JD Vance and the Galaxy-Brained Style in American Politics - 0 views
www.thebulwark.com/...rained-style-american-politics
vance right-wing cultural culture politics history gop
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“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.”
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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,”
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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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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
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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:
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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.
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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,
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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.