The two major political parties and the media will spend the remaining three months of the election campaign making it sound as if Trump vs. Harris presents the public with a stark choice. The “felon” vs. the dirty “cop,” they may say, or the mean boss vs. the living embodiment of “our [primary-disregarding] democracy.” The two presidential candidates are roughly the same, though, and Trump’s choice of JD Vance as running mate underscores that fact, despite superficial appearances.
It’d be bad enough if Vance really were the pastoral, back-to-the-land anti-capitalist as which he poses, but as discussed in this recent interview by comedian Jimmy Dore of political journalist Whitney Webb, Vance is much more like a typical Bush-era creature from the inhuman, underexamined area of the political Venn diagram where the financial bigwigs and the intelligence sector snoops intersect, near which dwell the likes of Richard Perle and Oliver North, though Vance is masquerading as a peace-loving paleocon for the moment. “If you’re going to punch the Iranians, you punch them hard,” Vance nonetheless told Fox News, who likely need no convincing.
The Dore/Webb interview also notes that it was surveillance mogul Peter Thiel who brought together Vance and Trump. Thiel may sometimes fund the political equivalent of prairiecore-loving medieval recreationists with a pet mouse, but he made that money in large part by doing things like selling security devices directly to intelligence agencies. The Palantir that should worry Vance critics is the panopticon tech company Thiel started by that name, not the magic crystal ball in the Tolkien novels that the left is suddenly and hypocritically alarmed to learn Vance likes. It’s not the Bilbo baggage that should scare them.
In the unlikely event that Vance turns the Midwest into the Shire, though, it’ll likely have Ents commoditized by the big banks as “natural assets”—and soon enough drones patrolling Syria instead of eagles escaping Mordor.
Trump himself is hardly just a naïve rustic populist. He’s now reportedly musing about making the defense secretary for his potential second term the private military contractor Erik Prince, who has proposed among other things deliberately flooding Gaza as a means of killing anyone hidden in tunnels there and thus ending the conflict. That’s efficient in a scary way, sort of like the idea a particularly right-wing acquaintance of mine once toyed with for enforcing the southern border of the U.S. with landmines. Government can be smaller or outsourced and still be vicious.
But then, under the Republicans, government probably wouldn’t even be smaller. Last week’s Republican National Convention was largely about ditching ideas like the free market and individualism in favor of nationalism and solidarity (not to mention loyalty to the leader). The young and idealistic, people after my own heart, may yet discern some fading embers of libertarian thinking in the Republican Party, but lest they get optimistic, they should recall that even the Reagan-era GOP of my childhood, which far more explicitly opposed Big Government and vowed to promote free enterprise, failed to shrink domestic spending (though it was more restrained than the Democrats on that front) and sent military spending through the roof.
This year’s RNC platform contained the usual vague talk about restoring our supposedly decayed and neglected military, talk that usually translates into spending about a trillion dollars a year and likely still will.
The Trump-era platform also explicitly promises for the first time that there will be no cuts whatsoever in Social Security or Medicare. Maintaining the two biggest socialist boondoggles in America is the easy and cowardly way to reassure the elderly, who are relatively prone to vote. Part of Vance’s job will no doubt be to use language about fealty to our beloved elders to distract you with from the red ink those two programs will continue to add to the federal government’s already $34 trillion debt.
Kamala, as they say, is a cop, and as president would only increase the kinds of spending Vance countenances and add some punitive jail time for good measure. Two authoritarian socialist parties we don’t need. Two authoritarian socialist parties is what we’ve got, and each side just gussies up the disaster in a different language. At least the Democrats sound like the same watered-down communists they’ve been for about a century now. By contrast, the spectacle of Republicans suddenly campaigning on behalf of the Forgotten Worker—as if Wall Street is alien and hideous to them—is particularly absurd.
If you want truly “paleo” values implemented, there might be more to learn from the work of a scholar who just died: James C. Scott, an anarchist who wrote several influential books about humanity’s earliest states and found with relief that our ancestors sometimes had no government at all yet had social order nonetheless and lived in relative peace. Let’s spend more time contemplating that and less time putting another b.s. faux-Sunday school veneer on the usual Big Government/Big Business gangsterism of modernity.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey
