Although an American politician will have plenty of occasions to denounce racism, it's rare that said politician would be put in a position to denounce racism toward Indians, specifically. Rarer still is the scenario in which such a politician has an Indian wife and kids himself.
Vice President JD Vance found himself in those narrow circumstances earlier this month. Marko Elez, a 25-year-old enlistee at Elon Musk's center for bussin' constitutional violations, had been linked to a Twitter account that posted things like "Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool," and "Normalize Indian hate." Straightforwardly vile stuff, although I must note that if Elez really did attend Rutgers and major in computer science, he wasn't trying all that hard to avoid us.
The rich detail here is how our charmless, faintly yassified vice president responded. At some point in the not-so-distant past, Vance would have been allowed to openly express that it's bad to normalize Indian hate. He used to be the sort of Republican who thought Donald Trump was an idiot, and who once wondered to an acquaintance whether Trump was a "cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad" or "America's Hitler." Vance fell even then into a recognizable mold. He was a striver from an elite law school, an ideologically malleable technocrat interested in power as an absolute value and not all that picky about its specific political valences. He was eager to use the machinery of finance and electoral politics to launch himself wherever he felt destined to go.
For someone like Vance, a dutiful homework doer, everything is a matter of positioning and strategy. Somewhere along the way, he correctly identified that he wouldn't have much of a future as a Republican who stuck to views like "It's bad to hate Indian people," so he course-corrected. Now Vance just says whatever he thinks will appease his boss and the MAGA plebes, through teeth that aren't even gritted all that hard.
Look at the corner that Vance has painted himself into, and you'll learn something. He might be America's least convincing populist, but he has studied the basic tenets and knows the rules; he knows enough, certainly, never to promise anything that makes anyone's life better, and to stick to a suite of prissy culture-war gripes. (As I write this, Vance is in Munich at a European security conference, complaining about being "scolded" by Greta Thunberg.) While Trump is a prodigious poster who farts out thoughts about whatever he last saw on linear TV, Vance simmers perpetually in a stew of online resentments that flavors his own artless, focus-grouped messages. When I think about the fact that we have a vice president who finds meaning in the phrase "Bronze Age Pervert" and tweets about IQ, I get so embarrassed that I feel a head rush. Clearly Vance is a moral vacancy, but on top of everything else, his act is so aesthetically and tonally repulsive. All of it, always, is off-the-rack—a reflection of a tiresome online-right scene where journalists are demons, cancellation is an urgent issue, and hating Indians is somewhat en vogue, peaking in an intra-MAGA war over H-1B visas. It is the stuff of "dissident" groupchats, but also the worst Silicon Valley dinner parties, whose aggrieved and dull hosts are Vance's patrons. To satisfy his base, Vance has to appear, if not outright enthusiastic about the notion of deporting people like his in-laws, at least not stridently opposed to it.
The actual posts from Vance are humiliating enough that they're worth looking at a whole week later. First, Elon Musk opened a poll on whether his racist federal employee should be brought back; in ordinary times that alone would be a subject of its own dissertation, but we move on. Then Vance chimed in:
Let's set aside the notion that Elez, 25, is both a "kid" and qualified to access the Treasury Department’s central-payments system. Shouldn't he at least have to disavow views that he'd expressed as far back as ... July of last year? California Rep. Ro Khanna asked, reasonably, if Vance would have Elez apologize before taking the job again, "just for the sake of both our kids."
Vance evinces much more convincing rage toward cancel culture than he did toward racists who would dehumanize his own children. After his Twitter poll, Musk claimed he would rehire Elez, who had resigned. The vice president could have said nothing, but he made sure to position himself in a way that would secure his social standing with Musk, who combines a raver's blood chemistry with a 4-year-old's emotional development, and also with Trump, a man whose loyalties last about as long as his commitment to finishing a given sentence. The last time an obsequious vice president effortfully changed his shtick to fit in with Trump, he heard his name chanted by rioters who wanted to hang him; clearly this fealty stuff pays off.
Obviously, Vance isn't alone in selling out his own family. Here he follows in the proud tradition of Sen. Ted Cruz, who watched Donald Trump suggest that his wife was ugly and that his father was involved with the JFK assassination, and wound up stumping for him anyway. This is just how it works with Trump; there isn't really any relationship to have with him that doesn't involve humiliation on one end or another. He hates anyone who inconveniences him, but Trump also disdains his supplicants in a different way, precisely because of how slavishly they suck up to him. There's no good deal to make here, and no way to engage with Trump without some version of degradation. Even Travis Kelce, who doesn't need Trump at all, couldn't find it in him to stand up to the man who posted "I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT" last September on Truth Social. This isn't a reflection of any political calculation or acumen, it is just how and what Trump is. Vance surely knew this was part of the deal, too. There is no shit these guys won't eat, but some will chow down more vigorously than others.
Live your life a certain way, and 40 years in, you might wake up one day and realize that you cannot plainly oppose statements in a "Normalize [ethnic minority] hate" construction. You might find that the decisions you've made have foreclosed that opposition even when such a statement is aimed at your nuclear family. To borrow a phrase that Vance oddly attributed to Cormac McCarthy himself, and not the monster McCarthy had created: "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" All this work to stay on the good side of a guy who doesn't care about your aspirations and cycles through expendable sycophants constantly. Is there any upside to degrading yourself this way? Just a few days later, Donald Trump was asked in a Fox News interview if he saw Vance as his successor. The president deflected and rambled, of course, but his first reaction was honest: "No."
