In Bed With The Right - Episode 148 -- JD Vance's Communion with Jamelle Bouie

00:00:00.000 Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

00:00:07.140 And I'm Moira Donegan.

00:00:08.300 Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

00:00:13.540 So, Adrienne, today we are talking about one J.D. Vance,

00:00:20.000 a character who, in case you have been living under a rock, 0.99

00:00:24.340 is the fucking vice president a enemy of childless cat ladies a wearer of very expertly 0.99

00:00:34.000 applied mascara yeah and for a long time he was best known as not a politician but as a memoirist 1.00

00:00:42.080 the author of 2016's hillbilly elegy now vance is back in 2026 with a new memoir communion a book

00:00:52.400 that is nominally about his conversion to Catholicism,

00:00:58.740 but really takes a kind of meandering tour through his life,

00:01:04.040 through his complaints about the decadence of American culture,

00:01:08.240 and that makes a flimsy, and I got to say,

00:01:12.120 seemingly pretty insincere case for a return to religious devotion.

00:01:17.320 Yeah, it feels like a retread of Hillbilly Elegy

00:01:21.260 where he was sort of upset about a cultural malaise

00:01:25.260 among what he thought of as the white working class,

00:01:28.100 but really was an appellation white Protestants, I guess.

00:01:31.580 But he's doing it here for Protestantism, right?

00:01:34.300 He talks about his disaffection from a faith

00:01:36.400 that revolves around sort of charismatic ministries,

00:01:38.940 televangelists speaking in tongues,

00:01:40.860 which is, you know, simply too chaotic

00:01:42.340 and too undisciplined to really hold on

00:01:44.180 to someone as smart as J.D. Vance.

00:01:46.680 Nevermind, you know, the fact that like

00:01:48.120 78 million Americans manage. What Vance's church needed, he tells us, which is also what America

00:01:54.520 needed, according to J.D. Vance, you know, because it was too carnivalesque, too distracted,

00:01:58.840 too worldly, was, you know, daddy. He said, with dad, I had a home in the church for the first

00:02:04.460 time. Dad's church offered something I had sorely missed, a real community of believers. And he adds,

00:02:10.120 in dad's church, religious and political conservatism were more explicitly linked. So

00:02:14.240 this is like all of J.D. Vance's father figures sort of tied up with a nice little bow and called

00:02:20.560 religion. At the same time, as we'll also, I think, need to get into, the book ends up sort of running

00:02:26.420 away from religion for very interesting ways, because it's like J.D. Vance's conversion is not

00:02:31.060 one that would endear him to most Americans, I would say. There's a funny way in which religion

00:02:37.080 sort of becomes a stand-in for something else, always. And so for J.D. Vance, U.S. history or U.S.

00:02:43.040 religious history is just an endless set of vibe shifts and like in the end like what I took away

00:02:48.940 from this is not like oh here's a guy trying to ingratiate himself with Christians it's oh here's

00:02:53.440 a guy who's gotten so Silicon Valley brained that he can't possibly ingratiate himself with

00:02:58.580 American Christians. Yeah I think there's something really strange about J.D. Vance's character he's a

00:03:05.420 like uncannily off-putting guy he's got these pathologies in terms of the way he understands

00:03:12.120 other Americans in terms of the way he like presents himself as a, you know, leader of

00:03:18.600 Americans as a potential future president. And I think the contempt he has, I think his own

00:03:26.280 failures of character and imagination, his sort of decision to embark on this kind of campaign book

00:03:33.220 and its failures. I think all of that is very revealing about sort of the state of American

00:03:38.700 governments and American elites.

00:03:40.580 And we're so excited to get to talk about this book with none other than Jamel Bowie,

00:03:45.660 who is a longtime J.D. Vance watcher.

00:03:49.140 And we're very excited to have you on to talk to us about this book.

00:03:52.860 Watcher is a very funny way of describing me.

00:03:54.840 I feel like it's a longtime J.D. Vance critic.

00:03:58.440 Right, right.

00:04:00.020 Hater, you might even say.

00:04:01.560 I mean, I think to watch the man is to hate him.

00:04:04.340 Like, it's hard to see what constituency this man has and what fan base this man has.

00:04:08.520 Like, this book is for no one, right? 0.99

00:04:10.540 Like, the idea of someone picking up, like, oh, goody, and then going to page 25 is like, this is exactly my shit. 0.98

00:04:15.920 Like, that person may not exist. 0.96

00:04:18.180 I don't think that person is even J.D. Vance.

00:04:20.360 So I do think to watch this man in his twerpory is just to be like, ugh.

00:04:25.160 I mean, it's worth the saying.

00:04:26.740 I don't imagine we'll dwell too much into his electoral record, but he's won exactly one election.

00:04:31.500 That's the 2022 Ohio-centered election.

00:04:33.560 he struggled to win that primary

00:04:36.520 against an already established politician

00:04:39.080 and then he ends up winning

00:04:41.300 but he ends up vastly underperforming

00:04:43.480 the rest of the Republican ticket

00:04:44.820 and for a lot of ways

00:04:46.360 it's kind of dragged across the line by Trump

00:04:49.000 who endorses him early and really touts him

00:04:51.000 people talk about the lack of general experience

00:04:53.920 Vance has as vice president

00:04:55.160 but as just a politician

00:04:56.840 he is like a strikingly unexperienced politician

00:05:00.000 and one of the tells of that

00:05:02.240 is the way that he kind, you can, whenever he speaks,

00:05:06.060 you can tell that he thinks he is getting one over on you.

00:05:10.440 Yeah.

00:05:10.740 Yeah.

00:05:11.380 That was something really striking about the book, 0.99

00:05:13.880 which, listener, I fucking read. 0.97

00:05:16.420 Like, what bad choices in my life have led me to reading J.D. Vance's second memoir. 0.98

00:05:23.920 But the whole time, he is so palpably contemptuous of his reader.

00:05:29.160 He is talking to his reader as if they are a child who he does not especially like.

00:05:34.300 You know, it's so smug.

00:05:36.580 It's so condescending.

00:05:38.300 And it's so at ease in the transparency of its own lies.

00:05:42.720 You know, he doesn't think he has to lie especially well to people. 0.97

00:05:46.580 And he just seems like he really thinks he's better than everybody else because the rest of us are a bunch of rubes, 0.99

00:05:52.140 which is very striking to me as somebody who's made his whole career on the sort of like critique of the elites 0.91

00:05:58.140 and an attempt to like vindicate the downtrodden and their dignity.

00:06:03.080 What he actually does is esteem himself at the top of a hierarchy of human life, like looking down on the rest of us rubes. 0.88

00:06:09.960 No, I think that's right. And I think it's something that is apparent. 0.86

00:06:13.520 You know, I've watched entirely too much of Vance to speak to audiences and speak in general.

00:06:20.060 He really has the impression of someone who is so impressed with his own intellect, so impressed with his own ability to get to where he's been.

00:06:28.660 I mean, this is part of, I think, his deep-seated resentment, which is, I think, kind of the most important quality about him, is he sees himself as just a better quality of person than people around him.

00:06:41.060 His first book, Kill Billy Elegy, is more or less all about how he's like, yeah, I was surrounded by failures, by people who couldn't get their lives together.

00:06:50.460 And if they could get their lives together and if people like them could get their lives together, maybe they'd be in better shape.

00:06:56.380 But I was able to get my life together.

00:06:58.820 I have the kind of drive and dignity and ability to get me out.

00:07:03.360 And it served me well.

00:07:05.400 and then when he is around people who are you know maybe born into more elite spaces and they

00:07:13.340 don't recognize him as being a superior kind of person it enrages him like it so clearly enrages

00:07:19.640 him he compared himself to nixon recently and in a bit at the nixon center yeah nixon the

00:07:24.720 presidential library which the nixon presidential library weird place is like one part research

00:07:29.220 facility one part shrine to richard nixon it's quite strange and he was he was like comparing

00:07:34.760 himself to Nixon, he's like, you know, young, you know, served in the military, wrote a memoir.

00:07:39.360 But the real comparison between him and Nixon is this sort of unquenchable sense of resentment.

00:07:45.000 Yeah. I think it's worth remembering that in Hillbilly Elegy, which was like partly a diagnosis

00:07:50.860 of the white working class, allegedly, but also a memoir, right? He keeps switching, I remember,

00:07:57.660 between I and we, right? And like very clearly some of the we statements are about everyone

00:08:03.000 around J.D. Vance except for him, right?

00:08:05.220 He's like, we don't rise to anything.

00:08:06.900 It's like, oh my God,

00:08:08.020 like obviously you're exempting yourself from that.

00:08:10.480 And if you're wondering if he's just as tough on himself

00:08:12.640 in the new book, yes, he is.

00:08:14.200 He says in the beginning that in my case,

00:08:16.400 one of the vices that animated me

00:08:18.000 looking back probably since my earliest days of my life

00:08:20.520 was the arrogant desire to rise above others.

00:08:22.880 Like I have many faults, such as my perfectionism.

00:08:25.700 I'm like, whoa, man, like you're really,

00:08:28.060 this is tough stuff.

00:08:29.780 You know, you're really bearing your soul here.

00:08:31.460 But something that's really striking to me about J.D. Vance is for somebody who clearly thinks that, you know, his farts smell like roses and he's always the smartest person in the room.

00:08:41.660 He's also really kind of a follower.

00:08:43.860 Yes.

00:08:44.380 Jamel, you pointed this out in a video I saw you do about the death of Lindsey Graham.

00:08:48.260 Like Lindsey Graham attached himself to more powerful figures like John McCain than Donald Trump.

00:08:54.740 And J.D. Vance has sort of a similar biography.

00:08:57.980 He's always looking for a daddy.

00:09:00.540 This was something that came up in the excellent episode we did on J.D. Vance a couple of years ago with Gabriel Wynan is that his biography is marked by a search for a protector, you know, be it like Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld at Yale Law, Peter Thiel when he was in venture capital and now Donald Trump when he's in politics.

00:09:22.520 So he's somebody who like does think he's better than everybody else, but doesn't have the integrity or courage, I think, to like be his own man.

00:09:30.560 He's always kind of a sidekick, at least thus far.

00:09:33.780 And this, I mean, this gets to the observation you made about the book.

00:09:36.220 So Vance, he pitches himself to powerful elites and he can ingratiate himself incredibly well with powerful elites who will bring him along as someone with whom they see something.

00:09:48.020 They see some kind of promise.

00:09:49.300 Very common thing, right?

00:09:50.940 It's not unusual.

00:09:52.520 And that's how he has advanced, through his association with these powerful elites.

00:09:57.120 And he knows how to talk to them.

00:09:58.320 He knows how to relate to them, how to talk to them, how to flatter them.

00:10:00.720 He does not know how to talk to people who are not those people.

00:10:04.400 He does not know how to relate to people outside of that milieu.

00:10:08.380 And so even in—this is a campaign book, right?

00:10:11.360 This is a book that's supposed to be front and center when Vance makes his inevitable announcement for the 2028 Republican nomination.

00:10:18.500 It is his audacity of hope, right?

00:10:20.880 That's what this is.

00:10:21.740 if hillbilly elegy was his dreams for my father nice this is his audacity of hope and to compare

00:10:28.900 i haven't read all of vance's book i've only read some of it but to compare what i have read to

00:10:33.220 audacity of hope lucky duck audacity of hope is a politician's book but it's like written by

00:10:40.580 someone who understands that his principal audience is like a broad public who understands

00:10:46.080 someone will pick up this book at an airport wanting to know more about himself and so i

00:10:50.260 to pitch myself to this person.

00:10:52.780 I don't get the impression that Vance's book is that.

00:10:55.740 It's not pitched to the kind of voter

00:10:57.640 who'd be trying to figure out who J.D. Vance is.

00:11:00.140 It seems, I don't know what it is.

00:11:02.120 I don't know what it's, who the audience is.

00:11:04.720 But I do know that Moira, as for your point,

00:11:07.660 in the kind of condescension of it all,

00:11:09.620 that to me captures his inability to talk

00:11:13.180 and relate to like a regular non-elite person. 0.99

00:11:18.420 Like how to talk to them in a way that doesn't sound like he's saying, here's some slop for you hogs. 0.86

00:11:24.160 I mean, right down to the cover of this book. 0.98

00:11:26.560 This is a book about his conversion to Catholicism, which has a church that, I mean, I'm no expert.

00:11:32.800 But if that's a Catholic church, I'd be pretty startled.

00:11:35.940 It's a plain Jane Methodist church. 0.96

00:11:37.660 Yeah, right?

00:11:39.040 The whole point of the book is that you should probably convert away from Methodism to Catholicism.

00:11:44.120 but he doesn't sort of want to say that

00:11:46.320 because of course he's made that move

00:11:48.220 together with his creepy elite

00:11:49.960 enablers and backers

00:11:51.200 it's a anti-majoritarian move

00:11:54.480 but he sort of can't acknowledge that 0.99

00:11:55.980 he's like ah fuck it let's slap a Methodist church on the cover 1.00

00:11:58.260 that inability to put forth 1.00

00:12:00.460 an image of what like American Catholicism

00:12:02.640 actually looks like is like

00:12:04.140 reflective of I think his basic

00:12:05.780 the way he cannot decide who he is

00:12:08.480 and who he's appealing to

00:12:09.980 and what he's trying to be

00:12:11.180 because the thing about American Catholicism

00:12:13.980 is that first of all, it's still a heavily urban religion, right?

00:12:17.580 Like if you want to find like big historic Catholic churches,

00:12:21.220 they are in America's cities.

00:12:23.320 They're in New York, Boston, yeah, San Francisco.

00:12:26.320 They're in the old Rust Belt cities, right?

00:12:28.560 Like they're in Pittsburgh, they're in Buffalo, right? 0.79

00:12:31.300 Like they're in places that today are often majority non-white, 0.71

00:12:36.460 majority black in a lot of cases, but majority non-white.

00:12:38.700 The big, active, thriving Catholic congregations

00:12:42.560 are increasingly, like, heavily Hispanic.

00:12:45.240 Yeah, they're Latino.

00:12:46.040 They do mass in Spanish.

00:12:47.540 Right.

00:12:48.020 The American Catholic Church is a very cosmopolitan place. 0.89

00:12:52.060 The kind of all-white, vanilla Catholicism, 0.86

00:12:56.460 to the extent that it ever existed, right?

00:12:58.280 Like, to the extent that it was ever a thing,

00:13:00.700 is genuinely hard to find.

00:13:03.160 Yeah.

00:13:03.900 And so it's like, Vance converts to Catholicism,

00:13:06.100 and I think his conversion, I mean, my own take,

00:13:08.500 is that he's embarrassed about coming from, you know,

00:13:11.580 evangelicals of various stripes it's not a very like intellectual religious tradition and

00:13:16.840 especially kind of the evangelicalism of suburban Ohio or like the Appalachia where his extended

00:13:23.620 families from tends toward the charismatic which is like a religious tradition that we associate

00:13:29.400 with like snake handling and that kind of thing much more sort of like emotional physical experiential

00:13:36.760 kind of religious practice, I think he's embarrassed by all of that.

00:13:40.920 And so it's like, what is mainstream in the United States, but has sort of like an intellectual

00:13:45.700 aspect to it?

00:13:47.640 Catholicism and right-wing Catholicism in particular.

00:13:49.880 And so you convert, not because you have a deep-seated view of what the Trinity is,

00:13:56.820 a deep-seated view of Mary's importance to like the Christian cosmology, like you're

00:14:01.720 not converting for those reasons, or because you want this connection to this deep-seated

00:14:05.900 tradition that stretches back, you know, thousands of years, you're converting because you don't

00:14:11.160 want to seem like you're a rube yourself.

00:14:13.240 Yeah.

00:14:13.420 Yeah.

00:14:14.140 I think it's important to point out that J.D. Vance converted to Catholicism as part

00:14:20.040 of a micro trend of this like very creepy sect of right-wing elites.

00:14:24.360 Like he did it because he was reading Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen and because, you

00:14:29.060 know, Peter Thiel got into it.

00:14:30.940 And apparently Rene Girard.

00:14:32.080 René Girard, as every Peter Thiel acolyte is required to read Violins of the Sacred.

00:14:38.520 And he did it as a part of a trend of elite reaction that indeed did have that intellectual tradition that is sort of like missing from the more charismatic and like maybe more like sensual aspects of American evangelicism.

00:14:53.080 But the intellectual tradition that he's participating in is a specific one within Catholicism that is anti-democracy, right?

00:14:59.800 Yeah. It's about Catholicism as a route to social worlds that will give you, frankly, funding and intellectual backing for an anti-democracy project.

00:15:11.780 I mean, the other thing I just want to note real quick about this is that I think he says in the book that he doesn't attend mass. He attends, he has mass at home.

00:15:19.220 At home, yeah. And his kid will put down the couch cushion pillows so they can all kneel.

00:15:23.940 But he likes it as a ritual more. He likes it as a ritual.

00:15:26.640 But, I mean, that itself, I mean, that captures exactly what you're saying, Moira.

00:15:29.980 This is not, you know, not the past judgment on people's conversion experiences, but, like, this is not something someone who's converting because of the force of, like, revelation.

00:15:39.440 Well, there's no spiritual struggle.

00:15:42.160 Like, J.D. Vance is a guy who does not seem to believe in much except for his own superiority, right?

00:15:46.220 Like, if you told me, like, does J.D. Vance believe in the redemptive power of the crucifixion?

00:15:52.440 does J.D. Vance believe in, you know, the hope and beauty of absolution. I would say no,

00:15:59.840 because he in fact mocks the ritual of confession in his book about how great being a Catholic is.

00:16:05.800 Yeah.

00:16:06.300 I would say what J.D. Vance believes in is that J.D. Vance should be the president,

00:16:09.340 you know, like that's his, that's his like messiah. That's his messianic message.

00:16:15.160 It's funny because it's really positive sounding. I should be the president because,

00:16:18.500 you know i would be the guy who could do it best but to my mind his motivation is you know i blame

00:16:24.940 these people for my bad childhood and if i become president i can show them like i can punish them

00:16:31.100 for what they did to me yeah i also think there's um there is a persistent thing and i think you're

00:16:35.980 both sort of putting your finger on it in different ways a persistent way in which this book about

00:16:40.720 religion is never about religion like his critique of the evangelicalism of his childhood is what he

00:16:47.420 says in those weird passages about being scots-irish in uh hillbilly allergy right like

00:16:52.920 mama you know who's played by glenn close in the movie shows up and she like loves jesus reads the

00:16:57.460 bible every day but church attendance is spotty and he says thanks to the chaos of my home and

00:17:02.640 my parents absenteeism right like the religious experience is identical with what hillbilly

00:17:07.420 allergy was about right their relationship to the church where you're like we only attended if mom

00:17:11.900 got religion or whatever, right? 0.87

00:17:14.200 Like, is an emanation of their lack of stick-to-itiveness

00:17:17.880 that he lamented in the previous book, right?

00:17:20.160 We find ourselves at church, he says, from time to time, right?

00:17:22.700 Like, our faith was amorphous, tied to family and oral traditions

00:17:25.800 and not to institutional orthodoxy.

00:17:27.840 It's really ultimately just like a family story

00:17:30.220 told through religious practice.

00:17:32.580 And then his fall away from his Christianity

00:17:35.880 is tied up with his crisis of faith in, like, the GOP, right?

00:17:40.240 Where, like, the vibes are off after Iraq turns bad.

00:17:44.320 And you're like, wait, is this about religion?

00:17:46.000 Or is this just, like, about, like, yeah, as Maura's saying, like, different daddy figures that disappointed you in your life.

00:17:51.860 I think that's exactly right.

00:17:53.300 So tell me, I mean, you guys read the book.

00:17:55.160 If there isn't that much about actual religion and religious experience, like, what is the book about?

00:18:01.820 He seems to make a case for like an epistemic politics of like abandoning reason in place of faith, which I think makes sense if you're trying to lead a sort of like post-fact political movement.

00:18:20.680 So he talks about during my youthful foray into atheism, I found like logical arguments against the existence of God, like very persuasive.

00:18:33.060 He talks about being on chat rooms late at night for many consecutive hours, which did strike me as one of the things that probably happened in this book.

00:18:42.020 I'm like, yeah, he seems like a very online guy.

00:18:43.980 Yeah, it's super online.

00:18:44.940 And then he's like, oh, well, there's something honorable about mere faith without evidence, right?

00:18:51.760 And seems to be prescribing this as sort of a intellectual posture that he thinks voters should take on.

00:18:58.860 He has a lot of like screeds against decadent cosmopolitanism.

00:19:02.620 He's like, oh, you know, people wait to have children for too long and that's why they have these empty lives.

00:19:08.520 So he does apologize for calling them cat ladies and then like just like calls them cat ladies, but with other words.

00:19:14.940 Yeah, he seems to think that Catholicism is virtuous for its sort of, you know, potential hostility to those, like, enlightenment values in which every person, every voter, every individual is capable of rationality and therefore sort of, like, owed explanation from authority figures that, like, defers to reason, right?

00:19:37.800 He seems to have a faith or an enthusiasm for, you know, deferring to power for power's sake.

00:19:44.460 So I would think of the book as like,

00:19:46.120 as bowling alone through religion, right?

00:19:49.140 What Vance calls faith,

00:19:51.120 ultimately I think turns out to be something

00:19:52.660 like community by another name, right?

00:19:54.860 He says he doesn't really lose his faith.

00:19:57.220 He says, I wonder whether irrelevance

00:19:58.860 captures entirely what happened to my faith.

00:20:01.160 My belief depended on trust

00:20:02.720 and through death or the passage of time, 0.85

00:20:05.280 I had lost most of the Christians I trusted, right?

00:20:07.600 So it's like finding your tribe.

00:20:09.800 Jamel, what you were describing,

00:20:10.880 this guise of casting around

00:20:12.500 for somewhere to belong while also being possessed of this very strong sense that he's better than

00:20:18.780 everyone else, like that tragedy becomes to him the tragedy of faith, right? It is that you lose

00:20:24.300 the community that sort of makes up your faith, which no one can ever do quite right, which no

00:20:28.940 one ever quite does to his satisfaction, and which in the end like doesn't depend on actually making

00:20:33.740 common cause with other people. Like he seems genuinely grossed out by most Christians, 0.98

00:20:37.880 including the, what is it, 78 million Americans

00:20:39.920 who make the kind of faith

00:20:41.140 that he keeps dumping on in this book

00:20:43.480 work for themselves, right?

00:20:45.180 But there is this kind of sense

00:20:46.340 that like there's a lack of social cohesion

00:20:48.720 at the heart of our falling away from religion

00:20:51.700 more so than these doctrinal things.

00:20:54.720 So a couple of thoughts.

00:20:56.020 First, it's just an aside.

00:20:57.240 It's funny to hear J.D. Vance complain

00:20:58.780 about cosmopolitanism and not marry,

00:21:01.960 not like having children early enough

00:21:04.180 when first of all, he is what, a Yale law graduate?

00:21:07.440 who only lives in cities like he lives in the most tony cosmopolitan places in the country

00:21:13.720 he is in an interfaith interracial relationship so he's a he's an elite law school grad who has

00:21:23.320 lives in new york san francisco you know tony dc suburbs who lives in the heart of like elite

00:21:29.680 cosmopolitan america who has the kind of relationship that you would see in that kind of

00:21:34.500 place and did not have children until he was in his 30s right it sort of just like have some

00:21:40.940 self-awareness by guy but the other thing is that vance's diagnosis of the lack of community in

00:21:49.300 american life like rings hollow when his political messaging rests on this like denigration of like

00:21:58.100 his co-religionists, right? Like his anti-Haitian demagoguery, his anti-immigrant demagoguery,

00:22:04.420 like these are all Catholics. These are all people who are trying to construct the kinds of 1.00

00:22:09.340 communities often on the basis of faith that he thinks he says that the country needs and he

00:22:15.420 denigrates them for, you know, political reasons. Like, I don't think, I do not think J.D. Vance

00:22:20.180 is a racist. I just think he is a opportunist who's like, I can, I can weaponize prejudice 0.99

00:22:25.960 in order to get what I want, which is power.

00:22:28.800 And so all of this just rings hollow.

00:22:30.560 It's sort of like, I can see you.

00:22:32.580 Like we can see how you behave in the public eye.

00:22:35.080 And this sort of like, you know, pious searching,

00:22:39.320 I just want, you know,

00:22:40.840 America built on a stronger form of community.

00:22:44.140 It's like you actively work to sow mistrust

00:22:49.000 and hatred among people.

00:22:51.640 And like, everyone can see it.

00:22:53.960 This guy's personal approval rating's not great.

00:22:56.260 Like, people don't like this guy.

00:22:57.740 And I think it's because everyone can kind of just witness with their own two eyes.

00:23:01.260 This is not someone who takes any of that seriously.

00:23:05.580 Yeah, I mean, the lack of self-awareness really is staggering.

00:23:08.260 One of the first pitches he makes for Christianity is like,

00:23:10.580 by their fruits fell, you know them, right?

00:23:12.620 And it's like, well, JD, have you looked at your fruits lately, dude?

00:23:16.220 Like, this is, that's a weird way to start your memoir.

00:23:19.400 Like, I mean, it would have been a great book if he's like,

00:23:21.900 and here's what the Trump administration made happen

00:23:24.340 in communities of faith and we are so sorry

00:23:26.280 and I'm resigning tomorrow nearby.

00:23:28.860 Like that might've actually been an interesting

00:23:30.640 and plausible pitch to run for the Republican nomination

00:23:34.240 in 28, but he doesn't do that.

00:23:35.580 It's like, what are your fruits, JD?

00:23:37.660 Like your faith only appears to matter

00:23:40.960 when it elevates you over other people

00:23:42.800 or when you act in contradiction to it, right? 0.98

00:23:44.720 Like what the fuck good is that? 0.96

00:23:46.980 I mean, JD Vance lacks, 0.96

00:23:48.460 for all of his high estimation of his own abilities,

00:23:51.900 His contempt definitely prevents him from being able to manipulate people as effectively as he wants to, right?

00:23:59.660 Like he cannot repress his contempt for his audience, which makes him less effective as a liar, right?

00:24:06.440 But he's also, you know, for somebody who has a very high estimation of his own importance, he's in this kind of like it couldn't happen to anybody who deserves it more. 0.90

00:24:14.600 he's in this ridiculous political position where he has to take responsibility for the Trump

00:24:22.200 administration, but he has no influence within the Trump administration. Like they send him out 0.81

00:24:28.540 to eat shit every time something is going badly for him. It's always J.D. Vance who has to do that 0.99

00:24:33.900 press conference, right? He couldn't stop Donald Trump from starting a war in Iran. He's clearly

00:24:40.240 not liked personally by Donald Trump as much as Marco Rubio is. And so I think it actually like

00:24:46.040 at this point, I think if it was today, like it might be Rubio actually who gets the nod

00:24:49.780 from Donald Trump as the nominee. But like Donald Trump has created a situation for J.D. Vance

00:24:55.720 where J.D. Vance is trying to take the Trump coalition and redirect it in a direction that is

00:25:04.880 more coherently in the interests of, you know,

00:25:08.780 J.D. Vance's particular ideological commitments

00:25:11.020 and the interests of his, like, Silicon Valley backers.

00:25:14.520 And his online griper friends.

00:25:16.120 And his online griper friends.

00:25:17.340 You know, he is sort of the poster boy

00:25:18.780 of what we call the creeps on In Bed with the Right,

00:25:20.820 and he's trying to make the creep project

00:25:23.320 amenable to the preacher constituency, you know?

00:25:26.080 Right.

00:25:26.300 I think if he had anybody in mind as a reader,

00:25:29.880 it was one of those evangelicals from those, you know,

00:25:33.720 midwestern red states from his like white charismatic tradition who he's trying to get

00:25:40.480 on his side to vote for him in a republican primary in 2028 and i think that that is a really

00:25:47.160 difficult task because he cannot credibly make any case to them yeah i mean it's funny to see

00:25:54.780 what is it john nance garner called uh not worth a bucket of warm spit i guess whatever it is or

00:26:00.680 warm piss to see it further reduced in esteem thanks to JD Vance. It's like, what's below that?

00:26:06.800 We're about to find out. Yeah, but it is the case that he is, everyone recognizes that he has no

00:26:13.680 independent political constituency. There are different models for the vice presidency. One

00:26:18.500 of the most common models is you have, you were almost president, right? You were the runner up

00:26:24.940 in a primary, you are the runner-up at the convention, you have this independent political

00:26:31.540 base that cannot be ignored. And so as a way to say to you, we understand your influence and

00:26:39.700 authority, you get to be vice president. That's one model for it. Another model for the vice

00:26:44.140 presidency is you may not have the kind of mass political base that could get you the presidency

00:26:48.860 yourself, but you are an important figure within the larger party. You are someone who commands

00:26:54.920 a lot of respect, that everyone likes you, and are considered someone who'd be a good

00:26:59.740 number two to the president.

00:27:01.960 That's like your Joe Bidens, right?

00:27:03.560 That Joe Biden was that kind of vice president.

00:27:05.800 Dick Cheney was that kind of vice president.

00:27:08.160 And then you have the vice presidential type, which is just kind of, we think you might

00:27:12.880 be a rising star, and you're kind of young, so we're going to toss you onto the ticket

00:27:17.920 as someone who represents the next generation.

00:27:21.760 and you may not necessarily have an independent political base

00:27:26.740 and maybe you'll inherit the principal's political base

00:27:30.400 once his term is up.

00:27:32.000 And that's kind of Vance.

00:27:32.960 That's where Vance fits in.

00:27:34.580 But Vance simultaneously cannot bring himself

00:27:38.700 to just go full on into the slop.

00:27:41.600 Like I'll say this for Rubio.

00:27:43.460 Rubio, who really has no inner life, I don't think.

00:27:48.040 Rubio will do whatever he needs to do. 0.99

00:27:50.480 Just a dead doll.

00:27:51.440 Yeah, whatever it takes. He'll completely remake himself. The issue with Vance, my colleague Tom Edsel, people feel all kinds of way about Tom Edsel, but sometimes he's very good. And my colleague Tom Edsel pointed this out very recently, which is that like Vance does have an inner life. He actually does have something there. It might just be his insanely high self-regard, but it's there.

00:28:13.340 and so he cannot fully remake himself

00:28:17.000 into something different than he is

00:28:18.940 he can try to sell the slop

00:28:21.780 but he will never be of the slop

00:28:24.060 in a way that Rubio will clearly just like do it

00:28:27.260 if that's what it takes

00:28:28.340 and you see that with his relationship to the MAGA base

00:28:31.760 he'll sell the administration 1.00

00:28:33.620 he'll eat the shit if he needs to eat the shit 1.00

00:28:35.460 but like he still wants to intellectualize it all 1.00

00:28:39.420 he still wants to give it the Vance spin

00:28:42.820 And he really cannot just, like, drop all of that to try to appeal to these voters.

00:28:49.100 And this book seems like that.

00:28:50.240 He's trying to intellectualize something, trying to, like, elevate it in a way, in a way that just, like, doesn't speak to anyone.

00:28:57.040 And the only other option for him in terms of a political lane is to be somewhat Trump-distant.

00:29:02.780 But he can't do that because he doesn't have an independent political base of himself.

00:29:06.340 He kind of has to rely on whatever Trump is going to throw his way.

00:29:10.280 Yeah, I mean, it's worth talking about.

00:29:11.880 Like, this is also,

00:29:13.220 maybe it's because I've been finishing my book

00:29:15.080 on Silicon Valley,

00:29:15.940 but like this is so much the leadership model

00:29:18.180 of Silicon Valley

00:29:18.880 and why that sort of never translates

00:29:20.900 into straightforward political constituencies, right?

00:29:23.360 It combines this populism and anti-elitism

00:29:25.800 with this like really serious elitism,

00:29:28.200 like this almost like eugenicist elitism,

00:29:30.300 like I am better than you.

00:29:31.740 You know, he loves Rod Dreher's Benedict option.

00:29:34.020 Like he's all about like hating on the very technologies

00:29:38.300 and kind of technological advances

00:29:41.660 that A, have made him fairly wealthy 0.98

00:29:43.460 and B, have cooked his freaking brain, right? 0.98

00:29:45.980 This is clearly someone who's too online, right? 0.99

00:29:48.600 And then C, he also like indulges

00:29:51.020 in this kind of charismatic leadership

00:29:52.760 or thought leadership

00:29:53.620 that he can't quite believe himself, right? 0.95

00:29:56.640 Like, as you say, like he's not of the slop.

00:29:59.460 He can dish it out,

00:30:01.300 but he's a little too smart

00:30:02.740 or a little too self-conscious

00:30:03.760 to really become one with it,

00:30:05.700 to really wallow in it.

00:30:06.840 And that to me describes so much of like when tech leaders sort of emerge into politics.

00:30:13.900 It's also the kinds of, frankly, the kinds of candidates that Peter Thiel has been routinely funding, right?

00:30:18.860 Like Masters was exactly this, right? 0.99

00:30:21.160 Like sort of trying to make common cause with people that were like, you're a fucking space alien. 0.99

00:30:24.800 What are you talking about? 0.99

00:30:25.900 And I guess J.D. Vance is the one that got loose.

00:30:28.880 The one that through a series of unfortunate events and bad primaries sort of like actually ended up in power.

00:30:34.040 But like, in some way, he's kind of a monument to the fact that these people have a really tough time genuinely living political leadership.

00:30:41.880 I mean, it's interesting to me that this is the reactionary centrist critique of the left, right?

00:30:45.800 That they're elitist, that they're out of touch, that they talk down to the quote-unquote real Americans or the everyday Americans.

00:30:52.100 And the alternative to the, you know, woke professorial model is this Silicon Valley, you know, cartoon villain model.

00:31:02.080 Like, I just imagine them rolling their fingers like Mr. Burns, you know.

00:31:05.580 Drinking green shakes, like real Joe six-packs.

00:31:08.280 Yeah.

00:31:08.500 Part of the common thing there is that both reactionary centrists and the Silicon Valley reactionaries, they imagine the typical American as a hog, as someone with like a bunch of gutter bigotries.

00:31:20.120 And so the left becomes like out of touch elitist in the insistence that they aren't a bunch of gutter bigots, that like you don't have to be that way.

00:31:28.000 that maybe we should have some sort of like social sanctions

00:31:30.960 for the expression of bigotry and so on and so forth.

00:31:33.600 You should accept people of different gender expressions. 0.94

00:31:36.200 That becomes like elitism 0.97

00:31:37.380 because your conception of the broad public is, 0.98

00:31:39.940 well, these are just a bunch of bigoted hogs. 0.94

00:31:41.880 And so if you approach the public that way, 0.99

00:31:44.440 you are by definition, in this view, not being elitist.

00:31:47.600 But I would contend that like that assumption 0.96

00:31:51.320 that the typical person is some bleeding hog 0.53

00:31:55.300 that if you just shovel slap in the direction, 0.98

00:31:57.580 and they'll do what you want them to do.

00:31:58.960 That seems to me to be quite wrong.

00:32:01.540 To be as condescending and as wrong

00:32:04.600 as whatever elitism you might find on the political left.

00:32:09.460 You know, it strikes me that one problem

00:32:11.300 for J.D. Vance's political theory of like the hog voter 0.94

00:32:14.280 is that he has lived a life that would provoke

00:32:19.320 some disdain from that character's bigotry,

00:32:21.640 by which I mean he's married to a non-white woman

00:32:23.800 and he has non-white children.

00:32:25.240 He has a son named Vivek, right? 0.91

00:32:26.780 Right.

00:32:27.020 I think from a gender standpoint, Adrienne, you pointed out to me earlier that Usha's first line of dialogue in the entire book is one she doesn't actually even say.

00:32:41.100 You know, she is kind of like a conspicuously silent figure, right?

00:32:44.500 Yeah, just to give some meat to this, the first two sides in the book are Matthew 7, 16 and J.D. Vance.

00:32:51.000 And then the next line, I think, is Usha's first line of dialogue in the book, which is one that, as you say, she doesn't actually say.

00:32:56.920 Quote, she gives me a look as if to say,

00:32:59.060 I'm not even Catholic.

00:33:00.200 I just do this because I love you.

00:33:02.780 You know, she was right there, JD.

00:33:04.380 You could have asked her.

00:33:05.780 Like, I'm sure she could look over the thing

00:33:07.920 and be like, I'll just insert the sentence

00:33:09.240 I was actually thinking.

00:33:10.720 But probably his copy editor is like,

00:33:12.200 we can't print that.

00:33:13.460 The other problem is just that, like,

00:33:14.960 as with someone like Elon Musk,

00:33:16.440 what JD Vance imagines the people to be

00:33:18.240 is just him, like, blown up to epic proportions.

00:33:21.640 Like, he's very unable to, like,

00:33:23.560 countenance people other than himself.

00:33:25.800 And that narcissism really makes the look for communion a little bit difficult because, like, in the end, like, it's just J.D. communing with J.D.

00:33:34.020 His vision of the voter is like, all my worst instincts applied to a stupid person. 1.00

00:33:38.420 You know, it's like, it's, he's like, what is the worst, stupidest version of me? 1.00

00:33:43.820 You know, what is the version of me that is not superior? 1.00

00:33:46.900 And I think, I think people pick that up.

00:33:49.140 I think people perceive that very, very cleanly, very easily.

00:33:52.240 I mean, the reason you might ask, well, what about Trump?

00:33:54.880 How does Trump get away with it?

00:33:56.760 People don't perceive Trump as Trump thinking he's better than them, right?

00:34:01.060 Trump's sort of terrible taste and tackiness and all these things code in this sort of lowercase d democratic way.

00:34:08.460 Oh, he's like us.

00:34:09.860 He's like us.

00:34:10.740 He just has a lot of money.

00:34:11.680 He even spends his money in ways that would be reminiscent of people like us.

00:34:15.660 So it doesn't code. 1.00

00:34:16.640 Even if Trump is full of contempt for his voters, it's actually very funny how much he just is constantly talking about how the people who vote for him are idiots. 0.99

00:34:25.220 But it doesn't like read as that to people. 0.99

00:34:27.640 His like vulgarity and his like dismissal of them, it reads as like almost intimacy. 0.97

00:34:31.700 It reads as like, oh, this is like my uncle shooting the shit and teasing me, you know? 0.98

00:34:35.640 Right, right. 0.99

00:34:36.320 Yeah.

00:34:36.920 And it also helps that Trump is always visibly having fun.

00:34:40.700 He seems to enjoy all of this.

00:34:43.480 Vance does not seem like a guy who has fun.

00:34:45.680 I feel like I said this a while ago, but I was watching him do something and I was just like struck by it.

00:34:51.020 Just like, what does this guy do for fun?

00:34:53.200 You know?

00:34:53.600 Like, I know what Donald Trump thinks is fun.

00:34:56.620 He likes to decorate.

00:34:58.120 He likes to decorate things.

00:34:59.980 He likes Broadway shows.

00:35:01.780 Andrew Lloyd Webber.

00:35:02.980 Yeah.

00:35:03.940 He has fun.

00:35:05.360 And you can see what it is that gives him aesthetic pleasure.

00:35:09.900 But, like, you never see J.D. Vance talking about a movie he likes or watches.

00:35:15.100 Or, like, what music does J.D. Vance listen to?

00:35:18.220 I have no clue.

00:35:19.380 Yeah.

00:35:19.700 Like, he just doesn't seem like a guy who enjoys life.

00:35:22.500 He seems like a guy who is single-mindedly trying to amass power for himself.

00:35:28.880 And I actually think that, I mean, there are plenty of people who try to do that.

00:35:32.420 But I think being able to seem like a person who enjoys life helps voters like to see that.

00:35:38.580 They like to think they're not putting into office basically a sociopath.

00:35:43.360 That brings me to something that maybe we haven't kind of hit enough in this book,

00:35:47.780 which is like we've sort of said, like, what's the theory of American religion?

00:35:51.540 what's its theory of American politics.

00:35:53.580 What it breaks down into really, though,

00:35:55.380 is like an endless series of anecdotes

00:35:57.280 and Maura already alluded to this,

00:35:58.900 most of which almost with 100% certainty did not happen, right?

00:36:02.460 Like there's like, mama says whatever you need her to say

00:36:05.780 because like she's dead and she can't contest it.

00:36:08.840 Charlie Kirk also says a lot of

00:36:10.580 very narratively convenient things.

00:36:12.860 And it's like, well, that's somebody

00:36:13.840 who cannot be called for a fact check.

00:36:16.140 You know what I mean?

00:36:16.700 Yeah, real convenient that.

00:36:18.720 There's a bunch of Yale anecdotes again.

00:36:20.440 And this time it's not the fork thing.

00:36:22.580 This time it's like he had to look something up in the OED.

00:36:25.560 And I'm like, you went to Yale in like 2012. 0.99

00:36:28.400 Are you fucking kidding me? 0.76

00:36:29.360 Like, you didn't look it up in the OED, like in the musty library. 0.99

00:36:32.300 Like, how old are you supposed to be, J.D. Vance, in this fiction of yours?

00:36:35.540 But anyway, this is all along wind up to saying, like, Trump's a terrible liar. 0.98

00:36:39.900 Like, debunking Trump is pointless. 0.99

00:36:42.260 But like, his lies are recognizable.

00:36:45.640 They're the lies of a man who forgot there was a presentation due or a campaign rally due today.

00:36:50.220 And it's like, okay, you know, we love them, folks.

00:36:53.620 The first thing we're hearing about them.

00:36:55.560 But the way he's like, people don't know that.

00:36:57.860 And it just means I didn't know that until three minutes ago.

00:37:00.160 It's like, look, I've been there, man.

00:37:02.160 Like, this is highly recognizable.

00:37:04.560 And Vance's lies are pointless. 0.99

00:37:06.740 Like, let the ghost of Charlie Kirk die. 0.68

00:37:09.600 Like, just make up your friend Steve and have him say it.

00:37:12.300 Say Lindsey Graham told you. 1.00

00:37:13.760 You can't contest shit. 1.00

00:37:15.640 The lying grates so much more because it's unrecognizable. 1.00

00:37:19.140 and, like, it has the lack of sort of baroqueness of Trump's lying

00:37:23.600 where you're, like, you're just going to be committed

00:37:25.620 to this bulge in the hurricane map, I guess.

00:37:28.900 But his is, like, it's calculating and sort of efficient

00:37:31.980 and it's so manifestly, like, false that you're, like,

00:37:36.440 it's not the con artist who, like, gets me with this charismatic speech

00:37:39.960 into his, like, pyramid scheme. 1.00

00:37:41.840 This is the little shit from the bank who stole all my retirement money 1.00

00:37:45.440 and took off to Boca or whatever. 1.00

00:37:47.840 Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right.

00:37:49.580 I feel like Vance maybe has some awareness that he comes off like a bit character in American Psycho.

00:37:55.980 Yeah.

00:37:56.580 And he's looking for ways to kind of mitigate that as much as possible.

00:38:03.300 And it's just like, I don't think he can wash it off of him.

00:38:07.080 And let me say, maybe, you know, I've been wrong about these things before.

00:38:10.800 Maybe he totally can.

00:38:11.980 And maybe he wins the nomination and puts in like a good effort running for president.

00:38:17.200 But I do think that the extent to which he's, like, not as clever as he thinks he is and an obvious try-hard. 0.97

00:38:26.740 Maybe what I'm trying to say is, like, he's not dumb enough, you know? 0.97

00:38:31.040 Donald Trump is not a particularly smart man, but he has a level of sort of, like, animal intelligence that helps him get by. 0.98

00:38:37.380 Really successful politicians can kind of, like, if not dumb themselves down, then just sort of, like, make it seem like they don't think they hold their intelligence above you.

00:38:46.480 Obama can make it seem like he didn't think that he held his intelligence above you.

00:38:51.300 There's a lot of Obama-Vance similarities you could draw.

00:38:54.440 Yes, I was just going to say.

00:38:55.760 It's actually quite strange.

00:38:57.500 Single mother, absent father figure.

00:39:00.960 Important grandparents.

00:39:02.800 Shot up into the elite very quickly.

00:39:06.040 Right.

00:39:06.400 Via law.

00:39:07.060 Yeah, via the law. 0.82

00:39:08.600 Strategic marriage. 0.97

00:39:10.320 Yes.

00:39:11.220 Yeah, and then a rapid, useful ascent to the Senate

00:39:14.640 And it followed very quickly by a term in the White House.

00:39:18.220 Yeah.

00:39:18.540 Yeah.

00:39:19.020 Yeah.

00:39:19.760 I see the differences lie in the fact that Obama's ascent was one part building the right

00:39:27.840 relationships with sort of like elite mentors, right?

00:39:30.740 Like he doesn't run in 2008 if not for the fact that he gets on very good terms with

00:39:34.840 Harry Reid early on in the Senate term.

00:39:36.940 And Harry Reid encourages him to run basically and vouches for him.

00:39:40.840 So he knows how to build those relationships.

00:39:44.040 But Obama also is interested in people in a way that I'm not sure Vance is.

00:39:50.520 Obama in his early career and like as he gets through politics is clearly trying to sort of like, I think Barack Obama sincerely does believe in community service.

00:39:59.300 Like what that is, what that looks like, how that plays out, lots of debate and argument.

00:40:03.180 But I think he sincerely believes in community service, sincerely believes in trying to connect people.

00:40:10.040 like I don't think his that there's no red America there's no blue America I don't think

00:40:14.240 that's like bullshit for him I think he really genuinely believes that and it comes across in

00:40:19.840 just like the way he relates to other people obviously with anyone who goes into high level 0.98

00:40:24.880 politics there's a great amount of personal ambition and self-regard but I think in Obama's

00:40:29.500 case that is tempered by a sort of like I actually want to do things for people in like a concrete

00:40:34.040 way and I just don't think Vance has that I think Vance is like always trying to prove himself and

00:40:39.200 prove himself better in a way that Obama Obama is like preternaturally self-confident that's like

00:40:44.840 what he has he's like I know I actually kind of know I'm better than you so I don't have to prove

00:40:50.340 it I can just sort of like be myself it reminds me of how a friend of mine was like the thing

00:40:55.500 about Zoran mom Donnie is that you can tell he had a good childhood yeah yeah yeah there's a sort

00:40:59.640 of like core of self-regard or uh like self-worth or self-respect in a figure like Obama or mom

00:41:08.860 Donnie, and I don't think you have to, like, endorse every decision they've ever made to identify that, right?

00:41:13.240 Like, these are guys who don't have a core of darkness and contempt for other people in their soul.

00:41:18.600 And there's nothing of generosity or altruism in Vance.

00:41:23.220 He's just got this, like, wound and this resentment.

00:41:25.960 Right.

00:41:26.280 I think you're both spot on.

00:41:27.540 I think there's a passage I flashed back to when I was reading this book and when you guys were talking from Hillbilly Elegy, where he talks about Obama, in fact, when he says,

00:41:36.900 Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president, meaning liberals, right?

00:41:41.480 But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color.

00:41:46.400 Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school.

00:41:50.340 Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both.

00:41:52.700 He's brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor, which of course he is.

00:41:57.120 Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up. 0.84

00:42:00.840 His accent, clean, perfect, neutral, is foreign. 1.00

00:42:03.660 His credentials are so impressive that they're frightening. 0.97

00:42:05.920 He made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis, and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him.

00:42:15.540 And I think until the last five words, this describes J.D. Vance, right?

00:42:20.420 This portrait of Barack Obama is a self-portrait.

00:42:23.660 The difference is, those last couple of words, that the meritocracy was built for people like Obama and not, to J.D. Vance's mind, for J.D. Vance.

00:42:32.220 Imagine being J.D. Vance and thinking the system is stacked against you.

00:42:36.520 Which he does, yeah.

00:42:37.720 It's so crazy.

00:42:39.500 I've in real life encountered people like this, encountered people from like roughly the same kind of background, right?

00:42:44.120 Like they're white guys, they're from maybe rural backgrounds.

00:42:47.680 Like Vance is notably from a suburb, but I mean, rural Louisiana, like rural places who, you know, they clean up their accents a little bit.

00:42:56.660 They go to a top 10 school and then they have a glide path into the elite world.

00:43:03.400 And then they maintain this like wounded attachment about their origins.

00:43:07.600 Like, oh, this place isn't made for people like me.

00:43:10.500 It's like, my dude, all you literally had to do was do well at a good school, put on a suit and suppress your accent.

00:43:18.320 And you've made it, right? 0.70

00:43:20.180 Like, what are you talking about?

00:43:21.800 You know, I can appreciate maybe feeling you wish you could be your most authentic self.

00:43:26.180 But the notion that American meritocracy is not built for, like, smart white kids from more marginal places is crazy.

00:43:36.660 Yeah.

00:43:36.940 It's the craziest thing I've ever heard.

00:43:39.260 Yeah, I mean, like, there are no more affirmative action programs, really, in this country.

00:43:42.340 What there are are still states.

00:43:44.240 You still get into college more easily if you come from a state that's underrepresented at a particular university.

00:43:49.460 Let's see who that helps, right?

00:43:50.660 But it's so telling to me that, like, I like the way that you guys point to the difference that, like, Vance constantly has to prove himself in the way Obama never did.

00:43:59.260 I think the other thing is that he thinks he shouldn't have to prove himself.

00:44:05.140 And the reason for that, he can't say out loud because it's race, right?

00:44:08.140 It's the one that he denies at the very beginning of that paragraph I just read where he's like, oh, race had nothing to do with it.

00:44:12.840 And it's like, J.D., if they accept you, but not Barack Obama, like, I'm just spitballing you, but you just said you're very similar in many ways, but accept the one.

00:44:22.740 Could that mean that the one is more significant than you give it credit for?

00:44:25.820 And I think that's it.

00:44:26.700 Like, he has a sense of superiority, and he can't acknowledge to what extent that's racialized and to what extent, like, he is really running as a white candidate.

00:44:35.340 and both his rage at not being allowed to say

00:44:38.460 why he thinks he's better than you

00:44:39.900 and at the same time feeling so obviously better than you

00:44:43.100 is at the core of the unlikability

00:44:45.180 of both this book and this guy.

00:44:46.920 Yeah, yep, I think that's right.

00:44:48.680 I think that's right.

00:44:49.620 I mean, just a little bit on like Vance's clear racial ideology.

00:44:53.440 I mean, the fact that he has made his contribution

00:44:56.500 into American political life,

00:44:58.120 this notion that what makes you an American

00:45:00.220 is your ability to trace yourself back

00:45:02.560 to some like mythical past in the country's history

00:45:05.700 is like so purely racialized, right?

00:45:08.000 I've made this comment a bunch of times.

00:45:10.180 I once made this comment to my now soon-to-be

00:45:12.900 former colleague, Ross Douthat,

00:45:14.320 when he was talking about his Heritage American stuff.

00:45:17.300 I was like, you know, I'm a Heritage American.

00:45:19.580 Yeah.

00:45:20.000 You know, like I can trace my origins

00:45:22.400 back to before the Civil War very easily.

00:45:25.100 But that's not what people mean

00:45:26.380 when they say Heritage American.

00:45:27.660 Right, right.

00:45:28.000 What they specifically mean is a white person.

00:45:31.700 They don't even mean someone who could trace their background to like the Mayflower because you have, you know, you have people with like Italian last names calling themselves heritage Americans.

00:45:39.760 It's like, you know, I don't.

00:45:41.120 Yeah, Rufo.

00:45:41.880 I really don't think that's, that's, you can do that.

00:45:45.400 But, you know, like this brings me back to something you said at the start of our conversation, Jamil.

00:45:49.220 You're like, I don't think J.D. Vance is sincerely racist so much as he is an opportunist.

00:45:55.460 Right. 0.99

00:45:55.780 Yeah.

00:45:56.180 And the thing that always gets me about J.D. Vance, I actually don't think this is a contradiction.

00:45:59.440 I think this is a guy who is more condemnable because he knows better.

00:46:05.600 Yeah, I think that's right.

00:46:06.640 I think he imagines a kind of like innocent racism in the like average voter, right, that is born of their animality and ignorance.

00:46:15.940 But that's not what he's doing.

00:46:17.340 He is electing to participate in and further this really malignant idea of what America is because he thinks that that will be a vehicle for him to ascend to further power.

00:46:32.760 Right.

00:46:33.080 Like Vance is pushing a particular racial ideology.

00:46:36.180 I don't think he sincerely—his wife is Indian.

00:46:40.340 his his wife is the daughter of indian immigrants to the united states the mother of his children 1.00

00:46:47.360 you know i don't think he sincerely believes any of this shit i really don't i think you're right 0.99

00:46:53.540 i think he's just the most vicious opportunist you can imagine and maybe it'll work for him 0.96

00:47:01.200 i don't know but one thing that's striking to me is advance has been in american politics as a

00:47:07.780 politician for about six years now. It's not very long. He has never been on stage with an actual

00:47:14.680 serious political competitor. Never once in his life. He's never had to do it. He's always faced

00:47:21.580 off against kind of like B-tier politicians. And I'm thinking back to Obama now. I do remember

00:47:28.740 the first debates when Obama was on stage with Hillary Clinton, and he had a hard time keeping

00:47:34.480 up. Yeah. Do you watch those 2007 debates? Hillary Clinton was like on the verge of dog

00:47:40.420 walking that guy. He had to keep up and he had to get better and maybe Vance will, but I'm still

00:47:46.760 struck by the fact that what's the, what's the famous aphorism? Everyone has a plan until they

00:47:51.160 get punched in the mouth. That's right. And Vance has not been punched in the mouth yet 0.98

00:47:54.820 in politics. Here's to hoping. Figuratively. Of course. Yeah. You know who has to go back to

00:48:00.640 another part of a conversation. Marco Rubio. Oh yeah. Marco Rubio, 2012, New Hampshire primary

00:48:05.340 debate. And Chris Christie kind of just like systematically took him apart on stage. Yeah.

00:48:09.980 You can tell that Rubio has been like dwelling on that for basically over a decade. And so

00:48:15.000 Rubio has a plan now for what happens when you get punched in the mouth. He didn't before.

00:48:20.540 I'm not sure that Vance does. That might be a great place to take a pause. That's great. Yeah.

00:48:25.500 Jamel, thank you so much for doing this. I think you're a really good commentator on like the role

00:48:30.380 of character in our political moment that lacks it.

00:48:34.580 And I'm so grateful to have your perspective

00:48:36.240 on this man of particularly low character.

00:48:39.820 So thanks for your time and for joining us.

00:48:41.520 Oh, thank you so much for having me.

00:48:42.800 It's funny that that's how you describe

00:48:44.160 because I've taken to describing my views

00:48:46.060 as sort of like social democratic George Will.

00:48:52.200 And that's pretty much on target.

00:48:53.900 So thank you.

00:48:54.800 Thank you so much again.

00:48:55.560 In Bed With The Right is made possible by hundreds of listeners who support us via Patreon.com

00:49:02.800 Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yoshizumi and Katie Lau

00:49:06.200 Our title music is by Katie Lau

In Bed With The Right - August 11, 2026

Episode 148 -- JD Vance's Communion with Jamelle Bouie

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