The Galaxy-Brained Style in American Politics
For JD Vance, no theory is too bizarre to explain everyday politics.
BY NOW, YOU’VE PROBABLY SEEN a recently recirculated 2021 clip of then–Senate candidate JD Vance attacking Vice President Kamala Harris as a representative of “childless cat ladies” who are so “miserable at their own lives and . . . choices” that they want nothing else but to bring the rest of us down, too.
It’s an ugly and misogynistic sentiment, and if it were coming from a more typical right-wing pug, it would probably have ended there—a nasty, sweaty soundbite. But Vance has a more capacious mind. He wasn’t satisfied with the insult alone; he knew he needed to sharpen his stick into a spear. So he worked in this point: “The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. . . . We’ve turned our country over to people who don’t have a direct stake in it.”
What a kicker! It creates the mental impression of an idea without actually leaving one for the mind to consider. Anyone who is alive in our country has a stake in its future, of course, but Vance isn’t talking just about our own lifetimes. He’s on the civilization beat. He is trying to think in centuries.
Am I overinterpreting a gibe delivered for the angry enjoyment of a Fox News audience? Perhaps. But I also think I’m not wrong to see in Vance a galaxy-brained tendency common among his hyper-online far-right milieu. Besides, if the roles were reversed, I’m sure Vance would reach for his exegetical tools, too.
“Cultural pessimism has a strong appeal in America today,” the historian Fritz Stern wrote. “As political conditions appear stable at home or irremediable abroad, American intellectuals have become concerned with the cultural problems of our society, and have substituted sociological or cultural analyses for political criticism.” This culture-forward orientation toward social problems characterizes the work of three late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century critics whose work whetted the appetite among the German public for a more militant reactionary movement. The 1961 book in which Stern profiled them is called The Politics of Cultural Despair.
I bring up Stern’s book because it nails the character of “revolutionary” conservatism—just the sort of politics Vance represents. The junior senator from Ohio believes “culture war is class warfare,” and the priority he’s given the former has made it possible for him to claim to be a tribune of the working class in spite of a 0 percent score from the AFL-CIO on “voting with working people.” Other aspects of Vance’s profile keep Stern’s analysis in view: Owning the libs, for instance, is just the current manifestation of an impulse that appears in many guises for conservative revolutionaries, its perennial form being an encompassing hatred of “modernity.” This mode of politics prefers the intuitive observation to the reasoned judgment. It is suspicious of facts and data—tools that corrupt their users, you see—and privileges the abstract, categorical, and high handed. In general, it’s the point of view of someone who takes Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire painting cycle to contain a subtle and profound truth about society, one best expressed in a familiar maxim: Strong men make good times; good times make weak men; weak men make . . . (I need to yawn and will let you fill in the rest).1
Vance’s specific ideas and the crowd he got them from are well known; for Vanity Fair, James Pogue did a good job summarizing the tech billionaire Peter Thiel influence nexus and the Thiel-funded coterie that Vance ran with online in a long feature two years ago. Pogue notes:
Vance and this New Right cohort, who are mostly so, so highly educated and well-read that their big problem often seems to be that they’re just too nerdy to be an effective force in mass politics, are not anti-intellectual. Vance is an intellectual himself, even if he’s not currently playing one on TV.
The modest thing I would add to this and other good reporting on Vance’s ideology is that the man doesn’t just have cracked beliefs but cracked instincts. Almost endearingly, he and his pals seem to think that workaday politics is an opportune context for doing a bit of grand theory, and further, that their theorizing will help them win over the citizens of the U.S.A., a country whose most notable contribution to philosophy is literally called pragmatism.
THE AFFLICTION IS UBIQUITOUS among hyper-online right-wingers. Consider James Lindsay, an atheist and anti–critical theory crusader who has characterized Kamala Harris as an enemy of Christian civilization. Her earnest and airy abstractions can be charming—hence the memes—but to Lindsay, they have a darker aspect. A canned line the vice president favors, “to see what can be, unburdened by what has been,” is not a slightly goofy way of encouraging optimism about our future prospects but is instead “esoteric. That is, it’s occult. It’s a Marxist and Luciferian incantation, and that’s easily seen.” Yeah, man. Pass that over here.
Curtis Yarvin, a friend of Vance’s, is a monarchist who would like America to install a “national CEO” to fire all government employees and rule as a startup-founder-cum-dictator. Yarvin sometimes writes about “the Cathedral,” meaning a network of institutions that is hostile to right-wingers and produces the parameters of our political reality. Vance would probably prefer the coin in his own pocket, “the Regime,” but otherwise, his ideas are similar, right down to the mass-firings and the seizure of power by a strong man. His strong man.
Well, as you might suspect, Vance’s muse has the bug, too. Yarvin has always had it: He used to write under the name “Mencius Moldbug,” and he illustrates his political analysis with invocations of “dark elves” and so forth. (This political interest in Tolkien is something Vance shares.) Here’s Yarvin’s archly knowing gloss on what he’s labeled the “Kamala Koup”:
You thought you were in a movie. But now, it turns out you’re not. You’re just in history.
What you are seeing is history breaking through the movie. Does all this make you feel like you are on drugs? You are not on drugs. You were on drugs. You are coming down. This is reality breaking through the trip. It’s painful, a little, but it’s a good feeling. Unfortunately, you may not have much choice but to learn to enjoy it.
You thought you weren’t in history—for reasons. You had reasons. They were good reasons. White was black, two plus two was five, and all men were created equal. History had ended. All power belonged to the workers and peasants. Democracy was the worst system of government, except all the others. Movie logic. Poetic logic. Empsonian ambiguity of the seventh type. Wonderful stuff. But—
It goes on like that. Stern, again: “They condemned or prophesied, rather than exposited or argued, and all their writings showed that they despised the discourse of intellectuals, depreciated reason, and exalted intuition.” As Stern makes clear, this is the style of thinking that did so much to pave the way for the “revolutionary conservatism” that emerged in the Weimar era. Of course, we know how that story ended, although it seems like not everyone agrees on who the bad guys were anymore.
But I take comfort in knowing that the trajectory Stern described is too historically specific to map neatly onto our own political context. Again, the American philosophical watchword is pragmatism, a far cry from high-minded German idealism. In place of Stern’s romantic theorists of German decline, we have a Vance fanboy claiming that Trump’s VP pick has “a wartime physiognomy.” (As one poster pointed out, he appears to be saying that Vance has a beard.)
Better suited to present purposes than Stern’s analysis is the writer John Ganz’s jock/creep theory of fascism: The high-school social categorization reduces the scale of what’s going on here to an appropriate level. I mean, come on: How seriously are we supposed to take people who make terms like “gynocracy” or “the Longhouse” load-bearing parts of their intellectual systems? Why should anyone listen to masculinist influencers with pseudonyms like “Raw Egg Nationalist” who sometimes literally live with their moms?
That isn’t to say the threat of the New Right in general and of a Vice President Vance in particular isn’t serious—to keep things in the domain of Ganz’s metaphor, high-school creeps sometimes bring knives to school—but they don’t seem particularly well equipped for compelling the attention of hundreds of millions of their fellow citizens. (And the attention they are starting to get is probably not the kind they want: As Democratic governors been telling cable news hosts, “These guys are just weird,” and Vance specifically “has a weird view of America, honestly.”) If Vance ultimately can’t suppress his natural intellectual inclinations and demonstrate an ability to make a straightforward pitch to normies, is it inconceivable that Donald Trump wouldn’t look for a way to get Vance off the ticket? And if that happens, I know just the song to walk him out.
For more on the psychological picture, I have to recommend Will Arbery’s 2022 play, Heroes of the Fourth Turning, which brilliantly depicts the spiritual travails of this set.
