"He never once mentions women until he reaches his adulthood in the story.". He also mentions in his book that he played Magic the Gathering. So this tracks completely. (this is based on my personal experience as a Magic player)
Yes — funny but true. The original comment is delusional. No chance Vance, overweight MtG-playing dork, was womanizing in HS. Can’t remember if he mentioned girlfriends prior to his wife but wouldn’t surprise me if he was a virgin when he started law school.
Also, the suggestion that maybe he was doing hard drugs? Crazy. Kids from broken working class homes that get hooked on heroin in HS don’t end up at Yale Law, sorry.
I think to some extent the comment is just too credulous of firsthand accounts of how many people are doing hard drugs in these types of communities. It's a lot, of course, but it's not like the *majority* of people are doing opiates and meth. It's still totally normal to go through high school not having done them -- though of course, from the perspective of an individual, it might feel like everyone is doing it.
This is kind of a weird take. The antiwoke tech crowd is such a tiny slice of the electorate (surely <1%), it would be strange to choose a VP to appeal to them specifically. But it seems like what you're saying is he wants to recruit from this demographic for future appointments? Maybe, but I think people like Musk would jump at the opportunity to advise Trump no matter his VP pick. I mean, it was kind of obvious Musk supported Trump all along?
I think a simpler story is that he chose someone who understands his populist rhetoric, has successfully deployed it himself, and has no scruples "turning 180 degrees on a dime" to support Trump in whatever he decides. Pence wasn't willing to do this and Trump isn't making that mistake twice.
The latter, yes. He doesn’t need voters, he needs staffers—and the $45 million a month Elon is throwing his way doesn’t hurt either. The demographic Vance appeals to has outsized wealth, power, and understanding relative to their raw numbers, and for a party that has plenty of voters but little institutional sway, that’s important.
I don't understand the belief in the Democrats having a deep bench of talent vs the Republicans. Where is this bench and why does nobody seem to be sitting on it? Aren't they having a meltdown because they don't have anyone credible who could replace Biden, an unimpressive senile old man?
If by elite human capital you mean academia or the civil service, then we have fundamentally different definitions of elite and capital. The left has a lot of people who want to work for the government, and who have awarded themselves a lot of certificates, but this doesn't translate into real insight or ability.
Tracy is talking about people who do the day-to-day of governing (writing bills, enforcing policies, making sure people pay taxes, and so forth), not the type that looks good on TV or have the "I will die for him"-levels of charisma for leadership.
Are you arguing that tax collectors have higher average IQ than people in the private sector? Or that they have better breeding? Lol, is this the Empire Ministry of Victorian England we're talking about here or the DMV?
As said: "The left has a lot of people who want to work for the government, and who have awarded themselves a lot of certificates, but this doesn't translate into real insight or ability."
I feel like you know what I mean, so I don't understand why you want to play this weird semantics game.
"Most of the really skilled people who want to do X are Y" does not mean "Most of the Y people who do X are really skilled." Presumably you already know this.
Unless maybe you're literally saying that e.g. the Department of Energy has no smart people, period? And that customer service people you see at the DMV are similarly smart to clerks drafting laws?
I'm not being difficult deliberately, no. Bear in mind we're discussing vague terms like "elite", "qualification", "human capital" and "skilled", which can be interpreted in many different ways.
The article says "The Democrats have a massive bench of people whose traditional qualifications are through the roof" and that the Republican Party has a "competency crisis".
If we look specifically at their politicians then traditional qualifications like having won primaries, run successful governorships, and actually wanting the job are clearly lacking on the Democrat side at the moment. If we take traditional qualifications to mean academic qualifications, then we face the problem that academic institutions don't issue qualifications in running governments (beyond maybe economics degrees). And degrees in politics, African-American Studies, history etc are not directly important to ordinary civil service jobs.
And if we make it even vaguer to mean general skill or competence then observing from afar I just don't see much evidence of this competence (COVID!!), and it certainly doesn't generalize to other countries. For example the classic narrative in the UK was always the reverse; that Labour have a serious talent problem (dominated by ex-trade union/student politics types), and the Conservatives have an abundance of competent politicians and policy people (ex business, often). And there's clear evidence of this being true, like in the wildly different rates at which members of the two parties can correctly answer basic math/probability questions. But in practice you don't see much difference in their ability to execute on policy, if anything it's the reverse as the civil service is left wing and blocks conservative policies whenever possible.
So I asked what the evidence for this claim is. In response you claimed this deep bench of talent is in ordinary civil service jobs like tax collecting and regulatory positions. These aren't jobs any culture I'm familiar with associates strongly with talent or expertise. They're mostly either rote checkbox following or when not, end up getting viewed as sleazy and prone to corruption. So I guess I really don't understand this argument. These people just aren't impressive to me.
I think J.D. Vance is a great vice presidential pick for Trump both from his perspective (i.e. his own crass self-interest) and from the perspective of the weirdo neo-authoritarian movement.
I, of course, am a liberal, and I think liberalism is good. Vance is almost certainly deeply and thoroughly opposed to liberalism at its very core. Given his many links to the wide range of online rightist factions like the tradcaths, NRx, etc., he almost certainly believes that the idea of liberal freedoms, individualism, and globalizing cosmopolitanism are bad. To me, that makes him completely and totally repugnant, a far greater and more sincere political threat than Trump ever was. But congratulations to the other commenters who are fellow-travelers with Vance. I'm confident that if you ever get what you want, you'll find that you regret it, but it is true that your movement has until very recently had a firm divide between the actual smart people who agree with you (who were invariably powerless), and your powerful allies (who were invariably stupid, like Trump).
Maybe there's a version of conservatism/illiberalism that is intellectually honest and could participate in society.
But what we see with Trump/Musk/Vance/etc is a clown show of dishonesty, grifting, amoral power seeking. They don't deserve engagement and should be shunned.
I didn't mean that they were the same thing, just that both labels have been overcome by grifters and intellectually dishonest people and both camps have aligned politically very frequently.
Vance's book was about telling the liberal elites what they wanted to hear about fly-over America while promoting himself. He called Trump Hitler not 4 years ago and now he's his VP. I see street smart, but not intellectually engaging or principled smart.
From his speech at the RNC the one thing that struck me the most is that he very much does not come across as someone who genuinuely believes in the US, or even seriously pretends to. Compared with the 2004 keynote speech by Obama which I watched recently and the difference is *massive*. https://x.com/LinchZhang/status/1814010864040886341
Obama: "For alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga.
A belief that we are connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief - I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper - that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. "E pluribus unum." Out of many, one.
Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope? John Kerry calls on us to hope. John Edwards calls on us to hope. I'm not talking about blind optimism here - the almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don't talk about it, or the health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. No, I'm talking about something more substantial. It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a millworker's son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. The audacity of hope!
In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation; the belief in things not seen; the belief that there are better days ahead. I believe we can give our middle class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity. I believe we can provide jobs to the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair. I believe that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices, and meet the challenges that face us. America!"
I very much do not get the same sense that Vance loves America the way Obama simply does, in his heart. Vance comes across (and seems to intentionally want to come across) as someone who wants to create clear enemies to hate on, including some traditional Republican allies like Wall Street.
Somewhat doubt the read of him as cynical. I’ve met powerful people and none of them struck me as cynical. Different from me, deluded from my point of view, but rarely cynical. There are better ways to make money for someone who thinks in a purely practical manner.
True, but people are complicated and I don’t think it’s a common thing for people to entirely fake their motivations and keep that narrative going for years and years.
Not if the Thing is something you have to be stupid to belief. In that case you - an intelligent pretender, will probably outmaneuver the dumb true believers.
the Thing here is that Trump's actions are justified and in keeping with liberal values. Vance has the advantage that he thinks Trump's actions are justified, he just doesn't care about liberal values.
This where I wonder how much of flip-flopping is pragmatic flexibility and political savvy vs. cynical self-interest/conformity. I imagine in most cases it is both or it depends on context. I’d say Vance is at least being deliberate in his positions, there’s strong motivation behind it regardless of the effectiveness of his shifts
I think there's a conflation here between 'cynical' and 'fake'. Vance definitely has real beliefs. He's just also willing to say anything and do anything and take any public position in furtherance of his beliefs -- i.e., he is unconstrained by duties to truth, much like Trump (hence why they are a great fit).
As far as I'm concerned (i.e. what I want to happen) Vance is the best pick that they could have made.
I'm not extremely intimately familiar with all the details of him, but everything I've seen I've liked.
His messaging is the sort of populist stuff that all of the trump base has wanted, right?
He has the credentials and if people want the GOP to change away from the old neoconservative stuff into something new and more aligned towards to American workers, then he is the guy that most embodies all of that as far as I can tell.
And yeah there's a laundry list of reason to be skeptical because of things he's done, his associates, and most of all just because he's a politician. But whatever, I'm willing to give him a chance and I hope he makes the most of it.
Edit to add: He's a million times better than someone like Mike Pence and I was absolutely dreading they were going to pick Nikki Haley, or someone of her type.
Idk who was also on the short list. Tim Scott and Tulsi Gabbard I think? Vance is better than both of them imho. I don't hate Scott, but he comes off as kind of a doofus and his religiousness can be offputting. Don't hate Gabbard either, but she's kind of all over the place and doesn't have the type of policy vision chops that Vance has afaik.
I would also add that the Silicon Valley antiwoke crowd could be very instrumental in applying AI/LLMs to effectively steer the ship of state via a skeleton crew of appointees overseeing the automation, rather than relying on manpower of sympathetic bureaucrats. I came across another substack showing how it could be done.
I've got an oddball book recommendation for you. It discusses the central matter of this article far more deeply than you'd expect -- "Catalina's Riddle," by Steven Saylor. It's ostensibly a mystery pulp, and the second in a series, but it stands alone just fine. (I found a copy in a Little Free Library near me.)
Excuse me if I'm Rome-splaining, but Lucius Sergius Catalina, known in the English-speaking world as Cataline, was a populist politician whose heyday was a few decades before the death of Caesar. At that time, Roman politics was, stated briefly, stalemated between a small elite faction that controlled enough institutions to stymy reform, on the one hand, and on the other, a populist faction, which had the support of the people, broadly speaking, but in general lacked able political leadership. In short, any member of the societal elite who deigned to do so - or who needed to do so as a result of being ousted from the elite from one reason or another - could become a populist leader more or less overnight, but that often led to their exile or death at the hands of the rest of the elite.
Two generations before Catiline -- approximately -- the brothers Gracchi made names for themselves as able reform-oriented politicians and rhetoricians. The elite dealt with them by -- more or less -- declaring a "The Purge"-style suspension of penalties for murder for a period, during which the Gracchi (and many of their supporters) were killed.
Between the Gracchi and Catiline, there was Gaius Marius, a successful general & military reformer of a non-elite background who came to politics in more of an Eisenhowery way, and pushed through various reforms against elite opposition, mostly with the goal of protecting the interests of the veterans of his army. This resulted in a brutal civil war between Marius and the elite faction, led by Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who wound up outlasting Marius (who died of a stroke eventually), and rolled back his reforms (as well as some from previous centuries).
Catiline, whom we know little about except from oppositional sources, seems to have taken up the populist mantle in no small part because of vast personal debts incurred during failed political campaigns. It seems to me like a sort of "The Producers" situation - rather than having any sort of long-term plan, he had to keep promising people things simply to keep himself from financial ruin. (Sound familiar?) He & various of his ousted-from-the-elite-for-various-reasons associates were accused of conspiring to overthrow the state & were executed extrajudicially on the orders of Cicero during his consulship.
The populist mantle next fell on Caesar, in no small part because he took a "middle course" during the Catiline vs Cicero affair, opposing Catiline but also opposing extrajudicial measures against him. He departed for a yearlong term as governor of Gaul at the end of that year, which he parlayed into a ten-year "state of emergency" governorship of the province (thereby removing his person from the nitty-gritty of Roman politics while he built a loyal army and took much booty), and you know the rest of that story.
"Ousted member of elite goes populist to get his own back" - as the uncharitable take - has happened a lot. Simon de Montfort is another example. The point of these historical analogies is, uhh, I forget...but it is interesting. It seems to me that if you want to replace a corrupt or failing "elite," you need more than one or two "competent ousted-elite populists" like Catiline - you need someone really, really, really charismatic, *and* smart, *and* cunning, like Caesar, *and* he needs to survive and build a network for not just years but decades before openly opposing the elite, *and* he (or she!) needs to present a novel and compelling vision for the future, one compelling enough to win over big parts of the elite itself. If one is looking for people with the potential to fit this bill, one should be looking exclusively for charismatic people who have become famous while remaining thus far nonpartisan. This means people like Taylor Swift, Shaq, Mark Cuban, Oprah - I think any of them could take the Republican nomination in '28, if any of them deem the time right, and remake the party in their image.
Keep in mind that the VP has very little de jure power, and I doubt Trump will allow him much de facto power. He'll sit on the sidelines for four years unless Trump is removed from office.
How is Trump going to *not* allow him de facto power? He's lazy and totally disinterested in the actual day-to-day governance of the country outside of whatever flavor of the month thing has captured his interest. Someone is going to have to do head down bureaucrat grinding, and it's definitely not the Donald.
I agree. Whether that person is Vance or not remains to be seen. I think Ramaswamy will likely be chosen as Trump's chief of staff or another senior EOP position to implement his agenda more effectively than in the first administration. People like him are the solution to the Republican elite competency crisis that was so apparent during the first Trump Administration. However, I also read somewhere that Vivek is lined up to fill Vance's seat in the Senate should the Republican ticket win in November to ensure there are loyal and competent people who can help push through Trump's agenda in Congress.
This particular faction of Silicon Valley rightists is actually pretty aligned with him on these things. They all feel that they are arrayed against the forces of old capital -- my personal theory is this is because their relationship to labor is totally different. Their enterprises rely on relatively few skilled laborers rather than the masses, and so they are willing to make common cause with the unions because it's no skin off their back.
This will not play well among the NYC elite, who still actually run the country and were warming up to Trump, and if the Democrats manage to kick Biden off the ticket I think it will come back to bite the GOP dramatically. But it'll be very good for the SV faction if they do manage to win these positions.
"He never once mentions women until he reaches his adulthood in the story.". He also mentions in his book that he played Magic the Gathering. So this tracks completely. (this is based on my personal experience as a Magic player)
Yes — funny but true. The original comment is delusional. No chance Vance, overweight MtG-playing dork, was womanizing in HS. Can’t remember if he mentioned girlfriends prior to his wife but wouldn’t surprise me if he was a virgin when he started law school.
Also, the suggestion that maybe he was doing hard drugs? Crazy. Kids from broken working class homes that get hooked on heroin in HS don’t end up at Yale Law, sorry.
I think to some extent the comment is just too credulous of firsthand accounts of how many people are doing hard drugs in these types of communities. It's a lot, of course, but it's not like the *majority* of people are doing opiates and meth. It's still totally normal to go through high school not having done them -- though of course, from the perspective of an individual, it might feel like everyone is doing it.
One funny side effect of becoming suddenly more prominent as a republican; he was shortened in his Wikipedia page by a good 5-6".
This is kind of a weird take. The antiwoke tech crowd is such a tiny slice of the electorate (surely <1%), it would be strange to choose a VP to appeal to them specifically. But it seems like what you're saying is he wants to recruit from this demographic for future appointments? Maybe, but I think people like Musk would jump at the opportunity to advise Trump no matter his VP pick. I mean, it was kind of obvious Musk supported Trump all along?
I think a simpler story is that he chose someone who understands his populist rhetoric, has successfully deployed it himself, and has no scruples "turning 180 degrees on a dime" to support Trump in whatever he decides. Pence wasn't willing to do this and Trump isn't making that mistake twice.
The latter, yes. He doesn’t need voters, he needs staffers—and the $45 million a month Elon is throwing his way doesn’t hurt either. The demographic Vance appeals to has outsized wealth, power, and understanding relative to their raw numbers, and for a party that has plenty of voters but little institutional sway, that’s important.
I don't understand the belief in the Democrats having a deep bench of talent vs the Republicans. Where is this bench and why does nobody seem to be sitting on it? Aren't they having a meltdown because they don't have anyone credible who could replace Biden, an unimpressive senile old man?
If by elite human capital you mean academia or the civil service, then we have fundamentally different definitions of elite and capital. The left has a lot of people who want to work for the government, and who have awarded themselves a lot of certificates, but this doesn't translate into real insight or ability.
Tracy is talking about people who do the day-to-day of governing (writing bills, enforcing policies, making sure people pay taxes, and so forth), not the type that looks good on TV or have the "I will die for him"-levels of charisma for leadership.
What is elite about any of those people?
traditional credentials, upbringing, iq, etc.
Are you arguing that tax collectors have higher average IQ than people in the private sector? Or that they have better breeding? Lol, is this the Empire Ministry of Victorian England we're talking about here or the DMV?
As said: "The left has a lot of people who want to work for the government, and who have awarded themselves a lot of certificates, but this doesn't translate into real insight or ability."
I feel like you know what I mean, so I don't understand why you want to play this weird semantics game.
"Most of the really skilled people who want to do X are Y" does not mean "Most of the Y people who do X are really skilled." Presumably you already know this.
Unless maybe you're literally saying that e.g. the Department of Energy has no smart people, period? And that customer service people you see at the DMV are similarly smart to clerks drafting laws?
I'm not being difficult deliberately, no. Bear in mind we're discussing vague terms like "elite", "qualification", "human capital" and "skilled", which can be interpreted in many different ways.
The article says "The Democrats have a massive bench of people whose traditional qualifications are through the roof" and that the Republican Party has a "competency crisis".
If we look specifically at their politicians then traditional qualifications like having won primaries, run successful governorships, and actually wanting the job are clearly lacking on the Democrat side at the moment. If we take traditional qualifications to mean academic qualifications, then we face the problem that academic institutions don't issue qualifications in running governments (beyond maybe economics degrees). And degrees in politics, African-American Studies, history etc are not directly important to ordinary civil service jobs.
And if we make it even vaguer to mean general skill or competence then observing from afar I just don't see much evidence of this competence (COVID!!), and it certainly doesn't generalize to other countries. For example the classic narrative in the UK was always the reverse; that Labour have a serious talent problem (dominated by ex-trade union/student politics types), and the Conservatives have an abundance of competent politicians and policy people (ex business, often). And there's clear evidence of this being true, like in the wildly different rates at which members of the two parties can correctly answer basic math/probability questions. But in practice you don't see much difference in their ability to execute on policy, if anything it's the reverse as the civil service is left wing and blocks conservative policies whenever possible.
So I asked what the evidence for this claim is. In response you claimed this deep bench of talent is in ordinary civil service jobs like tax collecting and regulatory positions. These aren't jobs any culture I'm familiar with associates strongly with talent or expertise. They're mostly either rote checkbox following or when not, end up getting viewed as sleazy and prone to corruption. So I guess I really don't understand this argument. These people just aren't impressive to me.
I think J.D. Vance is a great vice presidential pick for Trump both from his perspective (i.e. his own crass self-interest) and from the perspective of the weirdo neo-authoritarian movement.
I, of course, am a liberal, and I think liberalism is good. Vance is almost certainly deeply and thoroughly opposed to liberalism at its very core. Given his many links to the wide range of online rightist factions like the tradcaths, NRx, etc., he almost certainly believes that the idea of liberal freedoms, individualism, and globalizing cosmopolitanism are bad. To me, that makes him completely and totally repugnant, a far greater and more sincere political threat than Trump ever was. But congratulations to the other commenters who are fellow-travelers with Vance. I'm confident that if you ever get what you want, you'll find that you regret it, but it is true that your movement has until very recently had a firm divide between the actual smart people who agree with you (who were invariably powerless), and your powerful allies (who were invariably stupid, like Trump).
Maybe there's a version of conservatism/illiberalism that is intellectually honest and could participate in society.
But what we see with Trump/Musk/Vance/etc is a clown show of dishonesty, grifting, amoral power seeking. They don't deserve engagement and should be shunned.
I didn't mean that they were the same thing, just that both labels have been overcome by grifters and intellectually dishonest people and both camps have aligned politically very frequently.
Vance's book was about telling the liberal elites what they wanted to hear about fly-over America while promoting himself. He called Trump Hitler not 4 years ago and now he's his VP. I see street smart, but not intellectually engaging or principled smart.
yes
From his speech at the RNC the one thing that struck me the most is that he very much does not come across as someone who genuinuely believes in the US, or even seriously pretends to. Compared with the 2004 keynote speech by Obama which I watched recently and the difference is *massive*. https://x.com/LinchZhang/status/1814010864040886341
Obama: "For alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga.
A belief that we are connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief - I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper - that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. "E pluribus unum." Out of many, one.
Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope? John Kerry calls on us to hope. John Edwards calls on us to hope. I'm not talking about blind optimism here - the almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don't talk about it, or the health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. No, I'm talking about something more substantial. It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a millworker's son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. The audacity of hope!
In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation; the belief in things not seen; the belief that there are better days ahead. I believe we can give our middle class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity. I believe we can provide jobs to the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair. I believe that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices, and meet the challenges that face us. America!"
I very much do not get the same sense that Vance loves America the way Obama simply does, in his heart. Vance comes across (and seems to intentionally want to come across) as someone who wants to create clear enemies to hate on, including some traditional Republican allies like Wall Street.
Brilliant. You really nailed it.
Somewhat doubt the read of him as cynical. I’ve met powerful people and none of them struck me as cynical. Different from me, deluded from my point of view, but rarely cynical. There are better ways to make money for someone who thinks in a purely practical manner.
Being cynical doesn’t mean being after money.
True, but people are complicated and I don’t think it’s a common thing for people to entirely fake their motivations and keep that narrative going for years and years.
If you're cynically pretending to be something, you'll be worse at it and lose the election to someone who genuinely believes it.
People aren’t weighting motivation enough here. How do people keep doing things they don’t believe year after year?
Lots of “they must be bad people to not think like I think.”
Not if the Thing is something you have to be stupid to belief. In that case you - an intelligent pretender, will probably outmaneuver the dumb true believers.
the Thing here is that Trump's actions are justified and in keeping with liberal values. Vance has the advantage that he thinks Trump's actions are justified, he just doesn't care about liberal values.
This where I wonder how much of flip-flopping is pragmatic flexibility and political savvy vs. cynical self-interest/conformity. I imagine in most cases it is both or it depends on context. I’d say Vance is at least being deliberate in his positions, there’s strong motivation behind it regardless of the effectiveness of his shifts
I think there's a conflation here between 'cynical' and 'fake'. Vance definitely has real beliefs. He's just also willing to say anything and do anything and take any public position in furtherance of his beliefs -- i.e., he is unconstrained by duties to truth, much like Trump (hence why they are a great fit).
I wouldn't have believed it eight years ago if someone from the future told me we would have a (potential) Vice President who is friends with Moldbug.
Or that the Slutwalk organizer and Teamster head would speak at the RNC
Or a respected commentator who is a dramatard. Takes all kinds I guess.
It's basically the Eton of online communities, but slightly less gay
Everywhere is less gay than Eton. A 200 man no-loads-refused brunch party is less gay than Eton.
As far as I'm concerned (i.e. what I want to happen) Vance is the best pick that they could have made.
I'm not extremely intimately familiar with all the details of him, but everything I've seen I've liked.
His messaging is the sort of populist stuff that all of the trump base has wanted, right?
He has the credentials and if people want the GOP to change away from the old neoconservative stuff into something new and more aligned towards to American workers, then he is the guy that most embodies all of that as far as I can tell.
And yeah there's a laundry list of reason to be skeptical because of things he's done, his associates, and most of all just because he's a politician. But whatever, I'm willing to give him a chance and I hope he makes the most of it.
Edit to add: He's a million times better than someone like Mike Pence and I was absolutely dreading they were going to pick Nikki Haley, or someone of her type.
Idk who was also on the short list. Tim Scott and Tulsi Gabbard I think? Vance is better than both of them imho. I don't hate Scott, but he comes off as kind of a doofus and his religiousness can be offputting. Don't hate Gabbard either, but she's kind of all over the place and doesn't have the type of policy vision chops that Vance has afaik.
So yeah, I'm happy.
I would also add that the Silicon Valley antiwoke crowd could be very instrumental in applying AI/LLMs to effectively steer the ship of state via a skeleton crew of appointees overseeing the automation, rather than relying on manpower of sympathetic bureaucrats. I came across another substack showing how it could be done.
https://penbroke.substack.com/p/controlling-institutions-with-machines
I've got an oddball book recommendation for you. It discusses the central matter of this article far more deeply than you'd expect -- "Catalina's Riddle," by Steven Saylor. It's ostensibly a mystery pulp, and the second in a series, but it stands alone just fine. (I found a copy in a Little Free Library near me.)
Excuse me if I'm Rome-splaining, but Lucius Sergius Catalina, known in the English-speaking world as Cataline, was a populist politician whose heyday was a few decades before the death of Caesar. At that time, Roman politics was, stated briefly, stalemated between a small elite faction that controlled enough institutions to stymy reform, on the one hand, and on the other, a populist faction, which had the support of the people, broadly speaking, but in general lacked able political leadership. In short, any member of the societal elite who deigned to do so - or who needed to do so as a result of being ousted from the elite from one reason or another - could become a populist leader more or less overnight, but that often led to their exile or death at the hands of the rest of the elite.
Two generations before Catiline -- approximately -- the brothers Gracchi made names for themselves as able reform-oriented politicians and rhetoricians. The elite dealt with them by -- more or less -- declaring a "The Purge"-style suspension of penalties for murder for a period, during which the Gracchi (and many of their supporters) were killed.
Between the Gracchi and Catiline, there was Gaius Marius, a successful general & military reformer of a non-elite background who came to politics in more of an Eisenhowery way, and pushed through various reforms against elite opposition, mostly with the goal of protecting the interests of the veterans of his army. This resulted in a brutal civil war between Marius and the elite faction, led by Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who wound up outlasting Marius (who died of a stroke eventually), and rolled back his reforms (as well as some from previous centuries).
Catiline, whom we know little about except from oppositional sources, seems to have taken up the populist mantle in no small part because of vast personal debts incurred during failed political campaigns. It seems to me like a sort of "The Producers" situation - rather than having any sort of long-term plan, he had to keep promising people things simply to keep himself from financial ruin. (Sound familiar?) He & various of his ousted-from-the-elite-for-various-reasons associates were accused of conspiring to overthrow the state & were executed extrajudicially on the orders of Cicero during his consulship.
The populist mantle next fell on Caesar, in no small part because he took a "middle course" during the Catiline vs Cicero affair, opposing Catiline but also opposing extrajudicial measures against him. He departed for a yearlong term as governor of Gaul at the end of that year, which he parlayed into a ten-year "state of emergency" governorship of the province (thereby removing his person from the nitty-gritty of Roman politics while he built a loyal army and took much booty), and you know the rest of that story.
"Ousted member of elite goes populist to get his own back" - as the uncharitable take - has happened a lot. Simon de Montfort is another example. The point of these historical analogies is, uhh, I forget...but it is interesting. It seems to me that if you want to replace a corrupt or failing "elite," you need more than one or two "competent ousted-elite populists" like Catiline - you need someone really, really, really charismatic, *and* smart, *and* cunning, like Caesar, *and* he needs to survive and build a network for not just years but decades before openly opposing the elite, *and* he (or she!) needs to present a novel and compelling vision for the future, one compelling enough to win over big parts of the elite itself. If one is looking for people with the potential to fit this bill, one should be looking exclusively for charismatic people who have become famous while remaining thus far nonpartisan. This means people like Taylor Swift, Shaq, Mark Cuban, Oprah - I think any of them could take the Republican nomination in '28, if any of them deem the time right, and remake the party in their image.
Keep in mind that the VP has very little de jure power, and I doubt Trump will allow him much de facto power. He'll sit on the sidelines for four years unless Trump is removed from office.
How is Trump going to *not* allow him de facto power? He's lazy and totally disinterested in the actual day-to-day governance of the country outside of whatever flavor of the month thing has captured his interest. Someone is going to have to do head down bureaucrat grinding, and it's definitely not the Donald.
I agree. Whether that person is Vance or not remains to be seen. I think Ramaswamy will likely be chosen as Trump's chief of staff or another senior EOP position to implement his agenda more effectively than in the first administration. People like him are the solution to the Republican elite competency crisis that was so apparent during the first Trump Administration. However, I also read somewhere that Vivek is lined up to fill Vance's seat in the Senate should the Republican ticket win in November to ensure there are loyal and competent people who can help push through Trump's agenda in Congress.
Yuval Levin had some Interesting takes on competency vs trust (more specifically trustworthiness) on https://www.honestlypod.com/podcast/episode/245c7ec8/the-roots-of-the-assassination-attempt
Perhaps that competency void is not quite as important as it would seem ?
This particular faction of Silicon Valley rightists is actually pretty aligned with him on these things. They all feel that they are arrayed against the forces of old capital -- my personal theory is this is because their relationship to labor is totally different. Their enterprises rely on relatively few skilled laborers rather than the masses, and so they are willing to make common cause with the unions because it's no skin off their back.
This will not play well among the NYC elite, who still actually run the country and were warming up to Trump, and if the Democrats manage to kick Biden off the ticket I think it will come back to bite the GOP dramatically. But it'll be very good for the SV faction if they do manage to win these positions.