Political Reporter quotes the last five paragraphs of this Editorial.
Headline: In his immoral absolutism, JD Vance outflanks even Donald Trump
Sub-headline: Editorial: On everything from abortion rights to the future of Ukraine, the Republicans’ pick for vice-president could prove even more fundamentalist and isolationist than his boss
Tuesday 16 July 2024
Editor: J.D. Vance upsets the political/moral equilibrium of The Independent, yet this polemic seems to exercise a kind of political restraint, though no without it’s moments of political paranoia.
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Long before that, though, America would be lumbered with a slavishly loyal yes-man of a vice-president, with no more interest in building consensus and protecting the constitution than his boss. The most immediate danger is Mr Vance’s almost sadistic attitude to any woman seeking an abortion, again outflanking even Mr Trump in his immoral absolutism.
So far as the wider world is concerned, Mr Vance seems even more fundamentalist and isolationist than Mr Trump. Carelessly, or possibly not, he told the National Conservatism Conference last week that Britain is perhaps now the world’s first truly Islamist nation with nuclear weapons, “after Labour took over”.
More dangerously, Mr Vance is openly prepared to reward Vladimir Putin for his war of aggression against Ukraine, with huge tracts of this sovereign state to be ceded to Russia or some puppet statelets of the Kremlin. This, presumably, would be after Mr Trump had made the deal with Vladimir Putin, and presented it as a fait accompli to Volodymyr Zelensky. The echoes of the Munich Agreement of 1938 are as clear as they are chilling.
The only possible saving grace in the case of Mr Vance is that the opinions he holds at any given time seem to be entirely conditional on his own self-interest. After all, the man who he now claims to venerate he once derided as “America’s Hitler”: “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this, I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.” It is possible that pressure of events, changed circumstances or, most likely, self-interest would cause Mr Vance to change his mind once more. But there are no guarantees.
God does, indeed, want better for America than what Mr Vance and Mr Trump seem set to be offering this November. With the current disarray in the Democratic Party, however, God and mankind will be disappointed once again, and the most sinister vice-president in American history, carrying a metaphorical bucket of warm bile, looks set to be sworn in next January.
Compare the above, with this Financial Times essay written by Timothy Snyder.
Opinion US politics & policy
Headline: The Republican blueprint for power contains the seeds of its own demise
Sub-headline: It is not too late to stop the descent of the American political order into tyranny, oligarchy or anarchy
https://www.ft.com/content/a7eea0af-bf9f-4635-812b-271c30620e72
This week, Republicans reminded us of the alternatives to republics, hosting a convention that showed how the American one could be brought down. They summoned up three variants of collapse: tyranny, oligarchy and anarchy.
A tyrant emerges through a system that he breaks. Long before the assassination attempt on him last weekend, Donald Trump had transformed the Republican party into a cult of personality. As a convicted criminal running for office, he undoes the expectation of any rule of law. He has challenged the principle of succession in the US by encouraging the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He claims to be winner of all elections, regardless of the vote, and that he should be allowed to remain president indefinitely. His vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance, endorses his defiance of vote counts, past and present. Trump promises mass deportations, detention camps and military tribunals, actions that would change the American regime type.
Yet the tyrant might be less important than the oligarchs behind him. Whereas Trump can slip through the gaps of the legal system, his backers waltz through the cellophane barrier between money and politics. The right metric for predicting Trump’s vice-presidential pick was simple: what do these supporters want?
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Political Reporter
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