JD Vance and His Jobs Program For Angry Men
July 16, 2024
J.D. Vance – Donald Trump’s VP pick – loves the military, which is good because his job in the Marines was to produce propaganda. He served four years and spent six months as a “combat correspondent” in Iraq in 2005.
Luckily Vance wrote a book about himself explaining how important the Marines were to his development. Namely, he wrote that he was full of resentment and anger about his life – his clothes did not come from Abercrombie – and he experienced a basic level of human empathy, perhaps his first, when he gave a “shy boy” an eraser. In the kind of story I used to urge graduate school applicants to avoid, Vance wrote the following:
“One very shy boy approached me and held out his hand. When I gave him a small eraser, his face briefly lit up with joy before he ran away to his family, holding his two-cent prize aloft in triumph. I have never seen such excitement on a child’s face… IMy] resentment didn’t vanish in an instant, but as I stood and surveyed the mass of children of a war-torn nation, their school without running water, and the overjoyed boy, I began to appreciate how lucky I was: born in the greatest country on earth, every modern convenience at my fingertips, supported by two loving hillbillies, and part of a family that, for all its quirks, loved me unconditionally. At that moment, I resolved to be the type of man who would smile when someone gave him an eraser.”
And, thus, the boy-child became a man of sorts. A man, according to Vance, who runs on rage but is willing to use that rage for the greater good as long as that greater good is imperialist violence. From an interview, “We were taught to raise our fists to anyone who insulted our mother.”
This is, I think, the key to understanding Vance’s fascism – it is imperialist. It is uber-mensch. It is deeply rooted in the heterosexual imagined family in which there is a clear patriarchal hierarchy. And, boy oh boy, does he love cops. In a partnership from hell, he even wants to allow cops to track abortions (without protecting women from violence).
Project 2025, the blueprint for a MAGA government, emphasizes the need to “make men manly again.” What is a man? Well, for MAGA, a man is someone who provides, who can barely contain his rage at how the feminists have taken away their sense of self. Hence the appearance of Teamster’s president Sean O’Brien at the Republican National Convention.
From the Project 2025 Playbook: “Working fathers are essential to the well-being and development of their children, but the United States is experiencing a crisis of fatherlessness that is ruining our children’s futures. In the overwhelming number of cases, fathers insulate children from physical and sexual abuse, financial difficulty or poverty, incarceration, teen pregnancy, poor educational outcomes, high school failure, and a host of behavioral and psychological problems. By contrast, homes with non-related ‘boyfriends’ present are among the most dangerous place for a child to be. HHS should prioritize married father engagement in its messaging, health, and welfare policies.”
Finally, a jobs program for toxic men. There’s even a movement to improve child care for police – sponsored by the National Law Enforcement Foundation, which is connected to the Claremont Institute. (NLEF’s executive director Anne Bosanac is a “strategic partnership advisor” for Claremont, plus I have evidence that Claremont was connecting their Sheriff Fellows to NLEF.)
Women, on the other hand, should be like the boy with the eraser, happy with the two-cent crumbs.
Similarly, Vance panics about the heterosexual middle-class family structure, a relatively new invention that the right appears determined to naturalize as a way of achieving their aims. (You can see how the entire political party is structured like an abusive relationship – Mean Daddy must express his anger sometimes, and womenfolk need to bake some bread and get over it.) Vance not only claims a personal connection to the “broken family” – raised by a single mom and his grandmother – he also argues that the nuclear family unit must be preserved by politicians even when it comes at the expense of women and children.
In a 2016 interview with The American Conservative, he said, “The average kid will live in multiple homes over the course of her life, experience a constant cycle of growing close to a ‘stepdad’ only to see him walk out on the family, know multiple drug users personally, maybe live in a foster home for a bit (or at least in the home of an unofficial foster like an aunt or grandparent).”
J.D. Vance has been cosplaying the proletariat since law school, it seems. He loves the “drug war” and broken-windows policing. And from this cosplay emerges his deep love for the Law Enforcement Baronial Class. This, I think, is Vance’s core value. For him, the police are a way to sublimate masculine frustration and rage through the use of violence and, importantly, propaganda.
In a 2016 piece in The Atlantic, Vance explained how appealing Trump rallies were for a Vietnam veteran: “the vengeful joy … that brief feeling of power, of defiance.” (Immediately after this segment about the good veteran, Vance tells the story of – of course! – a neglectful mother.)
For this reason, Vance has always loved law enforcement and views them as the greatest extension of the working class. He has argued that police unions are the only good unions and would bust all other workers’ unions – very working class of him. Vance loves the police for the same reason he loved to pretend he was a soldier (a move similar to Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who embellished his military career). It’s a way for him to sublimate his righteous anger and channel his stolen valor tough-guy image into a politically acceptable project (for Ds and Rs). From a 2023 address at the Claremont Institute, in which he critiques the New Right’s dislike of unions: “Sometimes unions serve very useful functions…Why don’t we just be realistic. Here’s a union I really like…The Fraternal Order of Police…They are the most powerful institution in our society standing between barbarism and the rest of us…The Fraternal Order of Police ensures that [police] don’t lose their job for doing their job…I like people who stand on the line between civilization and barbarians…The Fraternal Order of Police are the good guys.”
Remember – Vance’s most influential job, by his own admission, was writing propaganda for a powerful military not his own.
This was perfect. That's it, that's all I have say. Perfect.