00:06:07.540Who was also attracted controversy for her complicity or cover-up of her husband, Jed Rubenfeld's sexual harassment of Yale Law students, if I'm remembering correctly, this five-year-old scandal.
00:06:20.440Yeah, there's been enormous kind of scandal circulating around Chua and Rubenfeld for years there now.
00:06:26.920You can read any number of articles about it.
00:06:29.980They're also closely linked to Brett Kavanaugh, for whom Usha clerks, I believe, at the Supreme Court.
00:06:36.140and that's a kind of career path that you know from Chua Menti to Brett Kavanaugh-Clerk
00:06:41.100anyway much of the book what the memoir is about or the later part of it is about you know how
00:06:46.360kind of alienating and difficult the environment of Yale was and how Vance kind of learned to adapt
00:06:51.020to it um and indeed the book is the product of that adaptation as you were saying Moira
00:06:55.400basically giving a kind of culture of poverty account of his own origins you know this kind of
00:07:02.160wonderful, hardscrabble, but pathological world where I grew up, where people are loyal to a
00:07:08.520fault, but don't have a strong work ethic. And it's kind of a classic, I mean, about Appalachia
00:07:15.480and in fact, about lots of places, right? This is a classic genre.
00:07:19.060Yeah. If anything, the innovation is that he uses racist tropes on poor white people, right?
00:07:24.360That if you replaced Appalachia with the South side of Chicago, we'd all be able
00:07:32.060to, it'd be quite legible what this book is doing, but because it's about, you know,
00:07:37.280Papa, it kind of seemed to have slipped people's notice.
00:07:40.940Also the fact that like the people that you think you're getting explained to yourself,
00:07:44.900right, are being, you know, not so faintly condescended to words.
00:07:50.960Also says a lot about 2016 that this could really become the best sell that it did.
00:07:55.900There are like actually weird racism arguments deployed against those poor whites.
00:08:02.360At one point, Vance assigns at least some responsibility for what he diagnoses as the0.96
00:08:08.240pathologies of his community in the fact that they're of Scots-Irish descent and therefore
00:08:15.460belligerent and not very hard workers.0.98
00:08:21.360This is a shockingly enduring kind of myth in American political culture. You may remember Jim Webb, the senator also, who has a whole book on this theme. And it's the kind of idea that, you know, the Scots-Irish were this kind of frontiersman Jacksonian kind of ethno class who built the country, right?
00:08:41.180They crossed the Alleghenies and they settled the interior and, you know, they fought the Indians and they built the country, right? And they have a certain kind of, you know, hardscrabble fighting populist spirit that linked them to Andrew Jackson in the first place.
00:08:55.580and that somehow endures kind of intact down into the present.
00:08:59.400And, you know, it's illustrative of the general kind of thing
00:09:02.900Vance is doing where he is appearing to participate.
00:09:07.700I mean, he's appearing to kind of glorify or, you know,
00:11:38.840And in fact, you do get, you do come away from the book quite liking his grandparents and especially his grandmother in a certain way, right?
00:11:45.080But I say in the essay, every moment in the whole book that's actually moving at all and
00:11:50.860not totally contaminated by his worldview is about the actual love of his grandparents
00:13:15.780I mean, this is so interesting, right?
00:13:17.480You write in the piece that what links Vance the memoirist and Vance the politician is
00:13:21.620a continuous policy of nearly absolute non-confrontation with what made him who he is, right?
00:13:27.580And like, of course, the pitch of the book is finding out what made him who he is, but
00:13:32.100it's just about the grandparents and the parents.
00:13:34.240It's not about like, yeah, as you say, structures of investment, you know, class relations.
00:13:40.000And even when we get to the kind of class questions, sort of fish out of water stuff at Yale, especially, right?0.96
00:13:45.880Like, you know, far be it from me to say what happened and didn't happen, but a lot of that shit didn't happen, right?
00:13:52.540Like, it's just, he has, you know, it's this kind of, the kind of writerly flourish clearly takes over.
00:13:58.540And like he names real disconnects and real kind of structural inequalities at Yale and about the fact that places like that don't draw equally from across the United States.
00:14:09.560But the kind of episodes and anecdotes he provides for it feel very memoiristic in the sense, right?
00:14:18.320Like that again, like there's no question about like no criticism of the institution, more of the people in it and sort of their individual shittiness kind of.
00:14:28.540Right. I mean, I would be the last person to say you shouldn't feel bad when you arrive at Yale. I mean, again, I spent eight years there. Everyone I know who got there, who didn't come from the upper crust of the American aristocracy, felt the violence of the institution in some way. You can't not.
00:14:46.960what's distinct about Vance's reaction
00:15:46.960you know, white, I mean, all students arriving there, especially white students are kind of,0.52
00:15:50.280you know, instructed in like the neighborhoods that shouldn't go in immediately and all this
00:15:53.520kind of thing. And he just like, can't clock that as like that, that he's in a place like where he's
00:16:00.340from, right. A place that has also been devastated by de-industrialization and is suffering a whole
00:16:05.580bunch of really familiar problems as a result. And that's racism, right? I mean, the way to
00:16:09.900understand that is that it's racism, but it's not just, it's analytically important, not just
00:16:14.020because it's like, oh, let's catch J.D. Vance as a racist, although he is, but because it tells you
00:16:19.000that his way of thinking about class and class inequality and class relations is completely
00:16:27.220mediated and kind of permeated by race and racism, right? So he's not able to actually think the
00:16:33.840thought that he has anything in common with this place. That's just like where he's from.
00:16:39.340So let's move on to Vance's sort of post-Yale career, right?
00:16:47.220Because he really plays up his origins as a, you know, orphaned son of de-industrialization.
00:16:58.100But I think he pays a little less attention when he's making this public pitch for his own authenticity to his time as a, you know, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist.
00:17:08.980Can you tell us a little bit about that part of his life?
00:22:27.740After he's already endorsed him, you know?
00:22:30.600I do think there's a kind of psychoanalytic thing going on with the J the Vance Trump relationship that we could also talk about um but uh yeah so that you know he he wins the primary on that basis he wins in general election on the basis of Ohio being a Republican state um and you know becomes a voice in Washington for the kind of uh you know populist right um you know including these very freaky speeches
00:23:00.580He gives it CPAC periodically, you know, and he talks about like the debossification of the American government, you know, the purge of the left, you know, from, from civil service.
00:23:10.320And, you know, his campaign involved tons of very obvious kind of references to great replacement theory and, right.
00:24:02.420And, you know, I mean, in a way that I think is going to be not possible for Democrats to figure out how to communicate in national politics, he's just part of this kind of, like, Nazi internet world.0.75
00:24:13.480I mean, he, like, for example, I don't know if this will mean anything to you all, but, like, he was on Amy Teresa's podcast, for example, and he was running for Senate.0.86
00:24:19.580you know he like follows bronze age pervert on twitter he's just like he's in that scene
00:24:26.020he is incredibly online i feel like there's um a way in which we have maybe understated the amount0.85
00:24:33.820that like this millennial republicans are just completely brain poisoned from the right-wing
00:24:41.540social media sphere and how it is uh really shaped their politics in a way that i think is
00:24:48.840much more commented upon when it happens to like democratic staffers who, you know, start saying
00:24:54.200Latinx or whatever. But, you know, Republican staffers are too online and they become like
00:25:00.520actual Nazis and monarchists. You know, it's a, it's a very asymmetrical.
00:25:04.680Well, we notice it. We notice it when it happens to Silicon Valley billionaires, I suppose,
00:25:08.140but we don't notice it that it's also happening to, yeah, to Republican vice presidential
00:26:13.660Do you hate Mexicans in this like kind of wink, wink way where he purports to be parodying like hyperbolic, hysterical liberal characterizations of Ohio voters.0.98
00:26:27.220But he's actually just suggesting like, like you, I am a racist and that's why you should vote for me.
00:26:33.780You know, it's very internet in that it is a simultaneous disavowal through ironic distance and like subterranean avowal with plausible deniability.
00:26:47.920I mean, you know, you would never be able to get him to answer, I think, like why it is that he simultaneously thinks our people need to have more babies, right, to reverse the decline in fertility.
00:27:01.520And also we need to remove, you know, so-called illegal aliens or whatever you would call them, right, in order to increase American workers, you know, labor market power, right?
00:27:15.500Like those two positions are only reconcilable through racism, right?
00:27:20.400It's the only logic that makes sense there.
00:32:58.660Which is like the actual misery of people who have suffered economically, engaging with
00:33:04.200it as something that can be explained at a level other than individual.
00:33:08.540Yeah, it seems to me that the other one, of course, is, as you were saying, kind of about
00:33:12.240the idea that the wrong elite is in charge, right?
00:33:17.160I mean, he is very, very comfortable, clearly, in elite spaces.
00:33:20.760And I mean, ironically, for someone who made his name kind of being the spokesperson for
00:33:26.480people that sort of don't penetrate into a bubble like Yale, he spent really an inordinate
00:33:32.180amount of time with some of the most insulated people on the planet, right?
00:33:37.040Yale Law School, Silicon Valley, and the US Senate.
00:33:40.680But, you know, like, you're, you know, there's just, there's also just kind of a, there's an incuriosity to all of it.
00:33:47.300I mean, it's a wounded incuriosity because, you know, so much clearly comes, as you say, out of his own personal traumas, which are legitimate and right, like, and you're not going to sort of wave away.
00:33:57.340But it's interesting that he rose to prominence miming kind of curiosity when in fact he is really matched only by his running mate in lack of curiosity what the Americans he seems so eager to represent are actually like and doing.
00:34:16.120Yeah, I mean, I have to admit that I sometimes think that the whole essay I wrote is like, it is just like men would rather become fascist dictators than go to therapy.
00:34:27.340i mean there is an explicit passage in the essay or in the book rather about uh you know how he
00:34:34.320doesn't want to go to therapy therefore like tries to understand his you know genuine mental
00:34:40.360health struggles which you can't blame him for having um for you know like kind of through
00:34:45.900force of will or something like that right and i do think you can see his whole trajectory
00:34:49.420as a series of displacements of you know this set of like real traumas from real challenging
00:34:55.820childhood circumstances, he just places again and again and again as a way of not actually
00:35:03.040understanding himself and his world and where he comes from.
00:35:21.840And you can, you know, explicate his gender politics, which are very extremist and very resentful towards women and, you know, gender minorities in the sense of, you know, his mother failed to perform this nurturing subservient role of caretaking and presence and sort of fixated attention on him.
00:35:50.940And therefore, he is going to compel all the nation's other mothers to do so by force, right?
00:35:57.560Another recurring theme in his gender politics statements is his real hatred and resentment for childless women.
00:36:04.460It's like a bizarre fixation he has that he returns to over and over again.
00:36:10.720But then I think his relationship with other men are also really telling.
00:36:17.000Could you tell us a little bit about that Trump endorsement and this sort of like,
00:36:20.040uh almost like desperately sycophantic relation with trump himself yeah well i mean i think in
00:36:25.600general like it's clear that uh or it's easy to see let me put it like that it's easy to see just
00:36:31.100from his memoir from his public record the way vance is constantly reconfecting to new parental
00:36:38.420figures mainly men although not only right i mean is an interesting character there too um
00:36:44.660but like he lets these parental figures remake him really intensely right um and that's the story
00:36:53.880he tells about Amy Chua is like he doesn't know what to do he's out of place at Yale she remakes
00:36:57.960him um and then he repudiates that remaking right for Keel and then for Trump um and uh you know
00:37:08.080But, I mean, the sycophancy for Trump, it's just like, you know, it's amazing he's not more embarrassed and humiliated.0.75
00:45:16.000Um, but like, I think that, um, question about what is the, what kind of alignment is he able to produce between, you know, the Republicans and a kind of, you know, nationalist chauvinist kind of populist politics.
00:45:35.080I mean, it's scary to me, honestly, I think like, it's not impossible that he will find some, although, you know, I mean, well, first of all, like the people at like compact magazine are totally exalted over this.
00:45:45.420right they see this as the realization of that program and i think it's they're not totally
00:45:50.620wrong too i think it's right for us i mean for me as someone who thinks of myself as a kind of
00:45:54.800in the labor left i feel scared about that possibility um but i also think there are
00:45:59.340real structural obstacles to that alignment really developing very far in the republican party and
00:46:05.060you know we know that rupert murdoch tried very hard to stop trump from choosing vance
00:46:08.200uh which is a kind of reflection of that uh so it'll be interesting i think if we see that these
00:46:12.740tensions emerge it will be in part around this kind of thing right like republicans who just
00:46:17.620want to you know further deregulate private equity and have taxes for the rich which is still the
00:46:22.500predominant thing in the party um versus what vance wants to do which is not straightforwardly
00:46:28.000populist but is you know he's interested in kind of weakening one elite in favor of another
00:46:31.880through populist politics and that is likely i think to generate some fissures yeah i think
00:46:38.180that's that's right i think there's a there's an interesting question here in terms of how exactly
00:46:43.580like how far exactly this kind of alignment can go but there's also of course the related question
00:46:48.440which is can can his insistent moralization of these issues sort of like ultimately you know
00:46:56.100unions are structural institutions they they they tend to think in in structural terms at least if
00:47:01.800they're functioning i mean unless they're like police unions or something like that but there is
00:47:06.540you know a real there it would seem to me that there are real limits to his pitch but then again
00:47:12.400it only has to hold for the next three months for him to be vice president but um you know i i do
00:47:18.180agree with you that like the kind of realignment that compact magazine is kind of hoping for
00:47:24.080anticipating that that seems to me very difficult but the problem like can you peel off some union
00:47:28.900voters like yeah that's the that's the other question yeah well and you know the democrats i
00:47:34.620I think Vance is a very good symbol of the total failure of liberals and Democrats to comprehend the genuine problem of which Vance is a symptom and to confront it properly.
00:47:47.940um right and instead they used vance and other symbols like vance as a way of kind of um
00:47:54.540you know refracting and obscuring that um so that they you know even now that biden you know has
00:48:02.080taken his own kind of pro-labor turn over the years and whatever right like it it doesn't wash that
00:48:07.120well um so you know i think it's you know that in some ways the electoral question is already
00:48:44.700They more or less split 50-50 between Trump and Clinton and Biden and the building trades, which are the right wing of the labor movement traditionally.
00:48:54.420And those are different sizes and, you know, uneven until it's a rough kind of cut.
00:49:00.140But it's worth saying also on this advance, you know, I mean, like he said that, you know, unions are good for some workers in some things, but, you know, not all.
00:49:09.320Like he is very kind of interestingly on the record about, you know, the idea that there are kind of good parts of the working class and bad parts of the working class, right?
00:49:18.420Good kinds of workers organization and bad kinds of workers organization, which is exactly in keeping with this idea that like what he's really interested in is a rival elite, which is able to partner with some kinds of organized labor, but not with an actually strong working class, right?
00:49:32.880What he wants is a very managed from above form of, you know, partial redistribution.
00:50:05.840And, you know, I don't think the form of advances of racism is like a, you know, old fashioned Jim Crow, right? It's a, it's a newer thing than that. So like, you know, he's happy, I think, to, um, you know, build an alliance if he can with the Teamsters, right? Who are certainly not an all white organization, um, but it's an alliance on the basis of like hostility to immigration.0.85
00:50:27.380right which has obviously a kind of racist politics to it as we were talking about
00:50:31.800and about the recuperation of a kind of you know single breadwinner model uh which has a
00:50:37.840sexist politics obviously uh that is really central to who he is and um you know in general
00:50:45.300like he you know he said this thing he's on he's on the record in terms of labor policy supporting
00:50:49.640um what's called sectoral bargaining uh you know there is actually sectoral bargaining legislation
00:51:20.940with all of this right-wing populist stuff.
00:51:22.600Like, for reasons of being interested in, you know, recuperating a certain kind of male breadwinner, you know, national citizen, punitively white kind of figure, right, they're potentially interested in some kinds of workers' power and redistribution and so on within limits.
00:51:46.380But the limits have to be really sharply drawn because what you don't want is like workers taking initiative, reinventing their situations, building their own organizations that are independent and accountable to them.
00:51:59.880Because in that process, all of those kinds of social boundaries start to break down around race and around gender and around citizenship and so on.
00:52:08.980In historical moments where that kind of initiative is coming up from below in the working class, like you see that really clearly.
00:52:15.060And so, like, J.D. Vance wants to give the working class a handout, right?0.75
00:52:19.560Like, he wants to, not in the kind of pejorative sense that conservatives use that about welfare, but rather in the sense that, like, he wants the government to aid and protect certain kinds of workers under certain circumstances in a tightly controlled way.0.80
00:52:31.920That might be a good place to wrap up.
00:52:36.600I mean, it's a great piece, and I really encourage people to read it in full.
00:52:40.320But yeah, it was great talking with you through this and, you know, elucidating this particular sidestream of our long and meandering national nightmare.