Donald Trump and JD Vance: Decoding a double dose of right-wing racism

The Republican ticket of Donald Trump and JD Vance is currently being subjected to well-deserved ridicule, but even if their venture ends in defeat, powerful antidemocratic forces behind them — such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk — aren’t going anywhere, and Trump’s base won’t suddenly melt into nothing. Despite what looks to be their failure (so far) to score with racist and misogynist attacks on Kamala Harris, it’s worth taking a closer look at how two distinct streams of conservative racism have come together this year.

Two recent books I have covered for Salon shed light on these distinct forms. First was David Austin Walsh’s “Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right,” (author interview here), which explains that the “mainstream” conservative movement never rid itself of its fascist element and the “paleoconservatives” who have re-emerged in the Trump era. The second book is Annalee Newitz’s “Stories Are Weapons” (interview here), which features a chapter about how neoconservatives (ideological rivals of the paleocons) tried to make racism great again with “The Bell Curve,” a 1994 book whose style of racist pseudoscience has flourished in Silicon Valley, including among JD Vance’s most significant backers. 

I reached out to Walsh and Newitz in an effort to expand our understanding of the present moment, what brought us here and what may lie ahead. What they told me was both simple and complex. Here’s the simple part: The paleocons can be understood as old-fashioned, antisemitic white nationalists, representing a form of instinctive racist conservatism that resents and resists all change. The neocons’ first intellectual leaders, on the other hand, were Jewish, and their “model minority” assimilation into the conservative movement typified the adaptive dynamic of a more pragmatic conservatism that accepts change and seeks to master it. Among other things, this involves intellectualizing racism in evolving ways — new bottles, same old whine. Yet at root, both forms boil down to denying the humanity of Black people, Native Americans and Muslims, along with a long list of racial, ethnic and religious “others.” The differences are largely about how best to do this.

What makes things more complex starts with what’s new to the news cycle, including the resurgence of “race science” thanks to Vance and his Silicon Valley backers. But as Newitz writes, there’s nothing new about it. The “Bell Curve” moment of the 1990s, as Newitz frames it, was a psyop aimed at both the right’s allies and adversaries, historically linked to the “Indian Wars” of the 19th century. By email, Newitz explained that when the U.S. government was waging war against “hundreds of Indigenous nations, [it] worked with churches and other groups to set up residential schools for Indigenous children”:

These children were taken away from their families, without consent, and taught English, forced to convert to Christianity and learn “Western” ways of life. The idea was that these children were ignorant, and that there was something defective about the way Indigenous communities taught their children. Their minds, in other words, needed fixing. 

This idea, that America’s enemies are somehow mentally defective due to poor education or simply inferior minds, has continued into the present. It fits nicely with the history of eugenics and race science, which inform more modern works like “The Bell Curve.” The thread that connects them is the idea that marginalized groups are somehow less intelligent than white people, and that therefore they don’t deserve the same privileges as white people. The argument in “The Bell Curve” is aimed at white people, at convincing them that they are inherently superior. If you think about it as a psychological weapon, however, its intent is also to undermine Black people’s confidence in their own abilities, and more importantly, to make it harder for them to be taken seriously by white people. 

The timing here is worth noting. Writers like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor had decisively smashed white male literary hegemony in the previous decade. Although no one outside the academic world had ever heard the term “critical race theory,” it had been developing for almost two decades before “The Bell Curve” was published. The first two volumes of Martin Bernal’s “Black Athena” were published in 1987 and 1991, challenging the received notion of ancient Greece as a distinctively European or “white” civilization. Legal scholar Lani Guinier’s influential articles (collected here) advocated for a more inclusive and responsive democracy. That triggered a right-wing backlash after her former college friend Bill Clinton nominated Guinier for a key civil rights post in the Justice Department. Clinton hastily backed away, as did Sen. Joe Biden, who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time. 

In other words, there had been a flowering of serious intellectual challenges to white racial hegemony. “The Bell Curve” implicitly rejected all of them, arguing against engaging in any argument at all. If it was a neocon psyop, as Newitz argues, white America’s elites were eager to embrace it. Newitz doesn’t see much difference, however, between the neocons and the paleocons: 

We see the same ideas about a natural hierarchy of intelligence, and even the same pseudo-scientific language about IQ being deployed. “The Bell Curve” doesn’t call for Black people to be enslaved, but it does suggest that they might be kept fenced into high tech “reservations” for people who are too weak-minded to do work. I think if we acknowledge that this is a psyop, rather than a reasonable policy document, it becomes very obvious that “The Bell Curve” is dealing in mythology rather than science. It’s about vibes, about reassuring white people that they are the best.

David Walsh, on the other hand, perceives crucial differences between the pseudo-fascist “paleocons” who are the focus of his book and the neoconservatives who became “a ‘respectable’ faction in Washington politics in the ‘80s and ’90s,” providing cues to many so-called liberals:  

After all, most of the neocons started out as liberals in the 1950s and 1960s before moving right, due primarily to challenges from the left with more than a little schmear of good old-fashioned racism. That’s fundamentally why “The Bell Curve” gets such a rapturous response in the pages of The New Republic.

The real stakes of the infighting between neocons and paleocons in the 1970s and 1980s was over the ownership of American conservatism and who would get the spoils — whether it would be old stalwarts and loyalists who came up in more explicitly movement and/or populist circle, guys like [Pat] Buchanan, or whether the intellectuals who moved right had a meaningful leadership role to play. This was heavily tinged by antisemitism and a sense of resentment towards Jewish intellectuals who had moved right. 

Perhaps the best big-picture way to understand this fight is found in Edward Fawcett’s “Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition,” (interview here), which surveys the history of conservative politics, culture and ideology from the early 1800s, both in the U.S. and Western Europe. The most crucial struggle Fawcett describes is between hard-line conservatives fundamentally opposed to liberal democracy and what he calls “liberal conservatives,” who seek accommodation in order to preserve their power. 

At the level of governance, this involves “Tory men and Whig measures,” in the words of 19th-century British prime minister (and novelist) Benjamin Disraeli. At a more fundamental level, it means redrawing the lines of who’s included in the conservative coalition, and under what conditions. Landowning conservatives in England were originally hostile to the rising merchant class, but over time began include them in their coalition. This qualified assimilation of previously excluded groups became a familiar strategic trope in the “liberal conservative” arsenal. 

Walsh also considers another aspect of the story: How liberals, in various ways and for a number of reasons, permitted or enabled this to happen. That’s the focus of his recent essay at the Boston Review literally arguing that “Liberals Are to Blame for the Rise of J.D. Vance.” As his subhead puts it, the liberal tendency to embrace “responsible conservatives” — defined as “someone who offers thoughtful critiques of the excesses of American liberalism and especially of the left” — has led to Vance as a vivid if illogical end point.

There has never been a parallel desire to identify a “responsible left,” meaning left-wing critics of liberalism such as Noam Chomsky, James Baldwin or Gore Vidal. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., often misleadingly portrayed today as a unifying centrist, was almost universally condemned for proposing U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. 

In Walsh’s essay, the legendary conservative intellectual William F. Buckley Jr. serves as his primary example, transitioning from radical fringe defender of McCarthy in the 1950s to mainstream fixture with the 1970s talk show “Firing Line.” Ronald Reagan, the most prominent symbol of conservatism’s triumph, followed a similar trajectory, moving much of conservative culture with him. In the latter part of his essay, Walsh argues that Vance’s political trajectory is unusual because, “unlike Buckley or Reagan, who began as ‘radicals’ and morphed into ‘responsible conservatives’ as far as liberals were concerned, Vance has traveled the opposite direction.”

That is, Vance has transitioned from a standard “never Trump” conservative to an enthusiastic Trump flunkey. But Walsh describes another complicated trajectory: that followed by the neocons who became Buckley’s allies in the 1970s but had earlier been among the first and fiercest liberal critics of both Joseph McCarthy and Buckley’s defense of McCarthy. This left-to-right voyage may be the most striking example of liberals moving rightward to accommodate “responsible conservatives,” while dismissing critics on the left. 

That complicated backstory is significant to any understanding of the neocon-versus-paleocon infighting Walsh describes, such as the “outright resentment” felt by paleocons like Pat Buchanan toward Jewish intellectual neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol: 

I think that you can explain part of this — and certainly William F. Buckley’s deepening ties with Jewish conservatives — by two things. One is the popularization of the “model minority” concept — American Jews were certainly prominent in this framing in the 1960s and 1970s — which simultaneously implied Jewish exceptionalism and the ultimate fairness of American society (i.e., the most deserving and hardworking groups get ahead). The other — and it’s intertwined with assimilation and meritocracy — is racism. This is the whole flipside to the model-minority approach — groups that haven’t “made it,” to paraphrase Podhoretz, haven’t made it on the merits. And this fits neatly with Buckley’s worldview!

JD Vance fits the neocon model on multiple counts. First and most obviously, his Silicon Valley backers not only embrace the eugenic arguments advanced in “The Bell Curve,” but center those arguments ideologically. This connection, bringing Silicon Valley wealth and social media influence into the picture, is clearly a dominant consideration. Newitz offered several intertwined thoughts on the subject:

While researching my book, I found that techniques the military had used for psyops had become common in culture wars. … Before that time, psyops had been reserved for use against foreign adversaries, but now they were being used by Americans on other Americans. Psychological war became culture war. And we’re still seeing the results of that, with industry moguls taking up the cause in the present day. [Elon] Musk and [Peter] Thiel are doing essentially what rich industrialists such as Henry Ford did, when he bought a Michigan newspaper and used it to publish Nazi propaganda during the 1920s. …

I think the ruling class always wants to justify its power with a mystical or pseudo-scientific story that suggests they are truly the chosen ones and that they deserve to rule. Of course the barons of Silicon Valley are drawn to myths about their superior intelligence because they work in an industry that values smarts and rewards brilliant inventors. The “Bell Curve” myth is also a story about meritocracy — it suggests that white people control the majority of our nation’s wealth because they deserve it, due to their mental prowess. It has nothing to do with luck or inherited wealth or an unequal playing field.

There are other commonalities between Vance and the neocons. Given the conservative fantasy that white men are the new oppressed minority, Vance’s heartland background signifies a “model minority” member who’s made it. But Vance also casts Appalachian culture more broadly in a caricatured, negative light — a fact that most elite commentators have missed, but which experts on the region have not. Finally, Vance’s wife is Indian American, representing another “model minority” group reflected in such diverse figures as Kamala Harris, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, among many others. 

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As Walsh notes, “There’s a fair amount of anti-Indian racism on the right,” which “Trump tapped into” with his infamous remarks about Harris’ racial background, “but that hasn’t precluded the right from making inroads and alliances with Indian Americans. ‘Model minorities’ may be rejected by the most nakedly racist factions … but are still more or less assimilable on the American right.”

So how did these factions come together in this year’s presidential campaign? Walsh frames the question this way, and answers it:

How do we explain JD Vance, who comes out of neocon-influenced Silicon Valley but has become — at least superficially — a Trumpian populist? I think the key is to be found in the shared contempt for democracy and meaningfully democratic processes. Let’s not forget that the neocons came to power with the George W. Bush administration in 2001, which was predicated on using the Supreme Court and carefully mobilized grassroots intimidation to overturn the results of a presidential election.

Thanks in part to 9/11, the soft-coup nature of the 2000 election has largely been wiped from public memory. But the parallels between the Bush and Trump eras are chilling, as Walsh notes:

Remember the Brooks Brothers riot [during the Florida recount of 2000]? It was the neocon Jan. 6! Remember Karl Rove’s bizarre but extremely revealing rant about how America is an empire now and creates its own reality? There was a lot of talk in 2016 and during Trump’s first term about how he was the first “postmodern” president, but a lot of what pundits and analysts pointed to really was pioneered by the Bush administration. 

I think the selection of Vance illustrates … that Trumpism is a syncretic movement that brings together various factions on the right united by a shared contempt for liberalism as a political philosophy and democracy as a form of politics.

As for how liberals and progressives can counter this trend, Newitz suggests that moral and intellectual clarity are paramount: 

We need to treat these racist myths as what they are: weapons in the culture war, intended to coerce, mislead and intimidate. They are not good-faith policy arguments or suggestions. But that doesn’t mean we should take up arms against them. I argue for a ceasefire in the culture wars, which means that we need to tell different stories — stories about Black history, Black excellence and competence. 

But it also means coming up with effective ways of dealing with misinformation and propaganda in the public sphere. … There is no way to engage productively with psyops — you can’t have a reasonable conversation with someone who is telling you that you are stupid or morally defective. I’ve been intrigued by the Harris campaign’s shift away from trying to debate the neocons with logic about democracy — instead, they are telling a new story, about a Black and South Asian woman who represents justice and thoughtful engagement with real political policies. Instead of engaging with Trump’s weaponized rhetoric, they are basically shrugging it off as “weird” and moving on. That’s a great response to a psyop — decline to engage with it and change the subject to something real.

What lies ahead? Walsh said he has no idea: “If Trump wins, all bets are off,” but if the Democrats triumph, the future remains murky in a different way. “Ordinarily you’d expect an American political party to go through a profound leadership crisis if it loses multiple consecutive presidential elections,” he said. “But considering how the GOP is effectively an apparatus of the Trump personality cult at this point, I think he remains the paramount figure until he dies … There’s no universally popular successor.” 

That is clearly reflected both in the history of right-wing authoritarian strongmen around the world and in Fawcett’s account of “liberal conservative” leaders of mainstream parties, who have rarely been able to pass their coalitions along to successors.

Newitz sees “a lot of psyops” ahead, often “disguised as good-faith political rhetoric”:

Don’t be fooled: If a politician or leader is using violent threats, lies or scapegoating a marginalized group in their speeches, then you’re in the realm of psyops. Those are the kinds of statements you can dismiss as just weird and myth-based. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have intense debates! But “debates” involve evidence-based statements, and a grounding in history and context. They are not vibes and insults.

That’s a tall order, in an age when both mainstream media and social media platforms have retreated from past standards of vigilance. To this point, the Harris-Walz campaign has set a high standard in responding to Trump’s torrents of lies and advancing straightforward, fact-based political discourse. Can we change the media environment, and restore the kind of debate Newitz advocates? Anything’s possible.