I’ve been following Yale professor Timothy Snyder ever since I saw his class about the history of Ukraine, which is free on YouTube. I’d recommend the course for the fascinating history, but also for a deeper look at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Snyder shows that the war is part of a pattern stretching back to the Mongol invasion, and that Putin is just the latest in Russia’s long history of distant rulers and compliant subjects — so if you’re wondering why Russians are going along with this war without rebelling, there’s your answer. Snyder also wrote On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century and The Road to Unfreedom, and he can be found all over the Internet giving talks on these topics and others.
In his latest Substack piece he leaves Eastern Europe and turns his attention to trump’s choices for Vice-President, and it was so great I had to share it. Even the title, “Felon Seeks Vice,” is terrific.
Donald Trump is searching, quite literally, for vice. And so those who wish to join the Republican ticket as the vice-presidential nominee must prove not their worth but their worthlessness. They must demonstrate that they do not challenge Trump in any way, and that they would not, should they become president, provide any resistance to those who would like to see American government fail. They must engage, in other words, in a politics of impotence, a determined effort to show that they lack determination.
Snyder then looks at each of the major frontrunners: Doug Burgum, Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, and J.D. Vance. “Scott might be too soft to make any sort of impression,” he says. “Rubio has not pushed too openly for the vice-presidential slot. That whisper of a shadow of dignity might be too much for Trump to handle. Doug Burgum has the problem that he is a successful businessman, the thing that Trump pretends to be…The presence of Burgum on the ticket will make [trump’s] con harder, because the press will then focus on Burgum's actual success in founding a software company and his actual wealth.”
I disagree about Burgum; I think trump might pick him because of his wealth. The guy needs money, after all, since he’s been spending almost every cent he can get on his lawyers. A rich VP would give him another source of funds.
Snyder is at his best on Vance:
Vance is a man of considerable intelligence and the author of an appealing memoir. Hillbilly Elegy leads the reader gently to a political conclusion: because Vance believes that his relatives were not helped by government assistance, we should all agree that government should do nothing to help people…. Like everything about Vance, what the memoir does is suppress any idea of positive policy in the service of a politics of impotence. A politician is someone who explains why nothing can be done.
I love that last sentence.
There is enormous political potential in Vance's approach. In the short run, he has proven with his wits that he can always transform the need for action into a rhetoric of aggressive hopelessness, something that will please a certain kind of right-wing donor. In the long run, he can attract the support of leaders of countries who like to see America weak, just as Trump has done. It is not at all hard to see a future with Vance posing alongside Orbán, Putin, and Xi as makers of an unfree world….
Like some of the others, Vance was also once a Never Trumper…. Vance's reversal, however, can be seen — uniquely — as part of a larger understanding of politics. One gives up in the face of a challenge, and does so performatively, aggressively. In this way, one transforms politics into an impotence display, training voters to think that government is just a kind of stage, on which our best leaders vent our feelings, rather than actually do anything…. Trump was a pioneer of this, but Vance is younger, smarter, and better.
In my opinion, Vance would be a good choice for trump, which means a very bad choice for us, and for democracy. He’s a populist, but unlike some populists he grew up around aggrieved white people and knows how to connect with them. He’s intelligent, but he puts his intelligence in the service of what Snyder calls “political nihilism.” He was a venture capitalist, meaning that he has a stake in making sure the government stays out of his life so he can keep vacuuming up money. He’s ambitious, and given the odds of trump surviving a second term he’d have a good shot at the presidency.
My guess is trump will pick Burgum. Burgum has money, as I said, but he’s also a colorless non-entity like Pence. Trump doesn’t like to be overshadowed, and Vance would be too compelling, would draw too much attention to himself.
Well, I can’t quote the entire article. Read it yourself at snyder.substack.com/.... Watch Snyder’s class on Ukraine. If nothing else, read On Tyranny. We might need it urgently in the months and years to come.