Mr. C and Mr. JD
In 1941, a number of years after being the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany, Dorothy Thompson wrote an essay called “Who Goes Nazi?” In it, she’s at a fictional cocktail party in the US and she’s basically going around commenting on who she think, if the time came, would “go Nazi.” Her comments and predictions are not really about, “oh, I heard this guy say this thing,” but rather about their upbringing and personality.
As she goes around talking about people at the party, like Mr. L, a powerful labor leader who has made a fortune by championing the oppressed. He has no real principles beyond the pursuit of power and wealth, and would easily align with Nazism to maintain his influence. She considers Mr. A, a cultured, modest man from a prestigious American family. Though he is poor and earns his living as an editor, he has a strong personal code and enjoys life without compromising his principles. He would never become a Nazi.
While I was reading this the other day, when she turned to Mr. C the hair on my arms raised. I’ve been fascinated by JD Vance for years. I never read Hillybilly Elegy, but if you’re a educated white man the algorithms online have been feeding you his speeches nonstop for a while now. He’s smart, has some interesting thoughts, and has some really dumb ones too, but the most important thing to know about JD Vance is that he is embattled, bitter, and traumatized. His childhood sucked. Every time he started to like one of his mom’s boyfriends, they’d leave. One time when his mom threatened to kill him he had to decide between lying to the police about it and going home to where he might be killed, and turning in his mom. He’s a sad bitter man, the kind of man that Dorothy Thompson, after being thrown out of Germany, warned us about rising to power:
The saturnine man over there talking with a lovely French emigree is already a Nazi. Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner.
He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him—he despises, for instance, Mr. B—because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly antsemitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity.
Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains. Already some of them are talking his language—though they have never met him.
There he sits: he talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is courteous. He commands a distant and cold respect. But he is a very dangerous man. Were he primitive and brutal he would be a criminal—a murderer. But he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him—intellectual and ruthless. But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.