Is J. D. Vance too much for the country?
Paleoconservative hubris infects white Christian nationalism
See update for August 1, 2024, at end of post.
The lesson of J. D. Vance for Republican politicians may be that they need to thread a needle between not crazy enough and too crazy. It’s a lesson they should have learned in 2022.
On the one side, we have Ohio state Senator George Lang saying, “I believe wholeheartedly Donald Trump and Butler County’s J.D. Vance are the last chance to save our country politically. I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country, and it will be saved.”[1] He apologized,[2] but his statement lies roughly on the same level of crazy as we saw with Doug Mastriano running for governor in Pennsylvania (he lost) and even with Donald Trump in off-year elections (he’s been a losing brand). They’re not alone, by a long shot.[3]
Indeed, the white Christian nationalist notion of ‘unity’ seems to go something like this: “Let’s pretend that this gentleman over here was running for county recorder. And he’s a good Christian man that believes what we believe. We can work with that, right? That, that’s unity.
“But if Stephen Richer walked in this room, I would lynch him. I don’t unify with people who don’t believe the principles we believe in and the American cause that founded this country. And so, I want to make that clear when we talk about what it means to unify.”[4]
It was a strange thing in the 2022 election: The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision striking down Roe v. Wade came down[5] and an electoral backlash was rapidly evident that seemed to combine with voter antipathy to Trump’s “stolen election” whining to yield unexpected Republican defeats.[6]White Christian nationalist politicians like Mastriano nonetheless doubled down on the crazy and were badly defeated.[7] This pattern continued in 2023 as even as defeat after defeat has piled up, these politicians seemed to imagine that their god would deliver a miracle. He didn’t.
I associated this hubris with a paleoconservative imagination that, on some level, all white people agree that “Black” and “brown” people are uniting against them (white people). Of course, many—probably most—white people do not subscribe to white displacement theory and they don’t generally subscribe to paleoconservatism—but paleoconservatives cling to a belief that they do.[8] This paleoconservative imagination took hold across the conservatism that Trump unified, leading conservatives to believe on some level that all white people must be conservative—it’s a bizarre prejudice, also held by some Black people, that I have personally encountered. And because it’s an imagination, not a reality, the much-vaunted “red wave” never happened.
With J. D. Vance, I’m thinking we may be seeing something similar. There may be an upper limit to the crazy, beyond which many—enough to deprive them of a plurality—Republicans won’t go, with politicians other than Trump. Trump leads them to full-on batshit crazy, but where he gets away with it, voters recoil from them.
Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, who despite representing entirely different districts from entirely different states seem to think they’re in a competition against each other for the stupid vote, manage, somehow, to be on the right side of that limit, at least in their districts. Trump’s vice presidential candidate, the reputed (but apparently not really[9]) couch-fucking J. D. Vance, however, might be too much for the country.[10]
Update, August 1, 2024: We are seeing again what I saw in 2022: As I previously noted, even as voters rebuked Donald Trump and Republican politicians both for the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade and his “stolen election” bullshit, they doubled down on it, like a moth to a flame. What we’re seeing with Trump now, running against a woman of color, is that he just simply can’t resist saying things that ‘polite’ racists consider ‘impolite.’[11] He’s reminding everyone of why, save for 2016, he’s been a loser as if he thinks it makes him a winner.
It's stupid for another reason, as Cleve Wootson, Jr., observes that “Trump’s political ascent has been steeped in grievance, and [Kamala] Harris supporters have long thought he would seek to make identity a central part of a race between him and Harris.”[12] Which is to say that Harris and her campaign knew that vile remarks such as those Trump indeed made to National Association of Black Journalists were coming and they could prepare.
If Trump keeps this up, he’s a loser for sure.
[1] George Lang, quoted in Arianna Coghill, “Trump Backers Are Talking Up Possible Civil War,” Mother Jones, July 26, 2024, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/07/trump-vance-civil-war-gop-political-violence/
[2] Arianna Coghill, “Trump Backers Are Talking Up Possible Civil War,” Mother Jones, July 26, 2024, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/07/trump-vance-civil-war-gop-political-violence/
[3] Arianna Coghill, “Trump Backers Are Talking Up Possible Civil War,” Mother Jones, July 26, 2024, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/07/trump-vance-civil-war-gop-political-violence/
[4] Shelby Busch, quoted in Arianna Coghill, “Trump Backers Are Talking Up Possible Civil War,” Mother Jones, July 26, 2024, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/07/trump-vance-civil-war-gop-political-violence/
[5] Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. ____ (2022).
[6] Andrew Prokop, “Why the red wave didn’t come,” Vox, November 6, 2022, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23448972/midterms-results-democrats-senate-red-wave
[7] Shayna Greene, “Shapiro defeats Mastriano in Pennsylvania governor race,” Politico, November 26, 2023, https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/08/doug-mastriano-josh-shapiro-pennsylvania-governor-race-results-2022-00064763; Andrew Prokop, “Why the red wave didn’t come,” Vox, November 6, 2022, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23448972/midterms-results-democrats-senate-red-wave
[8] David Benfell, “Conservative Views on Undocumented Migration” (doctoral dissertation, Saybrook, 2016). ProQuest (1765416126).
[9] Chris Murphy, “J.D. Vance’s Mythical Couch Tryst Is a Fact-Checker’s Nightmare. Stephen Colbert Explains Why,” Vanity Fair, July 26, 2024, https://apple.news/ATF8_1F3nTO22UF_ZxnNCpg
[10] Irie Sentner and Jared Mitovich, “Republicans are already souring on JD Vance,” Politico, July 26, 2024, https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/26/republicans-jd-vance-attacks-00171473
[11] Cleve R. Wootson, Jr., and Sabrina Rodriguez, “Trump’s attack on Harris’s racial identity moves contest into new phase,” Washington Post, July 31, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/31/harris-black-identity-trump/
[12] Cleve R. Wootson, Jr., and Sabrina Rodriguez, “Trump’s attack on Harris’s racial identity moves contest into new phase,” Washington Post, July 31, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/31/harris-black-identity-trump/