Having called Trump an āidiotā and a potential āAmerican Hitlerā, the Republican senator now fawns over him
ā¦
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. Josh Hawley et tutti quanti might have more impressive credentials (Yale and Stanford), but only Vance has spawned a Netflix series. Why opt for a cold rightwing technocrat when you can have the rock star of ānational conservatismā?
Vance has perfected what, on the right, tends to substitute for policy ideas these days: trolling the liberals. Mobilizing voters is less about programs, let alone a real legislative record (Vance has none; his initiatives like making English the official language of the US are just virtue signaling for conservative culture warriors). Rather, itās to generate political energy by deepening peopleās sense of shared victimhood.
The point for the rightist trolls is not that Democrats have all the wrong goals, but that they are hypocrites who say one thing and do another. Vance faults Trumpās opponents for pontificating about the rule of law, but in practice only caring about power ā an update of the ālimousine liberalā slogan for an age of rightwing autocracy.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A number of Republican candidates for running mate, from the endlessly self-humiliating Tim Scott to the nondescript Doug Burgum, are vying for what surely looks like a political suicide mission: they must know that Trump betrays everyone eventually, yet they seem to think that their fate as a faithful no 2 will be different.
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.
Mobilizing voters is less about programs, let alone a real legislative record (Vance has none; his initiatives like making English the official language of the US are just virtue signaling for conservative culture warriors).
Vance faults Trumpās opponents for pontificating about the rule of law, but in practice only caring about power ā an update of the ālimousine liberalā slogan for an age of rightwing autocracy.
Few others would try to impress readers of the New York Times 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.
As with so many self-declared rightwing champions of the working class, economics isnāt ultimately where the action is; much more than factory floors, āelite campusesā feature in an increasingly feverish Maga imagination.
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