VANCE ATTACKED WALZ'S CHARACTER BECAUSE HATING PEOPLE IS THE CORE PRINCIPLE OF MODERN AMERICAN CONSERVATISM

In a piece about J.D. Vance's thin skin, David Frum puzzles over one strategic choice Vance and the Donald Trump campaign made:

Immediately upon [Kamala] Harris’s selection of [Tim] Walz as her running mate, Vance attacked Walz over his military record. Walz had served in one rank, but retired at a lower rank because he had not completed all of the requirements to retain the rank permanently. Walz had on one occasion claimed that he had carried weapons “in war,” when he should have said “weapons of war.” Vance tried to amplify the discrepancy and the misstatement, but to little effect. When this line of attack fizzled, Vance switched to another: accusing Walz of deception because he had said that he and his wife had conceived a child by in vitro fertilization. In fact, they had used a different method of fertility treatment, intrauterine conception....

The point of the anti-Walz material was to depict the governor as a phony. But why pick that angle? Walz is a super-liberal governor of a state that was wracked by civil unrest in the upheavals of 2020. Surely that offers a more promising approach? Yet Vance chose otherwise. Why?

If Republicans wanted to attack Walz primarily on policy, they would have focused on depicting him as a "super-liberal governor." But they don't want to attack him primarily on policy.

Frum concludes that the accusation is a confession:

If Vance opted instead for the “He’s a phony” attack, it’s because Vance himself believes that the “phony” charge is the most powerful one he can fling. And why does Vance think that? Because he himself is such an extreme phony.

It's possible that Vance is projecting his own disgust with himself onto Walz -- as Frum writes, "Vance has changed his identity, beliefs, religion, personal history, even his name." But that's not the reason Vance went straight at Walz's character.

Vance made (failed) character attacks because the core principle of conservatism in America is that Democrats are bad people. Even when Democrats are attacked on policy -- say, immigration -- it's not because they're misguided, in Republicans' view. It's because they want to destroy America. Democrats are horrible people who want to do harm for the sheer pleasure of doing harm.

So immigrants aren't merely lazy, shiftless parasites, which is how bigots have generally characterized disfavored groups -- they're also subhumans who eat decent people's pets.

And Kamala Harris isn't just wrong on policy, according to Trump:

Trump in Wisconsin calls Harris "mentally disabled": "Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.bsky.social) September 28, 2024 at 4:07 PM

A colleague of Frum's at The Atlantic, Peter Wehner, writes:

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY today isn’t incidentally grotesque; like the man who leads it, Donald Trump, it is grotesque at its core. It is the Island of Misfit Toys, though in this case there’s a maliciousness to the misfits, starting with Trump, that makes them uniquely dangerous to the republic.

"Maliciousness" is the right word. If you disagree with Republicans, they denounce you as an evil person, even if you're a school shooting survivor. Wehner offers a greatest-hits compilation of remarks made by the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, Mark Robinson:

Regarding the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, in 2011, Robinson wrote, “Get that fucking commie bastard off the National Mall!” Robinson also has referred to the slain civil-rights champion as “worse than a maggot,” a “ho fucking, phony,” and a “huckster.” ... He referred to Michelle Obama as a man and Hillary Clinton as a “heifer.” He compared Nancy Pelosi to Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and Castro and mocked the near-fatal assault on her husband, Paul Pelosi....

He has used demeaning language against Jews and gay people. He has cruelly mocked school-shooting survivors (“media prosti-tots”).

Not enough dehumanization? Wehner has more:

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has blamed wildfires on a Jewish space laser, promoted a conspiracy alleging that some Democratic Party leaders were running a human-trafficking and pedophilia ring, and agreed with commenters who suggested that the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Florida, was a “massive false flag.” Another House Republican, Paul Gosar, has ... posted an animated video depicting him slashing the throat of a Democratic congresswoman and attacking President Biden.

Because, obviously, the congresswoman (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and President Biden are evil and deserve it.

And there's Vance, of course.

In 2021, he said that the United States was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs, and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

According to Vance, the childless cat ladies aren't just miserable. Stopping there might have made Vance's fellow conservatives feel sorry for the childless cat ladies. But no -- "they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too." And because they're Democrats, and therefore supervillains, they have the power "to make the rest of the country miserable." Destroy them!

This is why I'm so angry at Nicholas Kristof for saying that liberals should stop demeaning Trump voters, as if it's a one-way street. Demonization of Democrats is the core principle of the Republican Party. Coexistence is impossible. We are too depraved to be allowed to live our lives. We must be neutralized. By contrast, we just want to win a few elections and be allowed to live in a pluralist country. We loathe Trump, but the leaders of our party would not have dehumanized, say, Nikki Haley. That's the difference.