The Violent Promise of Vance-Politik
From the homeless to a new global color line to immigrant “safe havens,” the harm will be absorbed by the unseen and the unheard.
While I’ve been at a mind-jolting workshop in Canberra about “progressive” foreign policy, my head has just been spinning the entire time from everything going on in the world. Countless political cross-currents happening at the speed of Twitter right now.
But the J.D. Vance thing stands out as singularly significant, in part because people can’t help but comment on it while appearing to be confused about what the Vance nomination actually means for everything from the defense budget to “great-power competition,” and from NATO to war in America.
This take, for example, from Murtaza Hussain—who is generally of quite sound mind—totally misreads Vance based purely on a selectively hopeful reading of Vance’s rhetoric.
I’ve made it a point to digest every Vance speech, quote, or piece of writing since 2017 (or at least as much of it as I could find). Not because I thought he’d be Veep.
Rather, initially, I was trying to understand right-wing #NeverTrumpers (he had once been one). But Vance also intrigued me because it was obvious from the beginning that he was a class subversive, cosplaying as an Appalachian working-class explainer while actually following a typical Ivy-League-to-finance-bro pipeline. He was exploiting, rather than representing, a particular rural, white working-class grievance—and that made his presentation distinct from typical defenders of ruling-class privilege.
Now, you don’t need me to tell you all the reasons why he’s a bad candidate or a danger or whatever. Plenty of people doing that right now.
What I can add is an explanation of:
How Vance’s ideas about violence are explicitly racialized (envisioning a Global Color Line),
Why a Trump-Vance presidency will never yield foreign-policy realism (because of neocon infiltration), and
How the political terrain we’re operating on has changed (Washington’s foreign policy imagination is becoming post-hegemonic in a particularly reactionary direction).