#postliberal

[justinspoliticalcorner]

What J.D. Vance really believes

Trump's choice for vice president comes from the authoritarian wing of an authoritarian GOP.

Zack Beauchamp at Vox:

I met Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s new choice for vice president, in the summer of 2022. I was covering a conservative conference in Israel, and Vance was the surprise VIP attraction. We chatted for a bit about the connections between right-wing movements across the world, and what American conservatives could learn from foreign peers. He was friendly, thoughtful, and smart — much smarter than the average politician I’ve interviewed. Yet his worldview is fundamentally incompatible with the basic principles of American democracy.

Vance has said that, had he been vice president in 2020, he would have carried out Trump’s scheme for the vice president to overturn the election results. He has fundraised for January 6 rioters. He once called on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into a Washington Post columnist who penned a critical piece about Trump. After last week’s assassination attempt on Trump, he attempted to whitewash his radicalism by blaming the shooting on Democrats’ rhetoric about democracy without an iota of evidence. This worldview translates into a very aggressive agenda for a second Trump presidency. In a podcast interview, Vance said that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” in the US government and “replace them with our people.” If the courts attempt to stop this, Vance says, Trump should simply ignore the law. “You stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it,” he declares.

The President Jackson quote is likely apocryphal, but the history is real. Vance is referring to an 1832 case, Worcester v. Georgia, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the US government needed to respect Native legal rights to land ownership. Jackson ignored the ruling, and continued a policy of allowing whites to take what belonged to Natives. The end result was the ethnic cleansing of about 60,000 Natives — an event we now call the Trail of Tears. For most Americans, this history is a deep source of shame: an authoritarian president trampling on the rule of law to commit atrocities. For Vance, it is a well of inspiration. J.D. Vance is a man who believes that the current government is so corrupt that radical, even authoritarian steps, are justified in response. He sees himself as the avatar of America’s virtuous people, whose political enemies are interlopers scarcely worthy of respect. He is a man of the law who believes the president is above it.

[...] The Vance of Hillbilly Elegy was very different politically. Back then, he took a conventional conservative line on poverty, describing the working class as beset by a cultural pathology encouraged by federal handouts and the welfare state. 2016 Vance was also an ardent Trump foe. He wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “Mr. Trump Is Unfit For Our Nation’s Highest Office,” and wrote a text to his law school roommate warning that Trump might be “America’s Hitler.” Eight years later, Vance has metamorphosed into something else entirely. Today, he pitches himself as an economic populist and cosponsors legislation with Sen. Elizabeth Warren curtailing pay for failed bankers. In an even more extreme shift, he has morphed into one of Trump’s leading champions in the Senate — backing the former president to the hilt and even, at times, outpacing him in anti-democratic fervor.

[...] And it is clear that Vance is deeply ensconced in the GOP’s growing “national conservative” faction, which pairs an inconsistent economic populism with an authoritarian commitment to crushing liberals in the culture war. Vance has cited Curtis Yarvin, a Silicon Valley monarchist blogger, as the source of his ideas about firing bureaucrats and defying the Supreme Court. His Senate campaign was funded by Vance’s former employer, Peter Thiel, a billionaire who once wrote that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He’s a big fan of Patrick Deneen, a Notre Dame professor who recently wrote a book calling for “regime change” in America. Vance spoke at an event for Deneen’s book in Washington, describing himself as a member of the “postliberal right” who sees his job in Congress as taking an “explicitly anti-regime” stance.

Vance is also an open admirer of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a right-wing politician who has systematically torn his country’s democracy apart. Vance praised Orbán’s approach to higher education in particular, saying he “made some smart decisions there that we could learn from in the United States.” The policies in question involve using national dollars to impose state controls over universities, turning them into vehicles for disseminating the government line.

Donald Trump's pick of J.D. Vance to be his ticketmate is about doubling down on MAGA authoritarianism and the "postliberal" worldview.

See Also:

The Dean's Report: JD Vance is worse and more dangerous than you know

The Guardian: JD Vance once worried Trump was ‘America’s Hitler’. Now his own authoritarian leanings come into view

[apesoformythoughts]

"The second sense of post-liberalism is as a positive philosophy. It’s not necessarily anti-liberal; it’s not wholly against individual freedom or the idea of individuals having the freedom to make their own choices. But post-liberals argue that this focus on individual freedom alone isn’t enough to sustain political, social, or economic order. I agree with John Gray, a leading post-liberal thinker, that the Hobbesian idea that you can generate order from the chaos of competing individuals doesn’t hold up in the long term. Instead, we need a degree of social consensus and cultural coherence. There has to be a shared sense of the common good, of goods that we can only pursue together rather than purely individually. And we also need some idea of what constitutes the genuinely good life for individuals.

In that sense, post-liberalism suggests that, while liberal ideas about individual freedom are important, they need to be supplemented by a deeper, more communal understanding of what binds society together."

— John Milbank: "The Right's Co-opting of Post-liberalism"

[eternal-echoes]

[apesoformythoughts]

«For instance, a report from the New York Times argued, in its usual pandering style, “America stress-bought all the baby chickens,” and the Associated Press, not to be outdone, told us that “In chaotic times, gardening becomes therapy.” Our press has uncovered the sordid secret that when people are worried about the production of food, they begin to produce their own. There is an argument here; a knife worth sharpening. The plague has revealed what has been the case for a few hundred years, that we have built a society in which the poor and the middle-class are dependent on the wealthy for their material survival; in which the basic features of a free peasantry — productive land ownership, communal interdependence, and an intellectual formation in non-capital-intensive skills — has been exchanged for the basic features of slavery — debt-driven wage-work for those who own the means, not merely of industrial production, but of the production of the food, drink, shelter, and skills necessary for material survival. We depend on potatoes appearing in the grocery store, through the machinations of commercial farming, available for our money to buy, in order to live. Having seen those strangely empty shelves, we have turned to grow them ourselves. This is obviously the first step any re-establishment of a peasantry out of a mass society must make. Lauding this small, hapless attempt and encouraging it to endure would be the role of a truly revolutionary press.»

— Marc Barnes: “Do Not Go Unchanged”

[apesoformythoughts]

«One headline milks the obvious with a banality that nears a passion: “Expert Predicts Long Hair, Beards Back In Style By Summer.” […] There is something interesting here, but it is not the fact that men deprived of barbers will become barbarous. It is that barbaric beards will become “fashion.” Fashion is a word that is used to obscure its own meaning […]  Long hair will not be a sign of dearth, it will become a product, and the world will spin as it did before. The prediction that the consequences of disaster are just fashions in utero is a vague hope that we will not learn from our plague, but will restore an identical social order to the one that is falling about our ears.»

— Marc Barnes: “Do Not Go Unchanged”

[apesoformythoughts]

«If a Christian polity is a polity of those who can police themselves in virtue, then a Christian polity is precisely the kind of polity that “abolishes the police.” But this orientation towards abolition cannot be put off for some future day in which there is “enough virtue” to make official police work unnecessary, and until then, let the status quo reign. The office of policing is redeemed by being orientated to its own dissolution in the just and blessed order made possible by grace. Any good policing must bear a “mark” of this dissolution within it — and this would involve a fundamental transformation of our current structures of policing. What follows is a list of principles for this transformation (things to think), and a list of policy proposals to enact and accelerate this transformation (things to do).»

— Marc Barnes: “The Christian Abolition of the Police”

[apesoformythoughts]

«Now, every high-schooler that discovers that they exist outside of the male-female binary gets to support the regime; every anxiety-ridden mother gets to ciphon off her labor and property into medically and spiritually managing her child into some definite gender identity; every insecure cisgender denizen gets to perform his gender-achievement by shopping for the appropriate products; the body becomes money’s canvas and begs to be painted. It is no wonder that our neoliberal institutions, from the E.U. to the U.N., have welcomed and celebrated the very queer forms of gender and sexuality that were supposed to be so rebellious to their institutional squareness. They are one more source of economic production and growth.»

— Marc Barnes: “Gender Identity and the Spirit of Capitalism”

[apesoformythoughts]

«Within the subsistence tradition, gender is a gift, one given concomitantly with existence itself -- “male and female he created them.” To believe this particular description is to rest, for if gender is given then it is not a state to be achieved, purchased, or striven for. To the profiteering eye of the capitalist economy, substantive gender is a fertile ground for the expansion of production; a subsistent holdout yet to be transformed into a market; a possible object of labor, striving, progress, and growth.

Gems like Judith Butler, brilliant and incisive as they are, are mistaken in culling any revolutionary romance from their description of gender as a series of performative acts which only ever appear as something substantive. By transforming gender from a received gift into a human achievement, predicated upon certain kinds of activities, our dearest queer theorists did the good of work of their capitalist god, transforming a subsistent reality into a scarce commodity.»

— Marc Barnes: “Gender Identity and the Spirit of Capitalism”