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I have a rule that no one who holds an earnest opinion about Star Wars should be anywhere near the levers of power. J.D. Vance, a junior senator from Ohio, once posted about the cruelty of The Last Jedi. "It ruined Luke," he said. "It ruined Yoda too."
Vance has said and written thousands of things more consequential than this take on a beloved pulp movie franchise. You'll be hearing and reading all those things over the course of the next few months as the media machine digs into his past. He called for the "De-Ba'athification" of the United States, decried his critics as "degenerate liberals," and claimed that daylight savings time ruined a woman's fertility.
But I keep thinking about his Star Wars tweet. In recent years, the franchise has become a battleground in America's long and stupid culture war. Reactionary fans fight over Jedi and Sith with a fervency once reserved for religious debates. Bemoaning the franchise's moral decline is a shibboleth, it lets right-wingers know you're on their side.
That's what Vance is good at. He's a millennial charlatan who learned to twist himself into the shape he believes the powerful want to see. He doesn't seem to believe in anything except for the performance that will get him the most attention and the most accolades. It makes him the perfect person to bend the knee to former President Donald Trump.
Vance birthed himself into the public consciousness by writing the bestselling memoir of his childhood, Hillbilly Elegy. It was 2016 and coastal elites were desperate for an explanation for Donald Trump's rise. Vance's biography wasn't so much an explanation as it was a piece of exploitation: it rendered the people of Appalachia as wise, cantankerous, and drug-addled. They made their own fate, Vance asserted, and deserved what they got.
The people of Appalachia hated Hillbilly Elegy. Elites loved it and made it a bestseller.
And so J.D. Vance set himself to dancing to their tune. He gave a TED Talk about America's forgotten working class. Oprah picked Hillbilly Elegy for her book club. The New York Times put it on a list of the "6 Books to Help Understand Trump's Win." He made regular appearances on CNN. Ron Howard turned his book into a movie.
He began, timidly at first, to move into politics. He publicly compared Trump to the heroin that ravaged his mother and privately said the man, whose boots he now buffs, was akin to Adolf Hitler. But casting himself as a Never Trump Republican didn't play and Vance retreated from the position.
To win a Senate seat in Ohio, Vance rebranded himself as a Trump loyalist. He denounced old statements, deleted older posts, and began to dance for the MAGA crowd. He took millions of dollars in campaign donations from Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, namechecked radical theorist Curtis Yarvin, and began openly talking about owning the libs.
For Vance, the only war that matters is the culture war. When he made a bet that a principled stand against Trump could play in the cheap seats, he lost hard. Then he changed the bet. It's why he spouts weird stuff online about how New York City is like the television show The Walking Dead. It's why he's ideologically slippery with a beard that hides only an abyss.
It's why Trump loves him. Like Trump, Vance is a consummate showman. They're both all about the performance. But Vance knows when to bow and scrape and acquiesce. Vance knows how to kiss the ring. That was always the most important quality in whoever Trump would pick as his running mate.
Matthew Gault is a writer living South Carolina covering war and nuclear weapons. He's a former staff writer at Vice who has worked with Reuters, TIME, and The New York Times.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
