Instead of a truth-teller in his own community, Vance as a candidate has become a contemptible and cringe-inducing clown.
It continues in excoriating manner: My friend Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, tried to describe Vance recently and came up with “pathetic loser poser fake jerk,” but that is a lot of words. To distill the essence of Vance as a public figure, the word that enters my mind is an anatomical reference beginning with the letter a.
Unfortunately the rest of the article is behind a paywall, and I have been unable to track it down in full elsewhere.
Instead of a truth-teller in his own community, Vance as a candidate has become a contemptible and cringe-inducing clown. By Tom Nichols
What do we call a man who turns on everything he once claimed to believe? For a practitioner of petty and self-serving duplicity, we use “sellout” or “backstabber.” (Sometimes we impugn the animal kingdom and call him a rat, a skunk, or a weasel.) For grand betrayals of weightier loyalties—country and faith—we invoke the more solemn terms of “traitor” or “apostate.”
But what should we call J. D. Vance, the self-described hillbilly turned Marine turned Ivy League law-school graduate turned venture capitalist turned Senate candidate? Words fail. His perfidy to his own people in Ohio is too big to allow him to escape with the label of “opportunist,” and yet the shabbiness and absurdity of his Senate campaign is too small to brand him a defector or a heretic.
My friend Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, tried to describe Vance recently and came up with “pathetic loser poser fake jerk,” but that is a lot of words. To distill the essence of Vance as a public figure, the word that enters my mind is an anatomical reference beginning with the letter a.
I do not use that word lightly or comfortably. I am, in the formal sense, a man of letters. I have been an officer of instruction at several institutions of higher education (and I remind you here that I do not represent any of them and speak only for myself). I would not advise my students to use the term.
But the word is apt when I consider Vance’s silly and yet detestable moral collapse. Some people back in Vance’s home region of Appalachia thought his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, was hollow and inaccurate, but for a time, other people—including me—were intrigued by his writing and public speaking. Vance lived as a child in a steel town in Ohio and spent his summers in the hills of eastern Kentucky, while I grew up amid the rotting factories of New England, solidly in the working class but not poor. I welcomed his willingness to cast a critical eye on his (and my) people, especially after years of conservative hand-wringing focused solely on the dysfunction of minority communities.
Vance gained early support in the political center, particularly among conservatives. The American working poor, no matter where they are, do in fact need civic representatives from the center-right, people who can talk candidly about the limits of government and who can make a moral case for tough love and personal responsibility, but one based on a sense of shared experience, common values, and genuine compassion. Someone like Vance could be that candidate.
Someone like Vance, perhaps, but as we now know, not Vance himself. Not so long ago, he talked about the self-defeating bias against education among poor whites. He acknowledged the self-destructive habits of some of the people he grew up around. Vance wrote, in this very magazine, that Donald Trump “is cultural heroin”—a powerful charge from someone who hails from the epicenter of the opioid epidemic—and provided a “quick high” that could not fix what ails the country. All of that vanished once Vance decided he wanted to go to Washington—and after the Trump supporter Peter Thiel dropped $10 million into a political action committee.
Instead of a truth-teller in his own community, Vance as a candidate has become a contemptible and cringe-inducing clown. His attempts at authenticity are so grating because they are so blatantly artificial. His recent tweets, for example, attempting to ingratiate himself with rural Ohioans by slagging New York City were embarrassingly amateurish; we can only wonder which social-media consultant thought them up. “Serious question,” Vance tweeted. “I have to go to New York soon and I’m trying to figure out where to stay. I have heard it’s disgusting and violent there. But is it like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4?”
When the Republican commentator Liz Mair called him on this inane fear-mongering, he responded that “these people”—which is everyone but him, one assumes—have no sense of humor about what he claimed was only a joke.
Again, this is why a certain word immediately springs to mind.
Worse, Vance has not only repudiated his earlier views on Trump, but has done so with ruthless cynicism, embracing the former president and his madness while winking at the media with a What can you do? shrug about the stupidity of Ohio’s voters. “If I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about,” he told Time, “I need to just suck it up and support him.”
Well. One can only imagine their gratitude now that Vance the wealthy venture capitalist has deigned to accept Trump as his political savior.
These incidents are not isolated missteps. The writer Tim Miller recently noted in The Bulwark that within the space of a week, Vance not only tweeted his performative fear of New York, but also “defended a Nazi from being kicked off of twitter … shared a thread defending election fraud conspiracies … fantastically claimed Google was ‘hiding’ his website” and “mocked reporters for saying they were traumatized by the Capitol riot.”
Vance’s rhetoric is even worse than Miller’s description. For example, Vance minimized Nick Fuentes, the leader of a white-nationalist group, by referring to him merely as “a giant troll” who should not have been kicked off Twitter by one of the “tech companies” that want to “control what we’re allowed to say in our own country.” And, more recently, he ventured onto the former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka’s crackpot videocast to claim that the “Democrat” Party—a usage common among educated right-wingers trying for working-class cred—“is a party of childless people” who therefore do not value the future.
Vance has struck back at his many critics across the political spectrum by referring to them all as “degenerate liberals,” which is exactly the kind of thing a smarmy and pretentious asshole would say.
I apologize. I had hoped to avoid the word, but nothing else will do.
In fairness, Vance is hardly the most offensive Republican out there. He is no Louie Gohmert, the Republican congressman from Texas, or Marsha Blackburn, the senior Republican senator from Tennessee, people who create an electrostatic field of stupidity around themselves when they speak. Nor is he even the most craven candidate in Ohio; his primary rival Josh Mandel recently filmed himself burning a surgical mask in the name of freedom. The Republican Party is chock-full of such performative buffoons.
But what makes Vance so awful is that he knows better. His intentional distancing from his earlier views shows that he is fully cognizant of what a gigantic fraud he’s become.
I suspect that Vance is also reading his own press, which would explain why a young man who attained early fame is convinced that he can jump right to national office. Take, for example, the Trump-friendly columnist Henry Olsen of The Washington Post, who wrote that Vance scares America’s elites because “he hasn’t surrendered his mind to polls or to the donor class in an effort to fit in.”
But following the polls and capering to a jig played by rich donors is exactly what Vance is doing. His gooberish tweets, his recent declaration that the most important issue for Ohio is securing the southern border, his multimillion-dollar support from “ordinary folks” like Thiel—these all show that Vance is as mossy a creature as the swamp ever produced.
This hypocrisy makes him indistinguishable from other figures in American politics, such as Senators Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, who are products of privilege and elite education and who now pretend to be tribunes of the Forgotten People. (Vance, predictably enough, has recently expressed his admiration for both.)
Vance, so far, is less of a hazard to American democracy than aspiring authoritarians like Cotton or Hawley. Nor does he seem to have developed the full dedication to being a soulless careerist like Elise Stefanik, the Republican congresswoman from New York. Mostly, he’s just a … well, you know.
Instead of a candidate who’s willing to speak hard truths to his people, Ohioans now have a native son who has returned to weaponize their resentment and cultural dysfunctions. His ambition is fueled by the money of others who would never deign to live in the Midwest. And like other populist charlatans, he has convinced himself that he should be anointed to lead the rubes out of their misery.
Vance would no doubt welcome terms such as populist, savior, native son. But when thinking of a plastic fraud trying to harvest their votes, poor and working-class voters might come up with a different word.
Tom Nichols is a staff writer at The Atlantic and an author of the Atlantic Daily newsletter.
...no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
Sorry bad/old Subject. The post above has full text of article. nm
....no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
This fuck-nugget is going to be one step away from "leader of the 'free' world" soon
Trump’s running mate says UK could be ‘first Islamist country’ with nuclear weapons
Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, said the UK could become the first “truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon” after Labour won the election, it can be revealed.
Vance, the junior senator of Ohio and author of the memoir Hillbilly Elegy, was speaking at a conference for US Conservatives when he made the comments.
The jibe is likely to be embarrassing for the UK’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, who has attempted to build bridges with Vance in recent months, comparing their impoverished childhoods.
Vance was speaking at the National Conservatism conference on Thursday, where he said: “I have to beat up on the UK – just one additional thing. I was talking with a friend recently and we were talking about, you know, one of the big dangers in the world, of course, is nuclear proliferation, though, of course, the Biden administration doesn’t care about it.
“And I was talking about, you know, what is the first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon, and we were like, maybe it’s Iran, you know, maybe Pakistan already kind of counts, and then we sort of finally decided maybe it’s actually the UK, since Labour just took over.”
You mean "The Islamic Republic of Pakistan" which has nuclear weapons? That one? Or "The Islamic Republic of Iran" which doesn't? Or the UK? Which one is it. What a tough question.
This is going to be Veep. Fuck's sake.
...no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
Re: This fuck-nugget is going to be one step away from "leader of the 'free' world" soon
Just shows how much Tucker and his blatherings should be trusted. What a clown....no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
Posted by t on July 17, 2024, 12:53 pm, in reply to "What a clown .."
Thanks. Just a quick observation after having had a peep into Foundry, which is a Palantir platform or whatever. It it heavily invested in the Ukraine war it seems. So, it's a clear contradiction between JDV article and Palantir/Foundry investment plan.
Always impressed by the idiots the Yanquis have in store for us...
2. It's a commonly used, unofficial title, for the POTUS.
3. All those quote marks weren't enough to suggest how little I agreed with it?
Other than that, great post....no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
Re: This is going to be one step away from "leader of the 'free' world" soon
For expression to be worth the bother, it had to be witty, amusing and imaginative which rules out nearly all US slang since 1979. 'Harshing my mellow' and 'blow it out yo ass motherfucker' are good enough. (I don't know what the second one means but I doubt it's a compliment.) ;O)The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
J D Vance: FT: Europe must stand on its own two feet on defence
The United States has provided a blanket of security to Europe for far too long. In the aftermath of the cold war, European nations made deep and lasting cuts to their defence budgets. Estimates suggest the continent would have spent an additional $8.6tn on defence over 30 years had they maintained cold war levels of military expenditure. As the American defence budget nears $1tn per year, we ought to view the money Europe hasn’t spent on defence for what it really is: an implied tax on the American people to allow for the security of Europe.
Nothing in recent memory demonstrates this more clearly than the war in Ukraine. There is frankly no good reason that aid from the US should be needed. Europe is made up of many great nations with productive economies. They ought to have the capacity to handle the conflict, but over decades they have become far too weak. America has been asked to fill the void at tremendous expense to its own citizens.
Behind the price tag, this conflict has revealed the shocking weakness of the defence industrial base on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe and America, fragmented defence industries make limited quantities of the most advanced weapons on Earth, but struggle to produce heavy weaponry at the speed and scale needed to win a major conflict. For all the talk about who spends the most on defence by percentage of gross domestic product, Russia currently makes more than twice the amount of artillery shells each month than Europe and the US combined.
Defence spending and defence readiness are two different things. For example, Germany spends considerably more than France on defence each year, with little to show for it. The French army includes six highly capable combined-arms brigades ready to deploy and perform combat missions, but the Bundeswehr can barely scrape together a single combat-ready brigade.
The question each European nation needs to ask itself is this: are you prepared to defend yourself? And the question the US must ask is: if our European allies can’t even defend themselves, are they allies, or clients?
These issues go beyond budgetary gimmicks and trilateral summit attendance. They demand tangible military capacity and industrial power. London is the banking centre of Europe, and perhaps the world. But wars are not fought with dollars, pounds and financial derivatives, they are fought with bullets.
Germany is the most important economy in Europe, but it relies on imported energy and borrowed military strength. US leaders across the spectrum support Europe and see the value of generations-old alliances. But as we watch European power atrophy under an American protectorate, it is reasonable to ask whether our support has made it easier for Europe to ignore its own security.
Which brings us to Ukraine. In the press, the burden-sharing debate is often framed in monetary terms: who spends what, and how much should each nation spend? But this conceals the real resource constraint. Wars are won with men and materiel.
Starting with materiel: we don’t make enough of it. At current production rates, it will take years to rebuild military stockpiles after this war — even if we stop sending critical defence stocks today, as we most certainly should. A firm commitment to western re-industrialisation, to training skilled workers and rebuilding production capacity is needed.
Ukraine also needs more men. The average Ukrainian soldier is about 43 years old. Its former top general, Valery Zaluzhny recently said he needed a mobilisation of fresh troops. Ukraine will only be able to continue at this rate for so long until western troops are asked to answer the call.
We owe it to our European partners to be honest: Americans want allies in Europe, not client states, and our generosity in Ukraine is coming to an end. Europeans should regard the conclusion of the war there as an imperative. They must keep rebuilding their industrial and military capabilities. And Europe should consider how exactly it is going to live with Russia when the war in Ukraine is over.
In the US, justifications for the war often depend on a contemporary domino theory: unless we stop Putin in Ukraine, he won’t stop there. But the time has come for Europe to stand on its own feet. That doesn’t mean it has to stand alone, but it must not continue to use America as a crutch.
We blew up Nordstream to prevent all this happening...
I know. The new management thinks, obviously, that was wasteful. Sigh. Meanwhile it is not quite clear what the new policy with China will entail. At the end of the day, Trump's policy was to make friends with N Korea .. and lookie-lookie, NK is now with Russkies. Firm and strong.
I think the Dems are absolutely out of their trees. No rationality. It would be advantageous to stick with lesser of the two evils, nevermind the Emperor w/no brain hehe.
on July 16, 2024, 1:03 am