Behind Trump and Vance Is This Man’s Movement
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What is the opening context and why does the episode start with a discussion about New York Times Games?
Hi, I'm Juliette from New York Times Games and I'm here talking to fans about our games. You play New York Times Games. Yes, every day. There's this little tab down here called friends. So you can add your friend.
That feels new to me.
It is. It's
nice to have the social aspect. Oh
my god, and you have OLED Times. That's crazy. Right? You can look at spelling B, Wordle, Connections. Oh my god, amazing. Love that. I'd have to get the app.
New York Times games subscribers get full access to all our games and features. Subscribe now at nytimes.com/slash games for a special offer.
Mm-hmm.
Vice President J.D. more attention than it got. Vance was accepting an award from the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank, and not just any award, an award for statesmanship. Advance in this speech sets himself a few tasks. One is to understand the nature of the left. And I'm gonna be honest, I don't give him high marks for where he ended up.
The radicals of the far left, they don't need a unifying ideology of what they're for because they know very well what they're against. What unites Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites, and big pharma lobbyists, it isn't the ideas of Thomas Jefferson or even of Karl Marx. It's hatred. They hate the people in this room. They hate the president of the United States, and most of all, they hate the people who voted for that president of the United States in the last election in November. This is the animating principle of the American far left.
Something I've always found interesting about Vance is that if you read Hilbilly Elogy, and I've read it a couple of times, if you take seriously what he is struggling with in that book. One of the things he's struggling with is a sense of being othered. Vance reads his own audiobook, you can hear him saying this.
I realized that in this new world I was the cultural alien. I began to think seriously about questions that had nagged at me since I was a teenager. Why has no one else from my high school made it to the Ivy League? Why are people like me so poorly represented in America's elite institutions? Why is domestic strife so common in families like mine? Why did I think that places like Yale and Harvard were so unreachable? Why did successful people feel
so different? You could imagine that guy going on to build a politics of tolerance, a politics to make sure other people don't feel that way. And yet he goes on to build a politics all around othering. Maybe it's calculation, what he thought he needed to do to get ahead. But it feels more like projection.
We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.
I watched that. I listen to him. And I wonder if he imagines that everyone who disagrees with him feels as he does, is motivated by the emotions that pulse within him. And that's why he finds it personally convincing to say that his opponents are driven by hate. But explaining what motivates his political opponents is not the only task Vance sets for himself. He wants to diagnose something deeper, a more fundamental rot beneath Western society.
Every Western society, as I stand here today, has significant demographic and cultural problems. There is something about Western liberalism that seems almost suicidal or at least socially parasitic, that tends to feed off of a healthy host until there's nothing left.
And what is that something? What is the parasite here? Well a few sentences later, France makes it clear
America in twenty five. Із мордиверс ни газ евен. And yet the institutions that take this incredibly diverse country and form culture are weaker than they have ever been. While our elites tell us that diversity is our greatest strength, they destroy the very institutions that allow us to thrive and build a common sense of purpose and meaning as Americans.
That's the problem, Vance thinks.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the opening context and why does the episode start with a discussion about New York Times Games?
0:00–5:45
2
How does JD Vance frame the problem of American identity in his Claremont Institute speech?
5:45–16:13
3
Why does Vance describe himself as a cultural alien and how does that shape his worldview?
16:13–28:34
4
What is the guest’s theory of families, tribes, and nations as the building blocks of society?
28:34–49:03
5
How does the conversation connect the loss of national cohesion to the risk of civil war?
49:03–1:12:21
6
In what ways do the hosts debate nationalism versus multiculturalism in America?
1:12:21–1:21:05