JD Vance’s Negative Charisma, and How Fascism Accelerates

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Hi! How’s everyone? I hope you’re all enjoying the Olympics. Welcome back old friends, hello new readers, and a Big Thanks to everyone who’s joined so far.

Today we’re going to discuss…

The Negative Charisma of JD Vance

It’s been a breakneck few weeks in politics. Trump, Biden, Kamala. And by now, a weird and funny thing’s begun to happen. Trump chose JD Vance as his VP pick. And somehow, it turned out to be a great stroke of fortune for a newly ascendant Kamala, the Democrats, and democracy itself.

Because Vance has this rarest of qualities, seldom seen, in public life. Negative charisma. A quality that’s so rare and singular that we don’t even have a word for it, which points to how funny and strange it really is. He opens his mouth, and people are just jaw-droopingly creeped out.

And then he adds fuel to the weird inside out fire of negative charisma, doubling down on comments about “cat ladies.” We’re going to discuss what it all means in just a second, because it does have a kind of deep meaning, in the evolution of fascism, and democratic collapse, make no mistake. But first, we’re going to discuss the…human end.

How many celebrities do you see, after all, with negative charisma? Not just no charisma, but a sort of black hole that sucks all the energy from the room? Funny. 

When I pointed this out to my Twitter followers, for example, they created a hashtag, #negativecharisma. Because it’s funny when you think about it. After all, Vance has had all of America’s major institutions going to bat for him, and helping try to create for him a mythology. They practically anointed him. Big Publishing has no shortage of books to publish, and yet it chose Vance’s memoir. Then Hollywood turned it into a blockbuster budget movie, replete with A-list stars. Meanwhile, mainstream media did its usual hagiographic thing with him. 

The idea was manifold. He was a rebel, a genius, an intellectual, a man of the people, authentic, noble, wise, a kind of long-suffering almost Socratic figure in the wilderness of American politics, or maybe something like a JFK of the right.

And then America met JD Vance.

Hilarity ensued, because it turned out, he was none of the above. He was just something like a…creep. The weirdo at work, who’s always making off comments. The angry dad at the soccer park. The guy at the lonely end of the bar, muttering into his beer. Things got very weird, very fast, because Vance kept on making them weirder and weirder.

Awkward. Uncomfortable. Tense. 

Positive and Negative Charisma, Or, Kamala vs Vance

That’s negative charisma. My Twitter followers, bemused, began to invent new words for this concept. Creepisma. Zirr, or the opposite “rizz,” which if you don’t know, is a sort of trendy summation of charisma.

So what does this all mean? Obviously, it’s a huge boon to Kamala, who, it turns out, has a great deal of actual charisma. Much more so than even Joe Biden, and we can see that in the explosive wake of her rise to nominee. It didn’t have to be that way. Charisma is what made that happen, a base uniting behind her, donors pouring money in, and there’s a lesson there, even beyond the obvious one, which is this sort of hilarious juxtaposition of Kamala’s charisma, laughing, fierce, tender, warm, versus Vance’s anti-charisma, which is…

Where does that negative charisma come from, anyways? Think about how remarkable it is that even after Big Publishing and Hollywood try to make an entire mythology for you…people still don’t like you. That’s so remarkable I don’t think we’ve ever really seen it before. When the machinery of celebrity starts to work, by and large, people believe it, and there’s almost nothing that can discredit or pierce it. Once you’re famous, you stay famous. Once the machine tells people to like and respect someone, by and large, they do. So this is how deep negative charisma really goes. Even all the PR and institutional power in the world hasn’t been a match for Vance’s natural negative charisma.

That comes from a certain place, if you ask me. A sort of deadness in the eyes. You get the sense that here’s a person who isn’t there in some sense. There’s a lack of empathy, honesty, truth, the qualities of a great soul. You get the sense that suffering—which is what the mythology was about in this case—hasn’t, somehow, led to wisdom, grace, decency, kindness, married with the toughness to persevere in the names of goodness. And that’s bewildering, because once you realize that, the mythology soon enough falls apart. Suffer that much? You’re supposed to mature. Not end up this weird dead-eyed man-child hurling insults at, of all things, “cat ladies.”

The Evolution of Fascism (Or, From “Them” to “Us”)

But in all those weird, creepy, juvenile insults about “childless cat ladies” lies a very real, and pretty sinister point.

How does fascism evolve? As the old poem goes, first it comes for them, and then it comes for you and me. In other words, first it targets the outgroups, the minorities, the disabled, the “weak,” those who are already scorned in society. But it doesn’t stop there. It comes for people who consider themselves perfectly “normal,” too, and in the beginning, often believe they’d never be in its crosshairs.

So. First fascism comes for them, then it comes for me. And that’s what Trump plus JD Vance is really about. Think about it with me. Trump’s ire is directed at minorities, the undocumented, migrants—the easiest scapegoats. But Vance crosses another set of lines entirely. He’s angry, it seems, at women. And not just “brown” women or “minority” women, but even white women, who are “real” Americans—women, period, not to mention children and families, are in his sights.

And that’s the evolution of fascism. If you want it plainer English, first it was about minorities and migrants, and now, in Vance’s world, it’s about women, and their kids, their bodies, white, Black, all of them. He appears to want to exert some kind of bizarre, absolutist, totalitarian control over a society’s reproductive and familial choices, suggesting that having kids isn’t just some kind of religious imperative, but a social imperative, and if anyone fails that test, society should punish them. 

That is, in plain English, a totalitarian goal. One that reaches into every single household in society, and aims profoundly to limit, shape, and reorient its most basic freedoms. 

Foucault, of course, called all this “biopower.” As in, power over biology. For him, it was the essence of fascism. For Trump, biopower is about a purified society. But for Vance, who takes a quantum leap further, biopower is about the body of every woman in society, what it’s for, and who decides its fate, which is him.

Think about that for a second, because beneath all the hilarity about Vance’s negative charisma lies this deeply sinister reality. Fascism crossing this red line, targeting not just outgroups, but ingroups, aspiring to total control of every body in society, every interaction, every family, every child, all of that not really now something people freely choose to be or have or not, but just a means to an end. For Trump, the end is a purified society, and the means is cleansing. For Vance, something more weird and creepy appears to be true—the goal is a totalitarian society, and the means is your body and mine.

That’s where the negative charisma comes from. Crossing this set of lines before our eyes, trying not altogether very well to hide it, in juvenile jokes about “childless cat ladies,” which aren’t very funny, but the point isn’t that the joke’s on Vance for saying this awful, creepy stuff, it’s that the point of it is super sinister, mega weird, and practically Soviet in its implications. 

Does America Really Want to Be a Bio-Totalitarian Society?

Does America really want to be a society whose kids, women, bodies, families, are all under this weird thumb—just means to the end of a purified society? In what sense do basic freedoms even exist in that context, from association to intimacy to privacy and beyond? 

I doubt that most Americans want that. Vance was a stunningly poor choice for Trump. Because when you cross red lines that stark, that dangerous? You need an extra-heaping dose of mega-charisma to mask it, hide it, make it seem beguiling, seductive, and alluring. Maybe then, societies can be fooled into self-destruction. 

Lucky for America, Vance has just the opposite quality, despite the mythology power tried to build for him, as a long-suffering Socratic figure, he reveals himself to be an angry, bitter, bewildered, and shrunken figure, in mind, spirit, and character, a kind of weird voodoo doll of what power once said would be a great leader—and for that, I suppose, we should all breath a gentle prayer of thanks, because so far, all he’s done is made himself, revealing the utter creepiness of such poisonous ideologies, a laughingstock.

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