A link is enough. It is on a topic still getting much attention, but far from Presidential policy, good or bad. It is a story about an elite educated man who wants something.
It is a story from an apparent perspective, about how two people are behaving who know better, but want something. Worth the time to read.
Another story, from mid-August, a news report about a situation worth the read. Something we don't need.
A thread ties the two together: A Senator seeks nationwide office, and does stuff.
UPDATE: A Kevin D. Williamson prequel of sorts - more direct in its critique, less nuanced, but still more nuanced than much of the Internet.
FURTHER: Another author, a similar distaste for Vance. Very direct, judgmental -
To a certain kind of nationalist-curious conservative intellectual, having a fellow traveler with J.D.’s brainpower so close to the presidency raises tantalizing possibilities about enacting family-forward populist economic policies. Trump will always be Trump, but Vance supposedly represents something smarter and more substantive. He’s the thinking man’s MAGA, a more cerebral America-First-er who prefers kitchen-table issues to demagoguery.
In reality, it turns out he’s a sewer rat, the same gutter Know-Nothing populist trash that you’ll find among the worst elements of Trump’s movement. Let’s hear no more after this, please, about Vance being “different” now that he’s started a Two Minutes Hate directed at a group of immigrants.
The real significance of this episode, though, lies in how difficult it is to imagine his predecessor on the Republican ticket stooping to the same behavior. Mike Pence is no angel—no one who spent four years apologizing for Trump could be—but he was certainly more immune to the scummiest impulses of populism than Vance is.
For evidence, look no further than J.D.’s appearance this week on the All-In podcast, where he interrupted his posts about Haitian pet-eaters to again confirm that he would have blocked the certification of Joe Biden’s victory on January 6 had he been in Pence’s shoes. Nowhere is nostalgia for Trump’s first term more potent than it is on this point: Vance would have been an eager enabler of the single most destructive authoritarian impulse his boss had during his first term, not a constraint on it as Pence was. The replacement of one man by the other on the ticket is the radicalization of Trump’s operation in miniature.
Yes, Vance raised expectations of a kinder, gentler MAGA man, and yet firmly is a Jan 6, Stop the Steal-er. They taught him the Two Minute Hate along the way? Was it Ohio State, or Yale Law School, or just an innate skill?
He converted Catholic to be a better man. Married with children.