The Meaning of JD Vance

The Politics of National Despair Incarnate

The selection of JD Vance as Vice Presidential seems to be an act of supreme confidence by Trump. Biden barely looks alive and Trump survived; It looks like Trump will run away with it. So why not pick the most MAGA of the contenders? Party unity and the swing states be damned: He’s going with his guy. As many commentators have already pointed out, this marks the full ascendancy of Trump’s GOP: he doesn’t really feel like he needs to reflect the old compromise between the conservative elite and MAGA world at the top of the ticket anymore. It seems like the culmination of the process that was beginning in the early 1990s: the transformation of the party of Reagan into the party of Buchanan and then Trump. How that will play out in actual policy will be complicated: “worker’s party” baloney aside GOP remains the party of business. But now the industries seeking protection rather than free trade may get pride of place. Vance has sometimes shown friendliness to anti-trust policies, but he’s also a creature of Thiel world and Thiel is an unabashed believer in monopolies. But Trump’s GOP was never about a coherent policy regime or even ideology; it’s a structure of feeling and Vance embodies that: Anger, wounded pride, resentment, contempt, and ultimately, hatred and despair. More than anyone else on offer perhaps he is the New Republican Man. This is why he was picked.

A perspicacious commenter on this newsletter once expressed surprise that the GOP now seemed to be a fusion of Goodfellas and American Gothic. But it makes sense as a coalition. These are the people who may be more or less materially successful but feel unrepresented in politics and civil society, for whom the entire system of representation is just a hypocritical scam, and who call out for a strongman to help them get theirs, to dole out the requisite patronage and beatings. Trump represents the urban side of this mob and Vance the rural side.

Much is being made of Vance’s former opposition to Trump. But to Vance, this is a story of awakening and conversion. He left behind the stultifying elite consensus and found truth in the movement. The narrative he spins sounds like many young people of conservative tendencies who started out opposed to Trump and then gradually saw in him a champion or at least something that made sense. This story begins with Kavanaugh, but it really takes hold with George Floyd. These were great tumults that shook the confidence of many young white men aspiring to elite status: they took liberalism—broadly understood—to be a hostile work environment.

Vance himself, of course, is a winner in the cultural sweepstakes: his Hillbilly Elegy became a massive success, explaining the failures of the white poor. He made it okay to look down on them. After all, one of them said it was okay. Conservatives who reviled Trump’s base turned to Vance as well as liberals who condescendingly wanted to “understand” them. It was really the same old conservative nonsense about “cultural pathology” applied to whites now instead of blacks—a way to blame the poor for being poor, to "racialize” the white poor as the blacks had been; to find in them intrinsic moral weaknesses rather than just a lack of money and resources.

But Vance always wanted to run with hares and hunt with the hounds. He wants to hold fast to the his wounded Scots-Irish machismo while simultaneously rising to heights of both American capitalism and cultural success. He took his background to be both an advantage and a handicap, a counter-snobbery that served him well as he entered the halls of power and wealth. Look back at the famous American Conservative interview that turned him into a sensation: “…the deeper I get into elite culture, the more I see value in this reverse snobbery.  It’s the great privilege of my life that I’m deep enough into the American elite that I can indulge a little anti-elitism.  Like I said, it keeps you grounded, if nothing else!  But it would have been incredibly destructive to indulge too much of it when I was 18.” Reverse snobbery, like all snobbery, comes from comparison, of a feeling of not living up, of wanting to best others. As Peter Thiel acolyte, he’s familiar with René Girard’s theories of envy and knows how that emotion gives rise to hate. Vance once said that Trump might be “America’s Hitler” to a law school buddy. This is what that friend says now: “The through line between former J.D. and current J.D. is anger…The Trump turn can be understood as a lock-in on contempt as the answer to anger…” To people like that, Hitler, so to speak, has a point.

I joked yesterday on Twitter that Vance sounded like someone from Dorothy Thompson’s 1941 Harper’s piece “Who Goes Nazi?” It was truer than I thought. Squint and you can see Vance in this sketch of Mr. C:

The saturnine man over there talking with a lovely French emigre is already a Nazi. Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner.

He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him— he despises, for instance, Mr. B—because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations…

Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him…

But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.

To be sure, Vance’s humiliations are much milder. I’m sure he and his wife enjoyed many invitations to nice dinners, but still a hard kernel remains.

The sociologist Michael Mann writes that “Fascism was a movement of the lesser intelligentsia.” The hillbilly-whisperer Vance is practically chief of that party. And no one is more ecstatic to have their man on the inside as the online reactionary demimonde. They are proudly showing off the litany of creeps he followed on Twitter. That whole thing was always a bid for social prominence as much as political power and now they’ve arrived. Vance immersed himself in that mob on his path to being red-pilled. He’s buddies with Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel’s court philosopher who undoubtedly introduced him to Murray Rothbard and God knows what else. (Yarvin’s “cathedral” is just cribbed from Rothbard’s 1992 “Right-Wing Populism” essay — the ur-text of Trumpism in my opinion.) To borrow another term from Mann, this group of soi-disant intellectuals forms an “authoritarian right family,” a kind of nebula of inchoate American fascism:

Some of them are more national populist, some more Protestant Christian nationalist, some explicitly antisemitic, some Catholic integralist, some technocratic-utopian, some “national socialist” or Sorelian and made up of disaffected former leftists, but together they form a kind of cultural matrix of far right politics. Like the extremist paramilitary movements among hardcore neo-Nazis and Klan-types, all of them take Trumpism to be, if not exactly their ideal, either the kind of political phenomenon they’d been hoping for or recognized in it interesting possibilities. Without being overly alarmist, I think it’s worth keeping an eye on what shape emerges next from this proto-fascist ooze. And, if you are a conservative, you might ask yourself if you’ve already been sucked into the blob—Especially if you are already having trouble differentiating your own politics from fascism.

I’ve described the current condition of the United States as a “politics of national despair.” We can see the two sides of that—rage and resignation—so clearly in recent days: the Democratic party seems to have given up and the Republican party has embraced the demonic phantasmagoria of embittered pseudo-intellectuals. Vance’s form of despair is that, for all his worldly success, he can’t transcend a fundamental grievance, a sense of always being lesser. He didn’t escape the despair of poverty through gumption and intelligence: he carries it with him always. It fuels his ambition. To people like Vance, the system of domination that governs our society made itself painfully apparent. But he despairs of overcoming it: instead, the brutality must be embraced. He can win the game. Come out on top. Show them all. Just you wait.