J.D. Vance's "Admission to Lying" is a Fascist Flex, Not Something to Laugh Off

Reflections on Truth, Power, and American Fascism

At the beginning of this week, my online social circles lit up with buzz about how Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance had “admitted to lying” on Inside Politics. That framing has dominated the headlines, but what actually happened is a more complicated, and much more insidious than simply getting caught in a lie.

Regular readers of my work, here at The Bugbear Dispatch and/or elsewhere will hardly need the following caveats, but for any newer readers, let me be abundantly clear. In attempting to complicate the prevailing narrative about Vance’s September 15 CNN interview with Dana Bash, I am emphatically not defending Vance; he is a vile fascist who traffics in racist lies. And I am not attacking Bash’s performance; she handled the interview remarkably well, even if, at times, she slid a bit further into bothsidesism than I would have preferred.

What I aim to do is rather to dissect and contextualize this moment through the lens of authoritarian attitudes about the relationship between power and truth. Fascists and other authoritarians prefer to operate in post-truth conditions, where they can weaponize information and, ultimately, define the “truth” by exercising despotic power. Sometimes, reminding the public that that’s what they’re doing by winking at the ways in which they “create stories” isn’t a misstep or a fumble, but rather a power play. It’s a fascist flex.

On Fascists, Language, and Bad Faith

French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre’s reflections on antisemitism are apropos here. While in this specific context we’re looking primarily at Haitan migrants and Republicans’ anti-immigrant and anti-Black attitudes, it is worth remembering that there is a wider web of hate in play here, one in which antisemitism plays a key role. After all, the American Right has openly embraced the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which accuses Jews and “globalists” of deliberately bringing brown, Black, and “criminal” immigrants into the country to foster the displacement of white Christians. “Jews will not replace us,” we must not forget, was the rallying cry of the white supremacists at Charlottesville in 2017.

If someone put a gun to my head and forced me to answer, yes or no, whether Vance admitted to lying in his CNN interview, I’d say yes. But if I were allowed to say more, I’d add that Vance did so in a quintessentially fascist, winking way, and that his admission is the least significant part of the context in which he made it.

The politics of hate can be focused, but will also always find new targets to scapegoat as a means of grabbing power for those who embrace the contradictory “victor/victim” mentality of majoritarian grievance. Much of Sartre’s insight into antisemitism can be applied to this wider politics of hate. The following quotation from his 1946 Reflections on the Jewish Question* (often rendered Anti-Semite and Jew in English) went viral on Twitter precisely in November 2016 for a reason:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to dissuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

With this framework in mind, let’s revisit Vance’s interview with Bash.