Photograph Source: Airman 1st Class Colin Simpson – Public Domain
J,D, Vance explained in 2020 why he put aside the elitist atheism he picked up in college and law school to become a Catholic (“How I Joined the Resistance,” The Lamp, April 1, 2020). His quest for a meaningful life led Vance to be baptized a Catholic in 2019. The sentiments he so eloquently endorsed in 2020 suggested that in politics he would act as a Pope Francis progressive—the very opposite of a sophist acolyte for Donald J. Trump. Instead, we now see a vice-presidential candidate who lives by what Peter Quinn calls the “Wanton Opportunism” of a “Horatio Hillbilly,” Commonweal, September 8). Equally problematic, Vance is paired with a presidential candidate who, as Alexander Motyl points out (here, October 20) stops at nothing to boost his own power.
Has J,D, sold his soul? Does ne still have one? As Vance advanced through what he called “our educational hierarchy”—from Ohio State to Yale Law—he worried that his “assimilation into elite culture came at a high cost.” Having fallen in love, he found that the emotional demons of his childhood made it hard for him to be the type of partner he wanted to be. His “obsession with achievement” would fail to produce the achievement that mattered most–a happy, thriving family.
Vance had immersed himself in the logic of meritocracy and found it deeply unsatisfying. “I had traded virtue for achievement and found the latter wanting. But the woman I wanted to marry cared little whether I obtained a Supreme Court clerkship. She just wanted me to be a good person.” A voice in his head demanded: that he put her interests above his own and master his temper.
As Vance considered how his twin desires—for success and for character—both conflicted and did not, he met the venture capitalist and conservative libertarian Peter Thiel at Yale. Sone things Thiel said persuaded Vance he was too obsessed with achievement—not as an end to something meaningful, but to win a social competition. J,D, had prioritized striving over character. “I felt more shame over failing in a law school exam than I did about losing my temper with my girlfriend.” He decided all this had to change. He would focus on what he could do to improve things.
The answer he landed on, “as unsatisfactory then as it is now,” is that you can’t actually “solve” social problems. The best you can do is reduce them or blunt their effects.
Political experts on the right blamed these problems on “culture” and lack of personal responsibility, while the left’s intellectuals focused on the “structural and external problems” such as finding jobs and adequate resources.
J,D, sought a broad synthesis: “I felt desperate for a worldview that understood our bad behavior as simultaneously social and individual, structural and moral; that recognized that we are products of our environment; that we have a responsibility to change that environment, but that we are still moral beings with individual duties; one that could speak against rising rates of divorce and addiction, not as sanitized conclusions about their negative social externalities, but with moral outrage.”
Vance felt that St. Augustine’s critique of 5th century Rome fit the United States. Society has become oriented “towards consumption and pleasure, spurning duty and virtue.” J,D, came to see Catholicism as a kind of Christianity obsessed with virtue, but aware that “virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor…without treating them primarily as victims; protective of children and families and with the things necessary to ensure they thrive.” He believed that the best part of him took its cues from Catholicism. “It was the part of me that demanded that I treat my son with patience and made me feel terrible when I failed.”
So how could this seeker for virtue and truth align with an aspirant for the highest office in the land—a man notorious for his cruelty to women and daily resort to a Big Lie? Vance’s current partnership with Trump ignores J,D,’s earlier rejection of opportunism. Vance now looks like the incarnation of Goethe’s Faust, an intellectual who, despairing of finding meaningful truth, sold his soul to the devil in return for earthly pleasures.
Despite Satan’s interventions, Faust never reached the point where he could say to any situation, “Stay with me now, you are so wondrous.”
After ruining a young woman’s life, Faust got Satan to help him do something good for society. They built dikes and reclaimed flooded lands—actions that earned Faust a place in heaven instead of hell.
Regardless Vance’s ostensible skepticism about achievement, he accepted Peter Thiel’s help to become a successful venture capitalist and Thiel’s millions to finance his Senate race in Ohio.
Thiel believes that freedom and democracy are incompatible, due to welfare beneficiaries, As Robert Reich observed in The Guardian, October 3, Vance has become the handpicked leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US– part of Thiel’s “libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers and disaffected far-right intellectuals”—the antitheses of the Christian values that Vance claims to champion..
Do we need more wanton opportunism in Washington?
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