“We are in a late republican period,”
Vance said later,
evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar.
“If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild,
and pretty far out there,
and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
“Indeed,” Murphy said. “Among some of my circle, the phrase ‘extra-constitutional’ has come up quite a bit.”
I’d asked Vance to tell me, on the record, what he’d like liberal Americans who thought that what he was proposing was a fascist takeover of America to understand.
He spoke earnestly. “I think the cultural world you operate in is incredibly biased,” he said
—against his movement and “the leaders of it,
like me in particular.”
He encouraged me to resist this tendency, which he thought was the product of a media machine leading us toward a soulless dystopia that none of us want to live in.
“That impulse,” he said,
“is fundamentally in service of something that is far worse than anything,
in your wildest nightmares,
than what you see here.”
He gave me an imploring look,
as though to suggest that he was more on the side of the kind of people who read Vanity Fair than most of you realize.
If what he was doing worked, he said,
“it will mean that my son grows up in a world where his masculinity
—his support of his family and his community,
his love of his community
—is more important than whether it works for fucking McKinsey.”
At that, we called it,
and the crowd of young men who wanted to talk to him immediately descended on the couches.
People kept bringing drinks, and there was a lot of shit talk, and it went on late.
I remember thinking at one point how strange it was that in our mid-30s
Vance and I were significantly older than almost everyone there,
all of whom thought they were organizing a struggle to change the course of human history,
and all of whom were now going to get sloppy drunk.