https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/03/jd-vance-anti-democracy-movement-leader
JD Vance is the handpicked leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US
Robert ReichRightwing tech lords are betting that Vance will be the Republican presidential pick in 2028. They’re probably right
Thu 3 Oct 2024 11.00 BST
JD Vance, the Republican candidate for
vice-president, will almost certainly be the Republican presidential
candidate in 2028, regardless of whether Donald Trump wins in November.
But who is JD Vance, really? An opportunist chameleon who once viewed Donald Trump as “Hitler” and is now his pit bull?
Or does Vance have an agenda over and above mere political ambition?
In
one of the most important exchanges of Tuesday’s vice-presidential
debate, Vance refused to say that the former president lost the 2020
election, and he downplayed the violent events of January 6. Vance also
declined to rule out challenging the outcome of the upcoming election
even if votes were certified by every state leader as legitimate.
Trump
picked Vance as his running mate because Vance publicly stated he’d do
what Mike Pence refused to do – overturn democracy and place the US
under Maga control.
In response to a question
ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Vance last February – “Had you been
vice-president on January 6th, would you have certified the election
results?” – Vance said:
“If I had been vice-president, I would have told the states, like
Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have
multiple slates of electors, and I think the US Congress should have
fought over it from there.”
In 2020, Vance alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant
“more Democrat voters pouring into this country”. In 2022, he suggested
that Democrats were attempting to “transform the electorate” amid an
immigrant “invasion”.
In contrast to Trump ... Vance does have an ideology. He’s the emerging leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US
Echoing the so-called “great replacement theory”, Vance told
voters, “You’re talking about a shift in the democratic makeup of this
country that would mean we never win, meaning Republicans would never
win a national election in this country ever again.”
In
contrast to Trump, who has no ideology except accumulating power and
wealth for himself and taking revenge on those who would deny these to
him, Vance does have an ideology. He’s the emerging leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US.
Vance would never have become a senator from Ohio in 2022 were it not for the billionaire tech financier Peter Thiel, who staked $15m on Vance’s election – a major portion of all the funds that went into Vance’s race.
Thiel
knew what he was buying. Vance had worked for Thiel’s California
venture capital firm before running for the Senate and was part of
Thiel’s libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives,
back-to-the-landers and disaffected far-right intellectuals.
Because
Thiel had been a major funder of Trump’s 2016 presidential run, he had
significant influence with Trump when urging him to pick Vance for his
vice-president.
Why has Thiel been such a
strong sponsor of Vance? Because Thiel sees in his protege a future
leader of a political movement to turn the US away from democracy. “For
Peter,” said one of the people familiar with his thinking, “Vance is a generational bet.”
Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.hat’s the point. Thiel and Vance – along with
Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks,
Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg,
Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone, blogger Curtis Yarvin, and others in the
anti-democracy movement – believe that the only way true libertarians
can win in the US is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the US
establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.
Yarvin comes as close as anyone as being the intellectual godfather of the anti-democracy movement. He has written
that real political power in the United States is held by a liberal
amalgam of universities and the mainstream press, whose commitment to
equality and justice is eroding social order.
In
Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful;
they should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose
major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at
their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.
How to achieve Yarvin’s vision? The first step, as Vance offered
in a 2021 podcast, is to replace “every single midlevel bureaucrat,
every civil servant in the administrative state … with our people. And
when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say” – as did
Andrew Jackson – that “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let
him enforce it.”
Vance has been anointed by
Thiel and the rest of the anti-democracy movement as the post-Trump
president, tasked with replacing the US establishment with an
authoritarian regime.
Make no mistake: the foundation for the US’s first anti-democracy president is being laid right now.
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Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor,
is a professor of public policy at the University of California,
Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few
and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We
Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at
robertreich.substack.com