Tag Archives: J.D. Vance

According to Senate candidate JD Vance, the problem with making divorce easier is that people walk out on marriages for silly things like an abusive partner: “This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.”

When asked if he really meant people shouldn’t be able to divorce abusers, Vance went with the playbook from when he called for a dictatorship, whining that even asking the questions is biased. And he’s already answered it, so bygones! And unmarried partners abuse each other too, so divorce isn’t the issue, the left’s [non-existent] war on families is! Um, no, “unmarried couples have abuse problems” does not logically lead to “therefore divorce is bad.” And as a child of divorce I can safely say that while it’s not pleasant for kids, living in a dysfunctional family is worse — and my parents were not abusing each other.

Given his puppet-master Peter Thiel is a raving misogynist (see details at the link), maybe Vance shares his views. Then again, perhaps he’s dog-whistling to the religious right. A lot of them, like odious preacher John Piper, think spousal abuse isn’t as troubling as women defying their husbands (though if the husband proposes consensual kink, Piper suddenly discovers male authority has limits). And horror that liberals respect married women’s rights — the usual meaning of “war on families” — is common on the religious right too. So perhaps Vance’s bullshit response means he wants misogynist votes but he’s aware that won’t play well in the general election. But whether he’s a sincere misogynist or simply play-acting, he’s spewing an ugly message — faking it for votes is no excuse.

The equally odious Matt Gaetz went with one of the classics recently, that women’s looks invalidate their opinions. Specifically that pro-choice advocates are all ugly so they don’t have to worry about anyone getting them pregnant, haha, game over feminazis! Which is stupid, unimaginative bullshit, and of course wrong — rapists, for example, don’t pick victims based on looks. It’s cheap, third-rate trolling, but I doubt Gaetz is capable of better.

I get into this bullshit more in Undead Sexist Cliches, available as a Amazon paperback, an ebook and from several other retailers.

I’ll wrap up with an unrelated but equally striking moment of shitbag behavior: flying into Iraq, Trump was so impressed with his own courage (the plane could have crashed, but he didn’t let them turn around!) that he wanted to award himself the Congressional Medal of Honor.

That’s an observation Vance — now the Republican candidate for senator from Ohio — makes in a Vanity Fair article on relationships between him, his backer Peter Thiel and neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin. At one point Vance suggests Trump should just fire everyone in federal government and replace them with loyalists; if the courts say that’s not legal, he should ask how they plan to enforce that. From the article:

I’d asked Vance to tell me, on the record, what he’d like liberal Americans who thought that what he was proposing was a fascist takeover of America to understand.

He spoke earnestly. “I think the cultural world you operate in is incredibly biased,” he said—against his movement and “the leaders of it, like me in particular.”

Well, yes, I am biased. I think dictatorship is bad. Vance clearly doesn’t, and Yarvin’s been advocating for it for years. Like many conservatives Yarvin despises democracy, believing in “unconditional personal authority, subject to some responsibility mechanism.” He does not specify the mechanism; he seems much more interested in the power. Reading about him I get the impression he genuinely dislikes the idea of government that has to answer to the people; much better the people shut up and obey their superiors. Who will, of course, be predominantly white and male, and totally include him.

This is not a new thought, of course: Justice Rehnquist of the Supreme Court once wrote about how monarchy worked better than democracy because the plebes just shut up and obeyed the king instead of thinking they should have a say in running things. That said, a couple of things leapt out at me reading the article. As LGM says, it reads like another example of would-be revolutionaries/dictators convinced they’re edgy and cool and saying the unsayable.

In reality they’re cliches, the revolutionaries dreaming that once they sweep the old order away they’ll build as close to utopia as possible. They’re little different from the radical left of the 1960s, the French revolution, the Cuban revolution and so on. In the words of Stephen Vincent Benet they’re out “to make perfect states, in the names of the perfect states.” And it will work just as badly as it always does. Outside of the American revolution, very few have avoided sinking into a struggle for power.

But at least some of those revolutions started out aspiring to build a better world for all. I doubt Vance, Thiel, Yarvin, etc. do (see here); when the rich and powerful start discussing how the rich and powerful could run America so much better if they didn’t have to follow stupid laws and listen to their inferiors, they’re at best lying to themselves, and certainly lying to us. Here’s Vance, for example, lying through his teeth.

The other thing is a comment Vance makes, that if he gets his fascist state (oops, there I go being biased again) “it will mean that my son grows up in a world where his masculinity—his support of his family and his community, his love of his community—is more important than whether it works for fucking McKinsey.” (I believe McKinsey is a consulting firm,). So how exactly is the current system preventing Vance Jr. from supporting his family and community? Is it that he can’t find a woman who’ll let him be the boss? Or that his wife wants to work and there’s no way for junior to stop her?

Yeah, I’m cynical, but I’ve heard too many right-wingers who think women’s equality is castrating men. Or that prosecuting rape is an attack on men. And Vance is lickspittle to Peter Thiel, a billionaire misogynist who thinks women getting the vote is bad (a very common right-wing view) and that date rape is just buyer’s remorse (again, not new). So I’m disinclined to give Vance the benefit of the doubt.

I go into the cliches Vance and Thiel spout in more detail in Undead Sexist Cliches, available as a Amazon paperback, an ebook and from several other retailers. Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights remain with current holder.