Vance Trutherism and Conservative Diversity Hires

What happens when a person's entire personal self image is based on something that they claim to hate?  I continue to be fascinated by the tension between conservative pundits' unearned professional prestige and their claims to being committed to "merit" as the sole basis upon which career success should be built.  Do they live in denial?  Do they double down?  Do they internalize self-hatred?  It seems that all of the above are possible.

This is not, by the way, a problem only for the right-wing punditocracy but for the right in general.  I pointed out in a column on February 27, for example, that JD Vance is an especially obvious example of this conflict: the chest-thumping "I did it all myself" ethos versus the simple fact that Vance is a classic beneficiary of diversity-aware admissions.  I cited a New York Times op-ed from last summer in which Lydia Polgreen noted that people like Vance get a huge leg up in the admissions processes of elite universities -- probably even more of a boost than rich legacies receive, I might add, and almost certainly more than minority candidates.  This is for the very simple reason that Vance-like applicants who meet the minimal threshold for admission -- even though they would not be able to compete without a thumb on the scale -- are so very rare.

So kudos to Vance in the sense that he overcame whatever or whomever he was elegizing, which is apparently the drugged-out losers for whom he showed nothing but contempt until it became politically useful to re-identify with the people he scorns.  But he is most assuredly a diversity candidate -- definitely when he applied to Yale Law, and probably even when he applied to college, because The Ohio State University is not easy to get into even for in-state residents.  Moreover, his subsequent political rise was not based on any measurable merit but rather on having ingratiated himself to a billionaire or two who would have never been within his grasp had he not been given those legs up in university admissions.

In the title of this column, I used the term "Vance trutherism" to capture more clearly a key point that I made in my February 27 column, which is that nothing that I have written above can be disproved.  Vance's running mate attacked and ridiculed Kamala Harris's intelligence, bluntly claiming that she only got ahead via affirmative action or by sleeping her way to the top.  Every possible response to those attacks -- and there were plenty of ways to respond, because she was in fact a fabulously qualified candidate on any metric -- could be batted back by Trumpists saying that she only succeeded because the world is so mean to white men and gives "their" spots to women and people of color.

So I will be very clear: If nothing else, the same illogic that Donald Trump used to attack Barack Obama -- where every answer and every bit of evidence was per se rejected because, well, how do we know? -- would allow me to assert confidently that JD Vance is unqualified for everything that he has ever done, and all of his accomplishments are the result of diversity-over-merit special treatment.

Prove me wrong!  As I sketched out in another column a week ago, nothing can disprove this kind of claim.  Can he prove -- truly prove -- that he had top LSAT scores?  And if he did, can he prove that he was not given the answers to the exam in advance, that no one was paid to take the exam for him, and that he never hacked into the system to change his scores?  As Trump would say, it is only "common sense" to believe that Vance is an unqualified diversity hire.

Why?  Because Vance cannot in fact put together a coherent argument, instead spending his time making weird claims that, for example, Harris's reliance on the law is a mere "magic wand."  Someone commented to me recently that Vance is "a good debater, whether you agree with him or not," but that is precisely wrong.  Good debaters make arguments that can stand up to scrutiny.  Hack debaters change the subject and rely on cheap tricks to mislead listeners.  It is easy to tell the difference, and Vance is the latter.

I began this column, however, by asking about conservative pundits, not conservative politicians.  At this point, conservative politicians (including not just Vance but also Ted Cruz and others) are merely pundits who spend more time trying to "own the libs" than actually doing their jobs, which means that the pundit/pol distinction is increasingly difficult to discern on the right.  For that matter, pundits on the right like Hannity and Carlson, and for that matter Musk, exercise more political power than a lot of Republican officeholders.

But what about the true pundits?  Why are they relevant here?  Much like Vance, many of them get and keep their jobs through non-merit-based decisions.  The fact is that even the most respected news organizations like The New York Times have long evidenced a felt need to have one or more "conservative slots" on their pundit rosters.  Conservatives have long insisted that this is necessary because such newspapers' hiring decisions are biased toward liberals by default, but even if that were true (which it is not), that would not change the fact that the people who are on the slate of columnists are there not because they outshone everyone in an open competition but because the hiring editors decided to find some conservative who could at least minimally perform the job.  After all, this is not like being an airplane pilot or a surgeon, where the stakes are life and death.  Who cares if The Times and others try to pretend that conservative writers are as qualified and able as everyone else?  Who is the victim (other than logic and, in too many cases, decency)?

Last week, I described an instance in which Times columnist David French acted as if Trump's rantings about "transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison" was merely another "appeal to the mainstream" rather than a disgusting distortion of reality.  Is French one of these CAA (conservative affirmative action) hires by The Times?  No.  True, he has made simplistic comments about the pardon of Hunter Biden -- "[I]t was inexcusably unprincipled. Hunter was guilty of federal crimes. He should have served his sentence." -- which conveniently begins the analysis after the younger Biden was the victim of an egregiously politicized prosecutorial abuse of discretion.  On the other hand, plenty of people made that mistake, some of whom (but not all) are generally very sharp observers and who deserve respect.  No one is right all the time.

Moreover, French's relatively short tenure at The Times already shows plenty of evidence of being a merit-based hire.  His recent "The MAGA Culture War Comes for Georgetown Law," for example, was impressive.  And even when I disagree with him (as I often do, especially when he returns to his core obsessions of attacking abortion rights and universities), it has never occurred to me to ask: "How the hell did this guy get his job?"

But that cannot be said of some of French's ideological compatriots.  The older generation of reactionary pundits at The Washington Post includes George Fwill and Kathleen Parker, the latter of whom has openly said that she is there because they need a conservative pundit, and she is apparently barely good enough for that purpose.

At The Times, the slot-hire conservatives are a bit younger, and they are both notably defensive about their status.  Bret Stephens was brought on immediately after the 2016 election, when The Times was very publicly wringing its hands about "not having understood the electorate," or something, which led them to hire a climate denier who then lied about having been a climate denier.  Prior to that, Ross Douthat was hired when the experiment with Bill Kristol failed in 2009, and The Times needed to find someone to be a diversity candidate.  What they found is a writer who has now spent more than fifteen years working through his religious confusion in front of our very eyes.

Do I disagree with everything that Stephens and Douthat write?  Of course not.  But unlike French (and very much like Fwill and Parker), they frequently write things that would get them laughed out of any adult conversation, were it not for the fact that they are "New York Times columnists" and thus wrongly presumed by the public at large to be serious thinkers.  This is true of many of the center-left pundits as well -- Kristof, Bruni, and so on -- but the ongoing tragedy there is not that they are being kept on by their editors to be CAA diversity exemplars but because they are simply famous for being famous.

Douthat and Stephens tip their hands when, for example, they write about living in a college town or the Upper West Side (I did not bother to keep track of which was which), bemoaning the fact that so many people in their lives disagree with them.  Those closed-minded libs know who I am, but they still just won't listen to me!  It is almost (but not quite) poignant to think about how painful it must be to know that their exalted professional status as conservative pundits is only possible because their employer violated the supposedly core conservative commitment to merit.

As I noted above, these are in some sense very low stakes.  Who cares whether one of these guys writes that, say, "D.E.I. Will Not Be Missed: The Pentagon's Experience Shows Why"?  (That example is especially rich coming from a CAA hire, but whatever.)  Vance's unmerited advancement, by contrast, is going to change the world for the worse, and to their credit, the conservatives at The Times at least know enough to oppose Vance and Trump about that.  But it is impossible not to wonder how they deal with the cognitive dissonance of being what they would describe as a fraud in any other situation.

As it happens, there is more to say about this topic, given that The Post is now living in Jeff Bezos's new regime of enforced op-ed rightthink.  I will thus return to discuss that and more on Friday.