A working-class hero is something to be, but what the fuck does that have to do with Peter Thiel’s Fake-Appalachian Errand Boy J.D. Vance?
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Move over Josh Hawley, Glenn Greenwald has found another standard-issue Republican neoconfederate fanatically committed to upward wealth distribution to dream on:
Yes, fewer people are easier to beat that [checks notes] 7-term U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell.
Anyway, remember that Vance’s story is that he didn’t support Trump until he saw what he did in office. What he did in office was to 1)pass a massive upper-class and corporate tax cuts, 2)relentlessly deregulate on behalf of corporations, 3)pack the federal judiciary with extremely pro-corporate neoconfederates, and 4)come one vote away from taking healthcare away from tens of millions of people to pay for yet another upper-class and corporate tax cut. These are the politics Vance (like Hawley) favors, and they are as pro-corporate as it gets, stray complaints about tech corporations that aren’t pro-Trump enough notwithstanding.
Given that Glenn thinks that people like Hawley and Tucker are “socialists” he seems to be taking this laughably obvious con straight. But if his argument is that Vance is using superficially “populist” messaging to varnish his full-on commitment to Reaganomics, well that’s what Reaganite politics is — it’s what McConnell and pretty much all other Republican pols do as well. People who are on the actual left see it as their job to point out that it’s all bullshit, whereas people who prefer fascism to liberalism pretend that it’s something new under the sun that will really own the libs this time.
Incidentally, Yglesias keeps claiming that liberals should be cheering for Vance to win the Republican nomination. But since 1)Vance will act exactly like Mandel and cast exactly the same votes as Mandel, but 2)can get not just the anti-anti-Trump “left” but the mainstream press to take his ludicrous bad faith “populism” seriously, if anything he’d be even worse. Feel free to laugh your ass off when Vance gets totally creamed.