Geenstijl

Welja

Het kan snel gaan in een mensenleven, maar het staat iedereen natuurlijk vrij zich te bedenken. Republikein J.D. Vance - jong, baardje, erudiet - omschreef zichzelf in 2016 als 'Never Trumper', bekritiseerde hem in diverse media, en sprak in een dm naar een vriend zijn zorg uit dat The Donald zich zou ontpoppen tot een Amerikaanse variant van Adolf Hitler.

Sindsdien maakte hij een imposante draai naar het Trumpisme, werd senator en groeide uit tot vertrouweling van de voormalig president. 

Over die bekering zei de dertiger onlangs in de New York Times:

"I think most of us who are generally socially aware have a voice in our head that says: “You shouldn’t say this; you should try to say that. Maybe you believe this, but you should try to put it a little bit more diplomatically.” And in 2020 that voice had become absolutely tyrannical. There was nothing you were allowed to say. Offending someone was an act of violence. I think a lot of us just said: “We’re done with this. We’re not playing this game, and we refuse to be policed in what we think and what we say.”

Then you recognized that a lot of the pushback to Trump was that kind of social pressure. “You like Donald Trump? But he said these things, and he said that thing.” I saw this in my book tour in 2016. If you even acknowledged that there were reasonable things that Donald Trump was saying, there was this complete overreaction. And I think that some of us, me included, started to ask ourselves — there’s a voice in your head that tells you what you’re allowed to say and who you’re allowed to vote for. It was clearly deranged in 2020. Well, maybe it was deranged in 2016, too?"

En: 

"But just personally, I like him. At one point during my election, some negative story had come out, and I get a phone call out of the blue. “Hey, just wanted to let you know you’re doing a good job. You always hear from the most hateful voices, but there’s a lot of love out there. Don’t forget there’s a lot of love out there. Just stay with it.” He’s much more complex than the media gives him credit for. People think that this guy is motivated entirely by personal grievance and by power, and that he just wants to become president so that he can destroy American democracy. That’s not at all who he is."

En, over geopolitiek: 

"The term “realist” gets thrown around a lot, and I’d say there are three pillars to realism in the 21st century: The first is that moralisms about “This country is good,” “This country is bad” are largely useless, and we should be dealing with other countries based on whether they’re good or bad for America’s interests. That doesn’t mean you have a complete moral blind spot, but it means that you have to be honest about the countries that you’re dealing with, and there’s a complete failure to do that with most of our foreign policy establishment in this country.

No. 2 is the most important lesson of World War II, that we seem to have forgotten: that military power is downstream of industrial power. We are still, right now, the world’s military superpower, largely because of our industrial might from the ’80s and ’90s. But China is a more powerful country industrially than we are, which means they will have a more powerful military in 20 years.

And No. 3 is acknowledging that we’re in a multipolar world, and we need allies to step up in big ways so that we can focus on East Asia, which is where our most significant competitor is for the next 20 or 30 years."