The Price of the Circus Ticket
J.D. Vance makes history. Plus: Drinking the Devil's beer for nothing
If you’re looking for a place to give money toward Hurricane Helene relief and recovery, I can recommend Lutheran Disaster Response.
A couple things have happened since my last post. First, I was a guest on Sister Julia Walsh’s podcast Messy Jesus Business (the picture on that post is the chapel at the church of St. Etienne-du-Mont where Blaise Pascal is buried, though he doesn’t come up in the conversation). I found Julia’s interview style to be very disarming and ended up saying a lot of things I never would have expected to say. It’s about St. Augustine, Deep Springs College, ministry amid political polarization, the tension between making content and creating genuine community, and lots else. I hope you check it out.
Second, I wrote about seeing some posters from a white supremacist group in my neighborhood and tearing them down (with prompting from my oldest kid). Preached about it too. I doubt anything in that piece will surprise a reader of this newsletter but maybe clicking encourages my editors to keep running my articles? Who knows. Anyway, I hope it’s edifying.
Third, I’m presenting at the Lutheran Ethicists’ Gathering in Chicago on January 8-9. This is a preliminary event to the annual Society of Christian Ethics meeting, so if you’re going to be there, or live in or around Chicago, you should come to the LEG. I’ll share a registration link when it’s open.
We are, regrettably, watching history in the making.
Yesterday John Ganz had an insightful take on Trump’s enduring electoral strength, waxing pessimistic on the liberal critique of the Republican ticket as composed of freaks and weirdos:
It’s a circus. But people go to the circus. The problem is America is weird, too. A long time ago—way before Walz, I’m keen to note—I identified Trump’s approach to elections as the “any weird constituency strategy.” Basically, there are tons of people who feel left out of mainstream America, condescended to, put down. Trump doesn’t think much of them either, but he gives them the time of day.
This is really just what a lot of soft conservatives say about Trump’s support but without the optimistic, sanewashing gloss. It is, so far at least, a coalition incapable of winning a majority of votes but strikingly resilient against all manner of events and disruptions. And as it has emerged and solidified over the last nine years, it has provoked a corresponding expansion of the Democratic Party to include many not-at-all-moderate former Republicans. Dick Cheney is voting for Kamala Harris. Alberto Gonzales, whom Bush-era liberals will have seared into their memories as a sort of legal gofer for the War on Terror and the mass firing of U.S Attorneys, is voting for Kamala Harris. They don’t like the circus and are no longer content to write in Mitt Romney or leave the presidential line blank in the hope that it will leave town and they’ll be able to take their party back.
We’ve seen an effective end of what was called “Never Trump Republicanism” at the level of national media and electoral politics. It’s been a slow leak since 2016, as prominent senators and presidential hopefuls (Cruz, Rubio, Mike Lee) lined up to bend the knee after launching damning attacks on Trump and others started defecting toward Clinton or, later, Biden. But I really think it’s over and done with for good now. David French and Ross Douthat, two exemplars of the Trump-resistant tendency within conservatism, talked it all to death in an unbearable but revealing podcast last month. French, a staunch social conservative, evangelical Christian, veteran, foreign policy hawk, and law guy, made his case for his vote for Harris. Douthat, also a social conservative, Catholic, and his party’s last pundit, completed his shift from diagnosing Trump’s enduring appeal to rationalizing it. Their conversation went more or less like this:
French: I thought it was very bad that Donald Trump did January 6 after convincing a lot of people of a lie about a stolen election.
Douthat: Yes that was bad but let’s not forget that Democrats liked Ibrahim X. Kendi for a while there.
There has been a not-very-subtle relativizing of the January 6th event and everything led up to it, including by people who didn’t think anything like it would happen in the first place. There is some open angst about the outrageous and libelous pet-eating story, which is admittedly “totally irresponsible,” maybe a “bad call,” probably “unethical,” but which the team seems determined to defend as an appeal to “the media” to finally cover immigration (as if it has not been a daily topic in every outlet for years now). It’s not so much a circus as it is a kind of outsider performance art, whose deep meaning is simply unavailable to liberal elite media types.
But oddly enough, it took J.D. Vance on a debate stage to really portray the circus in respectable terms. He turned in a performance that I can only find impressive, especially given how off-putting his political persona is to me. The Doug Burgums, Tim Scotts, and Marco Rubios of the Trump veepstakes were all fine, reassuring, inoffensive figures who could not have accomplished what Vance did last night.
Vance is a smart guy who is not devoid of moral understanding. He has reason to know that massive across-the-board tariffs and expelling 5-10% of the workforce would be considered a crank policy by everyone who ever worked in the Republican Party or the think tanks. He knows the pet-stealing stuff was fake1 and he knows that Mike Pence didn’t have any statutory or constitutional authority to overturn the 2020 election, as he says he would have done.
So the deftness, the coolness, the lacquer-layered insanity with which he repeated the revisionist account of the 2020 election and January 6th near the end of the debate was especially instructive:
Look, what President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020. And my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully in the public square. And that's all I've said. And that's all that Donald Trump has said. Remember, he said that on January 6th, the protesters ought to protest peacefully. And on January 20th, what happened? Joe Biden became the President. Donald Trump left the White House.
In the process of workshopping his persona to get into and remain in Trump’s good graces, Vance has established the narrative of the 2020 election challenges—a major legal, backroom, and street-level pressure campaign to overturn election results even before the riot—that will come to be accepted as genuine, if not authoritative, if his ticket wins. Trump is too fragile and flighty to do it himself. His need to justify every single thing, to enter every possible argument, to cultivate the circus at any cost, makes him a poor artificer of narratives that can be repeated by people like Ross Douthat. But Vance can do it. His boss can cultivate the circus and attune himself to the moods of its varied performers and crowds. Vance clearly sees how it can be used. All it requires is the willingness, the resolve, to create a story and tell it without betraying the inner certainty that it is made up. Whatever his shortcomings as a politician, he has mastered that.
Appreciation: Kris Kristofferson, 1936-2024
During my impromptu memorial on Sunday night (i.e., listening to a playlist while running a slovenly four miles), I came across a Kris Kristofferson song I hadn’t heard in ages. It was never my favorite (I wrote about my favorite early last year; it’s a good post and I encourage you to give it a look even if you aren’t open to being a fan of “The Silver-Tongued Devil and I”), and it’s not his plainest, most earnest, or edifying work (“Why Me?” and “One Day at a Time,” which he co-wrote but as far as I can tell didn’t record, are good ones in that religious vein). But it captured both his knack for storytelling and his offbeat literary and, if I can put it this way, moral sensibility.
The artist meeting the Devil is an oft-told story, but the temptation here is not what you might expect. Old Scratch doesn’t offer skill, insight, fame, money, or success with women, but the seeming sophistication of nihilism. Nothing matters, certainly not the music you want to make, so don’t try to do anything meaningful with your art. The narrator rewrites the Devil’s verse to negate, so to say, his negation, and in the spoken-word narration at the end says that while he didn’t beat the Devil, he did drink his beer for nothing and stole his song. Better to believe in the power of music and be poor and obscure.
Kristofferson never achieved the commercial success that the other big Outlaw Country guys did, to say nothing of more mainstream Nashville acts. His songs were sometimes too ironic, his diction sometimes pitched too high, his bleakness sometimes too unrelieved (compare his superior recording of his “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down” lyric to Johnny Cash’s jangling up-tempo hit version). He cared about causes. He stood by Sinead O’Connor when she was being savagely booed for saying something everyone would know to be true a few years later. He took risks for the sake of artistic and ethical commitments and while he had a durable presence in the music world and a successful acting career, he probably did pay a price for those risks.2
He had, as a friend of mine put it, “the most American resume.” Texas, California, Army helicopter pilot, Rhodes Scholarship, West Point faculty appointment, emptying ashtrays during the Blonde on Blonde sessions, writing a hit song for Johnny Cash, etc. He seemed determined to make life harder for himself than it had to be. I don’t know if I admire that. I certainly haven’t emulated it. Yes, I still sing that line from “The Silver-Tongued Devil and I” about how “all he’s good for is gettin’ in trouble,” but I couldn’t get in trouble with a floor plan and a key card. But I believe his line about drinking the Devil’s beer for free and stealing his song. That’s real. There’s always a good reason to embrace instrumental dishonesty, short-term cynicism, the despair that masks itself with smooth sophistication. Happens every day, especially to smart people who want to make something of themselves. What Kris did may not have been all he could have done—“Lord help me Jesus, I’ve wasted it” is real too— but it was better than that. Rest in peace.
For the purposes of moral reasoning—as any adult convert to politicized Catholicism has cause to be aware—passing on unverified and rumors of a libelous nature is a clear violation of the 8th commandment and a dishonest act even if you haven’t seen a definitive denial of the rumors.
I am aware that he also had pretty serious substance-abuse issues that surely played a role in limiting his career.