When violent marriages were good for kids
I knew this guy wanted to go back to some fantasy era of good feelings in America but I didn’t realize that he fully embraces the actual horrors of the past:
What’s so insidious about Vance and any number of other highly educated “populist” thinkers turned politicians is that they are nothing more than phony opportunists who’ve seen how easy it is to manipulate the right wing. Vance was, until recently, a completely different person:
D. Vance won the Republican primary in Ohio’s Senate race Tuesday — and all it took was sacrificing whatever integrity he had at the altar of a man he once suggested was “America’s Hitler.” During the onset of Donald Trump’s political ascendence, Vance presented himself as a kind of conduit between two Americas — Trump country and those horrified by Trump country. The Hillbilly Elegy author was horrified, too, back then — or at least he said as much, even as he called on liberals to show compassion and understanding for the put-upon, middle American Trump voter. “I’m a Never Trump guy,” Vance told Charlie Rose in 2016. “I never liked him.”
But that was then. Vance has not only fully embraced Trump in the intervening years — he has banked his own political ambitions on the precise kind of Trumpian demagoguery he once suggested to a friend was an indictment of the GOP’s “collective neglect.” It paid off: In April, he won Trump’s coveted endorsement — thanks to powerful right-wing allies like tech billionaire Peter Thiel and TV pundit Tucker Carlson …
“The people who are caught between the corrupt political class of the left and the right, they need a voice,” Vance said in a victory speech Tuesday, thanking Trump and acolytes like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz for their support. “They need a representative. And that’s going to be me.”
In many respects, Vance — a Yale-educated venture capitalist — is an unlikely torch-bearer for Trump’s populist war against so-called elites. Then again, so is Trump, a wealthy television star who somehow managed to convince a sizable chunk of America that he was just like them — a “blue collar billionaire,” as his son, Donald Trump Jr., once dubbed him. There is, of course, no such thing, and what Trump was selling wasn’t a real plan to rescue the “forgotten men and women” Vance wrote about in his memoir; it was an addiction to what Vance described in the Atlantic back in 2016 as “cultural heroin.” Vance disapproved of it then. But in his campaign for Portman’s seat, he began pushing the same product.
With the assistance of Thiel, who helped bankroll his campaign with a Super PAC, Vance took some headline grabbing swings. He accused Biden of purposely getting conservatives addicted to fentanyl out of a desire to “punish people who didn’t vote for him.” He shrugged at Russia’s hostility to Ukraine, telling former Trump strategist Steve Bannon in an interview before the war broke out that he didn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another” and suggesting that Biden only cared because Vladimir Putin “didn’t believe in transgender rights.” And he more or less suggested Trump declare himself dictator if he wins reelection in 2024, saying in an interview on a far-right podcast that he should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say…‘the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
There are others like him running right now — soulless, empty people who smell the opportunity that Trumpism provides. And they have no limits because they are nihilists who believe in nothing. They’re far more dangerous than the true believers.