JD Vance and the Radicalisation of the American Right
The senator from Ohio is the plaything of a billionaire class with reservations about democracy
When all other routes to the top have been sealed off, aspirants must reluctantly fall in behind the leader and dutifully mouth the party line.
In 2024, there is no position worth having in the Republican Party that does not go through Donald Trump and his brood.
In March, Trump passed the 1,215-delegate threshold required to secure the GOP nomination for president in the shortest period of time since John McCain in 2008.
Since Trump (very reluctantly) left office in 2020, he has consolidated his hold over the Republican Party to the point where, four years later, those who wish to progress must embrace him and everything he stands for.
Which is exactly what the 39-year-old Ohio senator JD Vance has done. A venture capitalist turned politician who rose to fame with his 2016 memoir turned Netflix movie Hillbilly Elegy, Vance has metamorphosed from a “never Trump” guy to his presidential running mate.
Elegy captured the zeitgeist in 2016, winning plaudits from liberals who wanted to explain the Donald Trump phenomenon and from conservatives who wanted to pad out their prejudices with some ‘authentic’ imagery. It was a bucolic coming of age story in which the white rural poor were depicted (by one of their own no less) as the purveyors of a ‘culture’ of poverty rather than the victims of material deprivation.
Vance had little time for Donald Trump back then though. In 2016, in a private message to an old law school classmate, Vance wondered whether Trump was a ‘cynical asshole like Nixon’ or ‘America’s Hitler’. In a more measured essay he penned for The Atlantic that same year, Vance wrote that while Trump ‘feels good’ to many people, ‘he can’t fix America’s growing social and cultural crisis’.
At some point Vance overcame those reservations about Trump. So much so in fact that for several years he has been a dutiful ventriloquist of the Trumpian gospel.
Following the 2020 presidential vote, Vance accused Joe Biden of stealing the election. He has since fundraised for those who really did try to steal it on January 6.
In true ‘America first’ fashion, Vance wants to cut off military and financial assistance to Ukraine, effectively giving Vladimir Putin carte blanche to reduce swathes of the country to semi-slavery.
The apotheosis of this squalid political journey occurred this week when Vance stood on stage at the Republican National Convention next to the man he once compared to another dictator who pursued lebensraum in Europe. At this stage in his political evolution one wonders if he’s also changed his mind about the Austrian corporal.
Trump’s choice of Vance as his vice presidential pick is a way of thumbing his nose at the Republican Party’s conservative elite. It is also a sign that Trump feels supremely confident about his prospects for re-election in November.
The J.D. Vance that Trump has picked as vice presidential nominee is not only more Maga than the Vance of 2016, but he is more Maga than much of the Republican Party.
Vance has said that he would have refused to certify the 2020 election results as vice president, as required by the Constitution and as then-vice President Mike Pence did. He has also urged Trump, should he win office again, to ‘fire’ every civil servant and replace them with Trump loyalists (and to violate the constitution by defying the supreme court when it invariably acts to stop him).
Vance’s whiplash-inducing political volte-face probably isn’t driven by ambition alone. Like much of the American right he has been radicalised in recent years.
Vance has cited the Kavanah hearings and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 as events that denuded him of whatever liberal sensibilities he previously had.
For others it was Covid-19 that convinced them they were living under communist tyranny. For the Maga stenographer Sohrab Ahmari it was drag queen story hour. For Jordan Peterson the ‘woke mind virus’. For yet more it is a social media ecosystem that has been gamified by Elon Musk to boost an army of resentful edgelords and crypto-fascists with $8 blue ticks next to their names.
Continue reading at Byline Times.
And as David Frum points out, if Vance truly cared about the blue collar left behind or young men with few opportunities, he wouldn’t be fighting to hard to keep regulations away from Crypto, an industry designed to prey on people with a lack of financial sophistication combined with an above average appetite for risk, ie young men and people with fewer options than the middle classes
“and to violate the constitution by defying the supreme court when it invariably acts to stop him).”
Sorry James but no, the court will do no such thing, haven’t you seen their recent decisions, the MAGA 5 + Robert’s on the court have now decided to play the same role that the Guardian Council plays in Iran, robed religious zealots who decide which Presidents get to enact their agenda and which ones they will deny that right too
A 2nd Trump term Supreme Court will rule in favour of broad executive powers with enough opt-outs to allow Trump to do as he pleases but give themselves a way to block future Democratic Presidents doing the same
And Vance hasn’t evolved, he’s just stopped lying, he said what he thought he needed to say pre 2016 to rise in the GOP now he does the same, there is zero reason to believe that it’s this version that’s playing a role, it’s far more likely the one a decade ago was