www.amazon.com/Where-Flying-Car-Storrs-Hall/dp/1953953182
I'm well aware stupid regulations and NIMBYism and such are huge reasons for the stagnation, and I am very much in favor of producing an environment more conducive to tech progress to see if we can speed it up. I'm willing to try this anyway. But we each only have one life. If people don't get dramatic returns for labor anymore, it makes sense for them to pursue self-interest in other ways.
Done with this thread as I think it will just become circular.
As you note, historically the reward for working was that it produced a fair chance that you and your entire family would not immediately die horribly. In prior states of the world you might occasionally lose a kid or two to bad luck, but if you made ten and worked hard you'd probably see a few produce grandchildren. Now you get this baseline as a free gift for being born in an abundant time. But do you really want to be prole eating a food stamps diet in a decrepit small apartment, driving a battered Nissan, owning nothing else and going nowhere? If so, cool, you can have that without working very hard, enjoy!
Single task robot maids are available at a reasonable price at your nearest Walmart or with a few clicks on Amazon (vacuum, dishwasher, etc.). For a few dollars more you can get a real live immigrant to do anything the robots can't manage. Would you really work harder if robots were better at folding clothes? Why? And if so, get on it, because the robots are improving rapidly!
Flying cars would be unbearable - consider trying to enjoy nature or a walk in your neighborhood with several dozen helicopters overhead. Consider the accidents. Why not work for enough money that you're not required to compute any long distance in traffic on a daily basis and then enjoy living in a huge country with an excellent road network and direct flights to anywhere you want to go?
"But do you really want to be prole eating a food stamps diet in a decrepit small apartment, driving a battered Nissan, owning nothing else and going nowhere? If so, cool, you can have that without working very hard, enjoy!"
No, what I want, and what most people want is continuously, self-evidently rising living standards *while* spending less of our time on labor than we used to have to do. This is the whole point of productivity - getting more done with less effort. If I have to spend at least 1/3+ of my life doing labor I don't want to do forever no matter what kind of new technology gets invented, frankly, fuck that and I will optimize for gaming the system instead of valiantly serving it. It's about amount of time spent doing labor as much as what kind of labor at this point. Labor isn't hard now. It's fucking boring.
I don't specifically want flying cars. It's just an example. If tech was routinely delivering me obvious recompense for the remaining suffering and inconvenience of life - cures for cancer, cybernetic limbs, gene therapy to cure disease, actual and not "one task" robot maids, delivery drones, etc. it would self-evidently be worth working hard.
I actually did a mental exercise not long ago where I tried to come up with what inventions during my life have saved *me* labor or suffering as opposed to ones that just raise the opportunity cost of labor.
The only things I could come up with are e-commerce, GPS, and mobile banking. (And Sears catalogs have been a thing for 100+ years so e-commerce is really an improvement of degree and not kind). These have definitely reduced the amount of time I waste being lost or waiting in lines at stores. Everything else (Infinity Netflix shows, being able to read any book I want at any time, listen to any song I want, etc.) have just made me resent time wasted on labor more.
For my purposes, labor = necessary tasks I don't want to do
AI looks promising. I have found some ways to use it to automate tedium but it's nothing earth shattering and I still have to sit at work 8 hours every day even if I produce more output with the AI so it's not doing *me* any good there.
100% of my motivation for working hard is saving money to retire early so I can minimize the amount of time in my life I have to keep doing stupid things I don't care about.
You are making the point that you don't want to work because you don't want to work (because it's boring/non-preferred/not directly beneficial to you in an intrinsic sense). Many people share that tautological view. That's why the powers that be both pay you to complete tasks you otherwise would not even start, and make available to you nice things that can be bought with the money.
Technology and modernity are already saving you every day from such fates as:
1) sleeping on the ground exposed to the weather
2) never traveling beyond a ~10 mile radius of your sleeping place on the ground
3) worms eating your brain
4) dead babies being a regular part of your existence
5) tuberculosis, polio, measles, and many more
6) being hungry, looking around and finding literally nothing edible to the point where you waste away and die
7) wrapping yourself in whatever is around to avoid freezing to death
8) random marauders killing and eating your entire family
If your needs are stay alive, eat enough calories, maintain a Netflix account, you can work literally zero hours/day and be fine. If you want more nice stuff, you can trade your labor for it, at a very attractive rate compared to literally any other time and place in the entire history of the human race. It wasn't more fun or easier being an early coal miner or a subsistence farmer. If you don't believe me, you can probably find a way to try either lifestyle for a year and report back.
I don't care either that people in 1233 dealt with plague or famine or that people in 2175 might cure cancer. I only accept this at the intellectual level because I'm not an idiot and I've never been able to will myself into believing delusions.
But *I don't care.*
And most people don't care. It's not rational to care from the point of view of maximizing self-interest (which is what makes markets work). It's *virtuous* to care. This is 100% the point I'm making.
You can certainly coerce/lie to people so they work despite not caring because modernity is contingent on enough people continuing to labor to maintain it, or you can just tell the truth about "this is how it is and how it will always be" but both of these butcher anything about labor being virtuous. Labor is not virtuous. It sucks. It's the same category of thing as sickness and death. I will also 100% get sick and die, but nobody pretends those are noble.
I'm not making up fantasy economics or saying medieval peasants had a better life than I do. I am asking how do you convince people to keep laboring when many (maybe most) of us don't believe useful (for society) labor is virtuous anymore?
I assure you that most people spend zero percent of their time thinking about the nature of virtue (as distinct from tradition, habit, what others expect of them, or how to get things they want for largely unexamined reasons), and that it was ever thus. Work has always been motivated by necessity, coercion, social pressure, or direct rewards, not by some sense of "I am rationally contributing to the long-term greater good based on a deep sense of purpose and meaning." Most people prefer doing something to doing nothing because we are social animals who evolved to stay alive, reproduce, teach our offspring a few things, and contribute enough to the tribe that we're accepted and respected. You convince people to keep laboring by paying them to do it and giving them social validation, and punishing/shunning those who shirk. The results will often fall short of ideal human existence as imagined in a novel or religious text; some people will work intermittently at a Chipotle while very high and not even make a decent burrito. So it goes, but it's not worse than it used to be, and we have a pretty good option set as compared to most other hands that we could have been dealt.
Yes, but this still doesn't answer why I shouldn't maximize self-interest in anti-market ways like unionizing, getting other people to pay off my student loan debt if I can, trying to lower the retirement age for people like myself, using anti-discrimination and affirmative action law to my benefit, and so on. This is the point I'm making. Pro-market people argue I should be a pro-market participant because 1) it's virtuous or 2) I'll get rewards thereby - but I can objectively get better personal rewards by trying to rig markets in my particular favor, protections for me and not for thee.
Anway, I'm for real done with this thread I think. I've said the same thing slightly rephrased like 5 or 6 times now.
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.
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?
What's the difference between a Black Nationalist and a White Nationalist?
Melanin.
I suspect that the working class, of all ethnicities, is effectively a victim of a deliberate effort to filter the best and the brightest out and move them into the educated / skilled classes. This has worked via several routes - the deliberate effort to find academically talented youth in the schools, the filtering in the military by the ASVAB test (which correlates well with IQ) for selecting soldiers for the higher skilled specialties, and the relative openness to establishing your own business, ... The draft of World War 1 and the subsequent road building did in Appalachia - the most capable left, leaving communities that could no longer support themselves when the mines closed. Rural communities have been evaporating residents for generations - typically the most capable. My son-in-law took the Marines as his route out of a his rural community - and you can see that the extended family members who left have done much better than those who stayed. I was trained as a draftsman in high school and worked my way through college as a machinist (pre NC machining) and instrument designer.
But when you have several generations of filtering out a substantial fraction of the most capable, the remaining members of the group are, to some degree, somewhat less capable and adaptive. Giving opportunities to the most capable is certainly very helpful for those able to advantage of the situation, but over time it leaves those left behind worse off.
I expect the renewed interest in the skilled trades will result in the less academic but still capable children of the educated and skilled classes dominating those job categories in the near future.
"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. "
Congratulations. The inner party of the GOP does not believe in free market ideas. What they believe in is 'low taxes for wealthy business owners'. They build a coalition of voters who are willing to go along with that core goal in pursuit of their own ideas. For a long-time, they could count on religious conservatives and gun nuts to deliver majorities. Free market ideologues were useful intellectual window dressing for that coalition (as long as they didn't get sniffy about promising to put people in jail for getting an abortion). After religion faded out, Trump delivered them a new coalition. Trump's working class whites want economic promises that the inner party doesn't love, so they resisted, but in the end Trump delivered on the core goal and has kept delivering for more than a decade so they live with it.
A cabal of tech lords have the idea of re-industrializing America with AI and robots. I'm not sure that Vance style nationalism is optimized for winning an electoral majority for that agenda, but it might be a reasonable strategy for taking over the current GOP as it exists. The tech lords' agenda perfectly consistent with the core goals of the GOP, but its not really clear how useful free market ideologues will be..
This is, unfortunately, sounding a lot like what Marx would say. That the free-market ideology doesn't mean anything, it's just propaganda designed to keep the ruling class in power. And it is true in some sense, that it's instrumentalized on behalf of power. But it's also true that free markets actually do produce better economic outcomes and it's not just about lower taxes. But it's like everyone in the political class just thinks that's insane. The idea of committing to policies that are actually in the common good is anathema to people that trade in political favors. How the heck are you supposed to buy power if you can't rig the system?