Earlier this week, J.D. Vance sat down for an unusual unscripted interview with the New York Times. One of the first things that piques one's curiosity, as it does in any conversation with Vance, is the question of how exactly he manages to look himself in the mirror. How can he live with himself, after completely reversing his positions and selling out his own values so many times over the course of his career?
The interviewer's polite way of edging into this topic was to tell Vance that she was not sure, going into the discussion, "which J.D. was going to show up." He has so many chameleon shades. Vance's response to this was revealing: "Isn't that how most people are?" As in: doesn't everyone have this gnawing emptiness and void inside that makes them able to contort themselves into new forms without remorse?
To which the only answer can be: No, J.D., everyone does not in fact have such a complete lack of moral self. Everyone is not a shape-shifting creature that inhabits utterly different and mutually-incompatible ideological poses within the space of less than a decade of public life. That's a you problem, J.D.
But, having said this much—can we also admit that there's an element of truth to what he said? Vance is an extreme example of the protean self; but surely we can all admit, when we look inside, that we are multifaceted; that the face we present to the world is not the one we experience inside ourselves every day of the week; that, in short, we contain multitudes. "I'm complex," as Vance skin-crawlingly put it.
This is partly what makes the alt-righters, and everyone else who has converted to some sort of totalistic ideology at odds with their prior self, so unsettling. One can almost see how they got there. There is a voice of rage and hate in all of us that we try not to listen to. And it makes a certain amount of sense that some of us simply give in to the Dark Side. "Let the hate flow through you," as the Emperor says.
I know that sometimes, when I am feeling depressed and cynical, I will wonder if anything I've done in my life adds up to some coherent and stable "self"—an official ego. To counteract this tendency, my dad will usually try to reconstruct some narrative that makes positive sense of my life choices. "You loved divinity school," he says. "No, I didn't," I retort—in some states of mind—"I hated the entire thing!"
"Your whole life," he goes on, "you've had a passion for justice. So it makes sense you would go to law school." And I can sort of see the landmarks on my life's road he has in mind. There was my career as a human rights advocate. There's my writing about politics and ethics and justice-related issues. He's not wrong that these are in fact things I care about, and that I spend every day thinking about.
And yet, somehow, the narrative of the public self he is constructing remains a partial fiction. It is "something/ like me, and like a gibe at me," as D.H. Lawrence put it, in a poem condemning "Image-Making Love." Lawrence writes that, all his life, people created a version of him in their own minds that they could love. But that version was never his whole self. It did not take into account the rage.
"Always/ at the core of me/ burns the small flame of anger, gnawing," Lawrence writes, in the same poem. I have it too. And, at the risk of pulling a Vance (I'm vulnerable here to the same retort: "that's a you problem"), I think we all have it.
This is the part of ourselves to which the alt-right appeals. We imagine what it would feel like to simply let that flame out of its cage—to burn the "image-making love"—the version of the officially-sanctioned public self to which we did not consent—to the ground.
A friend was telling me about an acquaintance we both knew from divinity school. She was part of the same liberal religious students groups we were—and was to all appearances a mousy good-natured progressive like the rest of us. He gave me an update years later on what had happened to her. She had become, of all things, a far-right influencer with a following on MAGA Instagram.
Who would have thought? She let her "small flame of anger" out of its cage alright. She torched the public self that we knew. No one would "gibe at" her again with misleading constructions of a pro-social good-natured self with which she felt no real kinship. The story was frightening, to be sure—not only because of how much people can change, but because it was undeniable that in a sense, she had "found her power."
There's a character in Michel Houellebecq's novel The Elementary Particles who appears, in his public self, as a respected member of the French intelligentsia—a high school teacher and reader of novels. But, in a fit of sexual jealousy, he starts penning anonymous racist articles in secret. He even thinks of joining the National Front. He is the prototype of all the far-right anonymous trolls and "shit-posters" of today.
He decides at last that—for his chances on the dating market if for no other reason—he "had to stick to [his] 'liberal humanist' position." (Wynne trans.) He realized that his screeds had been "crazy." But there was something in him that made him write them. There was some part of him that made the public-facing pro-social liberal self a pose—"a simulacrum," as Lawrence says, both "like me" and "like a gibe at me."
Where Vance went astray is not the fact that he has this aspect of himself—it's not that he too has the "small flame of anger, gnawing." It's that he feels that the mere existence of this shadow-self makes him righteously entitled to give into it. The problem is not that he is "complex" enough to experience the temptation of rage and hate. That just makes him human. The problem is that he chooses to say yes to it.
That is the part—that willing choice—that dooms him to existential loneliness. It is that, the choice to succumb, not the temptation itself—that forces him to pass through life without a stable moral self—that condemns him to move from one pose to the next, ever-shifting, in a fruitless quest to fill the void inside where most people find integrity and the sense that, if all else fails, they are at least a good person.
Vance goes around, from interview to interview, trying on different masks. One day, he is the respectable old-fashioned conservative who is willing to have a civil debate over the issues. The next, he is the wrathful firebrand smearing vulnerable racial out-groups with baseless lies that threaten to stoke violence against them. The next he is writing blurbs for extreme-right manifestos. Each day, a new Vance.
He is no doubt hoping to land at some point on the formula that will make America love him. But America does not respond that way. America is creeped out by someone who has so unstable a core of self. So, in the very act of trying to win America's love, he loses it; because people do actually want someone with integrity. This is Vance's dilemma. And it is one that D.H. Lawrence again summarized well:
Those that go searching for love
only make manifest of their own lovelessness,
and the loveless never find love,
only the loving find love,
and they never have to seek for it.
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