Heather Cox Richardson on JD Vance (one of her best)
After writing about Trump's inability to coherently answer questions during an interview with Bloomberg News's editor-in-chief, Heather Cox Richardson points out that Trump is now so incompetent that a Trump presidency would inevitably become a Vance presidency.
Her description of Trump's answers, including his telling the moderator that he's "been wrong his whole life on this (economic) stuff" is eye-opening. But I think her description of what J.D. Vance and Peter Thiels want is even more important.
Like Thiel, Vance has spoken extensively about the need to destroy the U.S. government, but while Thiel emphasizes the potential of a technological future unencumbered by democratic baggage, Vance emphasizes what he sees as the decadence of today’s America and the need to address that decadence by purging the government of secular leaders. A 2019 convert to right-wing Catholicism, Vance said he was attracted to the religion in part because he wanted to see the Republican Party use the government to work for what he considers the common good by imposing laws that would enforce his version of morality.
Their worldview requires a few strong leaders to impose their will on the majority, and both Thiel and Vance have rejected secular democracy. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009.
In 2021, Vance called American universities “the enemy” and said on a podcast that people like him needed to “seize the institutions of the left, and turn them against the left.” In a different interview, he clarified: American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said.
The whole piece is well worth reading. https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/october-15-2024?r=a1fq7&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
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