The Witness Chronicles, July 25, 2024
The strange mythology of J.D. Vance
There is Something Seriously Off With J.D. Vance
That makes two of them
The Trump campaign desperately needs an adult on the team, a normal adult, not one spouting incomprehensible nonsense or another misogynist, i.e., woman hater. It is only a week since Trump chose J.D. Vance as his running mate and it is not going well at all.
I really wonder what kind of vetting they did that made this choice seem like a winning one. A Senator with less than two years experience, a west coast venture capitalist pretending he is a hillbilly, a man whose ideas about the role of women are rooted in some mythological fantasy of 1950s America.
It really looks like Trump overrode his advisors and made this pick on impulse, no big surprise there. Vance was chosen to appeal to the hardcore MAGA crowd while Trump set his sights on Joe Biden. But then Joe Biden was gone and his replacement is a strong independent woman who speaks for many others, young and old, but all living in the present, not back in the days of obedience.
It took less than a week (but what a week!) for Republicans to start questioning the choice. In that week Vance has managed to offend a large cross section of a major voting bloc with his extreme views on abortion, marriage, and other issues, like independence, important to women in general across the political spectrum.
No big surprise there. But it apparently was never suspected that he might be running against a ticket with a highly experienced woman leading the ticket, perhaps the greatest political miscalculation in recent history.
As an older white male I know a lot of my contemporaries are not really comfortable with the company of females, something that has always mystified me. We’re the last dregs of a society which still hung onto the idea that women need men, but Vance was never a member of that ancient group. Yet somehow he thinks those antiquated values are a key to winning elections.
The selection of this man tells us everything we need to know about the entire Trump worldview. Everything centers around the idea that white men are meant to run the world, despite our having done a fairly terrible job of it. But that idea is dead when it comes to younger voters, not just Gen Z, but everyone below the age of sixty or so.
It’s one of a lot of ideas the Republican Party clings to, including homophobia, transphobia, racial superiority, phony religious fervor, and a general sense of entitlement, as personified by the extreme narcissism of Donald Trump, narcissism bordering on sociopathy.
Kamala Harris turns out to be their worst nightmare, a powerful woman, multi-racial, with an extensive career in very responsible positions of power, a prosecutor running against a convicted felon, and a powerful voice for those generations that are post-boomer.
It says a lot that the Trump people really seem to have not seen this coming. They obviously relied on Biden hanging on to the values of old white men and refusing to step aside for a woman, something it looked like he might do. But Biden knows politics and he read the writing on the wall and did the right thing, not only dropping out but gracefully passing the torch to Harris.
Those on the right who thought this might be a possibility probably thought running against her would be a walk in the park. But now they are discovering that she has the ability to tap into large blocs of voters who either were not going to vote at all or were undecided.
Not only many women, but people of color, LGBTQ folks who feared the openly anti-gay right, non-evangelical Christians and people of other faiths, immigrants- the list goes on and on. People who fear Trump but were uncomfortable with supporting another old white guy, no matter how respected he has been.
All of this is why choosing a man like Vance is mystifying, except that it tells us a lot about the fantasy world the Republican right live in and cling to, a world where phony stories about hillbillies written by venture capitalists create an imaginary reality that never existed.
The world of J.D. Vance.
~ I write The Grasshopper, an occasional letter on the creative life and it’s sister, mostly daily publication The Witness Chronicles, a place for my articles on politics and climate. They share a free and paid subscription. I don’t paywall any content in these, however this is how I live and I strongly believe all writers and creatives should get paid, if we provide value. Your support with a paid subscription helps make that happen.
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Thank you for another good read. found myself explaining to our grandchildren that Presidential Campaign s never stared till late summer in our day . They were showing fifty years of Biden’s service I was shocked that in 1987 he dropped out of President race because Regan was trying to stack Supreme Court Biden went back to senator he was head of judiciary committee he stoped Regan from bringing on Boarke which at that time would had overturned Roe vs Wade It was all in segments of live interviews of Biden going ballistic over Supreme Court very interesting and very revealing how much I never paid attention or understood what my freedom really meant