This Land Is Not Your Land
The long thread of white grievance.
In the spring of 2012, I went to Harrison, Arkansas to report on a Ku Klux Klan meeting. When I arrived at the group’s compound the first day, after navigating down tiny dirt roads and over intermittently running streams, I was greeted not by a burning cross, but by a lawyer wielding a release form. Leadership of that branch of the Klan was a family affair, and one of the sons had dutifully gone to law school in order to serve as the squared-away bridge to the formal world. Inside the compound were the gutter racists with scraggly beards and knives on their belts, but outside the compound was the friendly, approachable attorney who just wants to make sure that we fairly represent the message of—not hate!—but love for your own kind.
The professional, polished public face is an archetype of extremist movements. For every hollering Hitler or Mussolini or Nathan Bedford Forrest whipping up the faithful, there must be a smoother, calmer emissary whose job it is to sand down the message to make it sound palatable to the wider world. In today’s Republican Party, America’s biggest extremist movement, that role is played by JD Vance. If Trump is the MAGA fascism’s deranged id, Vance is its ego, grooming himself carefully in order to smile and reinterpret the latest insane fascist rambling for a more intellectual crowd.
Skilled toadies like Vance are even more contemptible than the masters they serve, because their actions are more calculated, and their lies more considered. Vance has risen high by becoming Christian nationalism’s Good Little Boy, its gleaming messenger to television cameras. He also acts as both the conduit from the White House to the right wing intellectual superstructure. All of these people, from Trump to Stephen Miller to the mewling racist Southern congressmen tossing out red meat to the rubes, are extremists—but the smart extremists, the ones who fund the Heritage Foundation, know that their power can only be amplified if they can cultivate a vanguard of Vances to pave the way into America’s living rooms.
Because Vance’s entire career has been built on pleasing more powerful right wing elites, from Yale to Peter Thiel to the world of Republican donors, he plays an important role of reassuring all of these people that Trump’s is not fully off the rails. His job is to add a sprinkle of academic justification to the admistration’s’s instinctive policies of retribution, and sell them both up and down the social hierarchy. They key to this is to cultivate a sense of grievance. White grievance is the Republican Party’s fuel. Grievance demands a response, and the harshness of the response can be made to seem reasonable as long as the grievance is great enough. In this, JD Vance is the latest in a long line of whiny American demagogues.
Last weekend, the day after the 4th of July, Vance delivered a speech to the Claremont Institute, a right wing think tank in California. That speech was a useful lesson in both the manufacturing of grievance, and the rhetorical ploys used to provide cover for that grievance’s institutionalized expressions of rage and oppression. Half of the speech was spent scaremongering about the New York City primary victory of Zohran Mamdani, cast (by the Vice President of the United States, surrounded by armed guards, to a room full of wealthy donors) as a dangerous example of “elite disaffection and elite anger.” Always accuse your enemy of what you are doing.
“What unites Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites, and big Pharma lobbyists?” Vance asked (enumerating, of course, the major components of the New York City Democratic Party). “It isn’t the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, or even of Karl Marx. It’s hatred. They hate the people in this room. They hate the President of the United States. And most of all, they hate the people who voted for that President of the United States. This is the animating principle of the American far left.”
Do not focus on the fact that this is all bananas on an analytical level. Focus instead on how easy it is to convince a room full of wealthy supporters of the political party that controls all three branches of government that they are under attack and in great peril. How little it takes! A 33-year-old brown man winning a mayoral primary in a city all on the other side of the country; a small Asian or African or Central American nation with a left wing government that will surely cause the other dominoes to fall towards global communism; you get the idea. Facts of the world are far less potent than this sense of being wronged and being threatened. Once this has been instilled, it is a simple matter to cast the most extremist policies as a proportional response to the threat.
Vance’s preferred pivot is toward barely-concealed white Christian nationalism. His words would be shocking if they were not delivered from such a pampered set of lips. “They [on the left] certainly don’t care that deporting low wage immigrants will raise the wages of the native born, because they don’t mean to create higher living standards for those who are born and raised here. Whether they’re black, white, or any other skin color,” he said. “They mean to replace those people with people who will listen to their increasingly bizarre ethnic and religious appeals. They are arsonists, and they will make common cause with anyone willing to light the match.”
These arsonists, motivated by hatred, coming to fling open the door to foreigners who will replace you. Quite scary, for all of these millionaires who live in mansions in Pasadena. Vance has a story to tell, a theory that centers this vague sense of dread in a broader trend that cries to be addressed.
“Every Western society, as I stand here today, has significant demographic and cultural problems. There is something about Western liberalism that seems almost suicidal, or at least socially parasitic. That tends to feed off of a healthy host until there’s nothing left. That’s why the demographic trends across the West are so bad—why so many young people say they would not die for their own country. Because something about the liberal project in 2025 is just broken,” he said. A moment’s thought reveals the inherent racist lunacy of this assertion—these “suicidal” and “parasitic” “problems” that he speaks of could also be described as “immigration itself”—but to an audience primed by fear, it goes down smoothly enough.
“Social bonds form among people who have something in common. They share the same neighborhood, they share the same church, they send their kids to the same school. And what we’re doing is recognizing that if you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow that social cohesion to form naturally,” Vance said. “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.”
Set aside, again, the hilariously convoluted leaps towards fearmongering here (Who are all these people saying that Americans with ancestors who fought in the Civil War don’t belong in America? That’s a new one on me.) I was struck by the similarities of today’s fascist justifications and those of the past. I’ve been reading Shelby Foote’s immense three-volume history of the Civil War, and in Vance’s dark and petulant words, I heard an echo of the Confederates, who launched a war to protect their ability to hold slaves, building up their own self-image as the persecuted ones.
“You have been involved in a war waged for the gratification of the lust of power and aggrandizement, for your conquest and your subjugation, with a malignant ferocity and with a disregard and a contempt of the usages of civilization entirely unequaled in history,” Confederate President Jefferson Davis told a crowd in Mississippi in December of 1862. “The question for you to decide is, Will you be slaves or will you be independent? Will you transmit to your children the freedom and equality which your fathers transmitted to you?”
You, white slaveholders—these rascals want to subjugate you! What are you, slaves? Remember: always accuse the other side of what you yourself are doing. If you think that Davis was laying it on a little thick here, consider what Confederate general Braxton Bragg wrote in a message to his troops before they went to battle in Tennessee:
“The enemy is before us, devastating our fair country, imprisoning our old and venerated men (even the ministers of God), insulting our women, and desecrating our altars. It is our proud lot to be assigned the duty of punishing and driving forth these deluded men, led by desperate adventurers and goaded on by Abolition demagogues,” he thundered. “It is for you to decide whether our brothers and sisters of Tennessee and Kentucky shall remain bondmen and bondwomen of the Abolition tyrant or be restored to the freedom inherited from their fathers.”
Self-awareness: have white American racists ever heard of it? Nay. It appears not. Lo, ye Southerners, grab your guns and fight for the freedom to enslave, lest you be made into bondmen by these raving lunatics preaching freedom! Though the particular circumstances in 1860 were more exaggerated than they are in 2025, the general techniques of racist grievance-building have not changed a bit. From Jefferson Davis to JD Vance, there is a straight line.
“You, the real Americans, are threatened, and drastic action is required. Whatever you do, don’t think about context.”
To the extent that liberals have tried, for the past 200 or so years, to build good faith arguments against this line of thought, they have wasted their time. There is nothing rational here. Whether slavers outraged over assaults on their freedom or rich Republicans outraged over the attacks of the elites (DSA members and immigrant farmworkers), we must recognize that this is not a debate that can be won with reason. These are people who have baptized themselves in the cleansing waters of grievance, and who now feel blessed to carry out any measures that soothe their own fears—a category broad enough to include all of history’s crimes against humanity. This monstrous spirit of irrational anger cannot be eradicated overnight. But, at the very least, we could stop treating it as something other than fear, channeled into hate, weaponized for self-justification.
The South African journalist Rian Malan wrote frequently about the warped psychology of apartheid, which led generations of whites in his country to feel equanimity about perpetrating the cruelest atrocities. In his book “My Traitor’s Heart,” though, he speaks to one white farmer in the 1980s in Msinga, on the border of Zulu land, who took a more unadorned view of things than his neighbors.
“I like blacks,” said the farmer—who nonetheless had taken their land by force, fenced it off, and would happily shoot any desperate black people who let their cattle graze on his side of the fence. “I’m the fastest gun, and while that lasts I’ll survive here. The guy with the bigger stick runs things.”
I find this apartheid-era white South African’s words to be preferable to those of JD Vance. Though they match the immoral brutality of today’s Republican Party, they lack the accompanying artifice of personal grievance that America has erected to make itself believe that it is somehow more righteous, while doing, in essence, the same thing.
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Related reading: Onward, Christian Soldiers—To War!; It’s Interesting How the Past Can Make You Think About the Present; The Patriotism Trap; A Television Show Called the USA.
One good thing you can do today: Sign the pledge to support Starbucks workers, who have been unionizing for four years but have not yet won a contract from their Scrooge-like management. For a longer discussion of why the labor movement is our best path out of this fascist trap we find ourselves in, check out my book “The Hammer,” which you can order from an independent bookstore. To organize your own workplace, contact EWOC. To look good while doing so, buy a fresh How Things Work t-shirt.
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So, the price of making fat white men feel special is the destruction of the human future? Bargain! We must help these poor snowflakes! Sacrifice everything for them—or you’re a hater!
The idea that the decline of people willing to die for their country is a bad thing is just bonkers on its face.