The single most troubling thing about Senator JD Vance — his bizarre understanding of the work of J.R.R. Tolkien notwithstanding — is his close relationship with some of the most extreme elements of the American right.
When asked to explain his worldview, Vance has cited his former boss, Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who has written passionately against democracy (“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”), and Curtis Yarvin, a software developer turned blogger and provocateur who believes the United States should transition to monarchy (“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia”). Yarvin has also written favorably of human bondage (slavery, he once wrote, “is a natural human relationship”) and wondered aloud if apartheid wasn’t better for Black South Africans.
While Vance’s admirers see him as a uniquely intellectual presence in American politics — a thinker as much as a politician — his right-wing, authoritarian views are largely derivative of the views and preoccupations of Thiel, Yarvin and their community of “postliberal” ideologues and reactionary venture capitalists. Take Vance’s view that the United States is in a period of Romanesque decline. “We are in a late republican period,” Vance said on a podcast in 2021. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
Compare this to Thiel’s view that “liberalism” and “democracy” are “exhausted,” and that to restore the nation “we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton window.” Is this a call for new tax cuts, or does it represent a fundamental hostility toward popular constitutional government in the United States?
In addition to relationships with Thiel and Yarvin, Vance is also in close contact with the bottom feeders on the far right. For nearly two years, according to The Washington Post, Vance was in regular conversation by text message with Chuck Johnson, a notorious Holocaust denier who has spent the better part of a decade promoting right-wing conspiracy theories.
And as my colleague Michelle Goldberg wrote this week, Vance is close enough to Jack Posobiec — an alt-right lunatic who pushed the vile and absurd Pizzagate conspiracy theory and collaborated with online neo-Nazis to spread antisemitic hate — to blurb his latest book, a polemic devoted to the idea that liberals and leftists are Untermenschen who must be stopped lest they destroy civilization. “As they are opposed to humanity itself,” Posobiec and his co-author, Joshua Lisec, write, “they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.”
These are the friends and influences that JD Vance brought with him to the United States Senate, and these will almost certainly be the same friends and influences he’ll bring to the White House if he is elected vice president.
What I Wrote
My Tuesday column was on Kamala Harris and the return of “birtherism”:
The point is that there is no real dispute or even question about Harris’s background. As with its original iteration, the goal of this neo-birtherism is to cast doubts about Harris’s integrity. It is to say that she is inauthentic — that she can’t be trusted. “She is everything to everybody, and she pretends to be somebody different depending on which audience she is in front of,” said JD Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president, who once struggled himself to prove his MAGA bona fides after he spent years as a devoted opponent of Trump’s.
My Friday column was on the emergence of “weird” as a surprisingly effective attack on the Republican Party:
Through all of this, Republicans still insist that they’re the party of normalcy. This is why they can’t quite deal with the charge that they’re weird. There’s a reason for this. For years, in the American political imagination, Republicans were the normal party and Democrats were the party of weirdness.
And in the latest episode of my podcast with John Ganz, we watched the 1996 sci-fi farce “Mars Attacks!”
Now Reading
Paul Crider on Frederick Douglass and “fugitive liberalism” for Liberal Currents.
Joel Anderson on Ice Cube for Slate.
Aziz Rana on the Constitution for Dissent magazine.
Kim Phillips-Fein on the 1968 presidential election for The London Review of Books.
Sloane Crosley on losing a pet for The New Yorker.
Photo of the Week
It’s a bit blurry on account of the fact that the subject was moving and I was working with a 60-year-old camera, but I liked this photo I took of a motorcyclist in Savannah, Ga.
Now Eating: Spicy Brown Bean, Squash and Corn Succotash
I’m a huge fan of succotash, and this recipe is a staple of my summertime lunches. It’s filling, easy to throw together, and delivers a decent serving of fiber and protein. Sometimes I eat it with quinoa or couscous, other times I enjoy it with sourdough toast or cornbread — whichever fits my mood. If you have access to heirloom beans, like the ones from Rancho Gordo, use them.
Recipe comes from New York Times Cooking.
Ingredients
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 small red or yellow onion, chopped
1 ¼ pounds summer squash, diced (about 4 cups)
Salt to taste
2 garlic cloves, minced
Kernels from 2 ears corn
2 serrano or jalapeño chiles, minced
Freshly ground pepper
3 cups cooked brown beans, such as Good Mother Stallards, pintos or borlottis, with broth
¼ cup chopped cilantro (more to taste), plus cilantro sprigs for garnish
4 to 5 cups cooked quinoa, brown rice, wild rice, or bulgur (to taste)
½ cup crumbled queso fresco or feta
Directions
Set a strainer or colander over a bowl and drain beans. Set broth aside to use for moistening the succotash.
Heat olive oil in a large, heavy skillet over medium heat and add onion. Cook, stirring, until it begins to soften, about 3 minutes, and add squash and salt to taste. Cook, stirring, until squash begins to soften and look translucent, 3 or 4 minutes. Add garlic and corn. Cook for about 4 minutes, stirring often. Add minced chile and season with salt and pepper. Add beans and about ½ cup bean broth and continue to cook, stirring, for another minute or two. Taste and adjust seasonings. If you want this to be a little more moist, stir in more bean broth, or just hold the bean broth and spoon directly over the bowls. Stir in cilantro and remove from heat.
Spoon grain of your choice into 6 wide or deep bowls. Top with the succotash. Moisten with more bean broth. Sprinkle queso fresco or feta on top, garnish with cilantro, and serve.
The post Where Does JD Vance’s Ideology Really Come From? appeared first on New York Times.