If Trump had Picked Marjorie Taylor Greene for VP, He Could Hardly Have Done Worse than JD Vance

An Angry Pitiless Rant, Full of Invective, Against the Grotesque Ascendancy of the Postliberal Right

I cannot begin to describe how angry I am.

For the last few days since Trump picked JD Vance for VP, and, I had the mortifying embarrassment to observe the complacency among conservative Republicans with which Vance was received into the Republican mainstream’s orbit, I have been enjoying excellent 5 year old single cask bourbon whiskey, besides seething with discontent and profound disapprobation, my pessimism and horror verging on disillusionment and despair.

(I’m not sure how easy it is to find outside New York, but this is phenomenal stuff. It’s about $60 which I don’t think is bad at all for the quality. I’m a scotch guy, but I really love high quality bourbons)

Despair for the Republican Party. The fate of the American experiment in the twenty-first century at the most dangerous time since the interwar period of the 1930s. Despair for the world, the NATO alliance, and Western civilization.

My primary fear is that while the Democratic Party has been absolutely crippled by identity politics, symbolized, say, by Biden’s public announcement of his choice of a black woman as VP, a genuflection that was replicated when he nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, pandering that currently has reached a terrifying apotheosis in the characterization of Biden’s foreign policy towards Israel— though claiming to be the Jewish state’s strongest supporter in word, in deed, Biden is facilitating Israel’s de facto surrender to Hamas, bolstering Iran’s bid for regional supremacy— the Republican Party, however, has put waging culture war at the top of its agenda…

I wasn’t always altogether convinced that the Republican Party under Trump had totally defeated the Reaganite pro-immigration, pro-free trade, pro-immigration, foreign policy hawk neoliberal consensus of establishment Republicans like us. Though utterly abandoning trade, and defaming NATO, the remarkable thing about Trump’s first term was that despite his rhetoric, he combined a deregulatory approach to the market with a muscular foreign policy, cutting taxes and destroying ISIS, finally confronting China after decades of failed policies of naive engagement, impressively reversing Obama’s catastrophic conciliatory policies to the Middle East, pulling out of the suicidal nuclear deal and slapping sanctions on the mullahs, and assassinating Qassem Suleimani, and drafting the Abraham Accords, a sort of NATO between Israel and the Gulf Arab states to keep the Iranian genie in the bottle.

What we can say we like about Trump at least is that he did not pull out of NATO, like he threatened, and he didn’t totally kill NAFTA, though the USMCA fucking sucks. On the contrary he wielded American power fearlessly, like a boss. Say what you like about him and his boundless narcissism and his indefensible disrespect for constitutional norms, which are both reasons why I would never ever vote for Trump not under any circumstances, if character counts— but, if you care for American power to uphold world order, then you should admire Trump’s assertive, if fickle and inexperienced, approach to using power abroad.

He is no Eisenhower nor a Truman, nor a calculating Nixon. And he is nowhere near the ideological mastermind of Ronald Reagan, the greatest Republican president, if not the greatest, or at least the most consequential, American president since the Second World War after FDR. But Trump was not to be underestimated. He was not weak. His foreign policy was erratic. It was all over the place, and at times, it was disturbing how he embraced as business partners the very dictators who want to wipe us all out and currently are actively colluding to do so, like Putin, Kim Jong Un and Xi meanwhile heaping scorn on our NATO allies and disdaining the national security state.

The truth, however, is that where Trump evinced a tendency to nobly do what he ignominiously condemned in words, Biden— worse—does what he says he condemns. And it’s no exaggeration to say that Biden has pursued a more America First foreign policy than Trump did or may yet do. In another Trump term, I would add, he would be hard pressed to outdo the shameful retreat Biden has embarked on.

Effectively Biden has done everything in this term what Trump only threatened to do in his. Although Biden, the Democratic Party, and the legacy media would have you think Trump is an “isolationist,” it was Biden, wasn’t it, who cut a deal with the Taliban and surrendered Afghanistan, killing thirteen American soldiers in the process, and consigning our Afghan allies to imprisonment execution and torture, furthermore subjecting the majority of the population to starvation, and women basically to slavery— not to mention Al Qaeda is fucking flourishing.

It was Biden, wasn’t it, who on the eve of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine said he could tolerate a “minor incursion” into the country. It was also Biden who said nothing after Iran butchered a young woman for incorrectly wearing her head scarf and unleashed a terrible crackdown on protesters. Rather than punishing the regime with strong words and perhaps coercive threats, Biden actually eased oil sanctions on Iran. Even as Iran shipped lethal drones to Russia to aid Putin’s genocide, Biden was still praying to resurrect the nuclear deal that even he owned was “dead.” Currently, though we consider Trump this guy who hates our allies, it’s Biden right now who’s drawing redlines against Israel, halting weapons shipments, pressuring Israel to withdraw from Gaza, and incidentally proposing to reward Hamas with a “Palestinian state.”

With Biden presiding over a world on fire, at his sanction, in some cases like in Gaza with his open endorsement, having first wrecked our credibility with the cut-and-run betrayal of Afghanistan; and endangered our security guarantees with his lackluster weak-kneed support of Ukraine, slow walking arms shipments and basically forbidding the Ukrainians from maximally using the weapons we give them; and humiliated American power in the Middle East with his unwillingness to rise to America’s responsibility to defend freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, with the Houthis bombing, and the Iranians hijacking, container ships— one would hope that Trump offers a restoration of American hegemony.

However since Trump tapped Vance for VP, I don’t even think I could confidently take comfort in a return of the muscular foreign policy that dominated Trump’s first term. Trump has never had an ideology, which was always one of his serious drawbacks when American foreign policy needs one as much now as it ever did on account of the multipolar threat America faces in Europe and Asia. The only thing worse is that now he does have an ideology, and it’s very bad.

It requires no explanation that Vance is the substitute for Trump’s former lack of a vision. He could have picked the market-oriented and brilliant neoliberal Doug Burgum, or Tim Scott with Scott’s ostensible commitment to America’s aspirational ideals, upward mobility and equal opportunity. Instead Trump doubled down on the MAGA postmodern alternative reality phantasmagorical delusional worldview, arguably first hatched by Trump himself but expanded on by opportunists of the very online right such as Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, and lended intellectual credibility by the likes of Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule.

These are people who have a genuine desire to rip America’s constitutional order to shreds, not least by telling Israel Ukraine and Taiwan to fend for or go fuck themselves, and somehow build a Christian nationalist, probably Catholic illiberal regime in the United States. Their strategy is to advance these ideas so subtilely, and do it with such a patina of innocuousness that conservative voters, because of the excesses of the left, internalize its legitimacy, or else don’t notice it or pretend not to. Some of the preeminent vehicles for advancing and implementing these antidemocratic ideas are Josh hawley and JD Vance. Don’t mind people like Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene. They are no more than clowns, too stupid to do anything but help delegitimize the political system by mainstreaming conspiracy theories, name-calling normal Republicans “RINO’s,” and nihilistically obstructing the functions of government at every opportunity.

Conservatives have accurately, and in my opinion humorously, described wokeness as a “mind virus.” We should admit the same about MAGA. We would be advised to see JD Vance as one of the chief embodiments, at this moment, before even Trump himself, of what we can call the MAGA mind virus. Because Vance is diseased.

In 2016 echoing Karl Marx, he said that Trump was “cultural heroin” for the white working class. Now since the 2020 election—in which Vance admitted that if he were Pence, he would have submitted to Trump’s call to acknowledge alternate slates of electors, and thus aid and abet Trump’s bid to crown himself president for life—he has made himself Trump’s VP, positioning himself possibly for the future presidency, spearheading America’s descent into a post-liberal future, where waging culture war against the left and even conservatives, takes priority over everything else. The national debt, the limitless welfare state, entitlements going broke and cutting themselves without reform, and Iran’s nuclear breakout, Putin’s empire-building, and Xi’s global expansionism everywhere, in the Middle East, Africa, South America, and Asia of course: be damned. Those are all the concerns of “globalists” and “neocons” and “elites.”

America has no obligation to its NATO allies, not because they don’t all spend 2% of GDP on defense. Forget some countries that are spending 5% like the Baltics. Because Canada and Spain aren’t spending 2%, I suppose Vance would let Putin do “whatever the hell” he wants, like Trump says. And Georgia, Moldova? So what. When Putin invaded, Vance said he didn’t care about Ukraine. Why? Because “elites” do. At one point Vance managed to demagogue entitlement reformers and smear Ukraine in one sentence. He said that we’re pushing old people in wheelchairs over a cliff to buy Ukraine’s president a yacht.

JD Vance is repulsive. He, you could say, is why I started The Neoliberal Standard almost two years ago, to save the American Republic and save the West.

He is also pro-union, and he thinks we can fund social security and reduce the debt entirely with tariffs on Chinese imports. He wants to hike the minimum wage to $20! JD Vance has taken the MAGA line that there are two types of people in America, real Americans who are all white blue collar “workers.” And then there are Americans, who are not “real” in that sense, which you may fairly describe as everyone who went to college rather than lost their factory job to a multinational corporation, and promptly spiraled into dissipation within the timeframe of a generation.

It seems that within just a decade sometimes while every upper middle class college kid on one hand became a radical activist (everyone except for me), making identity into a transcendent religion, and exploiting ethnic and sexual minorities as a vainglorious means of atoning for America’s original sin of slavery and systemic racism, and worshipping clean energy to stave off the climate apocalypse end-times, with the aid of digital technology— there emerged a reactionary white male blue collar underclass, who despite the left, are in the process of inventing their own religion rooted in class resentment, self-pity and chauvinistic cultural grievances.

JD Vance represents the prospect of socialism for disinherited angry, lonely white men at the expense of everyone else (and inevitably even those angry men). This is a faction of voters old and young who feel insecure largely because of the ascendancy of women in the workplace, who resent women’s financial independence, and how it enables them to put off having children, or even enable them to choose not to have children at all.

Like Oh my god. Women choosing to live their own lives? How awful.

This drives lonely disaffected men crazy who desire to marry and suborn women with children to feel important, not unlike everyone on the left clamoring to feel like they matter… They harp on the demographic crisis, or baby bust or whatever, as a license to vote for illiberal authoritarian figures like Vance in vain hopes that the government can paternalistically provide the solution for their failure to attract women. For anyone who wants to know what “America First” really means, it’s putting no less than the socialization of alienated, weird, ugly, uneducated angry men first, people for whom it’s little wonder that women are not drawn to them in this economy in this century (which cracks me the fuck up by the way). Pity them.

But to put them first, these real Americans—because everyone else who went to college presumably isn’t a real American, all those doctors, teachers, and lawyers and CEO’s—involves practically rewarding these men for their vagrancy, with wage subsidies and tax credits, only depriving them of the incentives they need to work and get off the couch, and stop listening to Steve Bannon’s podcast, and actually talk to women rather than blaming wokeness and immigration for why they do nothing but fester, and succumb to addiction, depending on worker’s compensation, transfer payments and handouts galore.

I apologize for how this post meanders. It lacks most of the intellectual rigor and logical argument of most of my blog posts. I mostly disdain to weigh in on a personal level and vent like this. But in case you didn’t know what America First beyond MAGA, and the post-liberal right, and what they want really is, this had to be said. It is a fully developed, more or less coherent, though insane and ridiculous ideology, and impossible to actually implement without getting voted out of power, so I don’t worry about dictatorship or anything. But even to attempt a project on this scale, like the illiberal right proposes, could be a disaster for American power and the economy, at a pivotal moment for America and the West. Therefore it’s nonetheless a very serious problem. And neoliberals deserve to be particularly enraged with JD Vance. If you don’t like Trump, be assured this guy is ten times worse. It even forecasts a second Trump term that could be very different from his first with Vance’s influence, if Vance is supposed to be a blueprint for the future of the GOP after Trump.

Hold on.

— Jay