Chuck DarwinJD Vance is a rightwing troll disguised as a populist, and
could be our next vice-president
J.D. got the nod from Don, not just for sycophancy, but for clear and present authoritarian tendencies
The junior senator from Ohio had a massive advantage that made him more similar to Trump than any other contender:
a presence in popular culture, created by "Hillbilly Elegy,"
the memoir to which both conservatives and liberals dumbfounded by Trump’s triumph turned eagerly to understand why the “left behind” were opting for rightwing populism.
People think they know Vance, because they know his narrative:
growing up in poverty in Appalachia and making it to Yale Law School and Silicon Valley,
only to then turn into "political champion of blue-collar folks."
Vance perfected what, on the right, tends to substitute for policy ideas these days:
trolling the liberals.
Mobilizing voters is less about programs, or a real legislative record (Vance has none).
Rather, it’s generating political energy by deepening people’s sense of shared #victimhood.
No one but J.D. would try to schmooze voters with an invocation of the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt -- who, in the 1930s, claimed that liberals were either weaklings or prone to betray their own ideals.
(Schmitt is an obscure reference to most outside the hallowed halls of Yale Law School, but a signal to cognoscenti that Vance is all in on antiliberalism.)
As with so many self-declared rightwing champions of the working class, economics isn’t ultimately where the action is;
“elite campuses” feature much more in an increasingly feverish Maga imagination.
Vance has declared universities the enemy
and asserted that “the closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with leftwing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary”.
The reality is that Orbán has simply shut down entire academic subjects which conservatives don’t like – no more gender studies – and handed over Hungarian universities to cronies;
he also managed to chase out the country’s best school, Central European University.
When pressed, Vance re-describes his Orbánism as giving taxpayers a say in how their dollars are spent in education
– a startling admission that politicians should be in control,
and of course a blatant contradiction with the free speech pieties Vance’s allies in Congress have become so good at weaponizing.
How the hillbillies of Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy will benefit from removing Judith Butler from reading lists at Harvard is anyone’s guess.
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