The Davis Square Community

siderea posted this essay about Vance and now I have Thoughts, because I too have been wondering whether Trump dying and Vance in charge would be better, but apparently from an entirely different angle than most people. Because while I didn't know Vance was mentored by Peter Thiel, I did read his book back when it was first published. He did not, from his memoir, strike me as crazy, but I do remember a lot of people calling him a poser Appalachian who was appropriating their culture while not really belonging to it. I was unclear on what percentage of that was to do with the not-one-of-us from his changing of social class (thinking very much of this essay from siderea, and in particular the part where she mentions her grad school obliquely warning people about how getting the degree might lead to people thinking of them as class traitors, paired with the passage in Hillbilly Elegy where Vance makes a frantic phone call from the bathroom at a fancy law dinner to get someone more used to such situations to tell him what fork to use) versus him genuinely talking about aspects of the culture he hadn't experienced, but I remember the book being both lauded and backlashed at the time. I was also a bit startled by the appearance of Amy Chua as Vance's mentor-- not that I know that much about her, but I was like "Wait, from the tiger mother thing?"

(I startled my coworkers during the couchfucking thing, because I was like "Okay, it's been a while since I read it but I am certain I would have remembered that if it was in there" and they were like "You've read it?")

Again, Vance didn't seem crazy, and he certainly didn't seem like someone who would fall in with Trumpism. One of the things I have been trying and failing to do is reconcile the ideas espoused in the book with committing to being Trump's lackey, because the one really does not obviously follow to the other. Knowing he was subsequently mentored by Peter Thiel makes him make so much more sense.

But even without "how did we get from there to here" making sense, I was not wondering whether Vance becoming president would be a return to sanity in the executive. Vance has hitched his star to Trumpism at this point. Making an about-face return to sanity and respect for rule of law and the courts would guarantee Vance falls into irrelevance. One thing everyone agrees on is that they don't like signs of ideological corruption in their leaders--even people who shrug at actual corruption will get upset if it becomes too obvious that a politician doesn't actually believe the things they're espousing, or won't act on beliefs they claim to hold. (See also why Collins and Murkowski get so much attention. They keep gesturing at sanity but not actually following through on it. If they just voted for things without turning it into a production about how "This is amoral but I'm voting for it anyway for ~reasons~" they wouldn't get nearly so much heat for it from either side.) Vance cannot make any kind of return to sanity and rule of law without it being an outright admission of cold-bloodedly going along with Trump solely for power, at which point the naked power grab is too obvious and uncloaked in ideology for anyone to be willing to play along with it.

No, what I was wondering is whether Vance, lacking Trump's cult of personality, might have less of a stranglehold on Congress than Trump does. Because while Vance is committed, there are plenty of Republicans in Congress who could still gracefully back away, and Republicans are increasingly aware that people hate what they're actually doing to such a degree that they can't hold town halls--and no one likes Vance. They can't take action against Trump without putting themselves at electoral risk--but I wondered if they might be able to rein in Vance, since he isn't exactly popular. If they might be willing, were Vance the one in charge, to do things like revoke the tariffs or hold legitimate threat of impeachment over Vance if he goes too far, since it really wouldn't take that many Republicans backing away gracefully for the Democrats to force the proceedings.

Of course, that would imply that we're not yet at the point where Vance could respond to that by straight-up conducting a military coup, which is unfortunately not a given. Vance, unlike Trump, is competent. Vance, unlike Trump, would probably succeed if he tried a military coup.

This seems to be an unusual angle to come at it from, though, and I'm curious why that is. Possibly some of this is that I've been getting most of my news from The Bulwark, and I really do recommend adding it to your news diet--it was founded by the sane Republicans who stuck to their Not Trump principles, so it is being run by a bunch of people who genuinely adore John McCain. If you are looking for where the "party I disagree with, not the party that scares me" people went, well, several of them went and founded a Substack news site. And they don't talk about Vance much and on the rare occasion they do it's not terribly complimentary, so I already had some signal that he's not a return to Republican sanity. They're all about country over party there but they were Republicans once upon a time and some of them risked a lot, professionally speaking, in the course of founding the site. If they saw signs of rationality in the Republican upper leadership they would be all over it. (My primary news diet, for the curious: the free version of The Bulwark, Heather Cox Richardson's letters, and Josh Barro and Ken White's podcast Serious Trouble. Occasionally I will also watch a TL;DR News video on Nebula, and sometimes the videoessayists and craft newsletterists I follow will take a dip into politics like Lindsay Ellis's Palestine video or Scalzi's intermittent politics blog posts on Whatever.)

Incidentally, this can also be held up as an example of your framing making a big difference in whether people believe you--you've seen me make the occasional annoyed link to someone wandering down the leftist conspiracy rabbit hole. "A subset of the wealthy is deliberately accelerating our progression into complete societal collapse so they can make money off it and there is a man behind the man dictating Trump's behavior" sounds ridiculous when you phrase it like that and you aren't going to actually convince anyone who wasn't already inclined to listen to you. "Vance was mentored by Peter Thiel and has a deep ideological belief that democracy is bad and here are all these examples of these people talking about their plans" is saying a very similar thing--there is a cult of rich guys trying to destroy democracy for Reasons--but it sounds a lot more believable, enough so that I'm like "okay, this makes things I was already observing make sense in a way that comes with receipts and doesn't sound like you're trying to get me to join a cult." (I mean, cults as a general rule also don't sound like they're trying to get you to join cults, but there are no specific actions being prescribed here beyond "don't trust this guy who you already didn't trust," so.)