Behind Trump and Vance Is This Man’s Movement

Vice president JD Vance gave a speech recently that deserved more attention than it got. Vance was accepting an award from the Claremont Institute, a right wing think tank. And not just any award, an award for statesmanship. And Vance in this speech sets himself a few tasks. One is to understand the nature of the left. And I'm gonna be honest, I don't give him high marks for where he ended up. The radicals of the far left, they don't need a unifying ideology of what they're for because they know very well what they're against. What unites Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites, and big pharma lobbyists? It isn't the ideas of Thomas Jefferson or even of Karl Marx. It's hatred. They hate the people in this room. They hate the president of The United States. And most of all, they hate the people who voted for that president of The United States in the last election in November. This is the animating principle of the American far left. Something I've always found interesting about Vance is that if you read Hillbilly Elegy, and I've read it a couple of times, if you take seriously what he is struggling with in that book, one of the things he's struggling with is a sense of being othered. Vance reads his own audiobook. You can hear him saying this. I realized that in this new world, I was the cultural alien. I began to think seriously about questions that had nagged at me since I was a teenager. Why has no one else from my high school made it to the Ivy League? Why are people like me so poorly represented in America's elite institutions? Why is domestic strife so common in families like mine? Why did I think that places like Yale and Harvard were so unreachable? Why did successful people feel so different? You could imagine that guy going on to build a politics of tolerance, of politics to make sure other people don't feel that way. And yet he goes on to build a politics all around othering. Maybe it's calculation, what he thought he needed to do to get ahead. But it feels more like projection. We're effectively run-in this country via the Democrats, via via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable too. I watch that. I listen to him, and I wonder if he imagines that everyone who disagrees with him feels as he does, is motivated by the emotions that pulse within him. And that's why he finds it personally convincing to say that his opponents are driven by hate. Because it often seems like there's a lot of hate driving him. But explaining what motivates his political opponents is not the only task Vance sets for himself. He wants to diagnose something deeper, …