Sunday, July 21, 2024

U$A
The Long Shadow of JD Vance’s Hillbilly Pathology
July 19, 2024
Source: LA Progressive


Image by Don O'Brien, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

After Andy Beshear’s upset win over Matt Bevin in my home state of Kentucky’s 2019 gubernatorial race (which I wrote about then in History News Network), some pundits were quick to dismiss his upset victory as little more than an aberration. Others attempted to explain it away as a natural consequence of an incompetent or unpopular incumbent, or as a columnist for Louisville’s Courier-Journal claimed, because Bevin was just a “jerk.”

Ouch, lol, but since when did being unlikable become a detriment within a political party where spitefulness and belligerence have come to be worn like badges of honor by so many?

At the same time, commentators with more liberal leanings saw in Beshear’s victory a sign of the GOP’s vulnerability heading into the 2020 election. The outcome of which, as a whole, despite what all those well-funded insurrectionists, proud boys, and dishonest election deniers still claim, what? ahem, yeah still…,reinforced the validity of that perspective.

Despite the successes Democrats enjoyed in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles, America has only seemed to have sank deeper into the mire of a toxic political culture. This is potently reflected at the level of ideas and policy. With outrage in response to a series of Supreme Court decisions issued over the last three years not abating any time soon, social divisions have become more deeply entrenched along ideological lines on issues from abortion, religion and its influence on government affairs and the Second Amendment, to the status of Native tribal sovereignty and the protection of the environment.

Moreover, the atmosphere in which it has become commonplace to baselessly question the most basic facts, scientific data and truth, if not disregarding them altogether, seems to be spreading. While this way of (un)thinking has now seemed to have seeped into practically every corner of American social life, it is, perhaps, most palpable in the aforementioned anti-democratic election denialism being bandied about by a significant portion of the populace regarding the results of the 2020 Presidential election.

That Joe Biden so soundly defeated Donald Trump for the presidency in the 2020 election by a margin of 74 electoral votes and over 7 million popular votes, and the results can still be so obstinately rejected by so many, remains not just a source of endless bafflement but also cause for serious alarm.

These broader national issues aside, Beshear’s two gubernatorial victories in Kentucky appear as a reason for optimism within this discouraging context. For this positive development to be best appreciated, though, we need to move beyond the shallow surfaces of conventional wisdom and recognize that there may be good reason to reconsider the blunt dividing lines that have been drawn between rural and urban voters, along with those separated by regional boundaries, as well.

It bears reminding that Beshear’s stunning win over Bevin, the incumbent Republican Governor, hinged on a vote difference of less than one half of one percentage point. To emphasize the razor-thin margin this result represents, that’s a mere 5,136 votes out of a total of 1,443,077 votes cast.

Beshear’s improved performance this time around against Kentucky’s current Attorney General, Daniel Cameron who was touting a law and order agenda in a region many continue to see as hostile to Democratic candidates is even more remarkable. As of the time of writing, Beshear’s margin is more than 5 points, translating to an advantage of more than 67,000 votes, with 98% of the ballots counted.

The scope of Beshear’s latest victory, and the strategy deployed to get him there, has even prompted some to start considering him as a viable presidential candidate for the Democrats in 2028. Although 2028 is quite a ways off, even as the crow flies, Beshear possesses some natural advantages over others already in this discussion, such as California’s Gavin Newsome, in having a lower profile and by virtue of not being associated with a state that so many conservatives have been conditioned to see as anathema.

However one looks at it, his victory is an impressive outcome in Kentucky, which Donald Trump carried by 30 points in 2016, and again by 26 points in 2020. Such a result, especially given the significant financial support Cameron received from Kentucky Senators Mitch McConnel and Rand Paul, along with an endorsement from Trump, reinforce the premise that there is something far more complicated at play here than red state/blue state predispositions and the assumptions they imply.

The assertion I previously advanced, that the ostensibly deep-red regions of rural America made up of areas such as Eastern Kentucky may not be as “reliable for Republicans and unwinnable for Democrats as conventional wisdom suggests,” are bolstered by this week’s results. In fact, the tally for Beshear this election cycle provides additional encouragement as he secured wins in six rural counties in the heart of coal country, including Knott, Breathitt, Magoffin, and my home county of Floyd, with the addition of two other counties he had previously lost to Bevin in Letcher and Perry.

While some may dismiss the significance of Beshear’s support in such places due to their relatively small and disempowered populations—something those living in Appalachia have long dealt with—Tuesday’s results, nonetheless, run counter to the widely accepted narrative that people who live in such communities have closed themselves off to Democratic candidates and the policies they advocate.

This is precisely the notion JD Vance, using Eastern Kentucky as his prime example, deceptively advanced in his New York Times best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegy, which was also adapted into a film for Netflix by Ron Howard. Bolstered by sympathetic commentary and interviewers, along with an inexplicable number of largely positive reviews as seen here, here, here, appearing in some of America’s leading literary venues, as well as a myriad of invitations to lecture and give commencement speeches at universities across the country, Vance was successful in pushing a thesis predicated on white working class anger at failed Democratic policies as a means to shift the discussion away from the racial discord long promoted within the conservative movement as a strategy designed to drive a wedge between lower and working class voters. An effort that surged into overdrive with Barak Obama’s candidacy for the 2008 presidential election.

According to the story Vance conjured, the disenchantment of rural, working class people in Eastern Kentucky—which also applies across America more broadly—traces all the way back to the early seventies, as he claims, “it was Greater Appalachia’s political reorientation from Democrat to Republican that redefined American politics after Nixon.” This sweeping assertion is what forms the ideological thesis of Hillbilly Elegy.

A pseudo-memoir that asserts itself as an object lesson on the social realities of white lower and working class frustration and anger that ushered in a new political map, and which should have twice doomed Beshear’s chances in 2019 and 2023, if accurate. It wasn’t.

When I read Vance’s book as a person born and raised in Eastern Kentucky myself, something just didn’t seem right. From my experiences growing up in Floyd County, Kentucky, just seventy miles east of the town of Jackson where Vance’s family was from, many of the claims he made just didn’t mesh with the reality I’d known. So, I did what anyone who values critical thinking and truth should do, I went looking for facts. What I soon found, and with not all that much effort, was that Vance’s central claim based on the stories he tells of Eastern Kentucky from which he derives his claim about the shift in the Appalachian electorate, was just plain wrong.

This judgement is born out in the presidential election results from the very place in which Vance bases his conclusions, Breathitt County, Kentucky, in which Jackson is located. Even a cursory review of the election results themselves, starting with the 1972 contest between Richard Nixon and George McGovern, and up through to the 2016 election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, refute Vance’s claims.

In fact, the election data shows that in every presidential election from 1972 until, wait for it, 2008 and the candidacy of Barak Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate actually won Breathitt County by a margin ranging from a low for Walter Mondale of 9 points in 1984, to a high of 55 points for Jimmy Carter in 1976. That the actual shift in party allegiance from Democrat to Republican, which Vance attempts to rewrite, only happened in the first election in which an African American person stood as the Democratic candidate for president is suggestive of a correlation that is quite different from Vance’s.

This historical preference is emphasized by similarly wide margins of victory for Democratic presidential candidates across several Eastern Kentucky counties in 1980, 1992 and 2000. These results offer a much different take on Vance’s recollection of his Pawpaw’s “hatred” of “that son of a bitch Mondale.” Not as a reflection of the Eastern Kentucky hillbilly attitude he purports to celebrate, but that it was actually his grandfather who’d grown out of step from the place of his birth.

The successes Democrats enjoyed in Breathitt County are reinforced by the similarly large margins they scored in other Eastern Kentucky counties, including Floyd County. Here the margins were often wider, with Carter besting Reagan by 44 points in 1980, along with a pair of wins by Bill Clinton, who notched a 53-point margin over George H.W. Bush in 1992, followed by with a 45-point advantage over Bob Dole in 1996. In all these cases, the actual election data contradicts Vance’s claims of a great electoral shift dating back to Nixon. And speaking of Nixon, the results for Breathitt County also favored George McGovern—the winner of a paltry 17 total electoral votes—by an impressive 18%.

As this data makes clear, the thesis Vance, who has since parlayed the celebrity status brought by the success of his book into being elected to the US Senate in Ohio, offered as an alternative to the inconvenient reality of the conservative exploitation of racial conflict amounted to nothing less than the rewriting of the political and social history of the region. If only people like Ron Howard or the editors at HarperCollins, and many others who praised and lifted Vance’s story, because, perhaps, they really wanted to believe him or at least connect and sympathize with working class people, would have been more diligent in confirming the facts at the time, then maybe they would not be feeling so surprised and appalled by what they have been hearing from Vance since.

But, then, again, what happens to the people of Eastern Kentucky and Appalachia hardly ever impacts those so well insulated and distant from life in the hollows, mines and welfare lines. And that, of course, is another part of the problem.

While refuting the ideologically driven and objectively false claims Vance put forth in his book, the relevant facts also challenge much conventional political wisdom that has led the people of Appalachia to being unfairly dismissed, and often derided, as a monolithic assemblage of ignorant, close-minded, conservative voters. This is an assumption that Beshear’s initial win in the Kentucky Governor’s race and re-election serves to dispel.

The results reported from Tuesday’s contest between Beshear and Cameron by election boards in many of these same counties across Eastern Kentucky, including Breathitt, Macgoffin, Floyd, Knott, and others in an area that has been most impacted by the coal mining industry, give promise to the possibility that a region that was among the most consistently reliable Democratic strongholds in America throughout the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st century may not be a lost cause for Democrats after all. And that, in reality, lower and working class peoples who live in rural communities across America, more broadly, might not be as rigidly fixed in the red column as the current political maps would have us think.

As these facts, as well as common sense, tell us though, viewpoints built on hasty assumptions that cede the loss of whole populations and regions only act to reinforce simplistic and deeply flawed ways of perceiving America’s social reality. The danger therein, of course, lies in the way that the resultant ideas and expectations, when left unchallenged, can quickly transform into self-fulfilling prophesies. This is especially true when the concerns of such people and the problems they face are not attended to while their loyalties are taken for granted.

Unfortunately, the acceptance and even tolerance of what has become a default means of evaluating America’s voting population will simply continue to feed gas to the fire of the negative political and social feedback loops that debase public discourse and lead to the neglect and marginalization of people from regions and states written off by some strategists as unwinnable. It’s a process that, at the same time, will continue to hinder the success of Democratic candidates, while bolstering the feelings of alienation, isolation, hopelessness and fear conservatives have proven so adept at seizing upon.

Despite how deep such dissent and division has been sown among people who share a myriad of personal, economic and social interests, however, as the results on voter initiatives to protect the constitutional right to abortion and decriminalize recreational marijuana in Ohio show, for those who have a real concern for freedom and justice, there is still much to be optimistic about.

Ultimately, when set against the bogus narrative Vance spun, the lessons of Beshear’s election victories, as well as favorable results for Democrats in Ohio and Virginia, offer a refreshing counter to the trends in Kentucky, and other states like North Carolina and Ohio, that commentators lament as turning more and more red on those ubiquitous election maps over the last few election cycles. How this plays out in the future will depend not just on how much we learn from these lessons but also in our willingness to see and respect the agency and humanity of others instead of merely counting them as numbers.

J. D. Vance Wants to Crack Down Harder on Abortion Access


GOP vice presidential nominee J. D. Vance has pressured lawmakers to kill a rule that blocks police from accessing the medical records of people seeking abortions — an indication of the threat a Trump-Vance administration would pose to reproductive health.


Republican vice president candidate J. D. Vance during the first day of the 2024 Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, July 15, 2024. (Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images)

JACOBIN
07.16.2024

Sen. J. D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s pick for vice presidential nominee, pressured federal regulators last June to kill a privacy rule that prevents police from accessing the medical records of people seeking reproductive services, according to documents reviewed by the Lever. The rule was designed to prevent state and local police in antiabortion states from using private records to hunt down and prosecute people who cross state lines in search of abortion services.

If the Trump-Vance ticket wins this year’s presidential election, the new administration could rescind the rule protecting abortion records from police investigation.

The Biden administration proposed the rule in April 2023 in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade and ended federal abortion protections. The proposed rule expanded upon the long-established Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act’s Privacy Rule, which requires appropriate safeguards to protect individuals’ health information.

While these privacy laws do not usually apply in the case of a criminal investigation, the proposed rule prohibited health officials from divulging records related to reproductive health care — including for fertility issues, contraception, and miscarriages — even if requested by law enforcement.

The following month, Vance and twenty-eight other conservative lawmakers sent a letter to Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra demanding the department withdraw the draft rule. They argued that the Biden administration had overstepped its constitutional bounds and unlawfully infringed on congressional power.

“Abortion is not health care,” they wrote. “It is a brutal act that destroys the life of an unborn child and hurts women.”

A Vance spokesperson did not respond when asked whether Trump would rescind the rule if he’s reelected.

Supporters of the rule said expanding the privacy laws was a welcome and necessary step in protecting those who seek or perform legal abortions from being prosecuted in outside jurisdictions. Planned Parenthood wrote that tightening medical privacy rules was an “essential element” to securing patient data and supporting patient confidentiality in the health care system.

Similarly, advocacy groups say that securing patients’ privacy is paramount, given the recent gutting of abortion rights at the federal level.

“Since the Dobbs decision, the specter of criminalization has increased significantly, for both patients and providers,” wrote a group of 125 reproductive health and justice organizations in response to the proposed rule. “People must feel — and actually be — safe while accessing health care, but the overturning of Roe v. Wade further erodes this very necessary trust between patients and providers.”

Research on people targeted for allegedly ending or helping to end a pregnancy found that they were most often reported to law enforcement by health care professionals. Once police got involved, the vast majority of cases led to arrests.

Researchers also argue that criminalizing abortion will increase preexisting racial disparities in incarceration rates. While more than 42 percent of women who get abortions in the United States are black, more than half of all black women aged fifteen to forty-nine years old live in states with abortion restrictions or plans to implement them.

Meanwhile, the number of people nationwide who are traveling across state lines for abortion care is rising: nearly one in five abortion patients traveled out of state to obtain this care in the first six months of 2023, compared with one in ten abortion patients during the same period in 2020.

This past April, the Biden administration issued the final rule protecting the medical records of people seeking abortion services, and it went into effect last month.

“The Biden-Harris administration is providing stronger protections to people seeking lawful reproductive health care regardless of whether the care is in their home state or if they must cross state lines to get it,” said Becerra at the time of the rules’ implementation. “With reproductive health under attack by some lawmakers, these protections are more important than ever.”

While he once compared abortion to slavery, Vance has recently tried to soften his public position on abortion — mirroring Trump and the Republican Party as they work to address the fact that many Americans, even in red statesoppose excessively restrictive abortion laws.

Earlier this month, Vance said on NBC’s Meet the Press that he agreed with a recent Supreme Court ruling protecting people’s access to the abortion drug mifepristone. And in June, the Daily Mail reported that someone with the username “Chuengsteven” — an apparent reference to chief Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung — slightly edited Vance’s Wikipedia page to say he believes “abortion laws should be set by states,” echoing Trump’s position.

Still, Vance has worked hard to undermine efforts to secure abortion access even in states where it’s legal. Last December, he cosigned a letter pressuring the Department of Health and Human Services to continue diverting federal funds meant for low-income mothers to crisis pregnancy centers, which researchers say often fail to adhere to medical and ethical standards to dissuade people from getting abortions.

Immediately after Trump named Vance as his running mate on Monday, President Joe Biden’s campaign began targeting Vance’s antiabortion positions.

“A Trump-Vance administration will jeopardize reproductive freedom in all fifty states,” said Mini Timmaraju, president of the lobbying group Reproductive Freedom for All, during a Biden campaign call.

You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.

Veronica Riccobene is a producer based in Washington, DC. She has experience in live television, long form and vertical video, as well as reporting.

Helen Santoro is a journalist based in Colorado.

Joel Warner is managing editor of the Lever. He is a former staff writer for International Business Times and Westword.

Europe wary of Trump VP pick Vance’s opposition to Ukraine military aid

US presidential candidate Donald Trump's choice of Republican Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate for the November election has been met with alarm by some European politicians, who warn that his opposition to US military aid for Ukraine could force Kyiv to make substantial concessions to Moscow.

Issued on: 16/07/2024 - 
Republican presidential nominee and former US president Donald Trump and Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance point to the stage during Day 1 of the Republican National Convention (RNC), at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, US, July 15, 2024. 
© Elizabeth Frantz, Reuters

In February, Europe's political and foreign policy elite heard directly from Senator J.D. Vance on his opposition to military aid for Ukraine and his blunt warning that Europe will have to rely less on the United States to defend the continent.

If those comments at the annual Munich Security Conference were a first wake-up call, alarm bells are now ringing loudly across the continent after Republican Donald Trump picked Vance as his vice presidential candidate for November's U.S. election.

"His selection as the running mate is worrying for Europe," said Ricarda Lang, co-leader of the German Green party that is part of Chancellor Olaf Scholz's government, who took part in a panel discussion with Vance in Munich.

The pick stoked fears in Europe that if Trump returns to the White House, he will drop, or curb, U.S. support for Kyiv and push Ukraine into peace negotiations to end the war that would give Moscow a substantial slice of Ukraine and embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin to pursue further military adventures.

That view was bolstered by a letter to EU leaders from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who visited Trump last week. Orban, a Trump ally, said the ex-president will be "ready to act as a peace broker immediately" if he wins in November.

Lang said on X that Vance had made very clear in Munich how quickly he and Trump would "deliver Ukraine to Putin".

U.S. strategic priorities

At the Munich conference, Vance said Putin did not pose an existential threat to Europe, and Americans and Europeans could not provide enough munitions to defeat Russia in Ukraine.

He suggested the United States' strategic priorities lay more in Asia and the Middle East.

"There are a lot of bad guys all over the world. And I'm much more interested in some of the problems in East Asia right now than I am in Europe," he told the conference.

Speaking on a podcast with Trump ally Steve Bannon in 2022, Vance said: "I don't really care what happens in Ukraine one way or the other."

In Munich, he advocated for a "negotiated peace" and said he thought Russia had an incentive to come to the table.

Read moreFormer US president Donald Trump could ‘paralyse’ NATO if re-elected, specialist says

That stance is in stark contrast with the view of most European leaders, who argue the West should continue to support Ukraine massively with military aid and say they see no sign of Putin being willing to engage in serious negotiations.

Vance also voted against a U.S. funding bill for Ukraine that eventually passed in April. In a New York Times op-ed justifying his vote, he argued Kyiv and Washington must abandon Ukraine's goal of returning to its 1991 borders with Russia.

Nils Schmid, the foreign policy spokesperson of Scholz's Social Democrat party, said he had observed Vance in Munich and concluded the senator saw himself as Trump's mouthpiece.

"He takes an even more radical stance on Ukraine than Trump and wants to end military support. In terms of foreign policy, he is more isolationist than Trump," Schmid told Reuters.

Caution counselled


But some cautioned against jumping to conclusions about Vance, who was born into an impoverished home in southern Ohio.

"J.D. Vance is a devout Christian and the circumstances of his childhood give me great hope that he, like Speaker Mike Johnson, will conclude that U.S. support for Ukraine is the only option," said Melinda Haring, a senior adviser for Razom for Ukraine, a U.S.-based charitable organisation that advocates for Ukraine.

"While Vance has come out strongly against Ukraine, he hasn’t been in a top job and as vice president I expect to see his views evolve."

Some diplomats also cautioned that the U.S. election was far from over.

"We need to stop creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Trump hasn’t won and Biden hasn’t lost," said a French diplomat.

In Ukraine, politicians were wary of criticising Vance openly, as they may have to deal with him as U.S. vice president. But some acknowledged harbouring concerns.


Daily newsletterReceive essential international news every morningSubscribe

Oleksiy Honcharenko, a lawmaker from the opposition European Solidarity party, said he had met Vance at the Munich conference and found him to be "a very intelligent and cool-headed man".

"Is there any concern about Vance's statements? Of course. The U.S. is our biggest and most important ally," he told Reuters.

"We must remain allies and show the U.S. that Ukraine not only needs help, but can help itself."

Maryan Zablotskyy, a lawmaker for President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's Servant of the People party, argued Russia was harming U.S. interests on many fronts. He said any U.S. politician pursuing an America First agenda "will never be positive towards Russia".

(Reuters)


Choice of 'mega-MAGA-misogynist' J.D. Vance just one more step in Trump's war on women

Tom Boggioni
July 20, 2024 

Donald Trump's and J.D. Vance (AFP)

Appearing on MSNBC's "The Katie Phang Show," former GOP campaign consultant Tara Setmayer claimed the choice of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) should come as no surprise due to his attitude toward women's rights.

Speaking with the host, Setmayer pinned the label "mega MAGA misogynist" before documenting the Ohio Republican's history and what could happen if the Trump team wins in November.

According to both the host and Setmayer, the GOP convention was a decidedly anti-woman affair.

Pointingto the choice of Vance as a running mate, Setmayer stated, "This is the direction they are going in."

"It's a a big 'FU' to women whose rights are literally under assault," she continued. "This election is about life or death for women in America and the attacks on our freedom."

For her part, host Phang once again noted that the Trump campaign, with the selection of Vance" is treating American voters as if they are dumb, a point she took up earlier on MSNBC's "The Weekend."

Watch below or at the link.

Tara Setmayer on JD Vance: ‘You have a full mega-MAGA-misogynist ticket’youtu.be

 

J.D. Vance's brain 'pickled' by 'monstrous' conspiracies: MSNBC's Chris Hayes

Matthew Chapman
July 16, 2024


Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio in Detroit on June 16, 2024 (Gage Skidmore)


Former President Donald Trump's new running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), is emblematic of a deeper intellectual rot at the heart of the newer generation of Republican thinkers, wrote MSNBC's Chris Hayes in a scathing thread on X Tuesday evening.

Vance, a former venture capitalist who became famous for his "Hillbilly Elegy" memoir of growing up in western Ohio, started out as a never-Trump conservative who proclaimed Trump could become "America's Hitler" — but rapidly changed his tune when it came time to run for Senate in Ohio, going full-blown MAGA and now proclaiming he would help Trump overturn the results of elections.

That didn't happen by accident, wrote Hayes — and it's not entirely an act to win office, either.

"Something under appreciated in discussions of Vance and his ilk is the degree to which, yes, his ideological transformation is opportunistic, but also I think he and huge swaths of the modern right really have self-radicalized largely online and are constantly imbibing all kinds of genuinely monstrous, insane and bizarre ideas and have come to believe them," wrote Hayes.

Much ink has been spilled about how the far-right has established a following online, giving rise to the so-called "Groyper movement" seeking to inject white nationalism into mainstream political thought; the architect of this, Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, was catapulted into national awareness when Trump took a meeting with him at Mar-a-Lago. These are the kinds of ideologies that people like Vance are adjacent to as they harden their beliefs online, Hayes argued.

"A big part of modern right-wing culture is this frisson of the elicit, the reading of this or that writer or account who are outre in whatever ways (fascists, race-IQ obsessives, holocaust denial adjacent, people with very weird sexual fixations and pathologies they turn into their own philosophy, etc)" he wrote.

"A lot of them, and I think is true of Vance and definitely true of the creepy Silicon Valley MAGA weirdos, have simply pickled their brains," Hayes concluded.










No comments:

Post a Comment