There are many problems with the Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance. He isn’t particularly personable – his awkward interactions with doughnut shop workers and even his own fans have gone viral. He obsesses over issues that make him seem prurient, such as female fertility, which he finds is lacking. He has an unfortunate penchant for insulting huge swathes of the electorate, notably women without children. He is, to put it in the ubiquitous term of this election, just kind of weird.
Some of this is just Vance having no charisma. But much of it is a reflection of how Vance is just extremely online – and most normal people find that off-putting.
“Extremely online” has become shorthand for someone who spends far too much of their time and energy engaged in political discourse on social media. People who are extremely online “speak an inscrutable language that alienates your less online friends and acquaintances”, as writer Jay Hathaway put it in 2018. They focus on things “no normal, healthy person could possibly care about”. Those things could be marginal characters who draw some segment of the internet’s ire or admiration, or they could be issues that a loud fringe fixates on. In extremely online conservative circles, one of those is birth rates. Another, held by an often racist right-wing faction, is related: that immigrants are replacing native-born (read: white) Americans.
If the extremely online person is JD Vance, they don’t just spend too much time trolling on X; they also go on the podcasts and YouTube channels of various other extremely online influencers, and inevitably have conversations that aren’t just inscrutable to normal people, but often profoundly bizarre and blatantly offensive. And when these extremely online people try to talk to normal people – at campaign events or political gatherings – what they say often reflects the fact that they’ve been influenced by idiosyncratic or flat-out hateful internet communities.
That explains why we’re treated to seemingly unending stories of Vance making ludicrous comments. There’s the “childless cat lady” stuff, which he has even used in his fundraising materials. But there are also his complaints about childless schoolteachers, his decision to tweet about dolphin porn, and arguably most damaging, his repetition of a proved-false rumour that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating people’s pets, which he has admitted is a lie (“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m gonna do,” he told CNN).
Part of Vance’s weirdness is thanks to Donald Trump and the broader Maga movement. Trump and his most loyal followers have moved over to his social media platform Truth Social, where they enjoy a small but enthusiastic pro-Trump echo chamber. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X) reinstated some of the platform’s most loathsome users. With an algorithm that rewards outrage, X is packed with vileness, from unvarnished racism to gross sexism to pervasive anti-Semitism. Plus, most social media platforms steer users towards content that reinforces and sometimes amplifies their pre-existing beliefs, convincing many they’re surrounded by a silent majority that sees the world the same way they do. If you spend a lot of time on these platforms, and then spend your real-life time around people who share both your political beliefs and penchant for being on the internet, you’re going to have a pretty skewed view of the world.
This is JD Vance.
It’s also a small but loud segment of the Republican Party, which attracts many conservative influencers and hard-right social media personalities. And while plenty of people on the left are also extremely online, the kind of extremism that characterises some political social media communities hasn’t infiltrated the Democratic Party in the way it has the GOP. Part of this seems to be about credulousness – Maga conservatives simply being more so, having already thrown their support behind a con man – but part of it is also about how people of different political persuasions get their information, and how reliable those sources are (or aren’t).
Republicans tend to be low-information voters. Trump supporters are less likely to get their news from reputable sources, and more likely to tell pollsters that their information comes from social media, YouTube and cable news. Conservative media consumers are less informed and more likely to be drinking from a firehose of lies and distortions – such as right-wing podcasters, and their too-online followers.
The obsessions of the extremely online may be mainstream in the Republican Party, but that doesn’t mean they translate to normal Americans. Republican politicians and talking heads have gone deeper down their various internet rabbit holes, burrowing away from the reality of most American citizens. Trump’s strategy in picking Vance was to double down on his Maga ideology. But he also doubled down on the increasing self-marginalisation of the Maga movement. There’s nothing weird to Trump about extremely online Maga conservatives; they’re his biggest fans and provide much of his campaign staff. This is perhaps why Donald Trump himself doesn’t see JD Vance as weird at all, while the too-online left recognises an internet troll. Everyone else in the normal offline world, though, just sees a weird dude who can’t seem to stop spouting off about some strange ideas. That may not be someone they want to put in the White House.
[See also: America’s political violence is bipartisan]
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This article appears in the 25 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, All-out war