JD Vance’s ‘Purpose’

Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕

A clip made the rounds this week in which chief weirdo JD Vance said the “purpose” of post-menopausal women was to help raise children. This sort of thing falls outside the normal discourse. Many find it uncomfortable or unusual to talk about the ultimate purpose of wide swathes of society. What does it even mean when someone talks about someone else’s purpose? It smacks of Simon Birch.

What makes it “weird” is that alienating feeling you get when he starts talking as if he has special knowledge about other people’s purpose in life. But I think there’s something important and significant about this conversation: It speaks to a divide in how many conservatives interpret and understand the world. There was a time when the prevailing understanding of natural phenomena was teleological, which is a fancy philosophical way of saying that everything in the natural world was imbued with a specific purpose (Simon Birch was put on earth to save other kids from drowning), and in their view, this purpose was handed down from God. Over the course of the 17th and 18th Centuries, some of Western society’s major thinkers rejected this idea. Rain didn’t fall simply because flowers needed rain, rain fell because of a series of observable and measurable events. 

Anyway, we don’t need to get too in the weeds here. But, long story short, this kind of thinking largely died out as people like Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton and John Locke introduced new ways to understand and interpret the world. But there’s a kind of rhetorical trick conservatives play sometimes where they attribute intelligent design to evolutionary chance and Vance seems to be doing that here. For example, it would be perfectly normal in an anthropology course to hear a professor say something like, “Communities with post-menopausal women may have had an evolutionary advantage over those without, which over the course of time selected humans who experienced menopause favorably in evolutionary terms.” This, however, is not remotely the same as saying child care is the purpose of post-menopausal women. It just says that there was a time where this may have been beneficial. It doesn’t say, for example, that forever and always, only grandmothers can help with childcare, as opposed to, oh … I don’t know, government-funded programs. Or dads. Or grandfathers. Or friends. Or literally any other arrangement you can think of.

We don’t legislate or organize society based on nature alone. Yet, this appeal to Natural Law rears its ugly head a lot in the religious segments of the right. It’s why same-sex marriage was bad. It’s why trans people are bad. It’s why IVF is bad. If you have a worldview that assumes everything in the natural world was created with a specific purpose, the logical next step is to lament anyone and anything that violates that purpose. It is a tool for control.

This gets abstract real fast and can devolve into sophomoric “What’s the meaning of life” stuff. But as a general rule, since we don’t know the ultimate purpose of life on earth, it strikes me as a good idea to break down barriers and seek to expand rights and expand autonomy and expand scope of what each individual is capable of rather than put them in specific boxes limiting their potential. What if, and this maybe is nuts, we organize society such that people can decide their own purpose? Maybe we even call it, the pursuit of happiness?

— Joe Ragazzo

Here’s what else TPM has on tap this weekend:

• Hunter Walker tells us more about his conversation with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) this week.
• Josh Kovensky unpacks right-wingers’ new model for reversing, what they believe to be, the great American decay.
• Khaya Himmelman reports on Missouri Republicans’ efforts to preemptively help Donald Trump’s election denialism cause.
• Emine Yücel weighs in on why Republicans’ response to being labeled “weird” has been weird in and of itself.

Let’s dig in.

— Nicole Lafond

The 2016 Primary Is Finally Over

For nearly a decade, the Democratic Party was defined by the bitter rift that emerged when Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) went up against each other in the 2016 presidential primary. While Sanders ultimately backed Clinton and campaigned for her, their at-times-bitter faceoff led to years of fallout including a slew of congressional and local races that fueled the notion there was a conflict raging between progressives and the Democratic Party establishment.

In his own primary against Sanders, President Joe Biden explicitly ran as a moderate alternative to the Vermont senator’s progressivism. However, after winning the 2020 race, Biden worked to heal the split in the Democratic Party. That effort included the formation of “unity” policy task forces led by the Biden campaign and Sanders, which laid the foundation for a spate of progressive legislation from the White House.

Biden laid the groundwork for a bridge across the Democratic divide and his exit from this year’s presidential race has made clear the party has entered a new era. Since Biden passed her the baton, Vice President Kamala Harris has built a campaign that is not defining itself in relation to the factionalism of 2016.

While Harris has not fully embraced the progressive agenda, she is hardly running away from it. When Harris delivered her first major policy speech on Friday, she declared, “building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.” Harris also debuted what she described as “one element” of a plan to do that, which was a suite of pledges focused on cutting the cost of living. That included a promised federal ban on price gouging, a commitment to build three million units of new affordable housing, and restoration of the earned income tax credit and child tax credit.

Harris’ focus on the middle class and her pledges to take on corporations who have spiked food and drug prices sounded quite in line with the Sanders wing of the party. Ahead of her speech, Sanders repeatedly praised her, including in an interview with TPM where he flatly described her as a “progressive.”

The moment certainly feels like a new era in a Democratic Party that has finally exorcised the lingering demons of the bitter 2016 feuding. When this reporter made that point on social media, there were a few angry comments and tiffs in the mentions. However, at this point those pockets of fighting feel like anomalies and holdouts waging their own personal struggles.

Indeed, in her policy speech Harris seemed to acknowledge the turning point.

“Now is the time to chart a new way forward,” she said.

— Hunter Walker

Late Soviet America

Right-wingers seeking a model for what they see as irreversible American decay have struck on a new idea: the Soviet Union.

In a certain segment of the new right, the idea that the current United States deeply resembles the late Soviet Union – with the attending predictions you can make about where we’ll end up – has become extremely fashionable. John Eastman, currently indicted in two states and facing removal of his law license over his efforts to help Donald Trump stay in power after losing the 2020 election, likened his travails to Soviet prosecutions in a speech at the National Conservatism conference last month. Charles Haywood, a former shampoo manufacturer influential in some segments of the new right, makes the comparison a mainstay of his writing.

But it was historian Niall Ferguson who set off a fuller-fledged debate around the comparison in June, using his debut column in the Free Press to argue that it’s an apt way of capturing America’s current decay and supposed trajectory. Somewhat to his credit, Ferguson admits the “world of difference between the dysfunctional planned economy that Stalin built and bequeathed his heirs” and our world. But he points to other similarities, some of which others on the left have remarked upon: senescent leaders, cratering confidence in institutions. He also makes other points, more exclusive to the right: high debt levels, widespread drug abuse, and DEI all point to a governing ideology that’s exhausted itself. Ferguson’s column led to responses elsewhere on the right, sometimes pushing back and sometimes agreeing.

The irony here in my mind is that the Soviet collapse turned Russia into a version of at least what some GOPers seem to want to enact via policy: an extreme example of plutocracy sitting atop a Wild West market, eventually taken over by an autocrat with strict Christian pretensions. Russians still call this interregnum the “wild nineties,” a period where there was a lot of violence and sleaze but also a lot of money to be made.

I really don’t think the situation in the United States is anywhere near as existential as it was in the late Soviet Union. But what the comparison misses is interesting: a belief that democracy has the power to address all of the problems they describe, and to restore and regenerate the country. What’s telling is that the prospect of mass elections fixing what they see as problems doesn’t seem to cross their minds.

— Josh Kovensky

More Election Denial Fodder In Missouri

In yet another, blatant effort to perpetuate the myth of non-citizens voting in elections, Republican lawmakers in Missouri are moving ahead with putting a question on the ballot asking for the approval of a state constitutional amendment that would ban noncitizen voting in the state – a practice that is already outlawed. 

Earlier this week, a Cole County judge upheld the ballot summary language for the proposed constitutional amendment, which states that “only citizens of the United States over the age of 18 who are residents of Missouri and of the political subdivision in which they offer to vote are entitled to vote at all elections.” 

The court ruled on August 12 that the summary language, which was written by GOP Secretary of State Jay Aschcroft, is “fair and sufficient.” The proposed amendment is supposed to appear on the November 5 ballot. 

The ruling comes in response to a legal challenge from two Missouri voters against Aschcroft and other Republican state lawmakers, who argued that the ballot language summary is misleading because it “leads voters to believe that the law is being changed to prohibit non-citizens from voting, when in fact, the law in Missouri has always been (and still is) that non-citizens cannot vote in Missouri elections.”

This latest effort in Missouri comes against the backdrop of a larger Republican initiative to create election denial fodder around the same false myth of non citizens voting in case Donald Trump loses in November. Trump and his allies have been claiming for months that undocumented immigrants are coming across the U.S.-Mexico border en masse to vote for Democrats in the upcoming presidential election. It’s manufactured hysteria that Trump and MAGA allies will likely point to as a datapoint for their voter fraud lies if the former president loses in the fall. 

It is already illegal for non citizens to vote in federal elections and there is no evidence to suggest that this is an issue. 

In May, Republican members of Congress promoted a redundant piece of legislation known as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which is a bill that would make it illegal for non citizens to vote in federal elections. And, as reported by Voting Rights Lab, since 2020, nine states have enacted legislation to prevent non citizens from voting.

Eliza Sweren-Becker, senior counsel in the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, previously told TPM that the continued perpetuation of this false narrative can be understood as “yet another misrepresentation and falsehood about the integrity of elections that appears intended to spread mistrust in our election systems.”

— Khaya Himmelman

Words Of Wisdom

“I think I’m entitled to personal attacks. I don’t have a lot of respect for her. I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence … She certainly attacks me personally. She actually called me weird.”

That’s former President Donald Trump during his Thursday afternoon press conference, answering a question about if he agrees with his allies who have been urging him to stop launching personal attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris.

It’s clear the former president is hurt because the candidate he is running against called him “weird” — and he’s lashing out, for that and other perceived Harris wrongdoings. 

It wasn’t just Harris who called him “weird.” VP candidate Tim Walz also called Republicans “weird” in a recent interview, a moment that went viral ahead of him getting picked as Harris’ running mate.

Amid everything else happening around him, who’d think that the adjective “weird” would be what’s getting to Trump. And it’s clearly upsetting other Republicans too. You can see it in their various flailing attempts to counter the insult.

Last week during a rally in Montana, Trump tried to defend himself and his running partner Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) against being labeled as weird by saying, “No, we’re not weird. We’re very solid people.” (Not the burn he thought it was.)

When asked about it separately, Vance called it “fundamentally school yard bully stuff” during a CNN interview and then continued to say “it’s a little bit of projection.” So does that make him the “school yard bully”? Important follow up question here.

And in a very bizarre essay, titled “​​America the Weird,” Trump ally Vivek Ramaswamy tried to claim being weird is cool while also maintaining that calling a politician weird is “anti-American.”

The best thing you’ve got can’t be calling your enemy “weird” back.

— Emine Yücel