J.D. Vance: the new right's VP candidate (plus, "Russia, Russia, Russia")
Would you work for someone that you once derogatorily compared to Adolf Hitler?
Presumably this was a question that J.D. Vance, Donald Trump's vice presidential nominee, asked himself at some point in the process of accepting his role as the former president's new running mate. Vance, the Ohio senator and now-heir apparent to whatever Trumpism's fraught, authoritarian legacy will be, once speculated whether the former president would become "America's Hitler" in private messages.
“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?” Vance wrote in a Facebook message to Josh McLaurin, one of Vance's former Yale Law School classmates, in early 2016, according to a 2022 VICE News article.
McLaurin is now a state senator in Georgia. In an interview with Vox, he explained Vance's evolution from Trump-hater to the movement's heir apparent as follows: "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."
Vance may not be the politically smart choice. He's been in office for 18 months. His views on abortion are already out of step with the majority of the country. But the targets of his contempt are flexible. He appears to follow a slew of niche, overly online right-wing accounts that no one normal has ever heard of. He has favorably cited reactionary authors. One supports eradicating the 1964 Civil Rights Act and wrote for a slew of white nationalist publications under a pseudonym (yet denies being a white nationalist). One calls his enemies "unhumans" and collaborated with neo-Nazis (yet denies being a white nationalist). One pens long, rambling screeds calling for monarchy (yet denies being a white nationalist). Vance has condemned the "elites" but has received backing from one of the world's richest men, Peter Thiel. Since 2016, Vance has shifted his ire from the enemies of the white working class, whom Vance claimed to represent in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, to align perfectly with the preferred targets of the Republican Party's rightward flank: the meddlesome administrative state, "woke" corporations, supporters of Ukrainian military aid, and, of course, those who express insufficient loyalty to Trump.
Insofar as there is a "new right" — I hate that term because there is nothing new here under the sun, really — Vance embodies it through his rotating arrays of grievances and his abject refusal to own his own authoritarian impulses. For this movement, America's descent into fascism is always someone else's fault. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination,” Vance wrote on Twitter* after a registered Republican attempted to murder Trump over the weekend at a Pennsylvania rally.
Or, as John Ganz put it in his own newsletter today:
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.
This is what the right under Trump is: an empty vessel for the movement's adherents to project their grievances, to execute their rage. It's a movement for victims whose failures are never their own.
"To Russia, With Love" — Latest at The Baffler
Speaking of a loathsome movement of perpetual victims, I'm back at The Baffler, where I used to work, with an essay on what has drawn American rightwingers to Russia. Here's an excerpt:
But until Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, groveling to Putin and other Russian leaders was more or less beyond the pale within the mainstream Republican Party. (George W. Bush once described Putin as “very straightforward and trustworthy,” but later admitted that he regretted saying so.) Things have shifted considerably since then. With Ukraine now fending off the largest attack on a European country since World War II, Trump has promised to permit Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO country that fails to meet the alliance’s spending guidelines. Earlier this year, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, Trump’s pick for vice president, sought to quash military aid to Ukraine, calling it the “new crusade” of the same “experts” that invaded Iraq in 2003 after falsifying intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction. (Strangely, Vance’s paleoconservative invocation has not stopped him from endorsing robust aid to Israel.)
The institutional right, however, has at times been slower to ensconce itself in Russophilia. When several conservative hardliners challenged Ukraine aid, they found themselves at odds with other Republicans who accused them of blocking their own Speaker’s agenda. Even Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s nine-hundred-plus-page authoritarian manifesto intended to lay the groundwork for Trump’s second term, begrudgingly admits that “one issue today that starkly divides conservatives is the Russia-Ukraine conflict.” The movement may not be united on the issue, but this increasingly vocal camp of Russia-sympathizing agitators is a sincere expression of an ever-growing sense of victimization that afflicts the right writ large.
Read the full thing here.
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*Still not calling it "X," fuck that.