An early effort in the 2028 presidential fight: it's George Will in the Washington Post against J.D. Vance.

I haven't read this piece yet. I decided to blog it based on the headline and the photograph, which I find ludicrously unsubtle:

Let's read it:

Spurning the rich subtleties of the English language, JD Vance has a penchant for words that he perhaps thinks display manly vigor, and express a populist’s rejection of refinement. In a recent social media post, he called someone whose posts annoyed him a “dipshit.” He recently told an interviewer that anyone who criticizes his wife can “eat shit.”...

Maybe, because of Trump, "Americans are inured to such pungent language," Will muses, deploying the rich subtleties "inured" and "pungent." George Will's father was a philosophy professor. You can imagine the language he grew up with and that is second nature to him. We know Vance's story.

Here's an excerpt from page 132 of "Hillbilly Elegy": "[Mamaw] was a hard woman to live with, quick-witted and sharp-tongued. If I didn’t take out the garbage, she told me to 'stop being a lazy piece of shit.' When I forgot to do my homework, she called me 'shit for brains' and reminded me that unless I studied, I’d amount to nothing."

From page 158, as Vance entered the Marine Corps: "We were allowed one phone call, so I naturally called Mamaw and read off of the card they gave me: 'I have arrived safely at Parris Island. I will send my address soon. Goodbye.' 'Wait, you little shithead. Are you okay?'"

Page 166: "Mamaw, naturally, worried that I had picked up a gambling habit and was playing cards in some mountain trailer with a bunch of card-sharking hillbillies, but I assured her that it was online and legitimate. 'Well, you know I don’t understand the fucking Internet. Just don’t turn to booze and women. That’s always what happens to dipshits who get caught up in gambling.'"

Describing his college experience, at page 186-187, he deploys Mamaw's language himself, and it is very carefully aimed: "During an undergraduate seminar in foreign policy, I listened as a nineteen-year-old classmate with a hideous beard spouted off about the Iraq war. He explained that those fighting the war were typically less intelligent than those (like him) who immediately went to college. It showed, he argued, in the wanton way soldiers butchered and disrespected Iraqi civilians.... As the student prattled on, I thought about the never-ending training on how to respect Iraqi culture—never show anyone the bottom of your foot, never address a woman in traditional Muslim garb without first speaking to a male relative. I thought about the security we provided for Iraqi poll workers, and how we studiously explained the importance of their mission without ever pushing our own political views on them.... I thought about my friends who were covered in third-degree burns, 'lucky' to have survived an IED attack in the Al-Qaim region of Iraq. And here was this dipshit in a spotty beard telling our class that we murdered people for sport."

And finally, on pages 191-192, he uses "shit" not to humiliate ordinary people but to speak truth to the elite: "Many try to blame the anger and cynicism of working-class whites on misinformation.... The people I know are well aware of what the major news organizations have to say... they simply don’t believe them.... To many of us, the free press—that bulwark of American democracy—is simply full of shit."

Back to George Will. Just a bit more from the last paragraph:

Vance has a knack for late — very late — adolescent naughtiness. It is not easy being transgressive in an era when there are few norms remaining to transgress.... Performative politics is almost the only politics on offer nowadays. But must it be a coarseness and flippancy competition?