Nice job of hoisting Vance on the petard of Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided, a profound book. Also, for the life of me I can't understand how a man who married into a family of South Asians can wallow in this "blut und boden" hooey.
It’s because he is a self hating wanna be. It’s true of all of Trump‘s followers. They feel that they are inadequate. He feels inadequate and that’s probably what gave him self permission to marry a woman who, in many ways he thinks of as inferior. Because he doesn’t deserve a paradigm. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I believe this about her or her family. But I think it’s true of Vance. Just read his book. It’s full of self disgust. No doubt Stephen Miller has facts about him that are similar. I just don’t know them. And Trump too is disgusted with himself. That’s why he always talks about shame and filth and other “dirty,“ topics.
He's a moral fraud, just like his best-selling "elegy" to drug-addled layabouts he holds accountable for their personal downfall. But he is a thoroughly unlikable person. I can't see him filling Trump's gilded slippers. I'm not sure anybody can fill them.
I don't want to speculate about Usha Vance's political beliefs (she worked in a progressive law firm and she didn't follow him in catholic conversion, she remained Hindu), but it can actually be very easy for Vance to reconcile racist, blood and soil beliefs with being married to an Indian wife from a Brahmin caste family.
The caste system is rigid, blood based and hierarchical - and Brahmins are on top ! And the 19th racist thinkers mused about the Indo-European civilization and the influence of aryans - aryans being originally an Indo-Iranian people. Racist theories and weirdo musings about racial hierarchies are more circomvoluted than merely white vs non-white.
Hindutva? I think a lot Hindutva fans are very Trump-aligned and those who dislike Hindutva tend to be the opposite. I gather this from comments that I've seen, but I haven't seen any polling on it.
Good grief. Empirically it's almost impossible to deny that America is a creole nation. People like Benedict Anderson have shown how it was creoles, the American-born children of European colonial functionaries, who developed a new sensibility for independent political "we-ness" that was the basis for South and North American republics. (And Anderson goes further to argue that all modern nation-states are created or retrofitted to that blueprint for polities.)
The fact that all nation-states in the Americas connect citizenship to birthright comes from that history. How telling that Vance claims the white supremacists for his account of the true polity. But how weird that his vision downgrades the claim of his own wife to be a legit American. He is fighting for the model of an ethno-state that, had it never fallen into the hands of degenerate liberals and cosmopolitans, would have never let his in-laws past our borders, never let them have a child born in San Diego, and thus never occasioned the birth of his own children.
There was something in that TPM piece that annoyed me, though I don't know if it was part of Kovensky's commentary or that he merely alluded to something Vance had said: comparisons to Europe. For millennia, Europe has been governed by super-national institutions, from the Roman Empire, through the Church, to royal dynasties. Ethno-cultural nationalism has existed here, of course, but (over time), it's been the exception rather than the rule. The hint that blood-and-soil nationalism is a core component of Europe's DNA sounds like more fascist imagined past. I'm not a historian of ideas, but I wouldn't be surprised if much of it wasn't imported from America. It's just too egalitarian for "traditional" European sensibilities.
Romanticism aside, "our" conservative utopia is one of empires and super-national bureaucracies of educated elites who keep the peasants in check, not of tribal leadership. The thought that a British aristocrat is somehow closer to a British peasant than to a Greek aristocrat makes our conservative id shudder.
Sort of ancillary but this points to a frustrating outcome of the way that the lost cause narrative has taken a big, pretty divided chunk of the country and turned it into a unified, pro-slavery block. As far as I've read that's not really accurate (see, for example, heavy desertion from the confederate army), and the result is these sorts of assholes get to claim some sort of 'real' american heritage for their shitty opinions.
When one says some definition is both “over- & under-inclusive” it logically just means he thinks that definition is wrong, for it parallels the real definition he desires.
So what JD here means is that value-based definition of US citizenship is wrong, and the only definitive benchmark is by “heritage,” to use a euphemism of sorts.
Allow me to respond as someone who qualifies by the fact that my ancestors have been here far longer than the felonious peckerwood pigfuckers transported to the southern penal colonies Corporal Couchfucker is descended fro; as someone whose Revolutionary ancestors were friends and business associates with Icon of the Revolution Betsy Ross, soldiers who crossed the Delaware with General Washington to save the Revolution, and other later ancestors who defended the United States in the War of Southern Treason where jumped-up little Corporal Couchfucker's ancestors were likely found among the Southern Traitors.
Let me tell you this, you worthless little pissant: go fuck yourself in your face. Repeatedly.
You. Do. Not. Qualify. As. An. American, you couchfucking white trash failure as a human being. Go die.
Frederick Douglass "The Composite Nation" is an interesting document. Many passages are great and inspiring on this topic.
However, I am willing to use that irritating word "problematic". Partly it's that in talking about Chinese people he uses what is today no longer the preferred nomenclature. Also he keeps arguing that different races have Tolkienesque special abilities. Also he is outright prejudiced against the French.
I have some criticisms of Mamdani but it blows my mind that right wingers are more disturbed by him than this fucking Nazi.
Nice job of hoisting Vance on the petard of Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided, a profound book. Also, for the life of me I can't understand how a man who married into a family of South Asians can wallow in this "blut und boden" hooey.
It’s because he is a self hating wanna be. It’s true of all of Trump‘s followers. They feel that they are inadequate. He feels inadequate and that’s probably what gave him self permission to marry a woman who, in many ways he thinks of as inferior. Because he doesn’t deserve a paradigm. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I believe this about her or her family. But I think it’s true of Vance. Just read his book. It’s full of self disgust. No doubt Stephen Miller has facts about him that are similar. I just don’t know them. And Trump too is disgusted with himself. That’s why he always talks about shame and filth and other “dirty,“ topics.
He's a moral fraud, just like his best-selling "elegy" to drug-addled layabouts he holds accountable for their personal downfall. But he is a thoroughly unlikable person. I can't see him filling Trump's gilded slippers. I'm not sure anybody can fill them.
I don't want to speculate about Usha Vance's political beliefs (she worked in a progressive law firm and she didn't follow him in catholic conversion, she remained Hindu), but it can actually be very easy for Vance to reconcile racist, blood and soil beliefs with being married to an Indian wife from a Brahmin caste family.
The caste system is rigid, blood based and hierarchical - and Brahmins are on top ! And the 19th racist thinkers mused about the Indo-European civilization and the influence of aryans - aryans being originally an Indo-Iranian people. Racist theories and weirdo musings about racial hierarchies are more circomvoluted than merely white vs non-white.
Surely the in-law angle is worth further scrutiny.
A Brahmin-caste consciousness?
Hindutva? I think a lot Hindutva fans are very Trump-aligned and those who dislike Hindutva tend to be the opposite. I gather this from comments that I've seen, but I haven't seen any polling on it.
Cognitive dissonance? His wife is one of "the good ones."
We never should have ceded American patriotism to these cretins
Good grief. Empirically it's almost impossible to deny that America is a creole nation. People like Benedict Anderson have shown how it was creoles, the American-born children of European colonial functionaries, who developed a new sensibility for independent political "we-ness" that was the basis for South and North American republics. (And Anderson goes further to argue that all modern nation-states are created or retrofitted to that blueprint for polities.)
The fact that all nation-states in the Americas connect citizenship to birthright comes from that history. How telling that Vance claims the white supremacists for his account of the true polity. But how weird that his vision downgrades the claim of his own wife to be a legit American. He is fighting for the model of an ethno-state that, had it never fallen into the hands of degenerate liberals and cosmopolitans, would have never let his in-laws past our borders, never let them have a child born in San Diego, and thus never occasioned the birth of his own children.
There was something in that TPM piece that annoyed me, though I don't know if it was part of Kovensky's commentary or that he merely alluded to something Vance had said: comparisons to Europe. For millennia, Europe has been governed by super-national institutions, from the Roman Empire, through the Church, to royal dynasties. Ethno-cultural nationalism has existed here, of course, but (over time), it's been the exception rather than the rule. The hint that blood-and-soil nationalism is a core component of Europe's DNA sounds like more fascist imagined past. I'm not a historian of ideas, but I wouldn't be surprised if much of it wasn't imported from America. It's just too egalitarian for "traditional" European sensibilities.
Romanticism aside, "our" conservative utopia is one of empires and super-national bureaucracies of educated elites who keep the peasants in check, not of tribal leadership. The thought that a British aristocrat is somehow closer to a British peasant than to a Greek aristocrat makes our conservative id shudder.
Damn that Lincoln could write his ass off. Sadly, if he was alive today I think John Wilkes Booth would have a healthy following on X.
Harry Jaffa: All Americans are created equal--except homosexuals.
A different way of putting it is the JD Vance has ended the fascism debate by taking your side.
Vance, fascist yes, but also really really dumb.
Sort of ancillary but this points to a frustrating outcome of the way that the lost cause narrative has taken a big, pretty divided chunk of the country and turned it into a unified, pro-slavery block. As far as I've read that's not really accurate (see, for example, heavy desertion from the confederate army), and the result is these sorts of assholes get to claim some sort of 'real' american heritage for their shitty opinions.
It was telling that Vance, in the opening lines of his Claremont Speech, paid homage to “Henry Jaffa.”
When one says some definition is both “over- & under-inclusive” it logically just means he thinks that definition is wrong, for it parallels the real definition he desires.
So what JD here means is that value-based definition of US citizenship is wrong, and the only definitive benchmark is by “heritage,” to use a euphemism of sorts.
(John, the link in the opening graf takes us back to this piece, when I think it's supposed to take us to the piece about Vance's speech at the RNC?)
Allow me to respond as someone who qualifies by the fact that my ancestors have been here far longer than the felonious peckerwood pigfuckers transported to the southern penal colonies Corporal Couchfucker is descended fro; as someone whose Revolutionary ancestors were friends and business associates with Icon of the Revolution Betsy Ross, soldiers who crossed the Delaware with General Washington to save the Revolution, and other later ancestors who defended the United States in the War of Southern Treason where jumped-up little Corporal Couchfucker's ancestors were likely found among the Southern Traitors.
Let me tell you this, you worthless little pissant: go fuck yourself in your face. Repeatedly.
You. Do. Not. Qualify. As. An. American, you couchfucking white trash failure as a human being. Go die.
Frederick Douglass "The Composite Nation" is an interesting document. Many passages are great and inspiring on this topic.
However, I am willing to use that irritating word "problematic". Partly it's that in talking about Chinese people he uses what is today no longer the preferred nomenclature. Also he keeps arguing that different races have Tolkienesque special abilities. Also he is outright prejudiced against the French.
Vance strikes a note of fear in me that the others somehow do not.
He would seemingly do anything asked of him without question.