A movement of the lesser intelligentsia
By 
A lot of people seem to think that J.D. Vance having called Trump a potential Hitler 1)when he looked like he wouldn’t win and 2)when reactionaries weren’t sure he would govern as an orthodox reactionary can be used against the Trump campaign now. As with most hypocrisy charges, I’m very confident that it will fall flat. Many stalwart Trump allies have had a similar road to Mar-a-Lago, and if anything he prefers fawning converts to people who have been there all along. In addition to that, as we discussed yesterday Vance is a perfect representative of MAGA:
Much is being made of Vance’s former opposition to Trump. But to Vance, this is a story of awakening and conversion. He left behind the stultifying elite consensus and found truth in the movement. The narrative he spins sounds like many young people of conservative tendencies who started out opposed to Trump and then gradually saw in him a champion or at least something that made sense. This story begins with Kavanaugh, but it really takes hold with George Floyd. These were great tumults that shook the confidence of many young white men aspiring to elite status: they took liberalism—broadly understood—to be a hostile work environment.
Vance himself, of course, is a winner in the cultural sweepstakes: his Hillbilly Elegy became a massive success, explaining the failures of the white poor. He made it okay to look down on them. After all, one of them said it was okay. Conservatives who reviled Trump’s base turned to Vance as well as liberals who condescendingly wanted to “understand” them. It was really the same old conservative nonsense about “cultural pathology” applied to whites now instead of blacks—a way to blame the poor for being poor, to “racialize” the white poor as the blacks had been; to find in them intrinsic moral weaknesses rather than just a lack of money and resources.
We should pause here to note, since I see some of the “Trump will OUTFLANK Democrats to the left” people who batted .000 during the Trump administration are back, that Vance meant what he said in his shitty bestseller — i.e. that if people are struggling it’s their own damn fault and the state should do nothing for them. Even during the period when he was posing as a thoughtful moderate to sell books he strongly supported Trump’s almost-successful efforts to take healthcare away from tens of millions of people to pay for an upper-class tax cut. A second Trump administration will be about upward wealth distribution, cuts to social programs (especially for the poor and working class), deregulation, and an NLRB that is robotically anti-labor replacing Biden’s very pro-labor one. The fact that Vance favors some antitrust actions — mostly against tech companies he sees as being too reluctant to platform Nazis — doesn’t change anything meaningful.
Back to our story:
But Vance always wanted to run with hares and hunt with the hounds. He wants to hold fast to the his wounded Scots-Irish machismo while simultaneously rising to heights of both American capitalism and cultural success. He took his background to be both an advantage and a handicap, a counter-snobbery that served him well as he entered the halls of power and wealth. Look back at the famous American Conservative interview that turned him into a sensation: “…the deeper I get into elite culture, the more I see value in this reverse snobbery. It’s the great privilege of my life that I’m deep enough into the American elite that I can indulge a little anti-elitism. Like I said, it keeps you grounded, if nothing else! But it would have been incredibly destructive to indulge too much of it when I was 18.” Reverse snobbery, like all snobbery, comes from comparison, of a feeling of not living up, of wanting to best others. As Peter Thiel acolyte, he’s familiar with René Girard’s theories of envy and knows how that emotion gives rise to hate. Vance once said that Trump might be “America’s Hitler” to a law school buddy. This is what that friend says now: “The through line between former J.D. and current J.D. is anger…The Trump turn can be understood as a lock-in on contempt as the answer to anger…” To people like that, Hitler, so to speak, has a point.
I joked yesterday on Twitter that Vance sounded like someone from Dorothy Thompson’s 1941 Harper’s piece “Who Goes Nazi?” It was truer than I thought.
To be sure, Vance’s humiliations are much milder. I’m sure he and his wife enjoyed many invitations to nice dinners, but still a hard kernel remains.
The sociologist Michael Mann writes that “Fascism was a movement of the lesser intelligentsia.” The hillbilly-whisperer Vance is practically chief of that party. And no one is more ecstatic to have their man on the inside as the online reactionary demimonde. They are proudly showing off the litany of creeps he followed on Twitter. That whole thing was always a bid for social prominence as much as political power and now they’ve arrived. Vance immersed himself in that mob on his path to being red-pilled. He’s buddies with Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel’s court philosopher who undoubtedly introduced him to Murray Rothbard and God knows what else. (Yarvin’s “cathedral” is just cribbed from Rothbard’s 1992 “Right-Wing Populism” essay — the ur-text of Trumpism in my opinion.)
One thing Vance has that your Little Marcos and Scotts and various governors of North Dakota don’t have is an intimate relationship with young groypers as well as with post-liberal semi-intellectuals. His strong belief in the anti-democratic beliefs of both factions we’ll leave for the next post.
Since this is all very bleak, we can at least be amused that one of the sources of this Yalie venture capitalist prick’s bottomless well of resentment is the terrible reviews the godawful movie made out of his atrocious book received:
ELITES DONE MADE FUN O' MAH HOLLYWOOD MOVIN' PITCHER, AH'MA JOIN ME A THINK TANK https://t.co/auCxyMDsrj— Roy Edroso (@edroso) July 16, 2024