My column today begins with a tricky subject: modes of speech. Many people have different modes of speech, for different audiences and different occasions. Kamala Harris is accused of “talking black,” selectively. Infamously, Senator Harry Reid said that Barack Obama had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” William F. Buckley Jr. had an interesting encounter with Jimmy Carter, linguistically. Anyway, I lead my column with this.
What else is there? Myriad subjects, including JD Vance. A headline from CNN reads, “JD Vance got a former professor to delete a blog post he wrote in 2012 attacking GOP over anti-immigrant rhetoric.” Story here. Yes, he got the professor to delete it, but the post survived.
“Sometimes you want to airbrush,” I say in my column. “But sometimes technology — The Machine — won’t let you.”
Here on the Corner, I would like to quote JD Vance in 2012 — and link him to the Donald Trump of the same year. After the 2012 election, Vance wrote the following:
When the 2008 election was called for Obama, I remember thinking: maybe this will teach my party some very important lessons. You can’t nominate people, like Sarah Palin, who scare away swing voters. You can’t actively alienate every growing bloc of the American electorate — Blacks, Latinos, the youth — and you can’t depend solely on the single shrinking bloc of the electorate — Whites.
Vance further wrote,
Republicans lose minority voters for simple and obvious reasons: their policy proposals are tired, unoriginal, or openly hostile to non-whites.
A bit more:
I became a conservative in large part because I felt that the Right was far more honest about the real state of the world. Yet a significant part of Republican immigration policy centers on the possibility of deporting 12 million people (or “self deporting” them). Think about it: we conservatives (rightly) mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and regulate our food supply, yet we allegedly believe that it can deport millions of unregistered aliens. The notion fails to pass the laugh test.
Very interesting, in light of the 2024 campaign (and in light of a lot of things). Vance was interesting in 2016, as well as 2012: “There are, undoubtedly, vile racists at the core of Trump’s movement.” And: “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.”
Vance has explained his about-face — his fervent embrace of Trump and Trumpism — by saying that he had been misled by “the media.” Yeah. When in doubt, say “the media.” Usually works like a charm.
Back to 2012, however. After the election, Donald Trump was voluble, saying, “Republicans didn’t have anything going for them with respect to Latinos and with respect to Asians.” He continued, “The Democrats didn’t have a policy for dealing with illegal immigrants, but what they did have going for them is they weren’t mean-spirited about it. They didn’t know what the policy was, but what they were is, they were kind.”
Huh.
Trump then said, “He had a crazy policy of self-deportation, which was maniacal.” (He was referring to Mitt Romney.) “It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote. He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.”
Holy cow: everybody who is inspired to come into this country. Sounds kinda liberal . . .
Obviously, politicians, and other people, “evolve” — in ways good and bad. Today, Trump and Vance are running a campaign that smells of nativism, making a collective bogeyman out of immigrants, legal and illegal. Trump says repeatedly that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of this country.” In my view, Mitt Romney was sensible about immigration: firm yet decent. Trump and Vance are a completely different kettle of fish.
Vance is very different from his predecessor: Trump’s former running mate and, indeed, vice president, Mike Pence. This year, Pence has declined to endorse Trump. In my column today, I quote Vance: “In reality, if Donald Trump wanted to start a nuclear war with Russia, Mike Pence would be at the front of the line endorsing him right now.”
This is the way the Left used to talk about us — used to talk about us conservatives. Because we advocated firmness toward aggressors, we were itchin’ for nuclear war, you see.
Why haven’t conservatives come down on Vance? Why haven’t conservatives, as a class, come down on him for this calumny? They are very reluctant — all too — to cross populists.