President JD Vance? More slogging through a sewer of odious politics

With an urgency commensurate with the stakes, temperate Americans of all political persuasions, but especially conservatives, should act together to implement this proposition: JD Vance’s ambitions must be stymied.

He says Tucker Carlson (Putin fanboy, Hitler apologist, Churchill disparager, megaphone for Holocaust denial) is his friend, therefore Carlson belongs in the conservative movement. Vance said he will not throw Carlson “under the bus,” because a Vance virtue is acknowledgment of his debts: Carlson ardently lobbied Donald Trump to make Vance his running mate.

A president’s character counts because the nation cannot count on the sufficiency of the Constitution’s Madisonian ingenuity. The separation of powers, congressional primacy (if Congress will assert it) and judicial review will not constrain a president who can act more quickly and nimbly than those who would restrain him, and who lacks a constitutional conscience.

If Vance is the Republicans’ 2028 presidential nominee, for 12 years the party will have been led by people uninterested in, and inimical to, the policies and manners of conservatism, intelligently understood. If you think America would be fine without a truly conservative party, look around. We are there.

I agree with just about everything Will says in this column. And he actually understates the Tucker Carlson problem. It's not just Carlson; it's the "neoliberal" pseudo-right of which Carlson is a part. They believe in using government to impose a cultural restoration without constitutional restraints. While I agree with most of their cultural aims, their methodology is dangerous. I am with Levin, Lindsay, Shapro, and Erickson on this.

The so-called New Right (I call them the pseudo-right) has the same disdain for constitutional restrains as the left has and Vance is in their orbit.

And while Vance is unwilling to disavow Cucker Qatarlson because you don't throw friends under the bus, he broke off his friendship with Rod Dreher after Dreher warned him about the Groypers and urged him to disavow them.

Then there's Palantir, the huge private surveillance company that Vance is close to.

The conservative campaign strategist Morton Blackwell always taught that "personnel is policy." The people you fill your office or administration with are the ones who will implement the policies. Given Vance's associations with Carlson, Thiel, and the like, the people who would likely staff a prospective Vance administration are most likely dangerous identiatarian authoritarians who should be kept far away from the levers of power.

Trump is just an unmoored populist with a big ego who thinks everything and anything is negotiable. A listless vessel, to use Ron DeSantis's term. (And he brings out the worst in his enemies.) Vance is a dangerous demagogue with ties to bad and dangerous people and ideas.

I posted a couple of months ago that I cannot vote for him if he's the nominee -- which, thankfully, is less likely after Tuesday's results.

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