Lately, I have been listening to the Revisionist History podcast, which has a great series on the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, or ‘Hitler’s Olympics’. As part of their discussion of how the US agreed to participate in the Olympics of such an obviously evil regime, they mentioned an essay published during the war, which I think explains a lot about JD Vance.
The essay, “Who Goes Nazi?”, was published by the brilliant American journalist Dorothy Thompson in 1940. Thompson had interviewed Hitler himself in the early 1930’s and immediately saw through his bluster, describing him as “ill poised and insecure…the very prototype of the little man.” This got her expelled from Germany.
In the essay, she describes a ‘party game’ where one could look around the room and try to determine what type of person would or would not turn to fascism under the right circumstances. One of her archetypes, called ‘Mr. C’, immediately reminded me of JD Vance. Thompson’s full description follows:
“The saturnine man over there talking with a lovely French emigree is already a Nazi. Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner.
He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him—he despises, for instance, Mr. B (another archetype described in the essay as a man who has “risen beyond his abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer “) —because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly anti-(minority) because the social insecurity of the (minorities) reminds him of his own psychological insecurity.
Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains. Already some of them are talking his language—though they have never met him.
There he sits: he talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is courteous. He commands a distant and cold respect. But he is a very dangerous man. Were he primitive and brutal he would be a criminal—a murderer. But he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just just like him—intellectual and ruthless.”
