How Far Will Vice President Vance’s Conversions Take Him?

‘Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel …’ — Genesis 49:4Vice President Vance has an aptitude for conversions. His have involved politics, economics, history and religion, so far. Whatever his next one is will probably not be his last.One propelled him to Catholicism, from the Pentecostal Protestantism of his youth, through atheism. As the federal government’s “most senior Catholic” (his self-description) he, in the church since 2019, warned the pope to “be careful” when speaking “on matters of theology.” Leo XIV was careless (in Mr. Vance’s view) when criticizing the Iran war.Mr. Vance in scold mode has also reprimanded Chief Justice Roberts, who Mr. Vance says should be “extremely deferential” to President Trump. Probably a post-2024 conversion brought Mr. Vance to this view of the Supreme Court’s function.When interviewed concerning his book “Communion” about his religious conversion, Mr. Vance recalled that when he was a senator, his son, during a flight, dropped a cookie and said “shit.”Mr. Vance worried that people might think “I am apparently a terrible father because I’ve raised my kids, my 3-year-old, to use that language.”Five months ago this column listed examples of Mr. Vance’s many public vulgarities, as when he denounced a “dipshit” critic, and others who can “eat shit.” Five months is, however, plenty of time for a Vance conversion, this time to decorousness. In “Communion,” his new delicacy causes him to obscure the adjective “p***y.” So, presumably, he will not again talk of tech corporations telling a “bullshit story” about the need for more foreign workers.Christianity, Mr. Vance says, “is America’s creed.” His Christianity often dovetails with MAGA commandments. He says a “Christian statesman” must preserve “social cohesion.” This is code for restricting immigration. Something already has, Mr. Vance says, made America a place where “you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”Especially if you are properly descended. “I think,” Vance says, “the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America.” More “claim” (whatever that means) than most of today’s Americans, whose descendants arrived too late to fight. What conversion convinced Mr. Vance of this?Responding to Covid, Mr. Vance bought extra food and “one thousand rounds of ammunition.” Praise the Lord and pass the …Visiting the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, Mr. Vance told his hosts what he perhaps thought they were keen to hear: Today, Watergate would be only a “12-hour news story.” He said the real story was that “the deep state took down” Nixon. Mr. Vance — such a tease — did not explain how. What conversion convinced Mr. Vance of that? Has Mr. Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, always considered a president plotting to obstruct justice trivial? Or is this another convenient conversion, considering the president Mr. Vance so obediently serves?“I’ve always liked” Nixon, Mr. Vance said, because Nixon, like Mr. Vance, was a young senator, then a young vice president, who wrote books and was “hated by the media.” This narcissism as a rationale for historical revisionism did not impress National Review’s Dan McLaughlin, who says celebrating Nixon is part of Mr. Vance’s “ongoing effort to downplay the political success of Ronald Reagan.”Disparaging Reagan is a prerequisite for running in 2028 as Trumpism’s second wind. The political left, like the Trump-Vance administration, favors wielding uncircumscribed executive power to erase the distinction between public and private economic sectors. This administration has made the federal government an investor in 30 companies. And the administration’s Kulturkampf, Mr. Vance believes, has not gone far enough. He wants to “seize the endowments” of universities that he thinks are politically incorrect.Plasticity is part of the vice-presidential job description, but credit the sincerity of Mr. Vance’s conversion to Nixon celebration. Nixon, who gave America wage and price controls, might have favored, as do Mr. Vance and the socialist senator, Bernie Sanders, creating a sovereign wealth fund to expand socialism — the federal government purchasing equity stakes in artificial intelligence companies.Mr. Vance’s conversions include his recent discovery that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps wants to “turn over a new leaf.” Yet, then, before Ohio’s 2022 Senate election, Mr. Vance suddenly discovered that Trump is not “cultural heroin” and “America’s Hitler” but actually is Western civilization’s savior. Another in-the-nick-of-time, road-to-Damascus epiphany was that the 2020 election was “rigged,” so had he been vice president then, he would not have certified the results.Whether Mr. Vance has excelled as a result of his serial conversions is a matter of opinion. Yet certainly he has risen fast and far because he is as unstable as water.The Washington Post

How Far Will Vice President Vance’s Conversions Take Him?

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