51 Comments

If he wants to avoid being humiliated, being Donald Trump's VP is not the ideal job.

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He's presumably spent his entire adult life eating shit for rich bastards who hold him in open contempt - in that respect, he's far more prepared than most other Republicans, who have never been in a situation with a boss that's been anything other than indulgently nepotistic-by-proxy

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I think he'll make a great substitute for Mike Pence.

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"Great" is doing a lot of work there. JD Vance will be great in the way Bob Crane was a great cinematographer.

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I mean, he will be at least as submissive and sychophantic as Pence was. I have no idea who Bob Crane is.

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Here's the Wikipedia entry on Bob Crane.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Crane

He was an actor best known for starring in the sitcom "Hogan's Heroes." The cinematography is an allusion to a sordid aspect of his private life, and it likely led to his murder in Arizona in 1978.

Crane's kink was that he had a friend who was a video equipment salesman, and they would tag-team their sexual exploits and record them. The friend, John Henry Carpenter, was charged with murdering Crane but was acquitted.

There was a movie about Crane's life and murder called "Auto Focus".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_Focus

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I live on the edge of Appalachia, near the Cumberland Plateau. My small city is full of people sort of like J.D. Vance in that they are quite successful, even rich, but they love to play the anti-élite card. They despise educated people, if those people are liberals. Most of them have some higher education, mostly at the local public university, but if they find out you went to an Ivy League school, you are in deep shit with them.

I used to tutor the children of a petit bourgeois business owner and his wife. His wife literally ran me out of their house one day, screaming at me that I was an elitist, because I mentioned the fact that her homeschooled children were not putting in the sixteen hours a week of study that the state requires. (This woman also threatened one of her kids with an ax in the middle of the night; she was pretty unstable.) Note that she was paying me $20/hour at the time and also excoriated me as an elitist because I thought everybody deserved health insurance. Still not sure why that is elitist.

My niece just graduated from the same Ivy League school as I did. I felt like warning her that she should not stray too far south from the northeast, or too far into the midwest, where it's not an asset to have an Ivy League degree: it's a liability. You can't hide it forever. Maybe you worked hard in high school and college; you did all the homework; you didn't drink or drug or stay out late at night; you did everything they told you to; you got the prestigious degree. But guess what: people are not happy about it. They're mad! You think you're so smart! It's particularly dangerous if you're a woman or a person of color.

J.D. Vance can get away with it because he's a white man. It doesn't scare people that he went to Yale because he's probably not a subversive like the female graduates of Yale Law School. For example, Hillary Clinton. I heard Vance decrying Hillary as an élitist in a Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross, shortly after his book came out. I thought, does he not get it that Hillary's mother was abandoned by her parents? That she came from a background almost as debased as his own? That Hillary studied and worked hard, like he did, to get where she is? No, he gets all that. Hillary is bad/elitist because she's a highly educated female liberal, a subversive to the core.

The elitists are feminists, black people, and people who believe everybody should have health insurance. The word "elite" has lost its original meaning with these jerks. Now it just means, "educated person who is also liberal and kind of uppity and who does not accept white male patriarchy as God's plan."

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Vance will do his best to imitate small city petit bourgeois business owners seething with resentment toward coastal elites, but the truth is that he is a creature of coastal elite institutions to his bones and the decade-long book tour he's on is just his pretense to act as the elite's self-appointed ombudsman.

Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy are the exact same guy pursuing the exact same ends with the exact same motivations.

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To be fair this hatred of "smart people" has been around a long time, at least in the South. It existed in the 1960s, when I was in high school in a Southern city, but it was kind of disguised. People didn't come out and say, "I hate you because you're clearly quite talented intellectually"; they would criticize something else about you, like your hair or your clothes or general dorkiness. But you couldn't fix it: no amount of wardrobe or hairdo upgrade could fix the fact that you seem both (1) smart and (2) subversive.

The only "correct" way to be smart back then was to be at a boys' school and also be the quarterback for the football team. It was ok to be smart if you were also obviously, literally, playing for the right team. If they thought you might be a class traitor, as you almost certainly were if you were female, then, well, it wasn't ok at all.

I think the South has long hated "intellectuals," perhaps because abolitionists were intellectuals. It does not take a rocket scientist to notice that slavery was bad and made no sense, but since the people who said that out loud were educated Northerners for the most part, anti-intellectualism took root in the South and has not gone away.

Weirdly, poor white people also hate intellectuals, because weirdly, poor white people thought they had something to gain from white supremacy (and thus abolitionist intellectuals were the enemy). That has not gone away either.

MY parents sent me to the best schools they could find, and were educated people themselves. Imagine my surprise when they were angry that I turned out to be, in their words, an "effete intellectual." They got mad if I used a French word, even though they made me learn French! Why did this make them mad? Because they were afraid that if I found out that I was smarter than they were, I might not be as deferential and obedient. I was supposed to figure out that it was ok to make good grades, but not ok to actually think, and then speak.

This is essentially what is going on, on a more macro scale, with the white supremacist patriarchy and its hatred of "élites." They are afraid we will get uppity.

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When I rose to the top of my class in Brooklyn, NY, in 1961, I lost friends and felt shunned.

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Glad to know it's not just Tennessee. Sometimes I think this happens because people think you're setting the bar too high, and they might have to work harder. I've definitely seen that here, and in Texas: people are kind of lazy, and they resent people who actually put in some effort. They persecute those people in order to avoid having to compete with them.

Those damn elites! Computer guys! Math geeks! People who did their homework! Tricksy hobbits! We hates them.

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I don't think it's the disobedience as such; rather, it's the implication that, if you're educated *and* you disagree with them, you must think you're better than me! It's the reaction of people who've felt (rightly) ashamed of their behavior their whole lives but don't have the emotional fortitude to just *change their behavior.* Their only salve is resentment of the "hypocrites" who just think they're soooooooo smart.

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If Vance and Vivek are good little Thiel acolytes, surely they've absorbed René Girard and know it's going to end tragically for at least one of them.

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Somebody has to be the scapegoat!

Right now it's us, the elitist Democrats.

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One small step to making the world a better place: Do and say everything the exact opposite of what you have just said.

Fatalism like "somebody has to be the scapegoat" brings misfortune upon ourselves. How about, "It won't be me."?

Second, never make the mistake of internalizing the enemy's framing. Reject the elitist label, regardless of any truth value it may have. Ian Danskin, who produces YouTube videos as Innuendo Studios, has an important series called "The Alt-Right Playbook". With JD Vance as Trump's running mate, it is evident that the alt-right is now the center of the Republican Party, and every Trump voter think and acts this way.

Anyway, the reason why you should never accept your enemy's framing of you is contained in "Never Play Defense".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmVkJvieaOA

What the alt-right, and consequently now every rightwinger, understands that it's not the words that matter but its the position of the speaker to be able to make their opponent look like they are losing that define reality.

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that sounds pretty dead-on, but Vance is a MUCH more advanced piece of android design. the speech rhythms are almost "normal" (within a narrow compass, but still...), they straightened out that jerky movement thing. just better AI all around. gotta give it to 'em...

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very beautifully put. thank you.

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A force that I think is underrated is tech leaders' resentment at their lack of social status and prestige. Yes there's dystopian visions like Thiel's, but across the political spectrum tech people think they're rich, they're achieving great things, yet they're not treated like leading intellectuals or highly esteemed in the cultural discourse. I'm convinced that that resentment drives a lot of the movements around that subculture, not just Thiel and Ramaswamy and the like, but also the rationalists, effective altruists, etc. etc.

I think to some extent they still see their own social insecurity – some of it seemingly carried since high school! – as analogous to Vance's 'hillbilly' origins and rising above them through their own greatness/superiority.

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Tech leaders enjoyed social status and prestige, and still carry themselves like kings among men around Silicon Valley, Austin and now Miami. Tech writer Karl Bode coined the most delicious epithet for the tech bro/VC/private equity nexus: brunchlords.

What we're seeing right now is the tech industry itself, as well as its tech bro overclass, entering the midlife crisis phase of their lives. From the mid-1990s until the end of the pandemic lockdowns, tech was perceived and received positively. We had the first dot-com boom; we had blogs, YouTubes and podcasts; social media flourished following the Great Recession; then came the streaming era. Then came the point of diminishing returns, when tech stopped making people happy: the gig economy, cryptocurrency/blockchain/NFTs, and now AI. It became apparent that much of tech was built upon a hype life cycle of about 5 years.

The midlife crisis of the tech overlords is best embodied by Peter Thiel, because unlike Elmo, he's not a tragicomic figure and is genuinely feared. He insinuates himself in the most important economic transactions, invites himself to the important parties and pulls important people into his orbit. He is elitism incarnate.

The soi-disant Silicon Valley libertarianism is a very old phenomenon, but a certain subset of analytical, introverted and socially awkward white male was drawn to computing, and they were the settlers and prophets of the early internet. This gave illusion to themselves that the internet would make libertarianism a plausible ideology around which to organize a society.

The real horror came in the social upheaval of the pandemic lockdowns and the protest movements of the Trump era, starting from his victory to George Floyd. Tech workers themselves had no cause for soi-disant libertarianism, and revealed themselves to be shockingly progressive and intersectional (read: the w-word) and would join in and support such movements. The irony being that tech workers were so well-paid and privileged that they should be insulated from class and caste struggle, yet cast their lot in with movements. The childish workers were rebelling against their libertarian parents.

Inflation marked the oh-shit moment when the Fed started raising interest rates. The cheap money dried up, and the party is over unless your firm does an appeal for AI.

The culture has also moved on. Social media engagement is declining. Most of the decline is due to Musk turning Twitter into a $44 billion Nazi bar remodel, but all big platforms are seeing declines in engagement since 2022, and young people are the bulk of the exodus.

The brunchlords of tech are behaving just like the fin de siècle European aristocracy did from the 20th century through the interwar period, leaving behind the memory of their degeneracy and desperation of their final years.

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The point on the contempt he feels towards, everyone is right on the nose. It’s a bit frustrating to watch people be astounded by the idea that people who grew up in public housing may support a movement meant to destroy it when a lot of people in public housing hate the fact that they’re there and hold a particular contempt for their parents for raising them in such circumstances.

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With this ticket, the GOP has turned into a revolutionary patty-movement. A revolution from the far-right, but a revolution. Anger is the substance of this type of politics. Anger exclaims, does not reason. The Angry Man is not the Rebel. In his novel "Michael," young Goebbels giave voice to this neurotic sentiment. I first found out about Goebbels as a fiction writer (other than propaganda), ifrom Erich Fromm's "Fear oFreedom" (the British title for "Escape from Freedom"). I read it when I was 20 in my native Romania. Since I mentioned Goebbels, it is worth rememberring that, before becoming a fanatic Hitler-worshipper, he regarded the entranced mountebank contemptously. This may not be known to Trump and Vance, but it is known to those of us whi have ben studying Fascism seriously. Your writings are truly helpful in these times of value disarray.

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It's Maoism but from the right.

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I am trying to fend off my despair. But hearing Vance was the nominee was another blow.

I think his conversion is real (even as it nicely coincides with his titanic ambition). And the fear is not just for my country and for the people who would be most under the boot were Vance's America to come to fruition. It is also fear of a world where everything I value would become far more precarious––even if what I value is remarkably like what Vance enjoys and will continue to enjoy for himself.

Vance made his way to acquire an excellent education––and now says "universities are the enemy." My life and livelihood has been about universities (spanning very modest public K-12 schools, a religious university, free tuition to graduate school, and a teaching career at universities for 30 years now).

Vance met his wife because the US made a place for her immigrant (non-Christian) parents, she received birthright citizenship, and Yale admitted her to their diverse student body. (Lucky for her, and for Vance, her parents immigrated before MAGA and Christian nationalism became ascendent and had a chance at ending birthright citizenship.) My partner is a political refugee from Latin America. In Vance's America she and her family would never have been admitted. She and I would never be able to marry like Vance and his immigrant-descended wife can, nor would we have much protection for our civil rights.

Vance has used his speech rights to publish his book and speak his ideas and views unhampered by the government. The books and articles my partner has published, on philosophies of race and sexuality, could well be be banned––constitutionally, if the right Supreme Court is full MAGA after two more appointments from Trump/Vance.

In the larger perspective, I have financial means and a secure job and I'm more protected than most people. But my loved one, who writes scholarly monographs in English but speaks with a strong accent, is viewed as "vermin" by millions of Americans. Her risk is my risk.

Trump seems mostly to seek liberal tears and chest-thumping triumphalism––well, he's got my tears if that helps sate him. But Vance seems like he doesn't just want the tears, he wants to impose the moral order that causes the liberal tears, and that lets him enjoy all the things he would love to take from liberals.

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I am eager to see how Trump humiliates Vance. In general, this pick feels like a gift to Democrats. Vance is unappealing to a lot of people especially swing voters both parties need and he seems more like a shore up the base pick.

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Well done but I may have to disagree with the charge that Vance embodies the "structure of feeling" of the MAGA universe although it does characterize the Trump phenomena. I'm not at all sure that he's actually drunk the kool-aid he's dispensing so much as he detects the "interesting possibilities". As someone suggested he may be playing a very long, long game. Frankly, I didn't think Trump's narcissism would allow a Vance pick even tho it was the smart move.

There is no doubt that what drives his ambition and choices partake of his background and a submerged envy and generous contempt for elites- especially Liberal elites. But frankly, it's not as if Liberal elites have been covering themselves in glory lately. As for his views on the poverty and dysfunction he came out of I've had relatives who've come out of that kind of environment with the same contempt and impatience for it and those who remain mired in it - none of them are elites or MAGA minions; some are still there. In any event, I don't know that imputing motivations is all that useful; they're messy things.

Vance is, however, more than any other candidate successful in putting an appealing and coherent set of clothes on the Trump scarecrow - even if he sometimes borrows a lot of MAGA nonsense to do it as displayed in the Ross Douhat interview.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/opinion/jd-vance-interview.html

He's the heir apparent now that gives Trumpism the legs it would otherwise not have had. With Vance MAGA 2028 becomes possible in a way that Bergum, Rubio or a Vivek would not. I suspect in this campaign he's going to be the bad cop that gives Trump some room to play good cop - as much as that's imaginable. Vance is smarter, more disciplined and more focused than Trump. He is as you indicate the "new Republican man" - MAGA 2.0.

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The crumbling of resistance to this alienating and unpopular movement is astonishing to watch in real time.

The Obama coalition was vaporware.

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I think a lot of people are just not paying attention but will start paying attention in the autumn. Neither Biden or Trump are particularly popular and I think a lot of people erroneously got it in their heads that Biden would be a one-term President and Trump would be gone for good after 2020.*

The polling on the race has generally been pretty static despite a wurlitzer of bad press attacks on Biden.

Most interestingly, the assassination attempt is not seemingly doing anything at all for the polling.

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There has long been a durable plurality of the electorate that more-or-less accepts the liberal mainstream notion of Trump as an unacceptable figure.

The erosion of that plurality among less-paid-attention-to demographics has been slow but steady and now clearly represents the narrowly lesser bloc, but what's even more shocking than that is seeing when the chips are down that Institutional Team Blue itself is tacitly confessing that it doesn't *really* believe the case it's been prosecuting against Trump and Trumpism, in addition to not feeling any obligation to make an affirmative case for itself at all.

The Democratic Party mastered fundraising, campaign staffing and media strategy under Obama, and in the cold light of day all that's left is a headless fundraising, campaign staffing and media organization with no raison d'etre.

The contrast with France is incredible to witness.

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Yesterday Biden's team leaked their new judicial strategy/calls to have term limits on SCOTUS etc. The DNC also announced a $15m investment in state level operations (supposedly this is a record, but I think every cycle there are new financial records because of how inflation works over time) - I'm not sure the erosion you're referring to can be seen in election results, especially post-Dobbs.

The contrast w/ France (where they are now struggling to make that coalition) is in large part because France had an election, and we just have (probably garbage) polls and a (very delusional and biased) mainstream media calling the shots, and so some people take declarations of media, or media narratives, and declare them as facts. This is why I thought Hillary Clinton would win big in 2016. And it's why some seem to think Trump will win big now.

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*Biden never said he would be a one term President or even implied it but a lot of people insist he did say it and nothing can convince them otherwise. As for Trump being permanently defeated in 2020, that was just wishful thinking.

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It was real, but like a young plant, it needed to be nurtured. it wasn't. It was neglected, and so died.

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"Much is being made of Vance’s former opposition to Trump. But to Vance, this is a story of awakening and conversion.” This is a critical insight that the anti-Trump coalition can’t seem to grasp. They keep wanting to dig up evidence of high-profile supporters’ past opposition to Trump, as if it were clear and unambiguous evidence of hypocrisy or bad faith. But for the true believer, the framework of conversion has its own way to make sense of converts’ past opposition. This kind of evidence doesn't looks like hypocrisy, but rather confirmation of the transformative power and truth of their beliefs. (If you know Christian history—we might call this the Saul/Paul effect.)

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Bob Altemeyer, who sadly died this year, spent time studying authoritarianism as a psychological phenomenon. He's largely succeeded in refining past research to uncover whether there is a disposition toward authoritarianism, in other words is it a personality type rather than a person's agency. He developed the Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale, and built a framework to test for it at a cultural level.

Vance's knee-bending might or might not be rooted in belief. He can be explained in behavioral economic terms (the political incentives determine his behaviors) or social psychological terms (Vance is high RWA because "Hillbilly Elegy" is both factually true and a sincere worldview, so the culture that brung him and his family forged an RWA personality).

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evangelical america makes a lot out of people being "born again" as Christians when they genuinely accept the faith. it makes a better story to say "I used to be an atheist" etc than just to have always been on the true path. that said plenty of persuadable voters are not evangelical-brained and the extent of vance's former statements about trump makes for nice campaign fodder.

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vance's hillbilly elegy launders charles murray's bell curve theory of inequality, replacing obfuscatory statistics with folksy anecdotes

by changing the pathologized subject from urban blacks to rural whites vance's thesis traces that of fascism as colonialism turned inward

here the repressive tactics, disciplinary logic, eugenicist thinking and ethnic cleansing practiced on ghettoized black americans, theorized as an internal colony, has creeped into the white heartland and begun sawing away at the lower rungs of the herrenvolk-demos

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Have you read An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz? She has much to say about "wounded Scots-Irish machismo" and its consequences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, namely an appalling genocide and series of land thefts perpetrated against Native Americans. In her telling, the WASP elite used the Scots-Irish as a sort of settler vanguard, sending them out to the frontier to kill the indigenous inhabitants and seize their land at a time when the professional military was too weak and disorganized to handle this task itself. The Scots-Irish settlers kept pushing west while the planter class followed in their wake, setting up a slave economy that served a dual purpose of enriching the bourgeoisie while keeping poor whites noncompetitive in the labor market and thus necessitating their ever more bloodthirsty desire for stolen land. The Scots-Irish who did manage to become significant landowners or successful merchants generally converted to Episcopalianism in order to pretend that they had been ersatz members of the WASP establishment all along, accumulating slaves and property so they could exploit their fellow Americans like they had been exploited themselves. They then claimed dual privilege as the anointed beneficiaries of Manifest Destiny and the soldiers who shed blood in its pursuit. Same as it ever was.

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The apotheosis of tactical reverse snobbery. Get rich and famous off pathologizing the poor (“I’m one of them so I know!”) then use them to get their “anti-elite” vote (“I’m one of you so I know!”).

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So, he's a White Candace Owens?

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Vance is his generation’s Clarence Thomas. Each of them resents that luck rather than entitlement put them in a position to succeed. Each of them is amoral and corrupt. Each of them is a pathetic imposter. Both of them have and will continue to inflict great harm

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Very penetrating! Vance is clearly the future of "MAGA" once The Trump is no longer on the scene. More and more, MAGA looks like "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles": loosely translated, "America First!"

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...rage and resignation...a politics of national despair”. Indeed. And for the sake of our children something that can and must be battled.

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