JD Vance Is Half Right About Race (& That’s OK)

2,296 words

While fielding questions during a rally in Detroit last week, Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance was forced to speak about race. The questioner, who was black, asked, “Detroit is 77% African American and the state is 14% African American. Why should African American Michiganders vote for the Trump-Vance ticket?”

While I am unsure what these statistics actually have to do with the question itself, I get the feeling that non-whites like to ask white Republicans such questions just to see them squirm. It’s an uncomfortable question because to answer it truthfully would look bad for the Republican. Imagine:

Well, I’m glad you asked that question, Tyrone. So why should African Americans like yourself vote for me? Well, you really shouldn’t. You see, as a Republican I represent the interests of white people, not black people. This is why I oppose gun control, high taxes, abortion, sexual promiscuity, immigration, affirmative action, transgenderism, and all forms of cultural Marxism. This is why I back the blue, support traditional marriage, and favor public displays of patriotism and Christianity, and so forth. All of these policy positions are good for white people as a group, both adaptively in a Darwinian sense and eugenically. But because fifty percent of my donors are Jewish—and Jews hate it when whites express racial consciousness the way they do all the time—I cannot speak about this directly.

And that’s too bad, because what’s good for whites is necessarily bad for non-white elites who lust for the power white people have traditionally held in this country. Thus, non-whites such as yourself, Tyrone, support the exact opposite of what I support, not because it is good for your constituents or for the country in general, but because such policies demoralize whites and will ultimately replace people like me with people like you in the halls of power. And that would be a disaster, if the deplorably corrupt non-white political leadership across the world and in many of our inner cities is any indication. It would artificially elevate the status of non-whites, encourage miscegenation, and give freer rein to certain racial groups which are low in IQ and impulse control. This will necessarily lead to greater crime, corruption, and culturally degeneracy, as well as—worst of all—more immigration by people like them. Thus, our problems compound over time.

This is the inexorable engine of civilizational decline, and I would sincerely like to stop it. I truly believe that you are not smart enough to realize this, Tyrone. Instead, I think you are motivated by an undeserved sense of racial pride and a false sense of racial egalitarianism fed to you by Jewish intellectuals to snatch power for people like yourself, who are wholly unqualified to wield it. That’s basically why you tried to embarrass me with your stupid race-baiting question.

Compare this to what Vance actually said.

We’ve got a great number of black Americans in this crowd right now. They could probably answer that question better than I could, but without calling everybody up here—because I’m a politician, I don’t like to share the microphone with anybody as much as I like them—what I think they would agree with is number one, Donald Trump wants to bring back public safety in an economy that brings prosperity for everybody. Good wages for good jobs. That’s the Trump promise. And I think that’s a great promise to black families in Michigan and to everybody else.

Here’s something else. I mean, there is this idea in the media and I don’t know where it came from, that somehow black Americans don’t believe in public safety in this country. Well, we know whether you’re Democrat, Republican, or independent, black Americans do care about public safety in this country. They want to empower our law enforcement officers to do their job. Of course, do it respectfully and make sure we’ve got good relationships between police and community. But we can have a good relationship between police and the communities they serve while we lock up the violent criminals and keep everybody safe in the process. I think that’s very possible.

And look, I mean, the story of black Americans, especially in the city of Detroit, is actually very similar to the story of Appalachian white Americans who came from West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee. We moved to places like Detroit, black and white together, because there were good jobs for people who were willing to work hard and play by the rules. And it wasn’t always perfect, but for a generation in this country, people black and white worked together, raised their families, built things in this country, and created prosperity for the entire country.

That was the story, by the way, in the steel mill that my grandfather worked in for almost forty years. You had black folks and white folks living together, working together. And again, it wasn’t always perfect, but it worked.

You know why it worked? Because we had good jobs for people who are willing to work hard and play by the rules. The destruction of the manufacturing economy in the state of Michigan has been disastrous for black Americans, and it’s been disastrous for a lot of middle-class white Americans too.

We can make things in this country again, we can build things in the United States of America again. And when we do, it’s going to bring prosperity to black and white alike.

While disappointing when placed alongside the high bar of truth, Vance’s answer is in fact not bad and represents a major improvement in the thinking of white people. He’s essentially half right about race, but that’s okay.

First of all, it’s difficult for a politician to tiptoe around the truth in a stump speech and still use the kind of direct, forceful language that can inspire a crowd of thousands to cheer. Vance does exactly this and deserves credit for it. Imagine George W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney being put in the same position. Such a question would yank them out of their wheelhouse and result in a disappointing mishmash of platitudes, lies, and flattery. This is because according to our mainstream historical narrative, whites are oppressors and have always been oppressors of non-whites. This is their primary characteristic, despite any good whites may do or evil non-whites may commit. This makes it extremely difficult for a white politician to openly represent white group interests and not come across as an oppressor himself.

Since the Second World War, Republicans have typically dealt with this by purging all pro-white rhetoric from their platforms. They claim to represent all Americans rather than white ones, and actually take pains to prove this by pandering to non-whites and condemning explicit white identity. The result has become the overall blandness of the Republican Party and its inability to resist the Left in the culture wars of the past eighty years. As we all know, if you stand for everything, you really stand for nothing. And few are going to get excited about that.

Trump represents the first major departure from this mindset—halting and incomplete as it is. No major political figure has elicited such enthusiasm from his white base as Trump has. Fortunately, this time around he has selected a running mate who at least seems to be onboard with this change. In his speech, Vance counters the mainstream anti-white narrative with a mildly pro-white narrative which allows room for effective and confident oratory. This was the major thrust of his response, and it worked.

Secondly, Vance was obviously prepared for this kind of question. Unlike the vapid Kamala Harris , who couldn’t even sufficiently prepare for a pre-recorded 60 Minutes interview, Vance knew exactly what he was going to say before he said it. He spoke intelligently, eloquently, and enhanced Trump’s chances of victory with his answer.

Finally, Vance does tell the truth, in that some aspects of the story of poor whites from Appalachia do resemble that of American blacks. Many of these whites came to America in bondage as a result of England’s desire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to rid itself of its lower classes, which included undesirables, criminals, and political prisoners alongside many perfectly innocent people. Such folks were euphemistically referred to as indentured servants, but were in effect slaves. For over two centuries, hundreds of thousands of them made the perilous voyage to the New World, and it is estimated that over one hundred thousand of them died before completing their terms of service. This was often due to overwork, abuse, and neglect  from cruel taskmasters. During this time, white slaves were often valued less than their black counterparts because they could be acquired much more cheaply and did not carry the additional bonus of perpetual servitude across generations. Owners of white slaves therefore had less motivation to treat their chattel well.

Many of these indentured whites escaped to freedom in the mountains of West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, the very places Vance mentions in his speech. He’s basically referring to people disparagingly known as “crackers” or “white trash.” These folks did head north in the late nineteenth century in search of opportunities just like the blacks did. And in many cases, such as during the Great Depression, these two groups suffered alongside each other.

In uttering this historical truth, Vance hints at a profound metahistorical one: that whites have suffered just as much as anybody and therefore have just as much right as anybody to gripe. This automatically disqualifies the suis generis lamentations of many non-whites—Jews and blacks, especially—who believe that no one on the planet has suffered like they have. This is the trump card they almost always play when facing political resistance from conservative whites. We have suffered indescribable tortures and genocide throughout history because of you, Whitey [as they pull their hair and gnash their teeth]. Therefore, in order to prevent that from ever happening again, you must cede control of this great country to us.

Yes, this simplifies things a bit, but on the whole, it does accurately reflect the tactics of the black and Jewish political elite. And Vance, to his credit, just disposes of it. He pays it no mind, and instead focuses all the positive things he and Donald Trump can accomplish if they win in November.

I also like how he explicitly mentions whites as benefactors of his and Trump’s policies. I don’t remember Romney, McCain, or Bush being this smooth about race or claiming to want to improve the lot of white Americans as a distinct group apart from anyone else. Vance also uses the pronoun “we” to describe his own personal connection with the Appalachian whites who trekked to places like Detroit for opportunities over a century ago. Such a subtle, milquetoasty form of white identity is better than nothing and is not terribly surprising coming from the author of Hillbilly Elegy.

Of course, dissidents shouldn’t get too excited about any of this. Vance and Trump are still miles away from being the pro-white paladins we want them to be. I am also fully aware of Vance’s mercurial—some would say sketchy—past when it comes to his politics. Vance is also wrong in his optimism about blacks. He might be telling the truth about the minuscule proportion of them who vote Republican. But for the most part, public safety, empowered police, and good wages for good jobs are low on the list of black concerns. What they want most of all as self-identifying members of an overtly ethnocentric population is territory. A place they can call their own, where their political power is absolute and they can appoint people to prominence on the national stage. It’s quite ecological if you think about it. And the best way to protect this territory is to make sure crime, homelessness, drug abuse, and other forms of dysfunction are commonplace enough to keep racial outsiders out. As I have written before,

Without territory, no self-identifying group can survive, and nothing would reduce the square mileage of black-controlled territory faster than some block-headed white Republican who’s read too much Milton Friedman. Since American blacks are loyal first to their own diaspora, they vote for the one political party that, through a combination of largesse and negligence, assures them territory. To put it crudely, blacks vote Democrat because Democrats look the other way while they shit the bed. And nobody wants to live with people who shit the bed. That way, it remains their bed.

I consider the Dissident Right to be comprised mostly of post-Americans. We center our politics around the biological realities of race and gender and predict that a multiracial America which opens its borders and turns its back on traditional marriage will not survive the current century. We are preparing ourselves now for the inevitable breakup. Vance and Trump, of course, cannot do this, and so should be called current-Americans. They must profess patriotic zeal for America as it exists now as a political entity. The best they can say is that America in its current multiracial form will last indefinitely—but only if they win in November. That is giving the United States of America a lot more credit than the Dissident Right does.

Given this great disparity, judging current-Americans by post-American standards wouldn’t be useful. Of course, Vance and Trump won’t live up to them. How could they? Instead dissidents should encourage the metapolitical shift towards white identity and away from the race-baiting victim mongering which has served blacks and Jews so well these past eighty years. For all their faults—and they have many—I can see this beginning to happen in the campaign efforts of Donald Trump and JD Vance.