CROSSPOST: JONATHAN V. LAST: Neo-NeoFascism Watch: Welcome to JD Vance 6.0
Vance’s 2028 6.0 OS is new. In succession, he has been: memorist, never-Trumper, MAGA edgelord, the right-wing version of Elizabeth Warren,and loyal veep attack-dog. Now he is the amnesiac heir:
Jonathan V. Last highly annoyed by JD Vance.
He has good reasons.
Briefly, Jonathan Last’s take: Vance wants to inherit the MAGA coalition without inheriting its record. So he defends the Iran war in public while whispering opposition to access journalists. He denies Trump’s corruption while conceding Washington is corrupt. He apologizes for “imperfect” rhetoric while still blaming immigrants. Pure arsonist-firefighter stuff. Will voters buy it? This is a deeply unserious party he is aiming to lead.
We have Jonathan V. Last:
CROSSPOST: JONATHAN V. LAST: Neo-NeoFascism Watch: Welcome to JD Vance 6.0
<https://www.thebulwark.com/p/welcome-to-jd-vance-60-cbs-town-hall-vice-president-iran-corruption-immigration> <https://www.thebulwark.com/>
Everything is going great. And if it isn’t great, he has no idea how we got here.
Jonathan V. Last
October 19
1. Frontier Models
Back during the 2024 campaign I wrote about the 4.0 operating system upgrade that had been loaded onto the JD Vance platform.
Vance 1.0 was a memoirist and Hillbilly whisperer.
Vance 2.0 was a Never Trump pundit.
Vance 3.0 was a MAGA edgelord.
Vance 4.0 is something like a cross between 2010 Elizabeth Warren and 2016 Marco Rubio, with some light nativism sprinkled in.
Vance 4.0 was the Windows ME of the Vance platform. After November 2024 a new update shipped—the 5.0 VP Edition. But it was just a rebadged 3.0. As vice president, JD ran around slandering Americans killed by his police state, but in January we got an important patch—JD 5.1. The key upgrade on 5.1 was a backchannel feature that allowed the vice president to leak to reporters about how vehemently he disagreed with Donald Trump while publicly defending his boss. On Saturday, Vance Tech marked the soft launch of its 2028 presidential campaign with the unveiling of JD 6.0 at an event hosted by Bari Weiss’s CBS News. Let’s examine the new New JD not through the lens of politics or morality, but as a product—with an eye toward the question: Will it work?
2. Three Stars?
Overview: Vance 6.0 is a reintroduction of the product to a dissatisfied consumer base. The last two years have seen Donald Trump—the parent company of Vance Tech—lose customers at a rapid rate. Once the industry leader, Trump is now close to matching the record for the most unpopular president three weeks before a midterm election ever.1 Vance 6.0 comes to market with an audacious plan: He pretends that he has no idea how we got here, but is now ready to come up with solutions. Probably. Just none that he can share at this very moment.
Iran: The biggest problem Vance faces is the war against Iran that Donald Trump chose to initiate and has subsequently lost. Vance can spin reporters by publicly defending Trump and the war while privately reassuring access journalists that he is against the war. (Annoyingly, Vance Tech has yet to figure out how to communicate with voters on deep background.)
Vance 6.0 squares that circle with a couple of innovations. On Saturday Vance insisted that the war has been a total success. Sort of. Asked why America has not won the war decisively, Vance replied, “I would say in some ways we have won decisively.”2 He then went on to allow that maybe, perhaps, in other ways, the war is still on the journey to success: “The enemy gets a vote here,” Vance explained. “And they have responded in certain ways.”
“Certain ways” is an elegant euphemism for destroying the most important U.S. naval facility in the region, crippling key energy infrastructure, seizing control of the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing regional alliances, and elevating China’s influence. The key here is how Vance reduces specific military outcomes and economic developments into pleasant abstractions. It’s really quite something.
The next feature is Vance’s ability to shift from saying that, in many ways, everything is going great, to declaiming that he has no idea how any of the bad stuff happened.
I see what Abdul El-Sayed says about the war in Iran. I see [him] criticizing decisions that the president has made, the military has made. But fundamentally, we are where we are. And you have to—in my view, I’d like to know: What is Abdul El-Sayed’s solution for the problem that we have right now?
We are where we are! How did we get there? It’s a mystery! And while JD Vance does not, himself, have any solutions for the problems (which probably don’t exist), he’s pretty sure that Democrats don’t, either. So really, when you think about it, they’re kind of the ones to blame?
Corruption: Asked if he was bothered by the obscene corruption within the Trump administration, Vance applied the same processes:
First of all, if someone’s selling access to the White House, that’s disgusting and despicable and they should suffer consequences… . I want to make those judgments based on the facts and not based on a random news media report that I read… . I’ve seen these media reports, and I have the same reaction I imagine a lot of people in this room have, which—it makes me uneasy when I read about my public officials potentially getting wealthy off of my public trust. And I’m telling you that while, yes, D.C. is a corrupt town … Donald Trump—I have not seen a single shred of evidence that he participates or sanctions in that corruption… . I have not once seen evidence that Donald Trump has enriched himself.
Let’s break that down step by step.
First, the thing people expect to hear. In this case it’s not “We’re winning” but “corruption is not allowed.” Check.
But then the actual evidence gets a little messy. He wants facts—not just media reports. Which include text messages from Kimberly Guilfoyle to the guy she was asking for bribes. Which the guy in question, Eric Deters, has confirmed repeatedly and publicly. As with the Iran war: Sure, there’s evidence blatantly proving I’m wrong, but I prefer to rely on some secret other set of evidence that, if it exists (it doesn’t), I can see but you can’t.
Then he allowed that yes, corruption is endemic in Washington, but he, himself, has not witnessed any. Maybe some public officials are “potentially” getting rich off the public trust because that’s just how D.C. works, but never ever ever the people who are the most flagrantly and unabashedly corrupt of all.
Immigration: When forced to reckon with the words of Vance 3.0—for example, when he openly lied about Haitian immigrants—the new model attempted contrition. Asked by a member of the audience, “Why are you scapegoating immigrants for the issues you’re supposed to be solving as a vice president?” Vance responded: “I would say, and to the extent that my rhetoric has been imperfect here, that’s on me.” And later:
I will tell you that nobody’s perfect, certainly not me. But my goal here is not to dehumanize any immigrant. And in fact, I love a number of immigrants. My goal here is to make it so we can have a country with some baseline of social cohesion and sense of community, because … when too many people come to the United States too quickly, it changes the country in very profound ways.
This is pure arsonist-firefighter stuff. Vance has spent the last six years demagoguing immigrants—openly lying about them. He has taken a box cutter to the fabric of American society in order to win votes. And now he says that he only does it to preserve “social cohesion.” Like Iran, like the corruption, Vance has no idea how America got to this place. And he doesn’t offer any solutions. But he wants voters to know that he’s truly, deeply concerned.
Will this work? I don’t know. But however distasteful you may find this new version of JD Vance, you shouldn’t discount the possibility that it might work. We are a deeply unserious country populated by deeply unserious people.
Notes:
1 Some polls have Trump as low as 33 percent approval. Harry Truman was at about 33 or 34 percent approval shortly before the 1946 midterms. So Trump still has time to make history.
2 You see, the only way to understand the outcome of a war is to break it into component parts and evaluate each individually. For instance, in World War II, Japan conquered big parts of China before being bombed into submission by the United States. So in some ways, Japan won a decisive victory against China, even if, in other ways, Japan suffered defeats. By the same token, America has totally, completely demolished the Iranian navy. Now this has fuck-all to do with the actual strategic outcome of the war. But in some ways it’s a decisive victory!
<https://www.thebulwark.com/p/welcome-to-jd-vance-60-cbs-town-hall-vice-president-iran-corruption-immigration> <http://thebulwark.com>
Brad DeLong here: The first such of which Vance might be aiming to become was Napoleon III, or perhaps Napoleon the Great.
The coup of the 18 Brumaire (November 9, 1799) was followed by a plebiscite in which Napoleon’s new constitution with himself as First Consul of the French Republic was “approved” by a reported 3,011,007 votes in favour versus 1,562. Popularity—or at least the manufactured appearance of popularity—beats constitutional procedure, and elections are not on obstacle as long as the vote-count can be controlled, or at least cast into sufficient doubt that the real balance becomes a matter of he said-she said “observers disagree”. The lesson, I think, is that Al Gore focused on using constitutional procedures to get the votes counted, and lost. Thus a superior path is to claim that you won, and then to cut as many corners as you need to get your butt into the White House.
I find myself thinking about Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman’s Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century (Princeton, 2022), based on their 2019 Journal of Economic Perspectives article “Informational Autocrats”:
Guriev and Treisman’s thesis is simple to state and far-reaching: In a modern society, the cheapest way to keep power is to be, or seem to be, popular, and to use that popularity to neuter the elements of the constitutional infrastructure that might push you out. Spin dictators therefore:
Hold elections and usually win them, with rules tilted, opposition hobbled, and media coverage skewed, but stuffing ballots so crudely that the result loses all credibility only under absolute necessity.
Simulate democracy rather than denounce it by keeping parliaments, courts, parties, and NGOs, but capturing them and hollowing them out, all the while speaking the language of democracy, rule of law, and popular will.
Censor quietly, buying outlets through friendly oligarchs, squeezing them through advertising and regulation, and sueing them for defamation
Repress selectively and in disguise with violence rare and targeted, and dressed up as ordinary law enforcement: immigration violations, mortgage fraud, with critics are prosecuted, bankrupted, or pushed into exile.
Avoid grand ideology and favor flexible, catch-all appeals to resentment of outsiders and élites, to national pride, to stability, to competence, an d to prosperity,
The leader has to persuade enough of the broad public that he is on their side, is competent, and that the alternatives are worse. He has to buy and create—using plutocrat-kleptocrat money—an appearance of some support among the informed. he can then contain the informed tranche of the population that knows enough to understand. The job not of information control but rather of flooding the zone is to manufacture and protect that appearance of popularity, so that corner-cutting leads to political squabbles while his actions create facts on the ground that then become fixed points other actors must accommodate themselves to. And it might work, with enough banks, lawyers, PR agencies, lobbyists, consultants, and and others on his side to launder both money and reputations, and cast doubt. After all, actually winning one election—as Trump did in 2024—and gaining one set of congressional majorities freezes the opposition’s ability to oppose, as it does not feel it has the legitimacy to enforce strict constitutional procedure when you can always find a lawyer and often six Supreme Court justices to lie about or at least confuse and postpone resolution of questions of what constitutional procedure truly is.
In short: soft dictatorship, less like a prison and more like a con, with the central resource being a popular—or a popular enough among those who are legitimately full citizens—belief that things are going well.
CROSSPOST: Timothy Snyder: Ethnic Cleansing in Ohio (Feb 1, 2026)
In his first term, the analogues of Hermann Göring, Josef Goebbels, and Reinhard Heydrich did not show up for Donald Trump. Now, in Trump’s second term, JD Vance is auditioning for the slot(s)… Fantasy, Nazi mobilization, online memes, bomb threats, then bureaucratized ethnic cleansing—this is what Vance is about to try to test in Springfield, Ohio. America’s soul really is at stake here…
Why is JD Vance trying to make war on prosperity? Because the Vance-Trump policy agenda he has been one of the principal architects of is, as it was clear from the get-go, a miserable failure in terms of making a middle-class American lifestyle more affordable. It is about distracting people from the fact that nativism and protectionism make America smaller, poorer, meaner, and globally disrespected…
Same post:
The neo-fascist version of post-liberalism argues that “the belly may be full, but the spirit will be empty.” But their actual proposal is not to fill the spirit; it is simply to empty the belly, while pretending the resulting hunger is actually a form of spiritual discipline.
CROSSPOST: Lyz Lenz: Who Will You Blame When They Are Gone? (Jul 29, 2026)
And, of course, JD Vance is positioning himself to be the leader of the MAGA movement after Trump’s forthcoming exit into complete senility. And he is doing so by demonizing immigrants and their children as not real Americans, and so throwing his own wife Usha and his own children—Ewan, Vivek, Mirabel, and Alec—under the bus.