About JD Vance, an intelligent, complex, flawed person

LGBQT Nation writes about JD Vance:

J.D. Vance’s former trans friend speaks out 

about how he turned hateful

He delivered baked goods to his trans friend after their gender-affirming surgery. Now he's calling LGBTQ+ people "groomers"

“It hurt my feelings when he started saying hateful things about trans people,” said Sofia Nelson, a former classmate of Vance at Yale Law School.

They were reportedly close friends, with their friendship continuing after Vance graduated in 2013, but this ended when Vance supported an Arkansas bill that restricted transgender care for minors in 2021.

He had another classmate at Yale who has since cut ties with him – Josh McLaurin, a Democratic state senator from Georgia. The two stayed in touch up until when Trump first ran for president. Vance reportedly told McLaurin on Facebook, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”

“He realized that the only way that he could realize and give effect to his own anger in politics was to identify with the MAGA movement,” McLaurin said to the Times.

The cynicism of MAGA elites cannot be easily overstated. These people are driven by wealth and power lust, rage, hate, bigotry and moral cynicism to the point of nihilism. But try to square my allegation of cynicism with these parts of a fascinating much longer essay that Vance wrote for The Lamp, a Catholic blog in 2020:

HOW I JOINED THE RESISTANCE

As I advanced through our educational hierarchy—moving on from Ohio State to Yale Law School—I began to worry that my assimilation into elite culture came at a high cost. My sister once told me that the song that made her think of me was “Simple Man” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Though I had fallen in love, I found that the emotional demons of my childhood made it hard to be the type of partner I’d always wanted to be. My Randian arrogance about my own ability melted away when confronted with the realization that an obsession with achievement would fail to produce the achievement that mattered most to me for so much of my life: a happy, thriving family.

I had immersed myself in the logic of the meritocracy and found it deeply unsatisfying. And I began to wonder: were all these worldly markers of success actually making me a better person? I had traded virtue for achievement and found the latter wanting. But the woman I wanted to marry cared little whether I obtained a Supreme Court clerkship. She just wanted me to be a good person.

Around the same time, I attended a talk at our law school with Peter Thiel. This was 2011, and Thiel was a well-known venture capitalist but hardly a household name. He would later blurb my book and become a good friend, but I had no idea what to expect at the time. He spoke first in personal terms: arguing that we were increasingly tracked into cutthroat professional competitions. We would compete for appellate clerkships, and then Supreme Court clerkships. We would compete for jobs at elite law firms, and then for partnerships at those same places. At each juncture, he said, our jobs would offer longer work hours, social alienation from our peers, and work whose prestige would fail to make up for its meaninglessness. He also argued that his own world of Silicon Valley spent too little time on the technological breakthroughs that made life better—those in biology, energy, and transportation—and too much on things like software and mobile phones. Everyone could now tweet at each other, or post photos on Facebook, but it took longer to travel to Europe, we had no cure for cognitive decline and dementia, and our energy use increasingly dirtied the planet. He saw these two trends—elite professionals trapped in hyper-competitive jobs, and the technological stagnation of society—as connected. If technological innovation were actually driving real prosperity, our elites wouldn’t feel increasingly competitive with one another over a dwindling number of prestigious outcomes.

Peter’s talk remains the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School. He articulated a feeling that had until then remained unformed: that I was obsessed with achievement in se—not as an end to something meaningful, but to win a social competition. My worry that I had prioritized striving over character took on a heightened significance: striving for what? I didn’t even know why I cared about the things I cared about. I fancied myself educated, enlightened, and especially wise about the ways of the world—at least compared with most of the people from my hometown. Yet I was obsessed with obtaining professional credentials—a clerkship with a federal judge and then an associate position at a prestigious firm—that I didn’t understand. I hated my limited exposure to legal practice. I looked to the future, and realized that I’d been running a desperate race where the first prize was a job I hated.

I began immediately planning for a career outside the law, which is why I spent less than two years after graduation as a practicing attorney. But Peter left me with one more thing: he was possibly the smartest person I’d ever met, but he was also a Christian. He defied the social template I had constructed—that dumb people were Christians and smart ones atheists. I began to wonder where his religious belief came from, which led me to René Girard, the French philosopher whom he apparently studied under at Stanford.

One of Girard’s central insights is that human civilizations are often, perhaps even always, founded on a “scapegoat myth”—an act of violence committed against someone who has wronged the broader community, retold as a sort of origin story for the community.

Girard points out that Romulus and Remus are, like Christ, divine children, and, like Moses, placed in a river basket to save them from a jealous king. There was a time when I bristled at such comparisons, worried than any seeming lack of originality on the part of Scripture meant that it couldn’t be true. This is a common rhetorical device of the New Atheists: point to some creation story—like the flood narrative in the Epic of Gilgamesh—as evidence that the sacred authors have plagiarized their story from some earlier civilization. It reasonably follows that if the biblical story is lifted from somewhere else, the version in the Bible may not be the Word of God after all.

The victim of the madness of crowds is, as Christ was, infinitely powerful—able to prevent his own murder—and perfectly innocent—undeserving of the rage and violence of the crowd. In Christ, we see our efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim for what they are: a moral failing, projected violently upon someone else. Christ is the scapegoat who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims.

These very personal reflections on faith, conformity, and virtue coincided with a writing project that would eventually become a very public success: Hillbilly Elegy, the hybrid book of memoir and social commentary I published in 2016. I look back on earlier drafts of the book, and realize just how much I changed from 2013 to 2015: I started the book angry, resentful of my mother, especially, and confident in my own abilities. I finished it a little humbled, and very unsure about what to do to “solve” so many of our social problems. And the answer I landed on, as unsatisfactory then as it is now, is that you can’t actually “solve” our social problems. The best you can hope for is to reduce them or to blunt their effects.

I noticed during my research that many of those social problems came from behavior for which social scientists and policy experts had a different vocabulary. On the right, the conversation often turned to “culture” and “personal responsibility”—the ways in which individuals or communities held back their own progress. And though it seemed obvious to me that there was something dysfunctional about some of the places in which I’d grown up, the discourse on the right seemed a little heartless. It failed to account for the fact that destructive behaviors were almost always tragedies with terrible consequences. It is one thing to wag your finger at another person for failing to act a certain way, but it is something else to feel the weight of the misery that comes from those actions.

The left’s intellectuals focused much more on the structural and external problems facing families like mine—the difficulty in finding jobs and the lack of funding for certain types of resources. And while I agreed that more resources were often necessary, there seemed to me a sense in which our most destructive behaviors persisted—even flourished—in times of material comfort. The economic left was often more compassionate, but theirs was a kind of compassion—devoid of any expectation—that reeked of giving up. A compassion that assumes a person is disadvantaged to the point of hopelessness is like sympathy for a zoo animal, and I had no use for it.

And as I reflected on these competing views of the world, and the wisdom and shortcomings of each, I felt desperate for a worldview that understood our bad behavior as simultaneously social and individual, structural and moral; that recognized that we are products of our environment; that we have a responsibility to change that environment, but that we are still moral beings with individual duties; one that could speak against rising rates of divorce and addiction, not as sanitized conclusions about their negative social externalities, but with moral outrage. And I realized, eventually, that I had already been exposed to that worldview: it was my Mamaw’s Christianity. And the name it gave for the behaviors I had seen destroy lives and communities was “sin.”

A decade ago, I took this as evidence of a vengeful, irrational God. Yet who could look at the statistics on what our early twenty-first century culture and politics had wrought—the misery, the rising suicide rates, the “deaths of despair” in the richest country on earth, and doubt that the sins of parents had any effect on their children? 

This is a passage from City of God, where St. Augustine summarizes the debauchery of Rome’s ruling class:

This is our concern, that every man be able to increase his wealth so as to supply his daily prodigalities, and so that the powerful may subject the weak for their own purposes. Let the poor court the rich for a living, and that under their protection they may enjoy a sluggish tranquility; and let the rich abuse the poor as their dependents, to minister to their pride. Let the people applaud not those who protect their interests, but those who provide them with pleasure. Let no severe duty be commanded, no impurity forbidden. Let kings estimate their prosperity, not by the righteousness, but by the servility of their subjects. Let the provinces stand loyal to the kings, not as moral guides, but as lords of their possessions and purveyors of their pleasures; not with a hearty reverence, but a crooked and servile fear. .... If such happiness is distasteful to any, let him be branded as a public enemy; and if any attempt to modify or put an end to it let him be silenced, banished, put an end to.

It was the best criticism of our modern age I’d ever read. A society oriented entirely towards consumption and pleasure, spurning duty and virtue. Not long after I first read these words, my friend Oren Cass published a book arguing that American policy makers have focused far too much on promoting consumption as opposed to productivity, or some other measure of wellbeing. The reaction—criticizing Oren for daring to push policies that might lower consumption—almost proved the argument. “Yes,” I found myself saying, “Oren’s preferred policies might reduce per-capita consumption. But that’s precisely the point: our society is more than the sum of its economic statistics. If people die sooner in the midst of historic levels of consumption, then perhaps our focus on consumption is misguided.”

And indeed it was this insight, more than any other, that ultimately led not just to Christianity, but to Catholicism. Despite my Mamaw’s unfamiliarity with the liturgy, the Roman and Italian cultural influences, and the foreign pope, I slowly began to see Catholicism as the closest expression of her kind of Christianity: obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims; protective of children and families and with the things necessary to ensure they thrive. And above all: a faith centered around a Christ who demands perfection of us even as He loves unconditionally and forgives easily. (emphases added)

Three thoughts

1. Try squaring Vance’s 2020 essay with the Vance the 2024 LGBQT article talks about. On the one hand Vance (i) points to the “scapegoat myth” that Girard articulated as a fundamental insight, (ii) says God loves unconditionally and forgives easily, (iii) openly admits his own failings, but then he (iv) publicly attacks, insults and slanders the LGBQT community as evil “groomers.” What is going on in that man’s mind? Is he a cynical Christian nationalist scapegoating LGBQT people in an insane drive for wealth and power, an imperative he criticizes? Or, is he an old-fashioned Christian like his Mamaw? Or, is he just very confused? 

2. I am struck by how similar my thinking about some of these things has been to the journey that Vance took. I never had the complication of any urge toward any form of religion. My mental path was different that way, but pretty similar otherwise. Vance says he was desperate for a worldview that understood our bad behavior as simultaneously social and individual and structural and moral. I do wish that Vance had somehow become aware of pragmatic rationalism. It is a worldview that understands that human bad behavior is both simultaneously social and individual, and moral (maybe also structural depending on what he means by structural).

3. Not all religious people are stupid. Some are brilliant, probably most are average. I have argued that many times here. This essay make that clear. No one can accuse Vance of being stupid or carelessly self-deluded. He knows exactly what he is doing and why. That is how I see the elites behind the MAGA movement. I see them as cynical aggressively opportunistic people with an intense lust for wealth and power and fundamentally different from most (~95% ?) of the rank and file MAGA. So, is Vance a cynic and/or something else?