Vance, violence, and the lie of unity

After spending two days talking about god, healing the nation, and “lowering the national temperature,” Donald Trump picked one of his party’s preeminent fascists to be his Vice Presidential candidate, and hours later the Republican National Convention kicked off with chants of “fight, fight, fight!” First and foremost, Vance is a danger to society and a proponent of violence of every kind. He is now the most politically successful member of a group known as the “New Right” or National Conservatives. As Hannah Gurman recently wrote, they consider themselves to be the “post-liberal” right that “rejects liberal individualism and libertarian economics and promises to restore the centrality of religion, family, and nation to the conservative movement.”

What this New Right seeks to do is promote the rhetoric of economic populism, without promoting the reality of it, and simultaneously harness white racism and grievance politics. In doing so they hope to move the United States towards a more authoritarian future. These men, and they are almost all men, say that liberal democracy, classical liberalism, and modern conservatism have all failed, but rather than working towards real democracy they aim for a reversion to a system more akin to monarchy or feudalism. In a comprehensive piece for Vanity Fair that details this ecosystem, James Pogue spends a good amount of time on the ideological leader of the National Conservatives, Curtis Yarvin. Among other things, Yarvin has expressly written that he thinks we need a “national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator.”

And this movement isn’t new. A 2014 piece in The Baffler showed how much of the tech world was already enamored with Yarvin’s thinking, leading a chunk of Silicon Valley to “oppose popular suffrage, egalitarianism and pluralism.” Peter Thiel, Vance’s most powerful backer and close advisor, also backs Donald Trump and is Yarvin’s most influential acolyte. The former CEO of PayPal, the founder of Palantir, and the first outsider investor in Facebook, Thiel now has a fortune of about $8 billion, and he has used it to help fund the Senate campaign of Vance to the tune of $10 million. And he’s poured many times that amount into the New Right via other campaigns, events, and institutions.

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

What is most important, right now, is knowing what exactly Vance, Thiel, Yarvin and the rest really want. We know they want an authoritarian, dictatorial regime. We know that, unlike the semi-bumbling (and still dangerous) foray into fascism that Elon Musk is making, these men have spent a decade or more working to gain power within the Republican party and create a web of interconnected people and organizations on the right. We know that Vance supports a national abortion ban without exceptions for rape or incest, even though he took that page off his website within an hour of getting the VP nod, and that he even wants police to track down those who leave their states to get abortions. We know he doesn’t believe in gay marriage and that he’s a proponent of white supremacist Great Replacement Theory. We know he wants mass deportations as soon as possible.

And we also know what he’s opposed to. Vance doesn’t only support extremist, far-right ideas that would hurt just about everyone who isn’t a wealthy, Christian man. He’s also against policies that would help everyone else. After building a career pretending to be an Appalachian whisperer (with a book that is ultimately dismissive and condescending) he now pretends to be a populist while being opposed to basic populist policies. For example, after showing up to a picket line once, yes just once, Vance opposed the PRO Act, which would make unionization far easier. He also has repeatedly commented on his opposition to universal childcare, claiming that it’s “class warfare” against “normal people.” If working parents aren’t normal people, I don’t know who is. Neither does Vance, but his determination to oppose anything akin to socialism trumps his weak attempt to appear populist, as is always the case in the fascist movement.

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We should be clear, after a whirlwind few days filled with denunciations of political violence, that the policies Vance advocates for are monumentally violent. The total abortion ban that he hopes to implement would kill people. His opposition to childcare for all is the type of systemic attack that harms the working class, the exact people he falsely claims to be fighting for. Vance has even said that people in ‘violent’ marriages shouldn’t get divorced, a disgusting and dangerous position. He also goes after trans people, migrants, and Black folks. This is what he and his movement to tear the Republican Party away from neoliberalism and steer it into a fascist dictatorship is about. This course would bring immense violence, violence that they try to pass off as moral policy, but which manifests as abuse, pain, and even death for vulnerable people across this country – a category they hope to dramatically expand.

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

In Vance’s particular case, he’s also interested in interpersonal fascist violence. Not content with waiting for the ultra-MAGA wing of the party to take over, he also has pushed for violence right now, both in his words and in the company he keeps. Immediately after young Republican Thomas Matthew Crooks took a shot at Trump, JD got on Twitter to say, “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination.” Not only was he pointing the finger directly at Biden, and not so subtly insinuating that violence was merited in response, but he also was saying that condemning Trump as fascist spurred the attack.

His goal, shared by others in the far-right, was to say that criticising fascism is the source of this violence, a premise only a fascist would believe. Fascism meets and must meet resistance, but despite this truth, and despite the identity of the shooter, Vance’s claim gained traction. Democrats legitimated it by taking down campaign ads, walking back some of their rhetoric, and then pausing their counter-messaging at the RNC. This meekness stands in stark contrast to Trump, who after briefly pretending to care about unity pivoted to demanding that all charges be dropped against him and choosing a fascist running mate — a VP pick so far to the right that Proud Boys gleefully posted pictures they’ve taken with him for all to see.

This picture alone should be disqualifying, but it won’t be. After recoiling from confrontation, Democrats have slowly started to get back in the mix over the last 24 hours, but almost all have still been hesitant, uninspired, and have at most asserted that calling Trump a fascist is not the same as calling for political violence. The one notable exception I’ve found is Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who took to social media Monday morning to say, in part, “It isn't ‘politicizing’ the tragedy to point out that no politician has done more to glorify political violence than Donald Trump. That's just the truth. We shouldn't be afraid to say it.” And that’s just it, the simple truth. Trump is by far the single biggest individual vector for political violence in this country over the past decade. I’ll link an article here that lists ten examples of him promoting violence, and I assume it was an easy piece to write. Donald Trump disproportionately created this climate, and in backing away from that reality most Democrats have already ceded the point, instead of correctly indicting the fascist movement as the main source of political violence in the United States.

I wish Democrats didn’t give up valuable ground so easily, but the party and the president are weak opposition, and are unable or unwilling to confront the right in a meaningful way 9 times out of 10. So in this difficult moment we also have an opportunity. We have the opportunity to condemn the political violence of the right, the violence of a fascist movement, and the immense violence of policies that kill millions of people at home and abroad. We have the opportunity to explain how fascism is colonialism come home to roost. We have the opportunity to discuss how the inherent violence of capitalism breeds alienation and frustration and anger at the impotence imposed upon us because wealth and power have been stripped away from the masses and concentrated in the hands of the few.

I don’t want to pretend this is an easy moment, it’s not. But countless people are horrified at the right and fed up with the inept response of the center. While the Democratic Party is hesitant to act, the fascists in this country are striding away from their brief illusion of unity and towards ever-greater violence and repression. Trump and Vance are acting triumphant at the RNC. A real alternative is needed, and it’s on us to present it – both ideologically and through our actions. We’ve seen this summer how fast history can move, and, to paraphrase Howard Zinn, you can’t stand still on a moving train.