The Scapegoat Election

The VPs' similarities will only make them more vicious

Kamala Harris just chose Tim Walz to be her nominee for Vice President. The governor of Minnesota is best known as the creator of the “JD Vance is weird” meme. Look a little deeper, and you’ll notice a startling similarity between Vance’s strategy to make an outgroup out of “childless cat ladies” and Walz’s strategy to do the same to Vance.

https://www.businessinsider.com/jd-vance-tim-walz-vice-president-san-francisco-2024-8

That strategy is to find a scapegoat — a stereotype the median voter can identify as part of his own life — and blame it for all of the country’s problems.

For Vance, that scapegoat is “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” Among the “childless cat ladies” he names “Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]”.

He joins this critique with a broader populist narrative he delivers at the RNC:

I grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a small town where people spoke their minds, built with their hands, and loved their God, their family, their community and their country with their whole hearts.

But it was also a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington.

In Vance’s telling, Democratic elites betrayed the working class Ohioans he grew up around because they had no family, no stake in the future, and no shared interest with those people.

Hear now from Walz: “We can't even go to thanksgiving dinner with our uncle, because we end up in a weird fight that is unnecessary ... these guys are just weird.”

His scapegoat is the “crazy MAGA uncle” epitomized by Vance. The crazy MAGA uncle might have a family and a job, but it’s his disagreeable attitude that makes him weird for liberals. While political beliefs play a part, it’s the disgust reaction to that attitude that defines the crazy MAGA uncle. 

In the 2016 election, scapegoating backfired for Hillary Clinton. Left-wing journalist Ezra Klein (in bold) asks Tim Walz how he plans to avoid this backlash:

I want to get at this distinction you’re making, between Trump or Vance and the crowds. Because one of the most dangerous emotions that Democrats sometimes let slip — the negative side of, I think, the liberal personality — can be a kind of contempt, a kind of smugness. This is why Hillary Clinton’s comment on deplorables was so damaging. How do you police that boundary?

This is where I take offense to JD Vance and “Hillbilly Elegy.” Those are my people. I come from a town of 400 — 24 kids in a class, 12 cousins, farming, those types of things. And I know they’re not weird. I know they’re not Donald Trump.

At this point, it’s obvious that Vance and Walz are trying to accomplish the same thing. They want you, the voter, to think of the other party as run by an outgroup. That outgroup should be familiar. They should be someone you’re annoyed with in your ordinary life. That outgroup should give you a visceral, felt target for the complex problems of your country.

Logically, the most important question is whether it's plausible to blame either scapegoat for the country’s problems. Does either VP’s diagnosis ring true? An equivalent question: how believable is it to blame the problems of the country on childless cat ladies or crazy MAGA uncles? Can we really draw a direct line of causation from either of them to the geopolitical and economic turmoil of the entire country? No. That’s ridiculous. The weird aunt or uncle are simply not the ones with the power to destroy our country. Why they may share attributes with the opposing parties politicians, attributes which may genuinely annoy you in your interactions with them, the median childless cat lady or crazy MAGA uncle simply isn’t deciding the fate of the US.

The logic of cause and effect is precisely the wrong way to think about the magic of the scapegoat. French historian Rene Girard, an influence on both Vance and Peter Thiel, observed that throughout history, conflicts escalated based on mimesis, or the copying of behaviors. As Vance and Walz copy each other and copy past political scandals, they amplify the power of those scandals. The culmination and resolution of these scandals do not come through an accurate assessment of causation. Instead, this process inevitably leads to choosing an innocent scapegoat to sacrifice for the scandal that both parties have contributed to. 

This phenomenon can be seen quite clearly in political passions or in the frenzy of scandal that now possesses our "globalized" world. When a really seductive scandal comes near, the scandalized are irresistibly tempted to "profit" from it and to gravitate toward it. The condensation of all the separated scandals into a single scandal is the paroxysm of a process that begins with mimetic desire and its rivalries. These rivalries, as they multiply, create a mimetic crisis, the war of all against all. The resulting violence of all against all would finally annihilate the community if it were not transformed, in the end, into a war of all against one, thanks to which the unity of the community is reestablished.

THE VICTIM OF MIMETIC SNOWBALLING is chosen by the contagion itself; he or she is substituted for all the other victims that the crowd could have chosen if things had happened differently.

Both VPs understand that the country is looking for a scapegoat. Their shared understanding is that the music will stop playing, and someone will be left standing without a chair. Vance hopes that’s the childless cat lady. Walz hopes it's the crazy MAGA uncle. 

One might assume that the more our VP candidates have in common, the more clean their contest will be. Girard tells us that the opposite is true. Similarity brews ferocity. 

Two households, both alike in dignity,

In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

~ William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet