DO J.D. VANCE'S BIGGEST ADMIRERS EVEN CARE IF HE'S "INAUTHENTIC"?

Oh, dear -- we're talking about "authenticity" again. In The New York Times, Thomas Edsall writes:

Whenever Vice President JD Vance takes the microphone, he has to decide which combination of his multiple identities to select for the specific audience before him, a choice he sometimes seems to find bewildering.

The range of Vance’s mix-and-match choices includes hillbilly, intellectual, Trump successor, raging MAGA loyalist and high-tech investor, not to mention veteran threatening other countries and veteran no-long-wars guy....

Vance’s problem is his failure to find comfort in any combination of identities so that he comes across as inauthentic, cross-pressured, forced — even counterfeit.

As regular readers of this blog know, I don't believe in political "authenticity" -- or, to be more precise, I don't believe that the word is used in politics in a way that has anything to do with realness or fakeness. When we say a politician is "authentic," we mean the politician (usually a man) is personable. Donald Trump is the biggest liar on the planet, but we call him "authentic." We usually use the word "inauthentic" in politics in reference to politicians like Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton. They're not phony at all. They're just awkward. For the most part, they are who they seem to be -- they say what they mean, they just don't say it personably.

Vance has that problem, but I agree that he's also truly inauthentic, in the sense that he'll change his opinions to suit the prevailing trends. But I think there's an aspect of his personality that's utterly genuine, even though one of Edsall's sources -- Harvard's Randall Enos -- disagrees:

Part of Trump’s appeal is that, despite his ideological incoherence, you believe his commitment to the politics of resentment is genuine because he is personally motivated by resentment: feeling that he was disrespected by the establishment is his casus belli. In the end, that seems to be the only consistent feature of his governing style.

Vance lacks this characteristic; rather, he appears to have adopted resentment politics because it serves him politically.

Really? If there's any Vance characteristic that seems utterly genuine, it's resentment. He just seems like a deeply resentful guy. The object of his resentments may change, but the anger remains. (“Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion,” he wrote in Hillbilly Elegy.)

Republican voters leap from resentment to resentment -- whatever and whoever the right-wing propaganda machine tells them to hate, they'll hate. So I'm not sure they care about the specifics of Vance's resentments, as long as the resentments don't directly contradict their own. (They'll forgive Vance for formerly being a Trump critic just the way they'll forgive Trump for inviting the Clintons to his third wedding.)

Notably, it's only Republicans who like Vance:

Civiqs amassed 53,032 voter comments on Vance’s favorability/unfavorability ratings over the past two years and found that an overwhelming majority of Vance’s support is concentrated among Republicans, 86 percent favorable, 7 percent unfavorable, while independents were 33 percent favorable, 59 percent unfavorable, and Democrats 3 percent favorable, 95 percent unfavorable.

Karrin Vasby Anderson, a professor of communication studies at Colorado State University, has a theory about the one specific group Vance appeals to most:

There is, according to Anderson, only one constituency firmly in Vance’s corner: “It’s men who spend time in the so-called manosphere, which is where Vance cultivated his political support. He knows how to talk with that demographic on their own terms, so they are more likely to identify with him.”

That's plausible. Why would men in the manosphere care about authenticity? Much of the propaganda of the manosphere is about the importance of turning yourself into a fake, artificial, "maxxed" version of yourself. Change your name, like Myron Gaines (born Amrou Fudl). Get buff. Change your facial features -- with a hammer if necessary, like Clavicular. Andrew Tate went from atheist to Christian to Muslim over a period of four years. People in the manosphere believe they need to be phony versions of themselves in order to make money and get sex. (Let's face it, these are their only goals.)

So if Vance is inauthentic, they don't care, as long as he's resentmentmaxxed.