Wednesday, July 31, 2024

#213 / Hillbilly Allergy




The image above comes from an article about J.D. Vance (who was born James Donald Bowman). Vance is the author of Hillbilly Elegy and he is currently running for Vice President on a ticket with D.J. Trump. The article from which I obtained the picture ran in Boston Review on July 22, 2024, and is titled, "Liberals Are to Blame for the Rise of J. D. Vance."

Anyone who regularly reads my blog postings is likely to remember that I have mentioned Vance before, and not very favorably. The title I am using for my blog posting today reflects the fact that I do have something like an allergic reaction to Vance and to Vance's book. 

While Hillbilly Elegy has some worthwhile things about it, I find it rather off-putting for the exact reason that the Boston Review mentions, in the sentence I have emphasized, below: 

J. D. Vance’s selection as Donald Trump’s running mate has unnerved many Democrats. He is closely tied to the architects of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation plan to purge large swathes of the civil service. He is friendly with Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, and Alex Jones, and he warns darkly about falling birthrates and rising immigration. All of this strikes many as remarkable given that Vance began his political career as the darling of the liberal establishment with his 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy, widely praised as offering the definitive explanation of the appeal of Donald Trump to the white working class. In reality, Vance was a prominent Never Trumper in 2016, telling his former roommate that Donald Trump was “America’s Hitler” and publicly declaring he would vote for a third party.
Vance’s political transformation—if it is indeed even much of a transformation at all—from liberal darling to reactionary proto-fascist is easy to dismiss as simply a case of unchecked political ambition and thirst for power. The bigger story is what the fact that liberals’ favorite conservative in 2016 has now aligned himself with the hard right tells us about the deeper pathologies of U.S. politics—above all, the liberal dream of finding a “responsible conservative” to spar with that would render American democracy stable and safe from partisan extremes (emphasis added). 
Good "politics," I believe, does not come from an "unchecked political ambition and thirst for power." One way to distinguish between what are called "liberal" views and what are called "conservative" views is to focus on the question whether we should think of our politics, and our nation, and our personal position in the world, from an "individualistic" perspective, or whether we should believe, as both Joyce Vance and I never tire of proclaiming, that "we are in this together."

By the way, though it's probably quite obvious, J.D. Vance and Joyce Vance are NOT related. 

I find myself somewhat "allergic" to Vance because he is someone who always - or at least almost always - puts himself first. A self-centered belief that progress is achieved as an individual project, as opposed to being achieved by a succesful and collaborative social effort, is pretty much the way I distinguish political "conservatives" from political "liberals." While not totally "immune," of course, from the temptations of individualism, so-called "liberals" tend to be less susceptible than so-called "conservatives" to the "I alone can do it" syndrome. 

Our recently reconfigured presidential race is really about our "future." Do we like the Kamala Harris future, emphasizing openness and tolerance, and the need to work together, or are we going to be convinced by the claim that "I alone can fix it," this being the repeated assertion of Donald J. Trump. Trump, by the way, and despite his recent disclaimers, would apparently seek to implement this approach to government by implementing a "Project 2025," one main feature of which is to eliminate civil service protections for current federal employees, making the main qualification for virtually all federal employees their personal allegience to the "Great Leader." 

The Trump/Vance ticket is proclaiming the "individualistic" ideal. Harris says we're in it together. "Liberal" that I am, I am rooting for Kamala!

Here is Harris' picture, just to balance out the picture at the top of my blog posting today. Consider it to be an anti-allergenic antidote: 


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