As someone said a while back (I don’t have the link handy), J.D. Vance’s career has been built on carefully deciding who to sell out to and when. He has few limits on how badly he’ll sell out. Last year he said he wouldn’t have certified Biden’s win (admittedly the lie the election was stolen is now a baseline Republican belief).
After Tucker Carlson gave an admiring interview to a “Nazis were the good guys in WW II” Holocaust denier, Vance refused to back off from his ties with Carlson, while insisting Of Course he didn’t share the guest’s beliefs.
As a law student he expressed outrage over Republican anti-immigrant policies. As vice president, he happily lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets.
He hates universities because teaching facts and critical thinking is antithetical to Republican policy and makes it too easy for nonwhites and women to succeed in life (he phrases it somewhat differently)
(Side note: right-wing bullshit artist Bari Weiss recently claimed it’s impossible to get into college if you’re white or Asian, which is a complete lie. CBS, which just fired Colbert for daring to criticize the Felon, is now looking at giving Weiss a news position of some sort).
After the Wall Street Journal ran its story about the Felon’s letter to Jeffrey Epstein, Vance complained the White House never saw the letter … which completely contradicts his boss’s take (these are not coordinated, well-organized liars).
Then, at a recent speech to the far-right Claremont Institute, he expressed the view that Real Americans are the ones whose families have been here for generations: ““dentifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence — that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time,:
Overinclusive because it would include “hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree” with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. That’s “the logic of America as a purely creedal nation.” Underinclusive because it would reject lots of extremists who presumably don’t believe in things like all men being created equal, “even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.”
This is some impressive strawman bullshit. Nobody claims that simply because someone in Bhutan or the United Kingdom (or wherever) agrees with the sentiments in the Declaration, they’re American citizens. The premise of America as a “creedal” nation is that if you want to be a citizen, your race, sex, national origin and religion don’t stand in the way of that. The old sentiments that if you play by the rules, you’re welcome here. Not as a tolerated immigrant, but as a fellow American. As noted at the link above about Vance’s speech, that used to be accepted even by a lot of conservatives (even if it wasn’t always how things played out in practice).
Vance’s alternative view is not new. As Richard Slotkin chronicles in Lost Battalions, immigrants, Jews and black Americans hoped fighting for their country in WW I would prove they were real Americans; instead the country veered into heavy anti-immigrant sentiment over the following decade. Former president Teddy Roosevelt said it flat out: to be a real American you have to be Anglo-Saxon. Everyone else is here on sufferance.
It’s a view (as Slotkin shows) impossible to separate from racism, anti-immigration and misogyny. As Kevin Levin says, “Notice that Vance makes no distinction between whether your ancestor fought for the United States or the Confederacy. He doesn’t care. What matters is that they were white and that they were here.
This would be the perfect time for the Confederate heritage community to trot out their stories about Black Confederates and their view of the Confederacy as a multi-racial/cultural experiment. Don’t hold your breadth, folks. Vance also doesn’t want you to remember the roughly 200,000 African Americans who fought for the United States during the Civil War. Just under 80 percent of free born African American men of military age in northern states volunteered to fight for the United States during the Civil War. In ignoring these men, Vance appears to believe that white men, who fought to destroy the United States and create an independent slaveholding republic, are more worthy of inclusion.”
I will also mention we know a number of women fought disguised as men; many women contributed to the war in various ways. Vance would rather we not think about that, either. He loves the pronatalist fiew that women should be breeders. Misogyny seems to be one of the few principles he truly believes in, even though that makes him a bad father. And it aligns well with the old view that white American women need to breed more babies for the Reich — er, the Republican Party, to the extent there’s a difference. More on that view here.
As I wrote five years back, women are not means to an end, whether that end be maintaining the white population or taking care of the kids for J.D. Vance. Women are ends in themselves; all people are. To the extent of their abilities they should be free to choose their own path (with obvious exclusions like becoming an assassin, a rapist, or a Klansman) and figure out what having a meaningful life means to them.
I suspect Vance, and the techbros who’ve supported him, don’t see it that way. That freedom is for the elites like them. Giving it to other people would imply others really are created equal … and the subtext of Vance’s views is that he doesn’t think they are.
