J D Vance and Project 2025
Sounding Like A Leftist?
Here are the key grafs in J D Vance's foreword to the forthcoming book from Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and, as such, the mastermind of you-know-what. If the Republicans can sell this small-bore pro-business, anti-corporate agenda, they win. Now, I don't see how they can, given Trump's constituency on Wall St and his worship of anyone with more power or money than he's got. And this appeal from Vance would, if effective, only solidify the base, in the same way his misogynist credentials do—unless I'm wrong in thinking Trump has already procured as many white working-class men as are available for his pitch.
And yet . . . . Notice how Vance declares that his band of radicals, those MAGA-Heritage types who run the Republican Party, must “create the material circumstances such that having a family isn’t only for the privileged”—which means creating “better jobs” for all levels of the income scale. How?
Tariffs are the only specific solution mentioned, but there’s also anti-trust as Lina Khan wields it at the FTC, as a vigorous anti-monopoly program. Vance, who is a fan of Khan’s work, would apply her ideas quite selectively, to the “modern financial corporations” he reduces to Apple or Google rather than to the much larger sector where shadow banking, not the Fed, is now the headquarters of the investment system. But the anti-corporate rhetoric resonates, doesn’t it?
Notice, too, Vance’s obsession with the family. He and his comrades want Americans to have more kids—”real Americans,” that is, not those immigrants from shithole countries who are out to replace “us”—but they rail and vote against food stamps, child tax credits, subsidized child care, free school lunches, even public education. Are they stupid, malevolent, or hypocritical?
None of the above. Their opposition to these programs and their costs is principled: they undermine the independence of families from the state, the independence that is supposedly the source and sinew of the bourgeois virtues (Catholic social teaching of the kind Vance peddles would emphasize charity, redistribution by private means, rather than “welfare” as administered by the state). The application of the principle has perverse and malevolent effects, then, but its intentions are benign. These people mean well, but they are ideologically disabled--they cannot see the wounds they inflict, let alone stop the bleeding. They’re blind, and they won’t see.
One more thing. Left and Right meet here on the site of an anti-corporate, not an anti-capitalist, program. Or rather, these two ends of the political spectrum have come together over the dead body of the bourgeois individual, exhorting him to leap from the grave and restore those virtues for which he is famous. That’s not weird. It’s just pathetic.
Read it and weep. My italics.
"If you’ve read a lot of conservative books or think you have a good sense of the conservative movement, I suspect the pages that follow will be surprising—even jarring. Roberts understands economics and supports basic free market principles, but he doesn’t make an idol out of decades old theories. He argues persuasively that the modern financial corporation was almost entirely foreign to the founders of our nation. The closest eighteenth-century analogue to the modern Apple or Google is the British East India company, a monstrous hybrid of public and private power that would have made its subjects completely unable to access an American sense of liberty. The idea that our founders meant to make their citizens subjects to this kind of hybrid power is ahistorical and preposterous, yet too many modern “conservatives” make such an idol out of the market that they ignore this. A private company that can censor speech, influence elections, and work seamlessly with intelligence services and other federal bureaucrats deserves the scrutiny of the Right, not its support. Roberts not only gets this at an instinctive level; he can articulate a political vision to engage in that scrutiny effectively.
"Roberts sees a conservatism that is focused on the family. In this, he borrows from the old American Right that recognized—correctly, in my view—that cultural norms and attitudes matter. We should encourage our kids to get married and have kids. We should teach them that marriage isn’t just a contract, but a sacred—and to the extent possible, lifelong—union. We should discourage them from behaviors that threaten the stability of their families. But we should also do something else: create the material circumstances such that having a family isn’t only for the privileged. That means better jobs at all levels of the income ladder. That means protecting American industries—even if it leads to higher consumer prices in the short term. That means listening to our young people who are telling us they can’t afford to buy a home or start a family, not just criticizing them for a lack of virtue. Roberts is articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics: recognizing that virtue and material progress go hand in hand."
The British East India Company reference is kind of fascinating, because it almost incidentally reveals the yawning void at the heart of this kind of ethnonationalist thinking about the white family standing proudly alone, yeoman farmers breaking ground and carrying goods to market without the state. What they're editing out entirely is colonial conquest, land seizure, slavery, servility. Which explains why they react with such intensity in particular to any historical teaching that places slavery, violent conquest and land seizure back into the story right at the beginning.
It's true in a way that individual settlers went out into the frontier against the wishes of the early colonial administration, broke treaties, took land, waged 'private' war, but that's already something that the vision Vance is working off of doesn't want to discuss--that the property of these new American households was taken from people already working the land, that the markets that entrepreneurs found in the Great Lakes were among Native American societies (and Native Americans sold back to the new arrivals). But time after time, when the existing landholders finally had enough of the new arrivals pushing into land that wasn't theirs and banded together to stop them, the settlers went crying to the colonial state and demanded that it give them the force to seize what wasn't theirs. And then following, much of the time, that they have access to labor to work it in the form of slaves--or, in a pinch in the cities of the mid-Atlantic and Northeast, more newly arrived immigrants who were not in a position to go wagons-ho to the west. All of which was backstopped by government, facilitated by government, protected and extended by government.
Take the Little House books, which are kind of the ur-text of Vance's imaginary future. In this fantasy, all government ever does is make Pa Ingalls move off of Indian land right after he's made a safe little farm for his family. The reality of Pa Ingalls being a serial failure, of coming back East to be a hired hand in someone else's business, of being almost pathologically restless, and of depending utterly on two things for his family's ultimate salvation that he could never credit or acknowledge: the military conquest of the West and the building of the railroads, followed by the slow extension of bourgeois civil society from the East and the authority of municipal government. (He was only able to handle settling for good in DeSmet because the government was built up enough to handle deed recording and then because after his latest business failed, he got several jobs IN the municipal government.) The entire extended family from Ingalls' move to Wisconsin onward stayed afloat financially almost entirely off of buying cheap land (or just being given it via homesteading), proving it for a bit, and then selling it--it wasn't until Laura and Almanzo were in their 40s that they had a farm that actually provided income, which Charles Ingalls never managed. (Carrie's adult income came from her husband's job as a laborer building Mount Rushmore, which, hello! federal money.)
I think Thiel and Musk, Vance's underwriters, and their inspiration, Curtis Yarvin, have no genuine interest in this white-family Arcadia, and thus, not Vance either. He's not the second coming of Huey Long, fighting for the working man while scheming to be King. I think it's just about the votes, considering that Thiel and Musk are mostly dreaming of replacing everybody with robots except for the people Thiel needs for blood plasma injections and Musk needs to be serfs on Mars.