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Javier E

How Lord of the Rings Shaped JD Vance's Politics - POLITICO - 0 views

  • perhaps Vance’s most millennial trait is just how geeky he is about Lord of the Rings.
  • The trilogy of novels has been a longstanding nerd favorite for decades, but it became the center of culture during Vance’s high school years thanks to Peter Jackson’s movies.
  • Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, who sat next to Vance in Trump’s friends and family box at the convention Tuesday evening, asked Vance to name his favorite author.
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  • “I would have to say Tolkien,” Vance said. “I’m a big Lord of the Rings guy, and I think, not realizing it at the time, but a lot of my conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien growing up.” He added of Tolkien’s colleague: “Big fan of C.S. Lewis — really sort of like that era of English writers. I think they were really interesting. They were grappling, in part because of World War II, with just very big problems.”
  • In the books, the future of civilization rests on the search and eventual destruction of The One Ring. While Frodo and Gollum jostle over the singular ring, true fans know there are a total of 20 rings of power. Vance is apparently among those ranks, as the venture capital firm he founded in 2019 is named Narya, named after one of those other rings that Gandalf wears. Vance’s mentor Peter Thiel similarly named his company Palantir after the crystal ball used by Saruman in Lord of the Rings, and Vance has invested in the defense startup Anduril, named after Aragorn’s sword.
  • “By the time of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Narya has been entrusted to Gandalf to resist the corrupting influence of evil, preserve the world from decay, and give strength to its wielder,”
  • “Gandalf, unlike the other great powers in Lord of the Rings, cared for the hobbits and other lowly people of Middle-Earth, and so it is unsurprising that Vance would see himself as a kind of Gandalf, caring for the forgotten people of his hometown, keeping a watchful eye on them against the corrupting effects of the world.”
  • Luke Burgis, author of a book about René Girard (another of Vance’s intellectual heroes) and Catholic University of America professor, said he suspects “Vance’s appreciation of Tolkien is not unrelated to his conversion to Catholicism in 2019. Of the many ways that Tolkien’s work exemplifies the Catholic imagination, one is the relationship between the visible and the invisible. I think it’s fair to say that Vance believes there is real spiritual evil in this world, and it can become embodied in rites and rituals.” (At a closed-door speech in September 2021, Vance said, “I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society.)
  • Vance likely took away from Tolkien “an apocalyptic frame of mind” Burgis told me, a final and all-encompassing battle between good and evil
  • The books have a definite anti-war streak. In the Two Towers, the second of the trilogy, Tolkien wrote: “War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
  • Vance has said his own time in the Marines deployed in Iraq was formative to his isolationist, dovish approach to foreign policy. “I served my country honorably, and I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to,” Vance once recounted. “[I saw] that promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke.”
  • But his fandom also is in tension with some of Tolkien’s ideas about how nation-states should approach the outside world. The books are, in many ways, anti-isolationist. Frodo wants to ignore the ill tidings and stay home but eventually realizes that the Shire isn’t untouched by troubles elsewhere (like, say, NATO being pulled into defending Ukraine from Sauron Putin). In the end, Rohan, Gondor, the elves, ents and dwarves, all must band together and end their petty nationalist squabbles. Their lives are, they realize, interconnected.
  • Vance’s love of Lord of the Rings is of a piece with rightward nationalists abroad. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni used to cosplay as a hobbit. “I think that Tolkien could say better than us what conservatives believe in,” she has said, though unlike Vance she has supported aid to Ukraine.
  • Rick Santorum, the former senator and two-time GOP presidential candidate, is a fellow Tolkien-pilled Catholic but he has different takeaways from Vance.
  • “I’m a huge Tolkien fan,” he continued. “I’m also someone who believes that the message of Tolkien is that evil must be confronted. And so the idea is that well, we can wait until it comes to the Shire, but that is not a very good game plan. You gotta go to Mordor.”
  • All of this points to intellectual and spiritual tensions Vance still seems to be working out. “He’s been in office a year and a half. He’s never been greatly involved in politics before this,” Santorum said. “I suspect that this is one of the reasons Trump may have picked him: JD is a smart guy but is still a work in progress.”
  • Those close to Vance say he has been undergoing an awakening since he converted to Catholicism in 2019.
  • Conservative writer Rod Dreher, who Vance invited to his initiation to the faith in 2019 and was present for his first communion, told me that Vance “is thinking broadly about how all must join in the great struggle against darkness — there is no avoiding the struggle — and how God can use the humble and the lowborn to do great things.”
  • “Think about it: Who would have imagined that sad, scared little Ohio boy living in a wreck of a family would have come through it all, and risen to the gates of supreme political power? What might God be doing with him? J.D. Vance might be Frodo of the Hollers, a veritable hillbilly hobbit.”
Javier E

What's the Deal With JD Vance and Kids? - by Hannah Yoest - 0 views

  • In a recent interview with the New York Times, the Ohio Republican answered a number of questions about faith and family with uncomfortable candor.
  • Asked about his conversion to Catholicism, he discussed meritocracy, his search for how to live a virtuous life, and appealing to the authority of his wife’s opinion: “She was, like, really into it. Meaning, she thought that thinking about the question of converting and getting baptized and becoming a Christian, she thought that they were good for me, in sort of a good-for-your-soul kind of way.”
  • Had she converted, the interviewer asked? “No, she hasn’t,” Vance said, laughing. “That’s why I feel bad about it. She’s got three kids. Obviously, I help with the kids, but because I’m kind of the one going to church, she feels more responsibility to keep the kids quiet in the church.”
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  • When Vance said he’s the one “going” to church, what he meant is that he is the one participating in the great spiritual mystery of the liturgy and holy obligation; his family, meanwhile, is just there, trying not to disturb him. The way he describes it, JD and Usha Vance are caught in a mirror of shame, he asking her to give up her Sundays to meet the demands of his faith, and she wanting to maintain dignity and not let the kids cause embarrassment. It is all deeply Catholic, I’ll give him that.
  • Lulu Garcia-Navarro, pressed Vance on his conversion, pointing to the dysfunction of his childhood home and asking him if part of the allure of the church is the emphasis on the nuclear family. Bingo. “The American dream to me was never making a lot of money, buying a big house, driving a fast car. It was having what me and Usha have right now,” Vance replied
  • Vance portrayed himself as the victim of a (willful?) misunderstanding: All the talk about “cat ladies” is a distraction from the core of his argument, he stressed, in one of the interview’s tense moments. “I’m talking about the political sensibility that’s very anti-child. . . . We have become anti-family in this country.”
  • what does family actually mean to Vance?
  • He shared with Garcia-Navarro an anecdote of a young woman on a train handling her unruly children. The misbehaving children were “complete disasters,” he said. The mother “was being so patient” with them but everyone around her was apparently “so angry” and staring—but Vance sympathized with the mother. I’ve had similar experiences riding with my own kids on various modes of public transportation, and again it just sort of hit me like, okay, this is really, really bad. I do think that there’s this pathological frustration with children that just is a new thing in American society. I think it’s very dark.
  • in interviews like the one in the Times, he provides additional insights into how he personally views the family.
  • Though he might see a darkness to the “pathological frustration” that Americans have with children, the truth is Vance himself routinely exhibits it.
  • Back in August, he recounted telling his 7-year-old son to “shut the hell up” while he was getting the call from Trump asking him to be his running mate. At a rally in September, he quipped that his younger son was probably off looking for a building to burn as a “chaos agent.” At another rally last week, he made more derogatory remarks about his children: “I’m surprised we made it this whole time without anyone really complaining. Maybe I can trade you my kids, you could knock some sense into them.” 
  • Taken alone, each example could be excused as a daft, poorly delivered, but innocuous and even sad little attempt to be relatable (except for maybe “knock some sense into them”). But together, it’s a pattern—perhaps candid, but also off-putting and even disturbing—that clicks together like a puzzle piece with his natalist rhetoric. 
  • “The senator represents a strain of reactionary anti-feminism among the very online right that has, in recent years, seeped into the Republican mainstream,” Helen Lewis wrote for the Atlantic earlier this month.
  • Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election, would he have certified the election in 2020, and will he commit to a peaceful transfer of power in 2024? Vance, frustrated, tried to avoid answering directly. Later, on the campaign trail, he was less guarded, or maybe just more worn down. NBCNews reported when faced with the question again he answered “no” explicitly:
  • the closing couplet Louise Glück wrote in her poem “Nostos”:“We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.”
  • We can see the shadow Vance’s childhood casts on his life from his willingness to contort himself to appease powerful men who promise him safety from scarcity. What will his wife’s children remember?
Javier E

Opinion | J.D. Vance Keeps Selling His Soul. He's Got Plenty of Buyers. - The New York ... - 0 views

  • what’s most Faustian about Mr. Vance — and by proxy Mr. Trump. Their belief that a movement built on aggrievement and rage can be easily controlled, that there is some way in which you can trick the Devil while holding onto what he’s given you.
  • In my book on Faust, I argue that the politics of authoritarianism is often embraced as a tool by those who believe that they can contain such forces and use them for political gain.
  • There is a lesson for Mr. Vance from the Faust story, however, assuming he can hear it. Beyond mere self-interest, what the legend warns against is the embrace of irrational forces and powers, especially when there is the delusion that the person trading their soul can wrangle the Devil
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  • Mr. Vance “extracted what he needed from Appalachia.” Before anything else, the senator’s first betrayal was of his own region, the first portion of his soul to be sold.
  • Shortly after “Hillbilly Elegy” was released, writers throughout Appalachia denounced the classism and elitism of the book, as well as the self-serving ambitions of its author.
  • Without too much hyperbole, it could be said that J.D. Vance — a possible heir to the MAGA movement who has embraced some of the most noxious elements of the alt-right and the national conservative movement — is an infernal creation of the powerful liberals who championed his writing and elevated his platform. It’s hard to imagine that without “Hillbilly Elegy,” which was adapted into a film by the Democratic Party donor Ron Howard in 2020, Mr. Vance would have become the junior senator of Ohio, much less a nominee for vice president
  • Since being elected to the Senate, in large part due to the financial support of the tech billionaire and right-wing activist Peter Thiel, Mr. Vance has become a zealous convert to the MAGA cause. That’s a stunning reversal for a figure who eight years ago was celebrated as an astute voice of Never Trumper Republicanism, a man of learning who could formulate a centrist conservatism to supplant the dark turn that had taken hold of the G.O.P.
  • As Mr. Vance noted in a Time magazine interview in 2016, Mr. Trump’s greatest failure as a political leader is that “he sees the worst in people, and he encourages the worst in people.” That’s turning out to be true of Mr. Vance, too.
  • Eight years ago, during the heated days of the 2016 Republican primary, Mr. Vance wrote that Mr. Trump’s policy proposals “range from immoral to absurd.” A few months later, he referred to Mr. Trump as “cultural heroin,” and called him “unfit for our nation’s highest office.” And memorably, in a text conversation with a former roommate, the future senator worried that Mr. Trump might be “America’s Hitler.”
  • Mr. Trump’s White House tenure, he said, had changed his mind, but it’s hard to take the senator entirely at his word.
  • At the outset of Christopher Marlowe’s late 16th-century play “The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus,” the scholar at the center of the tale abandons all the learning he has mastered. Law, philosophy, medicine — none of these have fulfilled his boundless ambition. Instead, he turns to magic, making the fateful decision to sell his soul to the demon Mephistopheles, for what he “most desires” — “a world of profit and delight, /Of power, of honor.”
Javier E

How JD Vance Thinks About Power - The New York Times - 0 views

  • “In a way,” he said, “it’s like Trump chose Steve Bannon to be his running mate.”
  • He has suggested that Republicans should stack the Department of Justice with appointees who “actually take a side in the culture war, the side of the people who elected us, and not just pretend we don’t have to take sides at all.”
  • “Whether it’s the incentives that you put into place, funding decisions that are made and the curricula that are developed, you really can use politics to influence culture,” Mr. Vance said earlier this year. “And we should be doing more of that on the American Right.”
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  • Arguing that “culture war is class warfare,” Mr. Vance has repeatedly encouraged Republicans to use the machinery of government to reclaim institutions that he sees as wholly captured by the left.
  • In Mr. Vance’s telling, his perspective has been shaped most by his own biography: as a son of Middletown, Ohio; a veteran of a war defined by Washington’s mistakes; an author who was feted by coastal elites whom he came to despise
  • “You hear European elites and American elites talking in frightened tones about threats to democracy,” he told an interviewer this year. “Isn’t it a greater threat to democracy if people keep voting for less migration but don’t get it?”
  • He has said that Alex Jones, the Infowars conspiracy theorist, is a more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow
  • Mr. Vance recently contributed an admiring blurb for a book co-written by the far-right activist Jack Posobiec, who promoted the “Pizzagate” hoax. He is also listed as the author of a foreword for an upcoming book by Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and a leader of the Project 2025 initiative
  • People whom Mr. Vance has cited to explain his worldview or detail who helped shape his thinking include Patrick Deneen, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame who has suggested that conservatives must harness the power of the state to counter “liberal totalitarianism”; Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist for whom Mr. Vance worked; and Curtis Yarvin, a prominent voice on the New Right who has argued that American democracy has devolved to the point that the country needs a monarchical leader.
  • Mr. Vance would not necessarily disagree, those who know him said. He has spent his recent years at the four-way intersection of intellectual debates, campaign rhetoric, outright trolling and actual policy —
  • Mr. Rufo described Mr. Vance’s intellectual evolution, “somewhat tongue-in-cheek,” as a journey “from the pages of National Review to the fever swamp of right-wing Twitter.”
  • “In the past, the political right operated under the illusion that institutions could be neutral,” Mr. Rufo said in an interview, “that any use of state power was illegitimate and that the only rightful policy would be to try to roll back or reduce the size of government.”
  • said the move from a traditionalist like Mr. Pence to Mr. Vance exemplified “how the Republican Party is going to think about power moving forward
  • Christopher Rufo
  • He speaks bluntly about what he sees as the limits of America’s reach and resources abroad — “Those days are over,” he has said of the 20th-century “glory years” of American hegemony — and even more forcefully about the prospect of right-wing victories at home if conservatives could only summon the requisite gumption.
Javier E

Vance, Trump, and The Politics of Hate - 0 views

  • “I think our people hate the right people,” a relaxed JD Vance confided to an interviewer three years ago.
  • By “the right people,” Vance meant liberal elites.
  • it was also clear that Vance knew one couldn’t foster hatred for liberal elites without the collateral damage of hatred for immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, cultural nonconformists, and any of the groups whom those elites were supposedly elevating at the expense of “our people.”
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  • But these past few weeks suggest that it wasn’t merely collateral damage at all. The assault on these groups really was the point. The alleged failures of liberal elites (to, say, close the border or protect manufacturing jobs) are the excuse for the assaults on immigrants and minorities that we’ve seen throughout the Trump years. That’s where the real political payoff is
  • By “hate” Vance means . . . hate. Not disagreement or even dislike. Hate.
  • Vance’s politics are the politics of hate
  • perhaps he just watched Trump’s success and internalized its lessons. But in any case, for Vance it’s all about hate.
  • And the assault on the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, is a kind of culmination of Vance’s—and of course Trump’s—politics of hate.
  • It also represents a culmination of Vance’s and Trump’s politics of lying
  • Vance acknowledged yesterday on CNN that he had been trying to manufacture coverage of Springfield based on nothing more than a few unsubstantiated constituent phone calls. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
  • The creation of stories. One could call that fiction. Or lies
  • It’s familiar from the last century in Europe. It’s also familiar from periods of American history, especially with respect to race and immigrants.
  • in Trump’s case, the hatred is so mixed with his distinctive showmanship and conmanship that it’s sometimes hard to see the heart of the enterprise.
  • With Vance, who’s not as much of a showman or con man, it’s all much clearer.
  • he border’s been a mess, and there are people who’ve come across the border illegally and committed crimes. So there’s plenty of grist for the mill here for a more conventional (if still mean-spirited and demagogic) anti-immigration candidate.
  • instead, Vance and Trump have gotten “distracted” into a debate about legal Haitian migrants who’ve come to Springfield to work legally. Or is it a distraction? Might Vance and Trump know what they’re doing? Perhaps a pure play on racism and nativism is more effective politically than a somewhat complicated debate about the border
  • In any case, it’s striking that Trump and Vance are willing to make this campaign so clearly a referendum on nativism and racism.
  • Such efforts have worked at other times in American history. And such efforts have been aided by sophisticated allies who don’t quite join in the campaign, but certainly don’t go out of their way to denounce it or repudiate it
  • Think of the Southern Bourbons who tolerated and benefited from the uninhibited racism of Southern populists and demagogues.
  • The sounds you hear from that establishment and those elites, from corporate boardrooms and editorial offices, in the face of disgusting bigotry and dangerous incitement from the presidential ticket they support? Those are the sounds of silence.
Javier E

Opinion | This Is Why MAGA Loves JD Vance - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In choosing Vance and discarding Pence, Trump traded actual decency for a man who can simulate decency, and that’s exactly what Vance did on Tuesday night.
  • With those words and in that moment, Vance told MAGA: Don’t be fooled by my civility; when real power is on the line, I’m with Trump. He’s said so before. Just last month, he told the All-In podcast that he “would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we had.”
  • There was nothing peaceful about the transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden. Even the relative calm of Inauguration Day (which Trump skipped) was guaranteed only by a troop deployment that made any substantial disruption impossible.
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  • But he couldn’t keep it together for the entire evening. At the very end, the mask slipped. When pressed to say whether Trump lost in 2020, Vance said, “Obviously, Donald Trump and I think that there were problems in 2020,” and he had the gall to say, “It’s really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on Jan. 20, as we have done for 250 years in this country.”
  • No one should underestimate the importance of that moment. Earlier in the debate, Vance explicitly backed away from his previous anti-abortion positions. If abortion is no longer sacred for Republicans, we know who is: Trump. Vance will compromise on abortion, but he won’t waver from the Big Lie.
  • Even so, vice-presidential debates can still be instructive. And on Tuesday night, voters learned exactly why MAGA loves Vance so much. He’s a talented communicator. He has a compelling life story. He can make the ideological and policy case for Republican populism better than any other politician in America. And he’s no Mike Pence: He would wreck the Republic for Donald Trump.
Javier E

JD Vance and the Galaxy-Brained Style in American Politics - 0 views

  • “Cultural pessimism has a strong appeal in America today,” the historian Fritz Stern wrote. “As political conditions appear stable at home or irremediable abroad, American intellectuals have become concerned with the cultural problems of our society, and have substituted sociological or cultural analyses for political criticism.”
  • I bring up Stern’s book because it nails the character of “revolutionary” conservatism—just the sort of politics Vance represents. The junior senator from Ohio believes “culture war is class warfare,”
  • has made it possible for him to claim to be a tribune of the working class in spite of a 0 percent score from the AFL-CIO on “voting with working people.”
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  • for Vanity Fair, James Pogue did a good job summarizing the tech billionaire Peter Thiel influence nexus and the Thiel-funded coterie that Vance ran with online in a long feature two years ago. Pogue notes: 
  • In general, it’s the point of view of someone who takes Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire painting cycle to contain a subtle and profound truth about society, one best expressed in a familiar maxim: Strong men make good times; good times make weak men; weak men make . . . (I need to yawn and will let you fill in the rest).1
  • Vance and this New Right cohort, who are mostly so, so highly educated and well-read that their big problem often seems to be that they’re just too nerdy to be an effective force in mass politics, are not anti-intellectual. Vance is an intellectual himself, even if he’s not currently playing one on TV.
  • the man doesn’t just have cracked beliefs but cracked instincts. Almost endearingly, he and his pals seem to think that workaday politics is an opportune context for doing a bit of grand theory,
  • Stern, again: “They condemned or prophesied, rather than exposited or argued, and all their writings showed that they despised the discourse of intellectuals, depreciated reason, and exalted intuition.” As Stern makes clear, this is the style of thinking that did so much to pave the way for the “revolutionary conservatism” that emerged in the Weimar era.
Javier E

Trump, hillbillies and race - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • We all now know that Trump’s rise has been fueled by the alienation and anger of the country’s white working class. That cohort has seen its incomes stagnate, cities crumble and dreams vanish. But Vance gets underneath the data and shows us what these impersonal forces mean to actual people. He describes the abandoned children, the poor work habits, the drug abuse, the violence, the rage. But he does it with sympathy and love.
  • For Vance, the problem is ultimately cultural, one of values, attitudes and mores. “We hillbillies must wake the hell up,” he writes, and “stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what can we do to make things better.”
  • His own life story — coming from low expectations, dysfunctional relationships and persistent poverty to end up a graduate of Yale Law School and a Silicon Valley executive — demonstrates that grit can conquer all.
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  • But Vance got some help along the way. He tells us that his public schools were decent enough and, when he got motivated, his teachers helped him succeed. He notes that his trajectory changed when he was admitted to Ohio State University, which he was able to attend because of generous federal loans and grants.
  • the turning point in the book and his life takes place when he decides to enlist in the Marine Corps. He describes how the armed forces taught him discipline, hard work, high expectations and good values.
  • This is federal bureaucracy engaged in shaping mores and morals, the ultimate example of government as nanny. When so much of what government does is under siege, it is odd that Vance seems to minimize the role that government can play in providing opportunities for others like him.
  • The other, larger gap in Vance’s book is race. He speaks about the causes of the anxiety and pain of the white working class, but he describes the causes almost entirely in economic terms.
  • there is surely something else at work here — the sense that people who look and sound very different are rising up.
  • Vance touches on this sideways, when speaking about the almost pathological suspicion his hillbillies have for Barack Obama. Vance explains that it is because of the president’s accent — “clean, perfect, neutral” — his urban background, his success in the meritocracy, his reliability as a father. “And,” one wants to whisper to Vance, “because he’s black .”
  • The white working class has always derived some of its status because there was a minority underclass below it. In his seminal work, “American Slavery, American Freedom,” Edmund Morgan argues that even before the revolution, the introduction of slavery helped dampen class conflict within the white population.
  • The rage that is fueling the Trump phenomenon is not just about stagnant wages. It is about a way of life under siege, and it risks producing a “politics of cultural despair.” That phrase was coined by Fritz Stern to describe Germany a century ago.
  • The key to avoiding that fate is not a series of public policies — whether tariffs or tax credits — but enlightened politics, meaning leadership that does not prey on people’s fears and phobias.
Javier E

Opinion | The Republican Party's Problem With the Elite Begins With Its Own - The New Y... - 0 views

  • This puts those Republican politicians saddled with inconvenient Ivy League degrees in an awkward position, like the guy who shows up in a tux for a rodeo wedding. In order to stay in office and on message, they must reject the very thing that propelled their own careers.
  • Remember, Ron DeSantis once eagerly joined one of Yale’s secret societies and told classmates he’d dreamed of attending Harvard Law. He founded a tutoring firm offering “the only LSAT prep courses designed exclusively by Harvard Law School graduates.
  • But once in office, he made a show of distancing himself from his academic credentials.
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  • “I viewed having earned degrees from Yale and Harvard Law School to be political scarlet letters as far as a G.O.P. primary went,” DeSantis wrot
  • His Ivy League brethren, Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard Law), Josh Hawley (Stanford, Yale Law) and Tom Cotton (Harvard, Harvard), take similar pains to wash off the taint of East Coast academia with good-ol’-boy cred.
  • The latest standard-bearer for regular-folk Republicans is a down-home J.D., now JD — no periods, dude — who went to Yale Law School only with the help of student loans and side jobs. What’s more, JD Vance first got a humbler degree at Ohio State through the G.I. Bill. At the Republican National Convention, Yale barely came up.
  • Gone is the bushy-tailed Vance who wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy,” “The coolest thing I’ve done, at least on paper, is graduate from Yale Law School, something 13-year-old J.D. Vance would have considered ludicrous.” The up-and-comer who, in thrall of Yale’s “aura,” confessed that he “wanted to go to Yale more than any other school.”
  • The Vance who emerged as a MAGA politician is one who, after reaping the benefits and connections of an elite graduate education, turned around and gave a speech in 2021 called “The Universities Are the Enemy.”“How ridiculous is it that we tell our young people to go to college, to get brainwashed?” he asked the crowd, going on to quote Nixon: “The professors are the enemy.” For Vance, the biggest takeaway from his Ivy League education is the monumental chip on his shoulder.
  • he Republican Party has turned ignorance into a point of pride.
Javier E

Opinion | Manliness, Cat Ladies, Fertility Panic and the 2024 Election - The New York T... - 0 views

  • post-liberalism. And I think that’s a very important term here. It’s also a loosely defined one. And that comes from people like law professor Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen, who is a political theorist at Notre Dame. And they basically take an argument or vision of the world that challenges liberalism’s emphasis on the individual. Instead of saying the state is meant to be an engine for individual self-fulfillment or to allow people to live life as best they want it, they argue that there’s a shared telos, a purpose, a common good to politics. And for them, it’s primarily defined by Catholic doctrine, and the purpose of politics should be moving us toward that goal. And part of that envisions the nation almost as an organic whole rather than a series of discrete individuals making choices. So it’s the question of what is good for the body politic as a unit, and that includes perpetuity, survival, children — hence the natalism that’s so important in Vance’s thought.
  • You’ve made this point about the differences between what you call sort of the neopatriarchy right and the Barstool conservatism right. And the Barstool conservatism right has been a little less excited about some of what it is hearing from Vance. Can you walk through the difference there?
  • The neopatriarchal right, the one that Vance has really aligned itself with, is a group that says a major focus of the state should be on fostering traditional morality and family formation. They don’t explicitly say women shouldn’t be working most of the time — though sometimes they do — but it basically means an emphasis on traditional loosely defined family structure. So you got to have kids, you got to get married, you shouldn’t be having sex out of marriage, birth control is probably bad. You can see some of this in the book by the head of the Heritage Foundation, which JD Vance wrote the foreword to. The publications have been delayed, but some of the excerpts have leaked, and he makes exactly this kind of argument about birth control specifically and other family planning choices.
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  • So that’s one version of conservatism when it comes to views of the family, but another one, which honestly I think fits Donald Trump a little bit better, is this Barstool conservative. It’s a term that’s named after Barstool Sports, the popular sports website. The term was coined by Matthew Walther, a conservative columnist. And Walther’s argument is that these kinds of conservatives aren’t social conservatives like he is. They are people who really are frustrated with the left’s control of culture in the same way that the neopatriarchal right is, but for completely different reasons. They’re angry that they can’t say sexist stuff in public. They’re angry that sexual harassment has become something whose prohibitions are strictly enforced and they think prevent, you know, flirting in the workplace or something like that. They like seeing cheerleaders at football halftime shows.
  • And these dudes — I use that term very explicitly because it really speaks to the self-identity, right? These dudes are very, very different from the people who are telling you, don’t have sex before marriage, have a family as soon as you can. And while those distinctions are papered over when they’re fighting and at loggerheads against the left in a kind of alliance, they really disagree fundamentally on certain key issues.
  • Emba: One of the things that is unspoken in this clip, but seems very important, is the idea that citizens have to create the citizens to replace them in whatever country they’re in, which sort of negates the idea that immigration could be a possible way to help expand a society or prop up a civilization. This idea that, in fact, immigration is a bad thing and we should be wary of it, is a huge part of the Republican Party’s platform.
  • Right now, we’re seeing men only earn about 74 bachelor’s degrees for every 100 that women earn. Wages for men, especially working-class men, have basically stagnated since the 1970s or even declined — wages for men everywhere except the very top of the economic ladder. And so I think that men now in competition with women generally are feeling a little bit of anxiety — perhaps more than a little bit, I would say — and uncertainty about where they fit in America, both in a social sense and in the economy. That stress was already on the ground and underlying our political landscape.
  • And then, especially around the #MeToo movement in 2018, when the terrible behavior of certain men became really noticeable and women felt compelled to speak out about their own experiences, there was a general aura that masculinity was a bad thing. And a lot of men, I think, felt attacked. They felt that women were not just succeeding but actually holding them back and discriminating against them. In real life, I think this was not necessarily the case. I think that men and women clearly need each other to survive. But the discourse — especially the popular discourse on TV, on podcasts, did seem, I think, offensive to a large group of men and made them resentful.
  • Beauchamp: The other thing I want to add is that trans issues play a really important gluing role in the conservative coalition. We’ve been talking a lot about the distinction between Barstool conservatives and neopatriarchal conservatives. One way that you get people who have such different views on gender and social roles to align is by creating a shared enemy. And trans people are, for different reasons, disfavored by both groups. These two factions, they can both agree that liberals should not be allowed to be deciding what gender means or changing the way the bathrooms work or letting men into women’s sports in their view.
  • Emba: I think you’re actually observing something really real, and I would agree with you there. First of all, we have to think of the material conditions of the last couple of decades. We’ve seen a shift in the economy away from traditional and perhaps masculine-favoring manufacturing jobs and labor jobs to social skills jobs that have tended to favor or at least allow women to enter the marketplace. Post the 1970s, women who were previously barred or kept out of schools and employment entered the work force and entered the educational market and have really succeeded and, in many cases, are outpacing men.
  • Emba: In the past, Republicans have put themselves forward as the party of masculinity. The Democrats, the liberals are sort of the female party. But Tim Walz versus that vision of masculinity is turning that vision on its head. In the same way that Republicans seem to have gone from the party of freedom to the anti-freedom party, they have gone from the party of real masculinity, of men who shoot guns and work in the yard to, I don’t know, World Wrestling Federation performers?
  • So often when you see conservatives talking about a lack of family formation, they’re talking about a specific kind of family that aligns with their ideals. Which is why, even though there’s a lot of talk about how Americans aren’t having enough children, how there aren’t enough babies, how we’re below replacement rate, politicians like JD Vance have still voted against policies that would allow Americans to access I.V.F. and fertility treatments. There is the right kind of family that’s supposed to be reproducing, and that’s the family that they’re worried about.
  • Beauchamp: Apocalypses, imagined or real, tell you a lot about a political movement. And one thing I think that’s really interesting is the shift in the conservative vision of a future apocalypse from being the debt and the deficit, which used to be really the centerpiece of conservative fears about the future. And that’s declined in prominence in conservative movement rhetoric, with a lot of the family formation stuff and declining birthrates becoming a much more central theme.
  • Beauchamp: If you listen to Harris’s speeches — or Tim Walz’s, for that matter — there’s one word that they use over and over again, and that word is freedom. And there’s good reason for that. Freedom is one of those contested American values that used to be the centerpiece of Republican rhetoric
  • if you can convince voters that Republicans are anti-freedom — and Dobbs was really the opening here, Dobbs and election denial, right? They’re going after your freedom to have the kind of family you want and your freedom to vote
  • Those two things end up becoming really, really powerful in making Democrats seem like the live-and-let-live party, the one that wants to embody the American ethos of freedom.
  • Harris is not just saying, vote for me because my policies will give you a better world. What she’s saying is, vote for me because I’m the one who stands up for this essential American and crucially liberal value of freedom
  • If JD Vance wants to be the candidate of post-liberals, Harris is saying, great, I’m going to be the candidate of liberals. I’m going to be the candidate of liberalism. I’m for freedom. And what are you for? You’re for weird attacks on childless cat ladies and vague ideas about a structured society that you don’t even really want to own, because they’re unpopular. And it’s put her on immensely effective rhetorical ground.
  • The Great Replacement Theory is something that the right has mentioned often and that Tucker Carlson mainstreamed on his show — that Democrats and liberals are somehow going to bring in immigrants to replace American citizens who aren’t having enough children, to fill up America by themselves basically, and that this is a bad thing.
  • Democrats seem to have gone or are trying to go from a party of feminized soy boys — as they used to be insulted by Republicans — to, yes, the party of Tim Walz, a dad who wears a camouflage hat. The memes circulating of him online are of a guy from the Midwest who’s straight-talking, loves eating meat and will help you fix your car when it’s on the side of the road. And this is a vision of masculinity that is still very stereotypically masculine. He’s a football coach. He was in the military. But also positive. One might call it a tonic masculinity. He’s male, but he’s helpful. He supports women, but he says he’s not trying to be in their business and legislate how they should use their uteri.
Javier E

Opinion | What's Wrong With Donald Trump? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • We’ve never had good language for talking about the way he thinks and the way in which it is different from how other people think and talk and act. And so we circle it. We imply it. I don’t think this is bias so much as it’s confusion. In order to talk about something, you need the words for it. But for me, something clicked watching him up there, swaying to that music.
  • You may have heard of the big five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. We all fall somewhere on the spectrum of each of them.
  • And to be low on conscientiousness is to be disinhibited. To be very low on conscientiousness is to be very high on disinhibition. And that is Donald Trump.
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  • John Kelly, Trump’s second chief of staff, is known to have bought the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” seeking insight on the man he served. Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s third chief of staff, recommended aides read “A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness.” He thought it would help them understand the way Trump’s strange psychology, maybe even his mental illness, helped make him a powerful and unique leader.
  • The history of pathologizing political leaders we do not like is not an admirable one. So I am not a psychiatrist, and I am saying something simpler and, I think, more neutral here: Trump moves through the world without the behavioral inhibition most of us labor under.
  • every person’s strengths are also their weaknesses. Disinhibition is the engine of Trump’s success. It is a strength. It is what makes him magnetic and compelling on a stage. It is what allows him to say things others would not say, to make arguments they would not make, to try strategies they would not try.
  • The politicians we sense to be inauthentic — it’s often that the software is slower and buggier. You can see the seams
  • One of Trump’s verbal tics is to say, “Many people are saying.” But it’s the opposite. He’s saying what many people want somebody to be saying. He’s saying what people are saying in private but often are not saying in public.
  • You certainly don’t get his politics without his personality. How many people must want to do what Trump has done? How many millionaires and billionaires and celebrities must have thought to themselves, “I’d be a good president. I’m smarter and more charismatic and better on a stage and wiser than these idiots up there”?
  • What Donald Trump has done is remarkable. It is historic. It is unique in the entire history of American politics. To run as an outsider to a political party and capture that political party totally. Break its fundamental consensus. Slander its previous standard-bearers. To then become president, having never held elective office or served in the military, while saying things and doing things that, until you, everybody believed you could not do or say in politics. To achieve something unique, you must yourself be unique. Donald Trump is unique.
  • Politicians are inhibited. Before anything comes out of their mouth, they are running their response through this internal piece of software. Some of them are really good at it. Pete Buttigieg, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama — the software is so fast and efficient as to be almost seamless.
  • Let me state what everybody knows: There are many things politicians believe that they do not say. The norms of politics — the norms of simple politeness — suppress much that people feel. There are vast swaths of political opinion you’re not really supposed to talk about. A lot of people believe that immigrants are bad and dangerous and that we shouldn’t have so many of them in this country. That free trade is ripping this country off and it’s the fault of these corrupt idiots in Washington lining their own pockets. That China isn’t our ally or our partner — it’s our enemy. And that the great threat to America comes from within, that other Americans are disloyal, that they are the enemy and the power of the state should be turned against them.
  • It is Trump’s absence of inhibition that makes him feel, to so many, like not a politician — the fact that he was already the U.S. president notwithstanding. It is why the people who want to be like him — the mini-Trumps, the Ron DeSantises and Blake Masterses and Ted Cruzes — can’t pull it of
  • During his presidency, Trump repeatedly proposed firing Patriot missiles at suspected drug labs in Mexico. He mused about launching nuclear weapons at other countries, and in one very strange case, at a hurricane
  • It is his great strength. It is also his terrible flaw.
  • Trump’s disinhibition is yoked to a malignancy at his core. I do believe he’s a narcissist. If Putin praises him, he will praise Putin. If John McCain mocks him, he will mock John McCain. Trump does not see beyond himself and what he thinks and what he wants and how he’s feeling
  • He does not listen to other people. He does not take correction or direction. Wisdom is the ability to learn from experience, to learn from others. Donald Trump doesn’t really learn
  • He once told a biographer: “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different.”I believe him totally when he says that
  • If Donald Trump is so bad, why were things so good? Why were they at least OK?
  • There is an answer to this question: It’s that as president, Trump was surrounded by inhibitors. In 2020 the political scientist Daniel Drezner published a book titled “The Toddler in Chief.” The core of the book was over 1,000 instances Drezner collected in which Trump is described by those around him in terms befitting an impetuous child.
  • In 2017 his deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh described working with President Trump as “trying to figure out what a child wants.” Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, said — quote — “I’m sick of being a wet nurse for a 71-year-old.” James Mattis, Trump’s first secretary of defense, and John Kelly, later his chief of staff, often described themselves like babysitters; they made a pact to never be overseas at the same tim
  • Miles Taylor, the chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security. In a 2020 interview with ABC, he described the lengths he and others took to shield America — to shield their own staff — from the commander in chief’s whims and rages:
  • Miles Taylor: The president at the time would get into these phone rants with us, the secretary, myself, about Jerry Brown, and how frustrated he was with Jerry Brown and later Gavin Newsom, because they didn’t support him. And he didn’t have a base of supporters in California. So as wildfires were burning down houses in the state, the president basically said to us, “I don’t care. These people haven’t done enough to deserve it. Cut off the money.”
  • Our answer was: We’re not going to do it. Don’t worry. We’ll go back to the president. But then, George, months after, again in January 2019, the president said he wanted to do it. And again, I think subsequently, he tweeted about doing it. Fortunately, it never happened. FEMA didn’t follow through on it because I think because they determined from their lawyers that a tweet wasn’t an official order.
  • The Trump administration was rife with this sort of thing. In 2019 a senior national security official told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “Everyone at this point ignores what the president says and just does their job. The American people should take some measure of confidence in that.”
  • there is something undeniably electric to watch someone unchained from the bundle of inhibitions the rest of us carry around. Watching someone just say it. There is something aspirational about it
  • He mused about the efficacy of untested or dangerous treatments for Covid
  • In 2020, during the protests following George Floyd’s murder, Trump raged at his staff, demanding they turn the full force of the military against the protesters.
  • Esper: He says: “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” And he is suggesting that that’s what we should do, that we should bring in the troops and shoot the protesters.
  • After Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, he refused to admit that loss, perhaps refused to even believe that loss. I’m personally persuaded by the reporting that he’d come to believe very weird theories both of fraud and that he could be reinstated as president.
  • Trump did not care. He was unrestrained by those inhibitions. He tried, in every possible way he could, to overturn the election
  • What is remarkable to me about that answer — which, to be sure, Trump gave just last week at a Univision town hall — is that it doesn’t serve Trump’s own interests. He needs to reassure people about this. That’s the problem with lacking the restraint that most of us hav
  • When JD Vance showed up at the vice-presidential debate as a kinder, gentler, more accommodating version of himself, all that anger and contempt sanded off, he did that for a reason. He inhibited himself to achieve his goals. But Trump has no ability to do the same. That is why he lost the debate with Harris so decisively
  • If you want to see Trump lose the 2024 election, that answer is perfect. If you want to see him win it — which he does, which his staff does — that answer is insane. The man cannot help himself.
  • The best argument you can make about Trump’s first term is that there was a constructive tension between his disinhibition and the constraints of the staff and the bureaucracy and the institutions that surrounded him
  • Yes, some of his ideas were bad, dangerous and unconstitutional. But those mostly didn’t happen: They were stopped by his aides, by the so-called deep state, by the courts, by civil society.
  • And the way he pushed, the way he didn’t constrain himself to what other presidents would have done or said, maybe that led to changes that — at least if you agree with him — were positive. Changes that wouldn’t have happened under another president: tariffs on China, a sharp drop in border crossings, NATO allies spending more on defense.
  • But now the people around Trump have spent four years plotting to dismantle everything that stopped Trump the first time. That’s what Project 2025, and the nearly 20,000 résumés it reportedly vetted, is really all about. That’s what Trump’s inner circle is spending its time and energy doin
  • I’ve heard this from a number of people preparing for a second Trump term. Personnel was a problem in the first. Vetting for loyalty is the answe
  • When, Ross asked, did Vance decide he actually liked Donald Trump?
  • Vance is one of many now who’ve made it their mission to see that Trump’s future orders are carried out, no matter their content
  • Vance has been arguing this for some time. Here he is in 2021, again arguing that the true threat to democracy isn’t Trump trying to overturn elections or Trump doing dangerous things in office but Trump’s will being frustrated by the bureaucracy around him:
  • The thing to see here is that Trump’s supporters want to have it both ways: They point to what didn’t happen in his first term as proof that the same or worse would not happen in his second term. But they themselves are trying to remove everything that stopped Trump’s worst impulses from becoming geopolitical or constitutional crises.
  • we know that aging can make disinhibition worse. The August 2020 edition of the journal Psychology and Aging was entirely devoted to research on how the ability to control our behavior appears, in many studies, to decline as we get older
  • It is hard not to think of that research when I read that Trump’s rallies have stretched to an average of 82 minutes, up from about 45 minutes in 2016. Trump’s ability to ramble on a stage is often used as evidence of his continued vigor. I think it’s the opposite. I think his inability to stop rambling on a stage is evidence that what little capacity he once had to control himself is weakening
  • What has changed even more than Trump are the people and institutions around him. The leader of the House Republicans is Mike Johnson, not Paul Ryan. Mitch McConnell is stepping down from Senate leadership. And while I do not consider McConnell a profile in courage, his successor will be more in need of Trump’s patronage. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, for all their flaws, are out, while Don Jr. and Lara Trump are in. JD Vance wormed his way onto the ticket by promising to do what Mike Pence would not. Elon Musk is doing everything in his power to buy influence, centrality even, in another Trump administration. The Supreme Court has given Trump immunity from prosecution for official presidential actions. Republicans have spent four years plotting to take control of the administrative state — to stock it with loyalists who would never, ever do anything to impede Trump — and turn the entire machinery of the government to Trump’s whims.
  • Donald Trump is not cognitively fit to be president. The presidency is a position that requires an occupant able to act strategically and carefully.
  • for years, his supporters have said: Don’t watch the man. Don’t listen to what he says. Look at the results. But those results reflected the power and ability of others to check Trump, to inhibit him when he could not inhibit himself. It is not just the man who is now unfit; it is the people and institutions that surround him.
  • Here is one difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The people who work most closely with Joe Biden, his top staff, have always said he is up to the job of the presidency. Fit cognitively. Fit morally. The people who worked most closely with Donald Trump, many of his cabinet secretaries, many of them now say he is not.
  • But to admit the obvious is to be excommunicated, to go from one of Trump’s amazing hires — he only brings on the best people — to one of his deranged enemies, a loser, someone he fired. And so he is now surrounded by yes men and enablers, by opportunists and scam artists, by ideologues and foot soldiers.
  • What we saw on that stage in Pennsylvania, as Trump D.J.’d, was not Donald Trump frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. It was the people around him frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. He knew exactly where he was. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. But there was no one there, or no one left, who could stop him.
Javier E

Opinion | Why Trump Can't Shake Project 2025 - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Project 2025 — and much else like it that has gotten less press — is more than a compendium of policy proposals: It is an effort to build a deep state of Trump’s own.
  • Veterans of Trump’s administration believe personnel was their biggest problem. They could not act ambitiously or swiftly enough because they were at constant war with the government they, in theory, controlled.
  • some of it reflected a federal bureaucracy that resisted Trump and the people he appointed.
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  • This is the problem groups like Project 2025 set out to solve. Behind the policy playbook sits a database of around 20,000 applicants ready to be part of the next Trump administration. And that database is still growing.
  • To do that, the next Trump administration must first clear out or conquer the federal government that currently exists. Project 2025 is obsessed with this task and many of its 900-some pages are dedicated to plans and theories for how this might be done.
  • Victory will require the “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”
  • This, I would say, is the unifying theory of a second Trump term. Purge or break the federal bureaucracy. Fill it with vetted loyalists. Then use its power to pass policy, yes, but also to break or conquer the other institutions in American life that so vex Trump and his supporters
  • The Heritage Foundation was one of these groups and Project 2025 their signature effort. In 2021, Roberts took over Heritage and retooled it into an organization dedicated to “institutionalizing Trumpism.” He sought centrality through both scale and publicity: Project 2025 was a vast undertaking, and Roberts promoted it relentlessly
  • The next Trump administration will do far more than the Trump campaign is describing, and Project 2025 — which was produced with input from more than 100 conservative organizations that see themselves as part of the MAGA-governing coalition — filled the void that Trump himself has left. He did not tell us what he was going to do, so Project 2025 did.
  • The second is that Trump’s 2024 campaign differs from his 2016 campaign in a fundamental way. In 2016, Trump ran as the destroyer of the existing Republican coalition. He won by humiliating the politicians who had held power before him, but he did not, during that campaign, attempt to replace them
  • so Trump presided over a kind of uneasy coalition government with the Republican Party of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. His major domestic policy projects reflected that coalition: Repeal of Obamacare was what united congressional Republicans in 2016, so that’s what the Trump administration attempted in 2017. Cutting corporate taxes is what got Speaker Ryan out of bed in the morning, so that is what the Trump administration turned to next.
  • But now Trump is the leader of the Republican coalition. He cannot credibly divorce himself from the groups working day and night to secure his victory and staff his presidency. There is no competing power center that the media or the public can assume will do the governing that so bores Trump
  • But Trump is not temperamentally suited to the work of managing a coalition and he has not elevated a trusted ideological consigliere to do it for him. He is a diffident, distracted ruler, and the result is dozens of groups competing for his favor and unsure of how to win it
  • “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, which oversaw Project 2025, said in July.
  • “The problem, which I had always suspected, was that very few plans survive contact with Donald Trump,” said Matthew Continetti, the author of “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism.” “He always wants to maintain maximum flexibility and maximum maneuverability in order to improve his position at any given moment. So he was not just going to turn around and say, yes, Project 2025 is exactly what my program will be, and it’s exactly who I plan to have in my administration.”
  • The MAGA coalition — particularly its elected officials and Washington staffer class — has grown beyond Trump. It has more views on more issues than he does. It has absorbed more specific and unusual ideologies than he ha
  • t is more hostile to abortion than he is, or than he wants to appear to be. It is more committed to deregulating health insurance than he is, or than he wants to appear to be. There is a great gap between the MAGA leader who slept with a porn star and the factions in the MAGA movement that want to outlaw pornography, as Roberts proposed on Project 2025’s first page.
  • Trumpism is whatever Trump says it is, but MAGA is whatever his movement becomes. This is why JD Vance has been a political liability to Trump’s campaign: Vance represents MAGA as it has evolved — esoterically ideological, deeply resentful, terminally online — unleavened by Trump’s instincts for showmanship and the winds of public sentiment.
  • Trump is where MAGA started, but Vance and Roberts is where it is going.
  • Trump’s problem in the 2024 election is that he can no longer run as if he is a man alone.
  • A Trump administration would be full of people like Vance pursuing the agendas they believe in. In the Talento presentation I mentioned, she describes the Biden administration as “a federal leviathan that is killing our babies” and argues that “every cabinet secretary who comes into a new, hopefully Republican administration will have a pro-life agenda that they must enact.” This is not Trump’s election-year message but it would be his administration’s reality.
  • Another Trump administration would be filled with people pursuing agendas like this at every level, and properly so: That is what coalitions do when they win elections.
  • He is denying a reality of his second term that everyone else can plainly see. Project 2025 is not a perfect guide to that second term, but it the closest thing we have to one. It was all so much easier when the deep state was something Trump could complain about, rather than something he had to manage and own.
Javier E

From the Storm to the Stormtroopers - by Timothy Snyder - 0 views

  • And the day after tomorrow there will be no democracy and no country, just a politics of impotence and a fascist catastrophe.
  • Today, our American fascists blame the hurricanes on the meteorologists and disrupt the government response.  Tomorrow they will blame climate change on the climate scientists and deport their enemies of choice.
  • Trump and Vance are teaching us that the government cannot do anything except turn us against one another.  They do so by spreading disinformation about critical matters like hurricanes, so that people despise and disrupt the government, the only institution that can help.  This is impotence politics, and it leads to fascism. 
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  • In impotence politics, nothing is true except our emotions, and so we cannot see the sources of problems, and do not really expect to solve them.
  • Once we accept that government is useless, we respond to crisis by turning against one another.  Politics then begins not from improving life together but by choosing an enemy within. 
  • This is very comfortable for the impotence politicians, who rule not by addressing problems but by defining enemies. 
  • When there is a real problem, they will define enemies.
  • When there is not a real problem, as with the domestic animals of Springfield, Ohio, they will also define enemies.  From the pinnacle of politics they use their talents to turn us against one another
  • In a Trump-Vance impotence regime, America shifts then to fascism, in which it is no longer the law that matters, but the people, but only the people who are "the real people," the Volk
  • Politics is no longer government acting for them, but rather them acting for their rulers, following a script of us-and-them.  The political energy that was once resolved as policy as now spread as enmity.
  • The politics of impotence favors fascism in another way.  When we no longer believe in law and democracy, we still want to get things done, at least for ourselves.  And so we will have to find some way to appeal to the Leader personally: by paying a bribe to someone, by doing a special favor. 
  • Trump and Vance will suppress the science and blame the scientists.  The plan to fire all the meteorologists is already there. Project 2025 will eliminate the National Weather Service and make climate change a taboo subject inside the federal government.  This direct courting of death is itself quite fascist.
  • as climate change worsens, the fascism will worsen too.  This is the politics of catastrophe, which is where we are heading next.  When we face a truly existential problem, and when our politics is not about policy but about enmity, we will blame the victims. 
  • This has already started.  Climate change affects people to the south of the United States first
  • Our choice to warm the climate guarantees more attempted migration.  And when it comes, the politicians of impotence will just blame the migrants.  Their answer to everything will be deportation. 
  • And the attempt to deport millions of people will of course turn Americans against one another
  • The only way to organize such a mass deportation will be to to call on citizens to denounce their neighbors, and to deputize tens of thousands of local authorities for the manhunt.  And so we move from the storm to the stormtroopers.
  • None of this is speculative.  It is the plain reading of the Trump-Vance campaign
  • And none of this is new.  Hitler too denied the science that would have solved the basic problems of survival; Hitler too promoted ecological crisis as a reason for race war; Hitler too started from mass deportations of migrants (largely carried out by a non-governmental actor deputized for the purpose, the SS). 
  • The logic of fascism is known to us from history.  And if we don't avert our eyes, we see how that logic can play out in the future.
  • History can help us to see, but history will not do the work for us. We need to make history ourselves, in the name of a better future
Javier E

J. D. Vance and the Collapse of Dignity - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Americans once expected politicians to carry themselves with a seriousness that indicated their ability and willingness to tackle problems, whether poverty or war, that were too difficult for the rest of us. We elected such people not because we wanted them to be like us but because we hoped that they were better than us: smarter, tougher, and capable of being leaders and role models.
  • ven some of the most flawed people we elevated to high office at least pretended to be better people, and thus were capable of inspiring us to be a better nation.
  • Today, we no longer expect or even want our politicians to be better than we are.
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  • The new American right, however, has blown past the relatively innocuous populism of the past 40 years and added a fetid cynicism about almost everything related to public life.
  • Not only are the MAGA Republicans seemingly repelled by the idea of voting for someone better than they are; they support candidates who are often manifestly worse people than the average citizen, so that they may slather their fears about their own shortcomings and prejudices under a sludgy and undifferentiated hatred about almost everyone in public office.
  • These populists not only look past the sins of their candidates but also defend and even celebrate them
  • The same Republicans who claim to venerate the Founders and the Constitution have intentionally turned our politics into a scuzzy burlesque.
  • consider how many people cheer on unhinged cranks such as Marjorie Taylor Greene or allow themselves to be courted by smarmy opportunists such as Vance and Ted Cruz.
  • This new populism, centered in the modern Republican Party, has no recognizable policy content beyond the thrill of cruelty and a juvenile boorishness meant largely to enrage others.
  • The GOP’s goals now boil down to power for its elected royalty and cheap coliseum pleasures for its rank and file.
  • Republicans, therefore, are forced to lower their—and our—standards for admission to public office, because the destruction of dignity is the only way they can find the candidates who will do what decent men and women will not, including abasing themselves to Donald Trump.
  • Let us leave aside the cult around Trump, which has now reached such levels of weirdness that the specter of Jim Jones is probably pacing about the netherworld in awe.
  • I’m an adult. I get it. Our elected officials aren’t saints, and only rarely are they heroes. But must they now be a cavalcade of clowns and charlatans, joyously parading their embrace of vice and their rejection of virtue? The Republican Party seems to think so.
lilyrashkind

Why the Children of Immigrants Get Ahead | Time - 0 views

  • Abramitzky is a Professor of Economics and the Senior Associate Dean for the Social Sciences at Stanford University. Boustan is a Professor of Economics at Princeton University, where she also serves at the Director of Industrial Relations Section. Their new book is Streets of Gold: America's Untold of Immigrant Success
  • In paging through the profiles, we couldn’t help noticing one group of Americans who defies this trend: the children of immigrants. Sonya Poe was born in a suburb of Dallas, Texas to parents who immigrated from Mexico. “My dad worked for a hotel,” Sonya recalled. “Their goal for us was always: Go to school, go to college, so that you can get a job that doesn’t require you to work late at night, so that you can choose what you get to do and take care of your family. We’re fortunate to be able to do that.”
  • One pattern that is particularly striking in the data is that the children of immigrants raised in households earning below the median income make substantial progress by the time they reach adulthood, both for the Ellis Island generation a century ago and for immigrants today. The children of first-generation immigrants growing up close to the bottom of the income distribution (say, at the 25th percentile) are more likely to reach the middle of the income distribution than are children of similarly poor U.S.-born parents.
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  • The second notable takeaway is that even children of parents from very poor countries like Nigeria and Laos outperform the children of the U.S.-born raised in similar households. The children of immigrants from Central American countries—countries like Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua that are often demonized for contributing to the “crisis” at the southern border—move up faster than the children of the U.S.-born, landing in the middle of the pack (right next to children of immigrants from Canada).
  • To conduct our analysis, we needed data that links children to parents. For the historical data, we used historical census records to link sons living in their childhood homes to census data collected 30 years later when these young men had jobs of their own.
  • Our modern data is based on federal income tax records instead. The tax records allow researchers to link children to their parents as tax dependents, and then observe these children in the tax data as adults.
  • The first striking takeaway is that, as a group, children of immigrants achieve more upward mobility than the children of U.S.-born fathers. We focus on the children of white U.S.-born fathers because the children of Black fathers tend to have lower rates of upward mobility. So, the mobility advantage that we observe for the children of immigrants would be even larger if we compared this group to the full population.
  • Children of immigrants from Mexico and the Dominican Republic today are just as likely to move up from their parents’ circumstances as were children of poor Swedes and Finns a hundred years ago.
  • Today, we might not be that surprised to learn that the children of past European immigrants succeeded. We are used to seeing the descendants of poor European immigrants rise to become members of the business and cultural elite. Many prominent leaders, including politicians like President Biden, regularly emphasize pride in their Irish or Italian heritage. But, at the time, these groups were considered the poorest of the poor. In their flight from famine, Irish immigrants are not too dissimilar from immigrants who flee hurricanes, earthquakes, and violent uprisings today.
  • One question that arises with our work is: what about children who arrive without papers? Undocumented children face more barriers to mobility than other children of immigrants. Fortunately, this group is relatively small even in recent years: only 1.5 million (or five percent) of the 32 million children of immigrant parents are undocumented today. Indeed, this number is small because many children of undocumented immigrants are born in the U.S. and thus are granted citizenship at birth.
  • What enables the children of immigrants to escape poor circumstances and move up the economic ladder? The answer we hear most often is that immigrants have a better work ethic than the US-born and that immigrant parents put more emphasis on education.
  • U.S.-born parents who were raised down the block, or in the same town. This pattern implies that the primary difference between immigrant families and the families of the U.S.-born is in where they choose to live.
  • Ironically, J.D. Vance (who is now running for Senate in Ohio on an anti-immigration platform) poses this question in his bestseller Hillbilly Elegy,aboutgrowing up in Middletown, Ohio, only 45 minutes from the border with Kentucky, the state where his family had lived for generations. For Vance, moving up the ladder meant moving out of his childhood community, a step that many Americans are unwilling to take. He went on to enlist in the Marines, and then to Ohio State and Yale Law School—“Though we sing the praises of social mobility,” he writes, “it has its downsides. The term necessarily implies a sort of movement—to a theoretically better life, yes, but also away from something.”
  • Adapted from Abramitzky and Boustan’s new book Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success
Javier E

What Does Peter Thiel Want? - Persuasion - 0 views

  • Of the many wealthy donors working to shape the future of the Republican Party, none has inspired greater fascination, confusion, and anxiety than billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. 
  • Thiel’s current outlook may well make him a danger to American democracy. But assessing the precise nature of that threat requires coming to terms with his ultimate aims—which have little to do with politics at all. 
  • Thiel is, first and foremost, a dynamist—someone who cares above all about fostering innovation, exploration, growth, and discovery.
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  • It certainly informed his libertarianism, which inclined in the direction of an Ayn Rand-inspired valorization of entrepreneurial superman-geniuses whose great acts of capitalistic creativity benefit all of mankind. Thiel also tended to follow Rand in viewing the masses as moochers who empower Big Government to crush these superman-geniuses.
  • Thiel became something of an opportunistic populist inclined to view liberal elites and institutions as posing the greatest obstacle to building an economy and culture of dynamistic creativity—and eager to mobilize the anger and resentment of “the people” as a wrecking ball to knock them down. 
  • the failure of the Trump administration to break more decisively from the political status quo left Thiel uninterested in playing a big role in the 2020 election cycle.
  • Does Thiel personally believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump? I doubt it. It’s far more likely he supports the disruptive potential of encouraging election-denying candidates to run and helping them to win.
  • Thiel is moved to indignation by the fact that since 1958 no commercial aircraft (besides the long-decommissioned Concorde) has been developed that can fly faster than 977 kilometers per hou
  • Thiel and others point out that when we lift our gaze from our phones and related consumer products to the wider vistas of human endeavor—breakthroughs in medicine, the development of new energy sources, advances in the speed and ease of transportation, and the exploration of space—progress has indeed slowed to a crawl.
  • the present looks and feels pretty much the same as 1969, only “with faster computers and uglier cars.” 
  • Thiel’s approach to the problem is distinctive in that he sees the shortfall as evidence of a deeper and more profound moral, aesthetic, and even theological failure. Human beings are capable of great creativity and invention, and we once aspired to achieve it in every realm. But now that aspiration has been smothered by layer upon layer of regulation and risk-aversion. “Legal sclerosis,” Thiel claimed in that same book review, “is likely a bigger obstacle to the adoption of flying cars than any engineering problem.”
  • Progress in science and technology isn’t innate to human beings, Thiel believes. It’s an expression of a specific cultural or civilizational impulse that has its roots in Christianity and reached a high point during the Victorian era of Western imperialism
  • As Thiel put it last summer in a wide-ranging interview with the British website UnHerd, the Christian world “felt very expansive, both in terms of the literal empire and also in terms of the progress of knowledge, of science, of technology, and somehow that was naturally consonant with a certain Christian eschatology—a Christian vision of history.”
  • In Thiel’s view, recapturing civilizational greatness through scientific and technological achievement requires fostering a revival of a kind of Christian Prometheanism (a monotheistic variation on the rebellious creativity and innovation pursued by the demigod Prometheus in ancient Greek mythology)
  • Against those who portray modern scientific and technological progress as a rebellion against medieval Christianity, Thiel insists it is Christianity that encourages a metaphysical optimism about transforming and perfecting the world, with the ultimate goal of turning it into “a place where no accidents can happen” and the achievement of “personal immortality” becomes possible
  • All that’s required to reach this transhuman end is that we “remain open to an eschatological frame in which God works through us in building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth—in which the kingdom of heaven is both a future reality and something partially achievable in the present.” 
  • Thiel aims to undermine the progressive liberalism that dominates the mainstream media, the federal bureaucracy, the Justice Department, and the commanding heights of culture (in universities, think tanks, and other nonprofits).
  • JD Vance is quoted on the subject of what this political disruption might look like during a Trump presidential restoration in 2025. Vance suggests that Trump should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts stop [him], stand before the country, and say, ‘the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
  • Another Thiel friend and confidante discussed at length in Vanity Fair, neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin, takes the idea of disrupting the liberal order even further, suggesting various ways a future right-wing president (Trump or someone else) could shake things up, shredding the smothering blanket of liberal moralism, conformity, rules, and regulations, thereby encouraging the creation of something approaching a scientific-technological wild west, where innovation and experimentation rule the day. Yarvin’s preferred path to tearing down what he calls the liberal “Cathedral,” laid out in detail on a two-hour Claremont Institute podcast from May 2021, involves a Trump-like figure seizing dictatorial power in part by using a specially designed phone app to direct throngs of staunch supporters (Jan. 6-style) to overpower law enforcement at key locations around the nation’s capital.  
  • this isn’t just an example of guilt-by-association. These are members of Thiel’s inner circle, speaking publicly about ways of achieving shared goals. Thiel funded Vance’s Senate campaign to the tune of at least $15 million. Is it likely the candidate veered into right-wing radicalism with a Vanity Fair reporter in defiance of his campaign’s most crucial donor?
  • As for Yarvin, Thiel continued to back his tech start up (Urbit) after it became widely known he was the pseudonymous author behind the far-right blog “Unqualified Reservations,” and as others have shown, the political thinking of the two men has long overlapped in numerous other ways. 
  • He’s deploying his considerable resources to empower as many people and groups as he can, first, to win elections by leveraging popular disgust at corrupt institutions—and second, to use the power they acquire to dismantle or even topple those institutions, hopefully allowing a revived culture of Christian scientific-technological dynamism to arise from out of the ruins.  
  • Far more than most big political donors, Thiel appears to care only about the extra-political goal of his spending. How we get to a world of greater dynamism—whether it will merely require selective acts of troublemaking disruption, or whether, instead, it will ultimately involve smashing the political order of the United States to bits—doesn’t really concern him. Democratic politics itself—the effort of people with competing interests and clashing outlooks to share rule for the sake of stability and common flourishing—almost seems like an irritant and an afterthought to Peter Thiel.
  • What we do have is the opportunity to enlighten ourselves about what these would-be Masters of the Universe hope to accomplish—and to organize politically to prevent them from making a complete mess of things in the process.
Javier E

Opinion | Are We on the Cusp of a New Political Order? - The New York Times - 1 views

  • Gary Gerstle: A political order is a way of thinking differently about political time in America. We focus so much on two-, four- and six-year election cycles. A political order is something that lasts beyond particular elections, that refers to the ability of one political party to arrange a constellation of policies, constituencies, think tanks, candidates, individuals who come to dominate politics for extended periods of time. And their dominance becomes so strong that the opposition party feels compelled — if they still want to remain real players in American politics — it compels them to acquiesce and to come aboard the other political party’s platform.
  • They usually last 30 or 40 years. Economic crisis is usually involved in the emergence of a new order and the breakup of the old. Every political order also has not only an ideology but a vision of a good life in America.
  • What constitutes a good life? Because that becomes really important in terms of selling the virtues of that political order to a mass base, which is something that has to be won and sustained in American politics in order for a political order to exist and thrive.
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  • It was a revolutionary power that wanted to end capitalism everywhere, not just in the Soviet Union but all over Asia and Africa, North America, South America. They were gaining a lot of support in the decolonizing societies of Africa and Asia. America was not confident in the ability of its economy to have a permanent recovery from the Great Depression.
  • When I teach young people today, it’s hard for them to grasp the magnitude and the seriousness of the Cold War and how it shaped every aspect of American life. And the Soviet Union represented an existential threat to the United States.
  • What coheres to the New Deal is that the Republicans eventually submit to it. And that happens when Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower beats Senator Robert A. Taft. So tell me a bit about the counterfactual there that you think almost happened. What led to Taft losing prominence in the Republican Party, and what might have happened if he hadn’t?
  • he was slow to get on the bandwagon in terms of the threat of China, the threat of Communist expansion, and that opened up an opportunity for another candidate, by the name of Dwight D. Eisenhower, to enter the presidential race in 1952 and to present a very different vision.
  • He was a Republican in a classical sense — small central government, devolved power to the states, suspicious of foreign entanglements — believing that America was protected by the two vast oceans and thus did not need a strong standing army, did not have to be involved in world affairs. And he was opposed to the New Deal.
  • He thought it was a form of tyranny. It was going to lead to collectivism, Soviet style. And he was poised in the 1940s to roll back the New Deal, and he was looking forward to the postwar period after the war emergency had passed. Of course, the war emergency would require a very strong state to mobilize armed forces, to mobilize the economy for the sake of fighting a world war.
  • They needed foreign markets. America wasn’t sure whether it would have them. And the capitalist class in America was scared to death by the Communist threat, and it had to be met everywhere, and America mobilizes for the Cold War to contain Communism everywhere where it appeared. And that required a standing army in quasi-peacetime of a sort that America had never experienced before, and Taft was profoundly uncomfortable with this.
  • my counterfactual is that, absent the Cold War, the New Deal, which we now regard as such a juggernaut, would be seen as a momentary blip like so many other progressive moments in American politics. And we would see it as a blip and not for what it became, which was a political order that dominated politics for 30 years.
  • So there’s been this conventional story of the New Deal era, which is that the fear of Communism, the fear of being painted as soft on Communism or soft on socialism, leads progressives to trim their sails, moderates the sort of left flank of New Dealism. You argue that that story misses what’s happening on the right.
  • the imperative of fighting the Communists caused Republicans to make even larger concessions than the Democrats did.” What were those concessions?
  • Well, the biggest concession was agreeing to an extraordinary system of progressive taxation.
  • The highest marginal tax rate in the 1940s during World War II reached 91 percent, a level that is inconceivable in America of the 21st century. Eisenhower wins the election in 1952. He has both houses of Congress. And quite extraordinarily, Eisenhower maintains the 91 percent taxation rate
  • I think what mattered to him was the Cold War. The Cold War had to be fought on two fronts: It had to be fought militarily — international containment of Communism — and that required enormous expenditures on national defense, which meant not simply a conventional army but the nuclear arms race.
  • Eisenhower understood that in order to win the ideological struggle of the Cold War — which was not simply an American-Soviet struggle, but it was a global struggle to convince all the peoples of what was then called the Third World to come with the capitalist way, to come with the American way. In order for that to happen, America had to demonstrate that it could give its ordinary citizens a good life.
  • America had to prove that it had the better system, and that meant you could not return to unrestrained American capitalism — you had to regulate it in the public interest.
  • And the other aspect of that, which he appreciated, was that in the 1950s, it was not clear whether the Soviet Union or the United States could provide a better life for its average citizen. The Soviet Union was still doing quite well in the 1950s.
  • And that meant taking money from the rich and redistributing it, narrowing the inequality between rich and poor. It meant supporting powerful labor movement and not trying to roll back the Wagner Act, which the labor movement regarded as its Magna Carta, a very strong piece of federal legislation that gave it unambiguous rights to organize and obligated employers to bargain collectively with them.
  • He felt that this had to be the way that America went. Maintenance of Social Security — really all the key New Deal reforms — he ended up maintaining because he thought this would be a critically important instrument for convincing not just ordinary Americans but people around the world that this would prove the superiority of the American way.
  • That is why he acquiesced to the New Deal order.
  • It’s a pervasive recognition among America’s business class. You say, “The fear of Communism made possible the class compromise between capital and labor that underwrote the New Deal order.”
  • And you say it wasn’t just here; this was also true in many of the social democracies in Europe after World War II. Tell me a bit about that class compromise and the role the Cold War played in it.
  • It is often said that socialism was weaker in America than it was elsewhere. And in many respects, that has been true.
  • The corollary of that is that the American business class historically has been bigger, more powerful, more unencumbered than the business classes of other nations, especially in Western Europe among America’s industrial rivals. There was no shortage of labor protest in America, but rarely could labor achieve what it wanted to achieve because the resistance was extraordinary, the resistance was legal, it was extralegal.
  • The national security argument is crucial to getting large segments of the Republican Party on board. For them, the greatest threat, both internationally and domestically, was the Communist threat. And thus, they were willing to extend themselves beyond a point where they otherwise would have gone
  • I argue that it was the fear of the Soviet Union. And what did the fear of the Soviet Union represent? The expropriation of all corporate capital in the world. That was the Communist dream. And that was deeply felt. And it was felt not simply in a global setting. It was felt within the United States itself,
  • The history of industrial relations in America was very violent. The business class in America had a reputation of being very powerful and aggressive and unwilling to share its power with its antagonists. So what was it that got them to share that power?
  • it’s really remarkable to look at how closely the R. and D. state was designed and sold, in terms of its ability to keep America ahead for national defense. It has its roots in World War II, and it continues building much off that rhetoric.
  • so there’s this interesting way, I think we think of the New Deal in terms of Social Security. We think of it in terms of some of these individual programs. But it is this thoroughgoing expansion of the government into all kinds of areas of American life. And the thing that allows the Republican Party to get on board with a lot of that is this idea that if you don’t do that, well, the Soviets are going to do it
  • And the business class felt that it was in its interests to compromise with organized labor in a way that it had never done before. That was the grand compromise. It was symbolized in a treaty in Detroit between the three automobile makers, then among the biggest corporations in America, and the United Auto Workers — the Treaty of Detroit — purchasing labor peace by granting unions, good wages, good conditions, good pensions, good health care. Absent the threat of Communism, I think that grand compromise either would not have been arrived at or it would have been scuttled much sooner than it was.
  • they’re going to have the highways, or they’re going to have the technological or scientific superiority, they’re going to make it to the moon, etc., and then America is going to be left behind.
  • The vast education bills that are going to propel the tremendous growth of American universities in the 1960s and 1970s — which you mentioned about R. and D. — has a similar propulsion
  • the scale of this would not have reached the point that it did without getting a lot of Republicans on board. And the critical argument for them was national security, and a critical event was Sputnik, when Soviet Union shocks the United States by putting into orbit a satellite before the United States had done it.
  • that is a shocking moment: Oh, my God, America is falling behind. We must bend every muscle to beating the Soviet Union in every way, and that requires tremendous investments because of satellite technology and R. and D., and also that becomes the foundation of what is going to become the I.T. industry and the I.T. revolution — also a product of the Cold War.
  • How does that order end?
  • There are three factors that pull this order apart. The first is race, the second is Vietnam, and the third is the major economic recession of the 1970s.
  • Every political order has tensions within it in the United States. And the great contradiction in the New Deal Party of Franklin Roosevelt was the treatment of African Americans. In order to have a new political economy of a big state managing private capital in the public interest, Roosevelt had to get the South on board, and the South meant the white South.
  • And the entire promise of Western Europe prosperity and American university had been premised on the flow of unending supplies of very cheap Middle Eastern oil — most of them controlled by U.S. and British oil companies. And Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing nations in the 1970s say: No, these are our resources. We will determine how much is drawn out of the ground and the prices that they will be charged.
  • That was then complicated by Vietnam, a vastly unpopular war — inaugurated and presided over by Democratic presidents who were perceived by their own constituents to not be telling the truth about this awful quagmire.
  • It also inaugurated trade-offs between funding a war and funding Johnson’s beloved Great Society. Inflation began to take off.
  • the third element was profound changes in the international political economy. One of the reasons why America was able to enter its grand compromise between capital and labor and pay labor very high wages was that America had no serious industrial competition in the world from the ’40s to the ’60s.
  • Most of the industrialized world had been destroyed. The U.S. is actively helping the recovery of Western European economies, Japan, promoting development in Southeast Asia, and in the 1970s, these economies begin to challenge American supremacy economically. The symbol of that is the rise of Japanese car manufacturers
  • Roosevelt assented to that. But this was also a time, especially in the 1940s, when African Americans were migrating in huge numbers to the North, and they were becoming a constituency in the Democratic Party. This was the first point of crisis, and the Democratic Party found itself unable to contain the racial conflicts that exploded in the 1960s.
  • The quadrupling of oil prices leads to a profound economic crisis, along with competition from European nations against the United States. And this plunges the United States into a very unexpected and profound — and long — economic crisis known as stagflation. Inflation and unemployment are going up at the same time
  • None of the textbooks say this should be happening. The tools are no longer working. And it’s in this moment of crisis, the Democratic Party — this is the third strike against it — opens up an opportunity for alternative politics, an alternative party, an alternative plan for American political economy.
  • that sort of leaves out something that is happening among Democrats at this time. There’s a movement inside of liberalism. There’s the New Deal Democratic order, but you develop this New Left, and there is a movement of liberals against big government — young liberals for reasons of self-expression, for reasons of civil rights, for reasons of this feeling that they’re being fed into a bureaucracy and giant soulless organizations and eventually into the meat grinder of Vietnam
  • older liberals who are angry about the sort of reckless growth and the poisoning of streams and the building of highways through their communities and the sort of ticky-tacky rise of these suburbs. And this predates Reagan
  • Yes, the New Left erupts on university campuses in the 1960s, and the two primary issues in the beginning are race and Vietnam. But they also quite quickly develop a critique of the established order.
  • What was called at the time the system
  • what was the system? The system was large American corporations who were no longer under control. And one reason they were no longer under control is they were being aided and abetted by a large federal state that was supposed to manage them in the public interest
  • the system was meant to identify not just the corporations who were doing ill in America, but it was meant to identify a federal state that was birthed in the optimism of the New Deal and had been corrupted. So you have this fissure within the Democratic Party itself.
  • The other element of this is this profound search for personal freedom and autonomy that was intensely felt by members of the New Left.
  • The computers were these enormous machines, mainframes, and they were seen as stultifying to human creativity. The personal computer movement was born on — as part of the New Left. Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand imagined a personal computer that would be free of the IBM mainframe, free of big corporations, big corporate power — that it would be the authentic voice of only every individual who would be using that machine.
  • It was a profound expression of a desire for personal autonomy, individuality, expressiveness — unconstrained by larger structures. This cry, or cri de coeur, came from the left. It was a very powerful part of the New Lef
  • ne can see how it might suit the purposes of a rising neoliberal order because the rising neoliberal order was also intent on deregulating, freeing individuals from the grip of large institutions and allowing them to go their own way.
  • Neoliberals believe that the best economic program is one that frees capitalism from its shackles, that allows people to truck, barter and exchange goods, that gets the government out of economic life. And the only role for government is to ensure that markets can function freely and robustly. So it runs opposite to the New Deal. If the core principle of the New Deal was: Capitalism left to its own devices would destroy itself. The core principle of neoliberalism: Remove the shackles from capitalism. That will bring us the most productive and freest world we can imagine.
  • I have a shorthand for describing the neoliberal world that was envisioned by neoliberal thinkers and brought by policymakers into existence. It’s what I sometimes call the four freedoms of neoliberalism: freedom of movement, people; freedom of goods to move across national boundaries; the free flow of information; and the free flow of capital across all boundaries.
  • In a perfect neoliberal world, people, goods, information and capital are moving freely without constraint. If we can imagine a perfect world that The Wall Street Journal wants, this would be pretty close to it.
  • I do not want to suggest for a moment that the New Left intentionally created neoliberalism. But it turned out that the cries of freedom, personal freedom, personal autonomy that were emanating from them turned out to be very conducive to the economic philosophy of neoliberalism.
  • Jimmy Carter is an heir to suspicion of excessive federal power. But I also think he’s grasping at this moment a point of transition in the American economy and a sense that government policy as set forth in the New Deal was not working as well as it should have been. I think it mattered that he was an engineer and he was doing a lot of cost-benefit analysis: What kind of yield are we getting for the bucks that we’re investing?
  • so he’s open to this fertile moment of dissent. He’s channeling new thinkers and imagining a different Democratic Party that you are correct in saying precedes Clinton by 20 years. And the key figure in this movement is a man by the name of Ralph Nader.
  • I think as I evaluate the Carter presidency, I see a man really caught in the throes of a moment of transition, able to glimpse what is coming but unable to master what is coming
  • what defines his presidency, for me, is uncertainty, vacillation and, thus, failure. He’s a classical transitional figure, more controlled by than in charge of the moment.
  • Nader is a man of the left, but he doesn’t fit in the old left or the New Left.
  • We might call him a man of the consumer left. For him, the key figure in American society was the consumer, and he wanted to champion the consumer. And his contributions — in terms of automobile safety, occupational safety, food safety — were immens
  • But he also executed a profound shift in ideology, and I’m not even sure how aware he was of the consequences of what he was generating. Because in the process of making the consumer sovereign, he deflected attention, I would say, from what was and what remains the core relationship in a capitalist economy, and that is in the realm of production and the relations between employers and employees
  • And he was reluctant, in some respects, to challenge corporate power if corporate power was serving the consumer in a good way. He anticipates, in some respects, a profound shift in antitrust policy, and the key figure in this is going to be Robert Bork in the 1980s and 1990s.
  • It had been an article of faith in American history that no corporation should be allowed to get too large, because they would inevitably exercise power in an undemocratic fashion. So antitrust meant breaking up big corporations. Under Robert Bork, the question changed. Big corporate power was OK as long as it served the consumer with cheap goods.
  • he and his supporters and his organizations deserve a lot of credit for holding the government accountable and making vast improvements in a whole host of areas — regulating the environment and other matters, regulating food — and compelling government to do the service that it does.
  • But it also distracts from understanding part of that which powers the rise of large corporations and gives them the ability to control government and capture regulatory agencies. And I think the results of his attacks on government have been ambivalent, in terms of their consequences: in some respects really accelerating the process of delivering goods to the American people and American consumers that they want but, on the other hand, contributing to an atmosphere of thinking the government can’t really do much that’s right.
  • As you move toward Reagan, certainly part of Ronald Reagan’s appeal is his anti-Communism.So how do you describe the role of the Soviet Union in this period of political time?
  • The collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 is one of the most stunning events, I think, of the 20th century and arguably much longer.
  • What were its consequences? First, it opened up the whole globe to capitalist penetration, to a degree that had not been available to capitalism since prior to World War I. And this generates a tremendous amount of belief and excitement and expansion and a good deal of arrogance and hubris within the capitalist citadel, which is the United States. So that’s one major consequence.
  • The second major consequence is: What does it mean for Communism no longer to exist as a threat? And what we begin to see in the 1990s is capital in America regaining the power, assurance, authority, belief in its unilateral power that it had, across the years of the Cold War, if not sacrificed, then moderated.
  • hat the Soviet Union had promised, what Communism had promised, was that private enterprise could be superseded by rational planning on the part of an enlightened set of rulers who could manage the economy in a way that benefited the masses in extraordinary ways.
  • That whole project fails, and it fails in a spectacular fashion.
  • Ronald Reagan had insisted that there was a continuum between Soviet government tyranny and what he regarded as New Deal government tyranny. They were on the same spectrum. One inevitably led to another. He and other Republicans, George H.W. Bush, the party as a whole take this as a great vindication of their core beliefs: that capitalism, which, under the New Deal, was sharply constrained, should be freed from constraint; its animal spirits allowed to soar; venture capitalists encouraged to go everywhere; investments made easy; lower taxation; let capitalists and capital drive America and the world economy, unconstrained by regulation.
  • these were the core ideas of neoliberals, which have been incubating for decades. And now suddenly these ideas seem to be vindicated. This is the moment of free market triumph.
  • it intersects in a very powerful way with the ongoing I.T. revolution, which is also bound up with the Soviet Union’s collapse. Because the Soviet Union was very hostile to the personal computer because it required a degree, at that time, of personal freedom that the Soviet Union wasn’t willing to allow what the I.T. revolution represented in the 1990s. And this is one of the reasons that Democrats get on board with it. What it represented was a belief that market perfection was now within human grasp, that there may have been a need for strong government in the past, because knowledge about markets was imperfect, it was limited, it took time for information about markets to travel, a lot of it was wrong, not enough of it was available instantaneously.
  • Well, suddenly in the 1990s, you have this dream, this vision of all economic knowledge in the world being available at your fingertips instantaneously and with a degree of depth and a range of statistics and figures that had been unimaginable, and a techno-utopianism takes hold
  • it’s the intersection of these two vectors — a sense that the collapse of the Soviet Union vindicates free market thinking and the I.T. revolution — that allows people to think market perfection is within our grasp in ways it never has been before, that pours fuel on the fire of neoliberal free market thinking.
  • You described Bill Clinton as the Dwight D. Eisenhower of neoliberalism. What do you mean by that, and what are some of the, for you, core examples?
  • When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, no Democratic U.S. president had been elected since 1976. Sixteen years is an eternity in electoral politics in the United States. And the question becomes: Will he roll back the Reagan revolution of the 1980s — massive efforts at deregulation — or will he follow a path that Dwight Eisenhower followed in the early ’50s?
  • Clinton, in the beginning, is a little uncertain about what he is going to do. And he has some ambitious proposals in his first two years — most notably a vast program of national health insurance, which crashes spectacularly.
  • And then he gets punished for that venture severely in the 1994 congressional elections, which bring Newt Gingrich and a very right-wing group of Republicans to power — the first time that Republicans control both houses of Congress since 1952. It’s a huge achievement for the Republicans
  • Clinton reads that moment as signifying that the older Democratic Party of the New Deal, of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, really had to be reworked and revamped.
  • the only way for him to win re-election, and the only way for the Democrats to hold on to national power and to regain it in Congress in 1996, is for him to acquiesce to some core Reaganite beliefs. And at the center of the Reaganite project was deregulation — which is a code word for getting the government out of economic affairs or curtailing government power.
  • Archived clip of President Bill Clinton: We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there’s not a program for every problem. We know and we have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means. The era of big government is over.
  • so Clinton signs off on the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which effectively deregulates the burgeoning I.T. sector of the economy, makes possible an unregulated internet. He signs off on the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.
  • The Glass-Steagall Act had divided investment from commercial banking and had imposed a kind of regulation on Wall Street that brought an end to the crazy speculation that had brought about the Great Depression in the first place. It was a core principle of the New Deal
  • He does not seek to revive the Fairness Doctrine, in terms of regulating public media, which had guided successive Democratic administrations: the idea that if a news outlet put out one side of a debate on a policy matter, they were obligated to give the other side equal access.
  • He becomes an advocate of deregulation and, in some respects, pushes deregulation further than Reagan himself had been able to do. And in that sense, he acquiesces to some of the core principles of the Reagan revolution rather than seeking to roll them back, and it is in that respect that I think it’s appropriate to think of him as a Democratic Eisenhower.
  • what one remembers most about those battles is how much Clinton and Newt Gingrich hated each other’s guts. And they were seen as being polar opposites.
  • Clinton, the representative of a New Left America: cosmopolitan, open to the liberation movements, looking for new ways of creating a new and diverse America, embracing sexual liberations — his embrace of gay rights was somewhat limited but still significant. Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, representing traditional Victorian America, wanting to reassert the patriarchal, heterosexual family, men at work, women in the home, religious.
  • one of the surprises, to me, in working on this book, because I remember those days very well, was the degree to which they worked together — on telecommunication, on reform of Wall Street, on welfare.
  • Clinton would claim, and his defenders would claim, that he was triangulating. He was trying to make the best of a bad deal, that popular opinion was running with free markets, was running with the Republicans. And to some extent, that was true.
  • the lesson that I draw from that moment is that one must refrain from always getting sucked into the daily battles over cultural issues.
  • “cosmopolitanism.” Something that was fresh, to me, in your book was this argument that in neoliberalism, you’re looking at more than just what we typically think of it as, which is an economic theory. You argue that there is a moral ethic that came alongside it, that is part of it. You talk about it as, at various times, cosmopolitan, individualistic. Tell me about it.
  • “Neoliberalism” is often defined, as you say, simply as being about markets and freeing them up
  • And “neoliberalism” is also defined as something that’s profoundly elitist in orientation, and it’s a device and an ideology used by elites to implant market ideology on a society in ways that deepens economic inequality and has the ability to strangle the democratic rights of the masses.
  • I also say that in America, it had a profound popular base. Reagan was an enormously successful president, and by “success,” I mean he was able to excite the imagination of majorities of American voters, and his core message was freedom.
  • half the time he meant freedom in terms of a free enterprise economy, but the other half of the time he meant freedom in terms of giving individuals the autonomy to go their own way.
  • he was not a fan of the liberation movements of the ’60s. But when Clinton becomes president in the 1990s, he has a profound connection to those liberation movements of the 1960s — to feminism, to sexual liberation, to civil rights.
  • he detects in a world in which everyone can travel to wherever they want to go. He valorizes immigrants. He valorizes diversity. These are all values that are profoundly compatible with the neoliberal vision. The opportunity to travel anywhere, to seek out personal adventure, to seek out different cultures.
  • This is a world that neoliberalism makes possible, and it’s a thrilling moment for many people who have the opportunity either to mix in the world of American cities, which have filled up with immigrants, or to travel abroad and experience other cultures.
  • A single global marketplace enables and encourages the kind of cosmopolitanism that people on the left-center side of the political spectrum in America have so deeply valued.
  • you locate the end of this era in the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. Why?
  • The promise of neoliberalism was that it would lift all boats. There was an acknowledgment about those who were freeing the energies of the market economy that it would probably increase inequality, the distance between the rich and the poor, but that the increase in inequality wouldn’t matter because the forces of production that would be unleashed on a global scale would be so powerful and so profound that everybody would have more and everybody would have a better life.
  • And what the 2008-9 financial crisis exposed was first a lot of the market freedom that neoliberalism had unleashed had led to corrupt banking and financial practices that had brought the world to the edge of financial abyss of unimaginable proportions. We ended up skirting that abyss — but not by a lot.
  • on the other hand, it brought into view a sense of how profoundly unequal the access to power was under the neoliberal regime. And here it’s not so much the financial crash itself but the nature of what governments did to promote recovery from the financial crash.
  • The object in the U.S. and also in Europe became to save the banks first. The culprits of this financial crisis were the ones who were bailed out first. If you were an American in 2009, 2010, 2011, who had assets in the stock market, you had pretty much recovered your position by 2011, 2012. If you were not one of those fortunate Americans and you were living week to week on a paycheck, your recovery did not occur.
  • You didn’t reach pre-2008 levels until 2016, 2017, 2018, and people understood, profoundly, the inequality of recovery, and it caused them to look with a much more scrutinizing gaze at the inequalities that neoliberalism had generated and how those inequalities have become so embedded in government policy toward the rich and the poor.
  • one of the identity crises in the Republican Party — one reason the Republican Party is not held together better — is that the Soviet Union was fundamental to what made its various factions stay in place. And it was also, I think, fundamental to what kept the Republican Party, which at its core has a real anti-government streak, committed in any way to real government.
  • hen I think there’s a sort of casting about for another enemy. I think they end up finding it after 9/11, or think they have, in what they try to turn into global jihadism, and then it falls apart — both as the antagonist and as a project and just feels to me like another part of the sort of wreckage of this period that opens a way for something new.
  • That new thing, I think, is more Donald Trump than it is anything else.
  • I think it discredits what had been a core project of the Republican Party, which was to spread market freedom everywhere. When I teach the Iraq war, I tell my 20-year-old students that this is the worst foreign policy mistake in U.S. history, that it’s going to take the U.S. and the world 50 years to recover from. And it’s imbued with a neoliberal hubris that everyone in the world is simply waiting for the wonders of a market economy to unleash, to be unleashed upon them.
  • OK, if that era ended, what is being born?
  • there’s also new zones of agreement that have emerged. When I think about the way I covered politics in 2010, the legitimacy of elections could be taken for granted, and the legitimacy of the Affordable Care Act could not.
  • I think it’s useful in this moment of acute polarization to look at some of what lies beneath the polarization.
  • you’re right: On a series of issues there are intriguing conversations going on between Democrats and Republicans. China and tariffs are one area of agreement.
  • Ironically, immigration is becoming another area of agreement, regardless of who wins the election. One can imagine that the bill agreed to in the Senate late in 2023 could easily be implemented in some form.
  • here is an area of convergence on antitrust. Josh Hawley and Lena Khan seem to like each other and are finding some common ground on that. And the national security hawks in the G.O.P., people like Marco Rubio and Mitch McConnell, have converged with what we might call the industrial policy doves in the Democratic Party — people like Bernie Sanders — on the importance of reshoring critical sectors of manufacturing and on improving in dramatic ways the nation’s infrastructure.
  • we can see here a new political economy taking shape, one that breaks with the central principle of neoliberalism, which is that markets must lead and the only role for a state is to facilitate markets.
  • another element of that, which has been crucial to the ideological reorientation, is a new understanding of the relationship of free markets to democracy.
  • for the longest period of time, Americans and Europeans were willing to give China a blank check on their democracy, or on their violations of democracy, because of the belief that if market freedom and capitalist practices set down deep enough roots in China that people with economic freedom would want to add to that political freedom and that democracy would begin to flourish and that the Communist Party that rules China would either have to profoundly reform itself or see itself ushered from the political stage.
  • It’s hard to convince people now of how deeply rooted that belief was. No one in the Democratic or Republican Parties believes that anymore, and that has intensified the fear along with this “Oh, my God” sense that China is not simply producing ordinary goods. It’s producing very sophisticated goods. It’s cornering markets on electrical vehicles and batteries and solar panels that seemed unimaginable 15 or 20 years ago. And it has had the effect of profoundly shocking both parties.
  • that has completely transformed and the word “protectionism” is not being used because it’s such a negative term, but the sentiments that lie behind protectionism, which might be described more positively as fair trade, are profoundly with us and shape conversation about U.S. economic relations with China every day of the week.
  • So the change has been profound in both parties, and one of the surprises of the Biden administration, although in retrospect, it’s not so surprising, given the Biden administration’s commitment to industrial policy, is the continuity we see between Trump tariffs and Biden tariffs.
  • hey’ve also come, in many cases, to the view that we should have much more industrial policy: the sense that if you leave it to the market, China might, by using the government to foster and supercharge certain kinds of market pursuits in China, just lap us. I think it’s become the dominant view in both parties.
  • I would agree with that, although I think the Republican Party is probably more deeply split on this than the Democratic Party is. The Democratic Party arranged another kind of grand compromise between the left, represented by Bernie Sanders, and the center, represented by Joe Biden, which led to a profound commitment symbolized by Build Back Better, a $5 trillion project that was going to insert industrial policy into the heart of government economic relations in a way that marks the Biden administration as profoundly different from his Democratic predecessors, both Obama and Clinton.
  • I think the Republican Party does not have agreement on that to the same degree. And one of the interesting things to watch if Trump wins is how that internal fight in the Republican Party works itself out.
  • So the sort of ideological strain in the Republican Party that JD Vance is part of, this sort of more populist dimension of it: What they see markets and, particularly, free trade and trade with China and immigration as having violated is the strength of communities and families. They look around, and they see broken communities, hollowed-out communities.They see families where the male breadwinners have lost their jobs and lost their earning power, and so they’re not getting married, and there are divorces, and there are too many single-parent families
  • on the Democratic side, I think there’s some of the same views. There’s a lot of broken communities.
  • a huge part participant in this ideologically is climate change: the sense that markets would happily make people rich by cooking the planet. The market doesn’t know if the money is coming from, the profit is coming from, burning oil or laying down solar panels. And so once again, that some goal actually does need to be set. Markets can maybe serve our goals. They can serve our vision, but they can’t be assumed to get what we want right in the world.
  • And so the sense on both parties that you actually do need to define goals and define vision and that, ultimately, that is going to have to happen through government setting policy and making decisions — the primacy of that kind of dialogue now, the degree to which the first conversation is: What are we trying to achieve? That does feel different.
  • that speaks to the decisive nature of the election of 2016, which we will see the longer we get from it as a decisive inflection point, as really marking the end of the neoliberal order
  • It doesn’t mean that suddenly there are no more advocates of strong free markets. I think one of the questions now and one of the key questions for the Republican Party is: Can they get serious about this?
  • It requires them to have a serious program of political economy in a party that has lacked direction on political economy for quite some time.
  • You describe the sort of neoliberal era as bringing this much more cosmopolitan view of ethics, of morals and of America’s relationship with the world — a more sort of urbanist view. There’s a lot of connections between what it means to live in New York and to live in London and to live in Tokyo and to live in Hong Kong.
  • JD Vance is a good example of this — are much more skeptical of the individualistic moral structure that dominated here and that Republicans, for all the influence of the Christian right, largely left untouched.
  • it’s actually very complicated in both parties because Donald Trump is himself such a poor vehicle for a return of traditionalist virtue. But there is something happening here, a sort of questioning of not just government policy and industrial policy but: Did all this individualism work? Is a world where kids are on their smartphones all the time and families are having this much trouble — and did we get something more fundamental, almost spiritual, wrong?
  • he concern about the moral fiber of the American people is not new in the Republican Party. That goes back to Jerry Falwell, to some of the ministers who became popular in the 1990s and calling America back to moral virtue and identifying enemies of God.
  • The new element is a sense that one has to connect that concern for this kind of morality to a serious program of political economy, that it’s not enough simply to call on people to be virtuous.
  • t serious conservatives have to find a way to rebuild the economic foundation that lies at the root of so much immorality and so much despair in American life.
  • If that develops enough of a base in the Republican Party, then there becomes an opportunity to talk with Democrats about that, about family welfare, about the welfare of children, about creating institutions, both economic and social, that have the capacity to sustain communities in ways in which they have not been sustained.
  • There are some issues that run so deeply on questions of morality between Republicans and Democrats, it’s hard to see how they can find common ground. And probably the most important of these is on the question of abortion and reproductive rights. And to the extent to which JD Vance and his associates take their stand on this issue, the possibilities for developing a conversation about morality with liberals and Democrats are going to be very, very slim, indeed.
  • the things that I think would have once been framed in terms of Christianity are now framed in terms of classical virtue. There’s a sort of rediscovery of the Stoics, not the early Christians.
  • there’s something here where — obviously, efforts to remoralize America are not new — but this idea that we have gone wrong in modernity by becoming so individualistic seems to be gathering a fair amount of force.
  • My read of it is that the Christian right is just too weak and not sufficiently appealing to be the vehicle for it. And so these other aesthetic and ancient containers are being searched for, but there is some kind of pushback happening
  • I think you see a lot of interest among people in both parties around some of these tech regulations. But I think of that as sort of fundamentally moralistic.
  • he Christian right has become somewhat contaminated by its blind adherence to Trump and by its too great a willingness to plunge into politics with any messenger, no matter what moral qualities they’re exhibiting.
  • That there is a movement among conservatives to step back from that and to ground their morality in something deeper, more widespread, something that can appeal to a greater cross-section of Americans, regardless of whether they go to church or not
  • If there is a moral awakening underway that is not tied to instrumentalizing churches for strictly partisan purposes, which is one way of describing evangelicalism in the last 20, 25 years, then that would be new.
  • Sarah Igo, “The Known Citizen” — very different kind of book — “A History of Privacy in Modern America.” We’re talking about morality, we’re talking about community, and of course, social media has put the question of privacy and what constitutes privacy and what’s private and what’s public — such an urgent question in understanding America. And she gives us a wonderful hundred-year overview of how Americans in almost every generation have redefined the boundary between private and public, and I found that extremely useful in thinking about where America is at in the 21st century.
Javier E

Review: In 'Hillbilly Elegy,' a Tough Love Analysis of the Poor Who Back Trump - The Ne... - 0 views

  • the questions he raises. Chief among them: How much should he hold his hillbilly kin responsible for their own misfortunes?
  • Time and again, Mr. Vance preaches a message of tough love and personal responsibility. He has no patience with an old acquaintance who told him he quit his job because he hated waking up early, only to take to Facebook to blame the “Obama economy.” Or with a former co-worker at a tile warehouse who missed work once a week though his girlfriend was pregnant.
  • “Political scientists have spent millions of words trying to explain how Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation,” Mr. Vance writes. He suspects those cellphones have a lot to do with it. “I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largess enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • In Mr. Vance’s estimation, the answer is: a lot. Economic insecurity, he’s convinced, accounts for only a small part of his community’s problems; the much larger issue is hillbilly culture itself. Though proud of it in many ways, he’s also convinced that it “increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.”
  • he frames his critique generously, stipulating that it isn’t laziness that’s destroying hillbilly culture but what the psychologist Martin Seligman calls “learned helplessness” — the fatalistic belief, born of too much adversity, that nothing can be done to change your lot.
  • What he’s really writing about is despair.
  • His friends and relations are convinced that the media lies. That politicians lie. That the military, an institution they revere, is fighting two fruitless wars. Universities feel “rigged” and inaccessible; job prospects are slim. For what purpose do you live under such circumstances? When the stanchions of your life have sunk into the muck?
woodlu

Peril ahead - Donald Trump faces an array of legal trouble when he leaves office | Unit... - 0 views

  • Armchair psychiatrists claim that Mr Trump’s lifelong fear of being seen as a loser has inspired his battle against democracy.
  • at the stroke of noon on January 20th, the legal shield that Mr Trump has wielded to stave off lawsuits will vanish, exposing him to an abundance of civil and criminal legal peril.
  • Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, has been investigating several possible financial crimes, including Mr Trump’s alleged hush-money pay-offs to an adult-film star and a Playboy model on the eve of the 2016 election
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • his old boss directed him to pay these women, Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, to prevent revelations of extramarital dalliances that could have dented his presidential run. (Mr Trump denies these allegations.)
  • Mr Vance subpoenaed eight years of financial records and tax documents from Mazars USA, Mr Trump’s accountant.
  • the Supreme Court proceeded to sit on a final appeal for three months, staying mum and keeping the documents out of the district attorney’s hands.
  • The ramifications could be serious for Mr Trump as he reprises his role as private citizen: Mr Vance’s office has suggested the investigation may range significantly more broadly than just pay-offs.
  • Potential charges, if evidence is found, could include scheming to defraud, falsification of business records, insurance fraud and criminal tax fraud
  • penalties of up to 25 years.
  • Mr Trump fought assiduously to keep his finances under wraps and soon they may be scrutinised by a grand jury.
  • New York’s attorney-general, Letitia James, is investigating what she says may be fraudulent business practices in which Mr Trump and the Trump Organisation inflated the value of their assets when applying for loans and deflated them to evade tax liability.
  • Ms Carroll wrote in 2019 that Mr Trump raped her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store; Ms Zervos said he sexually harassed her on set
  • Moments after his second impeachment on January 13th, Ms Carroll tweeted: “Trump tore our democracy. I'm going to tear him to shreds in court.”
  • Mr Racine says some members of the Trump family made a sweet deal with themselves when the inaugural committee—a tax-exempt charity—used non-profit funds to pay the Trump International Hotel $175,000 a day to host events during the 2017 inauguration.
  • a violation of District of Columbia law governing the operation of non-profit organisations.
  • that the non-profit footed the bill for a $49,000 payment that should have been issued by the Trump Organisation, a for-profit business.
  • Persuading someone to use “physical force against the person or property of another” is a federal crime; sparking a riot is a crime under DC law.
  • Given the broad scope for free speech set by the First Amendment, however, it may be hard to make criminal charges stick.
  • whether Mr Trump is guilty of inciting a specific lawless action, as opposed to just general exhortation.
  • Mr Trump could also find himself in legal jeopardy for the hour-long phone call he made to Georgia’s secretary of state on January 2nd.
  • has asked the Department of Justice and Georgia prosecutors to investigate Mr Trump’s bid to find nearly 12,000 votes to swing the election to him some three weeks after the electoral college voted
  • the president may have “illegally conspired to deprive the people of Georgia of their right to vote” and “to intimidate Georgia election officials in an effort to falsify the count of votes in the presidential election”.
  • Mr Trump’s phone call in July 2019 asking Ukraine's president to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden, the son of his eventual rival.
  • it could constitute extortion and criminal conspiracy under New York law.
  • Mr Trump may be tempted to issue himself a presidential pardon.
  • No president has ever attempted such legal onanism, though Richard Nixon contemplated it in 1974
  • Counsel in the Justice Department said it would be out of line with the principle that “no one may be a judge in his own case”
  • A self-pardon may run counter to Mr Trump’s instincts, as it would require him to confess to potential misdeeds.
  • The strategy may also backfire if the courts conclude self-pardons are unconstitutional
katherineharron

Appeals court skeptical of Trump's effort to block subpoena for his tax returns - CNNPo... - 0 views

  • A federal appeals court expressed skepticism Wednesday that President Donald Trump can block a subpoena from New York state prosecutors for his tax returns, in a case that all sides agree is likely headed toward the Supreme Court for an election-year showdown.
  • The back-and-forth was an allusion to Trump's comment during the 2016 campaign that he "could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters."
  • The case is expected to make its way to the Supreme Court. Both sides struck a deal Monday to fast-track any Supreme Court petitions after the appeals panel weighs in, potentially teeing up a dramatic showdown in Washington before the 2020 election.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • "The premise is that this is a distraction. It distracts the President from carrying out his duties," federal Judge Denny Chin said. "Where is the distraction if the subpoena is served on accountants? The President doesn't have to do anything to comply with the subpoenas?
  • "You could invent scenarios where you could imagine it would be necessary or at least perhaps a good idea for a sitting president to be subject to a criminal charge, even by a state while, in office," Dunne said. "If he for example did pull out a hand gun and shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, well, what would be the impact of that? Would local police be disabled from restraining such a person? Or from processing such a person? Would we have to wait for an impeachment proceeding to be initiated?"
  • The case can be traced back to the hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and another woman who alleged extramarital affairs with Trump, which he denies. State prosecutors want to know if the Trump Organization, based in New York, filed false business records to cover up the payments.
  • Trump's team had asked the lower-court judge to block Vance from enforcing the subpoena, and to stop Mazars from sending over the tax records, until Trump leaves office. His lawyers argued that a criminal investigation of the sitting president is "unconstitutional." In a surprising move, the Justice Department got involved and also requested a temporary freeze on the subpoenas.
  • His critics have alleged that his tax returns could expose massive debts to foreign interests or that is he not as wealthy as he claims to be. A Forbes estimate from September said Trump is worth $3.1 billion, though Cohen has testified that Trump inflated his earnings in the past.
  • A federal appeals court expressed skepticism Wednesday that President Donald Trump can block a subpoena from New York state prosecutors for his tax returns, in a case that all sides agree is likely headed toward the Supreme Court for an election-year showdown.
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