It is a long road from Panbowl Branch Road in Jackson, Kentucky, to the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. Even further than the distance itself might indicate. From the house where JD Vance spent his childhood summers, it is 782 kilometers to the vice president’s residence. The villa in the heart of Washington was built in 1893 and is situated in a 30-hectare (75-acre) park, at the entrance to which stands the Master Clock, displaying the time accurate to 100 picoseconds. In front of the house on Panbowl Branch Rd. are overflowing garbage bags, the skeleton of a gas barbecue and a smashed cooler with no lid. The roof looks like it might collapse at any moment, which is why the owner prefers living in a trailer propped up on stilts next to the structure. That, at least, is what locals say in the town below.
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 18/2025 (April 25th, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL.
In his book "Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance writes warmly of his time in Jackson. He describes the place in the Appalachians as an island of calm in the chaos of his youth, growing up with a drug-addicted mother and her constantly changing boyfriends. "There’s something about the mountains that holds a person’s soul,” says Stephen Bowling, head of the library in Jackson where Vance did research for his bestseller.
The house in Jackson, Kentucky, where Vance spent his childhood years.
But a drive down Bert T. Combs Mountain Parkway towards Jackson provides a clear indication of how one of the world’s most powerful men grew up. The beauty of the mountains stands in stark contrast to the poverty of those living in the region, who spent decades mining coal and who now frequently survive on welfare checks or by selling parts from the wrecks lying around in the numerous informal junkyards. Jackson is located in a county considered one of the poorest in the country and which is no stranger to catastrophe: first the Civil War in the 19th century, then the collapse of the mining industry, and now fentanyl, the synthetic drug that has become one of the leading causes of death in the area.
Several men in U.S. history have made it to the White House from modest backgrounds. Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Kentucky, Bill Clinton grew up with an alcoholic, gambling addicted stepfather in a god-forsaken corner of Arkansas. But nobody has gone through what Vance has, whose drug-addled mother drove off with little JD in the backseat and, unable to beat addiction, had her family provide urine samples on her behalf.
Vance’s rise looks a lot like an American fairy tale, as proof that anyone in the U.S. can still find success with enough effort. He had teachers who encouraged him and patrons who supported him. He joined the Marine Corps and studied law at Yale in one of the most renowned law schools in the world. Vance’s friends, his former comrades in the Marines and his ex-schoolmates all express great pride in his success. "It means the American dream still exists,” says Bradlee Avots, a former officer in the Marines under whom Vance served in Iraq. "It means that you can always become greater than the circumstances you grew up in.”
Strangely, though, success has not reconciled Vance with his country. The vice president is currently using his power to smash the America that made his rise possible in the first place. He wants to destroy the system, and Trump, who has proclaimed the 40-year-old Vance as the heir to his Make America Great Again movement, has given him the means to do so. Rarely in United States history has a vice president wielded so much power.
Vance doesn’t just have direct access to Trump, who invites him to lunch in the White House almost every week. The vice president is also present at virtually all of Trump’s meetings with other heads of state and government. In late February, it was Vance who started the spat with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office that has inflicted lasting damage on the relations between the two countries. At the Munich Security Conference, instead of identifying Russian President Vladimir Putin as the greatest danger to Europe, Vance instead pointed to what he has diagnosed as an attack on the freedom of opinion on the Old Continent. It was a speech that established the foreign policy tone of the new Trump administration and shocked Paris, Berlin and Brussels.
But Vance hasn’t just trampled all over the established conventions of foreign policy. The government he belongs to has deported migrants to prison in El Salvador with no due process – a prison which, as the local government has said, can only be left in a coffin. The vice president is also driving the ruthless assault on the independence of American higher education facilities. An addresshe held in fall 2021 before the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando was called "The Universities Are the Enemy.”
The universities, he intoned, "lend credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas” that exist in the United States. "If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” And that is what the Trump administration is now doing.
Where does the fervor come from? For many years, Trump’s MAGA movement had no hard ideological core, a lack that primarily had to do with the movement’s leader. Trump has always been more entertainer than politician. A real-estate shark who organized beauty pageants and then achieved fame through a television show. The president does, to be sure, have political instincts that have long guided him, such as his belief that Europe and China are taking advantage of the U.S. and that America would be better off limiting its ties to the rest of the world. But for most of his life, he was the New York playboy who leaked his own seamy secrets to the city’s tabloids. Not even his most loyal fans would claim that Trump is a staunch conservative.
Vice President JD Vance visited the pope on April 20, one day before the pontiff died.
The same cannot be said for Vance. The vice president is a deeply religious man who converted to Catholicism in 2019 and visited Pope Frances in Rome the day before his death. He is a reader of books who doesn’t acquire his knowledge solely from watching Fox News in the evening. Vance has been influenced by the political scientist Charles Murray, who wrote an extremely controversial book about the ethnic distribution of intelligence, but who also penned "Coming Apart,” an early warning about social divisions in the U.S. He is a fan of the conservative writer Rod Dreher, who is a sharp critic of identity politics. And he has written about René Girard, the philosopher of human desire. The vice president has completed an intellectual journey that has led him to the fringes of the right-wing spectrum and to flirtations with ideas that were only recently considered unthinkable in the White House. Like many on the American right, he has a taste for provocation, intended to expose the left’s hyper-sensitivity, but which also serves to break through new taboos.
In mid-January, just before Trump was sworn in for his second term, a small publishing house called Passage Publishing held a party in the Watergate Hotel in Washington. The company is the publisher of "Storm of Steel,” the English translation of Ernst Jünger’s memoirs from World War I, along with the works of the British-Polish writer Joseph Conrad. Onits website, the publishing house says it was founded "as an alternative to the increasingly close-minded worldview of modern mainstream publishing.” In right-wing circles, however, Passage Publishing has achieved a certain amount of renown for putting out the essays of Curtis Yarvin, a former computer scientist who long wrote a blog under the pseudonym "Mencius Moldbug” and who became a thought leader of a milieu that goes by a number of different names – "Post-Liberalism,” "New Right” "Dark Enlightenment” – but which has one thing in common: a deep aversion to the progressive zeitgeist of recent years.
The party was a who’s who of the ultra-right. Trump’s former chief advisor Steve Bannon was there. Jack Posobiec was on the guest list, the man who promulgated the – absurd – theory that Hillary Clinton was operating a child-trafficking ring from the basement of a Washington pizzeria. His book "Unhumans” argues that liberals shouldn’t be treated as human beings because they are trying to start a war against all that is good and decent in the world. Vance praised the tome by saying: "In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people.” Posobiec and his co-author, Vance continued, "show us what to do to fight back.” When Vance showed up at the party, he greeted the blogger Curtis Yarvin by saying: "Yarvin, you reactionary fascist.” To which Yarvin answered: "Thank you, Mr. Vice President, and I’m glad I didn’t stop you from getting elected.”
That, at least, was the account given by Yarvin inan interview with Politico.
Blogger Curtis Yarvin has served as an inspiration for JD Vance.
When asked about it later, Yarvin said: "My main goal with JD Vance is honestly not to cause him any trouble." The 51-year-old lives in a nice house in the hills above San Francisco Bay. To describe him as eccentric would be a gross understatement. "Lord Yarvin,” as his acolytes call him, views questions as merely pesky interruptions to his never-ending torrent of ideas. As his wife levitates through the living room in a cream-hued silk kimono, Yarvin talks about his communist grandparents in Brooklyn. For him, recent American history – the protests following the police killing of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, the complaints about racism – are just the reincarnation of a power mechanism mastered by the communists in the U.S. of the 1930s. "It represents kind of the natural desire of a patron to aggrandize himself,” says Yarvin. "Having as many clients as possible, preferably who are prepared to do violence on your behalf.”
It's not always particularly easy to follow Yarvin’s train of thought. It is an endless chronology from Elizabeth I to Hitler and Stalin. In the middle of it, he has to drive his son to soccer practice, but that doesn’t keep him from continuing his stream of consciousness. Instead of just having a journalist from Germany as an audience, he now also has a teenager in cleats, who silently stares out the car window as his father explains how the world works.
In 2021, Vance cited Yarvin’s work during a podcast with the blogger Jack Murphy – which is astounding insofar as Yarvin’s approaches democracy with a mixture of ennui and arrogance that recalls early 20th century Germany. "If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia,” is a statement typical of Yarvin. When he speaks, he sounds like an amalgamation of Carl Schmitt, the right-wing philosopher from the Nazi era, and the cultural pessimist Oswald Spengler. His comments on slavery ("a natural human relationship”) have even managed to earn Yarvin fringe status on the otherwise scandal-resistant American right. Those who follow Yarvin have turned away from both democracy and established societal conventions.
In Silicon Valley, though, he achieved cult status over the years among investors who were uncomfortable with the prevailing zeitgeist. In a climate where even the slightest verbal misstep could morph into a scandal, "radical chic” was suddenly far right. And Yarvin delivered. His criticism of Anders Breivik did not focus on the fact that the Norwegian mass murderer slaughtered 77 people – but on the attack’s failure to produce acollapse of Norwegian "Eurocommunism,”as he wrote.
Yarvin developed ties with the PayPal founder Peter Thiel, for whom Vance worked for a time after graduating from university and who later donated $15 million to Vance’s Senate campaign in Ohio. The tech-billionaire Marc Andreessen, who famously turned away from the Democrats during the 2024 campaign and joined the MAGA camp, isa fan of Yarvin’s convictionthat Washington bureaucracy must be destroyed. Ever since Vance was elected along with Trump, the ideas of the "Dark Enlightenment” have had a seat at the table in the White House.
Yarvin believes that Franklin D. Roosevelt, who led the U.S. through World War II, was the last truly influential American president. "FDR, unlike Alexander the Great or Julius Ceasar or Napoleon, actually conquered the world,” Yarvin says. Josef Stalin may have led the Soviet Union, he says, but FDR never saw him as his equal.
Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Josef Stalin in Yalta in February 1945.
When FDR died shortly before the end of World War II, Vice President Harry Truman took over, who, in Yarvin’s narrative, wasn’t even close to having the ability to keep all the influence FDR had wielded inside the White House. This was the moment, according to Yarvin’s theory, that the power shift took place that continues to the present day – one in which a bureaucracy holds sway over Washington, no matter who happens to be sitting in the Oval Office. It was the moment that the "Deep State,” as Trump and Vance refer to it, was born.
Yarvin also coined the term "cathedral” to refer to what he describes as aliaison between journalism and left-wing academia– a union which, he believes, determines the zeitgeist and is similar in its effect to a dictatorship. In a 2021 essay, he uses the fictional countries of Mundana and Mutopia to describe how the cathedral works. Whereas Mundana is an absolutist monarchy in which dissidents are hunted down with the help of the secret police, Mutopia is a progressive, liberal democracy. "Mutopia is governed by a permanent administrative state which implements policies designed by liberal professors at prestigious institutions and supervised by liberal journalists at prestigious institutions. These are hard gigs to get, and great gigs to have. Andno oneneed supervise the professors and journalists – they areself-watchingwatchmen. Nice!”
There is a kernel of truth in Yarvin’s analysis, namely that an intellectual monoculture has developed at American universities over the last several decades. The number of conservative professors has plunged dramatically.A 2021 survey foundthat just 3 percent of the professors in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences consider themselves to be conservative. At the same time, radical theories have become popular at American institutions of higher learning that don’t just criticize the liberal constitutional state, but even view it as an instrument of white, patriarchal power. From that, however, both Yarvin and Vance have drawn the rather audacious conclusion that the United States is now nothing more than a faux democracy – a country run by a bureaucracy that is permeated through and through by left-wing ideology. That is what Yarvin calls the "cathedral,” what Peter Thiel refers to as the "Ministry of Truth,” and what Vance has labeled "the regime.”
"I've always been very sympathetic to this idea that we don't have a real constitutional republic anymore,” Vance said in a2021 interview. "What we have is an administrative state, right? The administrative state controls everything.” That’s why it is necessary to make a radical break, he continued, and to start a revolution from above. "If we continue to let bureaucrats control the entire country, even when Republicans win the elections, then we've lost,” Vance said. If he could give Trump one piece of advice, it would be the following: "Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people, and when the courts – because you will get taken to court – and when the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say the chief justice has made his ruling, not let him enforce it.”
At the time of that interview, Vance hadn’t even been elected to the Senate yet. But today, his comments read like a blueprint for the program that Trump has pursued during his first 100 days in office. The president has broken up entire federal agencies and threatened judges who have dared to question decisions made by the White House. Many in Washington have begun speaking of a constitutional crisis. Trump appointed a secretary of education whose primary task is that of dismantling the institution she runs. It is a plan that Yarvin christened "RAGE” back in 2012: "Retire All Government Employees.” Yarvin, though, added his advice that the United States be run like a company. He believes the country needs a CEO, which, as he allows, is essentially the same thing as a dictator.
Does Vance agree? His people insist that Trump and Vance have a mandate to fundamentally change America. The president, they say, didn’t just win the popular vote, they also emerged victorious in all of the swing states. Trump, according to their narrative, managed to prevail against a hostile media environment and a slew of indictments and legal proceedings. From Vance’s standpoint, it’s not Trump who is flouting democracy, but those who would put hurdles in their path.
But what value is a democracy when the White House no longer respects its rules? The president has mentioned on more than one occasion that he might be interested in a third term, which the Constitution clearly doesn’t allow. For Vance, the political rivalry is not primarily a battle for majorities but a war between good and evil. In 2021, he wasprofiled by theAmerican Conservative,a magazine that has become the intellectual voice for the MAGA movement. In the piece, Vance refers to himself as a reactionary and vents his rage at liberal America. "I think American politics is either going to be a place of permanent, effectively institutionalized civil war that ends in genuinely bad things,” he said, or the "modern ruling class” must be overthrown. "I don’t think there’s a common ground between the reactionaries and the regime,” he says.
In early April, Vance made an appearance at the Heritage Foundation, the think tank that wrote "Project 2025,” essentially a roadmap for the second Trump administration. Vance was thereto introducea series of documentary films by his friend Rod Dreher, who spent many years as a columnist for theAmerican Conservativeand is currently living in Budapest as a fellow at the Danube Institute. The film is based on Dreher’s book "Live Not by Lies,” which Vance, in his speech, called one of the most influential books he has ever read. In it, Dreher criticizes the "new totalitarianism” of the American left, which, he avers, differs only in form from the old Soviet regime. "It’s not establishing itself through 'hard’ means like armed revolution, or enforcing itself with gulags,” Dreher writes. "This totalitarianism is therapeutic. It masks its hatred of dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing.”
If there is a term that the second Trump administration has repeated as a kind of mantra, it is "national emergency.” The president has used this alleged emergency to justify his unsparing crackdown on migrants, the expansion of domestic raw materials exploitation and the tariffs with which he has sent the global economy into a tailspin. An examination of the writings of Yarvin, Dreher and Michael Anton provides one with an understanding of where this feeling of impending doom comes from – and the source of the conclusion that almost any means is justifiable to ward off the leftist "regime.”
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign.
Anton was appointed director of policy planning at the State Department in Trump’s new administration, but in September 2016, the former investment banker created a furor with an essay entitled "The Flight 93 Election,” a reference to the United plane that was hijacked by terrorists on September 11, 2001, likely with the intention of flying it into the White House or Capitol – only for the plane to crash into field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back against the terrorists.
In the essay, Anton described the race between Trump and Hillary Clinton as a life-or-death decision. "2016 is the Flight 93 election,” he wrote. "Charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You – or the leader of your party – may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: If you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: A Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.”
"Flight 93” was one of the first texts to present the fight against the Democrats in such drastic terms. In Vance, Trump chose a vice president who amplifies the messianic character of the MAGA movement – the belief that it is up to this government to create a new America in which the boundary between good and evil is clearly defined and where one’s opponents must be given no quarter because doing so would be a display of weakness in this existential fight.
It is not without irony that Vance has declared liberal America to be his enemy. He spent his youth in Middleton, a town in Ohio which, like so many places in the Midwest, has been devastated by globalization. Middletown became wealthy through the steel industry, which lured Vance’s grandparents out of the Kentucky mountains with its well-paid jobs. But the industry began its steep decline in the 1980s, and the paper mills also shut down.
When you drive through town today, many of the villas still bear witness to past prosperity, but the center of Middletown looks almost like it has been bombed out: Vacant lots gape where shops once stood and empty stores have been boarded up. "Even the pawnshop is closed,” says Steve Dillman, who operated several grocery stores in Middletown until it was ultimately no longer profitable.
The city center of Middletown, Ohio is no longer what it once was.
It would have been simple for Vance to blame the demise of his hometown on the Democrats and their neoliberal policies. The argument that the Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama betrayed the workers of the Rust Belt is a matter of faith within the MAGA movement. But in his book "Hillbilly Elegy,” published in 2016, Vance blames the locals for their own misery, not the politicians. "People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown,” Vance writes. "You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.”
Despite this criticism, Vance shares the view of many "hillbillies” that educated and prosperous America looks down on them. As a teenager, Vance worked for a time in one of Steve Dillman’s grocery stores. "A friend of mine recommended that I give him a job,” Dillman recalls. "He was always smiling, quiet, never caused any trouble. Everyone that worked with him liked him.” At first glance, you could almost interpret that job working for Dillman as the start of an incredible ascent, as the archetypal American story of a person born into the working class who, despite all of the difficulties aligned against him, still made it to the top. The story of a boy whose teachers, recognizing his intelligence, encouraged him, and who was given a job by a store owner who liked him.
As a teenager, Vance lived just a short walk from Dillman Foods. It’s not a wealthy neighborhood by any means, but it’s not bad either. His grandparents’ home on McKinley Street is a simple wooden house with a narrow front porch and two small windows looking out from the second floor. But the simple structure cannot compare to the villas where the families lived who could shop on credit at Dillman’s "He began to discover the differences in classes and of citizens in the town, how they were treated in businesses,” says Dillman. It was a realization that began eating at the 16-year-old. "I hated the feeling that my boss counted my people as less trustworthy than those who took their groceries home in a Cadillac,” he writes in his book. "But I got over it: One day, I told myself, I’ll have my own damned tab.”
The house in Middletown where JD Vance was raised.
After finishing high school, Vance joined the Marine Corps. "September 11, 2001, had a big influence on a lot of us,” recalls one of Vance’s comrades, who would later serve with him in Iraq and who still counts the vice president among his friends. "We wanted to defend our country.” He says he still remembers how many young men from Ohio were at bootcamp in Parris Island, South Carolina, where young recruits received training ahead of their deployment. The time he spent in the Marines was a formative period for Vance. Just like in the supermarket back home, he performed his duties without fault. After bootcamp, he was sent to Haiti and then to Iraq, where he was responsible for press relations. "He was very smart and very mature,” says Bradlee Avots, Vance’s commander.
But his service in Iraq deepened his skepticism of his own country. "I left for Iraq in 2005, a young idealist committed to spreading democracy and liberalism to the backward nations of the world,” Vance would later write inan essayfor the Catholic magazineThe Lamp."I returned in 2006, skeptical of the war and the ideology that underpinned it.” It is a justifiable position given the lies used to justify the invasion of Iraq. But it also deepened his view that a "regime” held sway in Washington that was fundamentally untrustworthy – a position he still holds today.
In late March, he visited the military base in Quantico, Virginia, where up-and-coming Marine Corps officers receive training. His helicopter touched down on the gigantic airstrip two hours later than planned and the vice president – clad in jeans, hiking boots and a green outdoor jacket – jumped out to greet the hundreds of young Marines who had been waiting since that morning. He saluted before hopping onto a stage and saying that he never managed to make it into Officer Candidates School at Quantico. "It’s one of the reasons why I wanted to run for vice president. I thought maybe it was time for the colonels and generals to listen to the corporals for a change.”
Vice President JD Vance during his visit to the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia in March.
Vance, as vice president of the United States, still sees himself as a rebel against the establishment. At the presentation of the film of his friend Rod Dreher in early April, Vance said: "The way to deal with being attacked by the ruling elites of a given society is to speak the truth.” It almost sounds as though Vance was still the boy from Ohio struggling for success in the face of adversity.
Perhaps that is the key to understanding Vance. He has a chip on his shoulder, one that leads him to read condescension into any bit of help he receives, seeing it as a patronizing gesture from a powerful establishment that assures itself of its own respectability by promoting little JD. During anappearance in 2016, he said that one of the motivating factors behind writing "Hillbilly Elegy” was that he had felt like a "cultural outsider” at Yale. Four years later, he wrote of his time in law school: "I had immersed myself in the logic of the meritocracy and found it deeply unsatisfying.” Yet another disappointment. Another betrayal. In 2021, that sentiment morphed into a claim that no reasonable American could send their children to the universities that propelled his own rise. "Ladies and gentlemen, we are giving our children over to our enemies and it’s time we stop doing it,” he said.
InVance’s narrative, it is the liberal camp that radicalized, not him. A turning point for him, he says, came in fall 2018 when the Democrats sought to block the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh – a conservative jurist for whom Vance’s wife Usha worked after completing her degree at Yale – with an "incredible campaign of character assassination.” If someone like Kavanagh can be dragged through the mud with a decades-old story, Vance said, then couldn’t it happen to anyone in the right-wing camp? "The thing I kept thinking about liberalism in 2019 and 2020 is that these guys have all read Carl Schmitt – there’s no law, there’s just power. And the goal here is to get back in power,” Vance told theNew York Times.
There is, however, another explanation for Vance’s transformation. Opportunism. There is a long stream of earlier articles, interviews and leaked text messages documenting Vance’s disdain for Trump. Vance referred to him as the "American Hitler” and as the "opioid of the masses.” When Trump kicked off his first campaign for the Republican nomination in February 2016, Vance penned an opinion piece forUSA Todayin which he wrote: "I quickly realized that Trump’s actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd.” There was hardly anyone from the conservative camp who was harder on Trump than Vance. But when he decided to run for the Senate from Ohio, he needed Trump’s support. So he made a pilgrimage to his residence in Mar-a-Lago, became friends with Trump’s son Don Jr. and publicly renounced his own words.
It was such a transparent flip-flop that Vance bashing became a genre of its own in the liberal American press. "JD Vance Joins the Jackals,” was one headline. Another: "The Moral Collapse of JD Vance.” The most rueful piece was written by David Frum, the former speech writer for George W. Bush. As a law student, Vance had once written for Frum’s website.The pieceexudes no anger, just disappointment in a person who so clearly sacrificed his principles to his ambition. "Many who knew the early Vance ponder the question: What happened to him? I don’t overthink that question; the answer seems obvious enough.”
Vance, if you will, has traveled the opposite direction in his assessment of Trump: He was initially disappointed only to then recognize the opportunities. Trump is 78 years old, and at last summer’s Republican Party convention in Milwaukee, he essentially declared Vance to be the heir to the MAGA movement. But Vance’s fate is now closely linked to that of the president. The radicalism of this administration could also drag Vance’s career into the abyss.
Vance’s friends on the right-wing fringe believe that the new administration’s fight against the "regime” is still far too hesitant. Liberal Washington may be shaking in their boots before Elon Musk and his wrecking crew, who have already fired thousands of civil servants on behalf of Trump. But Curtis Yarvin, for his part, believes the Tesla CEO hasn’t understood the vast scope of Trump’s mission. "Everyone accuses him of being on the far right,” Yarvin says of Musk. But that is a great misunderstanding. "He’s just a Democrat of 20 years ago. Elon Musk is a Bill Clinton Democrat.” It’s not meant as a compliment.
From Yarvin’s perspective, Musk and his team aren’t focused on fundamentally changing the government. Rather, they are satisfied with merely saving a couple billion dollars and promulgating fear. Yarvin expresses it with the following metaphor: "It’s like some late barbarian tribe that’s somehow slipped past the Roman army and gotten into Rome, like 500 of the. And what are they going to do? Barbecue a goat in the Pantheon, rape some girls, steal some shit. Like: 'Where are the legions? There are no legions. Let’s fuck some shit up!’”
At the moment, though, it doesn’t look like the Americans are in the mood for yet more chaos. Trump’s approval ratings have fallen steadily since his inauguration and are now deep in the red. As a candidate for the vice presidency, Vance addressed a number of issues that are important to many Americans. The exodus of well-paid factory jobs to China and Mexico. The endless wars in the Middle East for which young men from Ohio and Kentucky must risk their lives and not the sons from the Upper East Side in New York. The unwillingness of the Europeans to take care of their own security. The excesses of an elitist, dogmatic left.
But Vance, whose writing about America and his own biography was so nuanced in his book, has become an extremist himself during his voyage through politics. He has become a right-wing crusader. His administration’s trade policy is in the process of plunging the global economy into chaos. Vance favors a form of isolationism that has many Europeans questioning whether NATO, the most successful military alliance in modern history, still has a future. And in response to the illiberalism of the woke left, Vance has responded with an attack on the freedom of academia the likes of which the United States hasn’t seen since Joseph McCarthy’s inquisition on the search for communists in the 1950s. Do the Americans really want the kind of culture war the vice president is fomenting – a counterrevolution from the right?
There was a time when Vance had a watchful eye for the dark pitfalls lurking in a Trump presidency. "I’m not sure when or how that realization arrives,” he wrote in a 2016 essay a few months before Trump was elected president in 2016. "Maybe in a few months, when Trump loses the election; maybe in a few years, when his supporters realize that even with a President Trump, their homes and families are still domestic war zones, their newspaper’s obituaries continue to fill with the names of people who died too soon.” But that day, he wrote, will come. "And then, perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of 'Make America Great Again’ for real medicine.”
The question then becomes, why should they vote for Vance? A man who has become far more addicted to the Trump drug than many hillbillies have to fentanyl.
