JD Vance interviewed by Ross Douthat on big issues with a Catholic twist

JD Vance is clearly a really smart cookie. I would guess he has an IQ (and that’s definitely a flawed measure) of about 140-150. That’s wicked smahrt. It suggests our meritocracy was more or less working, at least for some people, as of 30 or 40 years ago. He’ll be a formidable candidate in 2028. I don’t buy his common good constitutionalism 100 percent. (I seem to be into quantities today.) But as an overarching view, it beats the heck out of trans-communist-free money to everyone who votes Democrat-whatever the other persons are selling. His sophisticated take on how liberal law professors and NGOs created the problems we now face attempting to control who is in our polity strikes me as right on. We see this in the rulings of some left-wing Federal district judges on immigration issues. Vance is pretty good addressing these issues for my money.

It’s ironic isn’t it? Turns out the people who want to preserve Our Democracy are exactly the people that the people who claim to be fighting for Our Democracy hate the most. Unless the people in a democracy can say what it takes to be a member of the polity that calls the shots, you don’t have a democracy or anything like it.

Relatedly, the left has always hated Catholics. I mean, look at Voltaire, or what the Spanish communists and socialists did to Catholics (executed them by the thousands in gruesome ways, raped the nuns of course before killing them, etc., etc.). One way our wonderful future could work out is a civil war between the religious and the anti-religious. I should hope it doesn’t but there’s a strong strain of this in the air.