This week, Politico revealed the contents of Young Republican leaders’ group chats, which were filled with rampant bigotry, endorsements of rape, and praise for a certain fascist dictator (“I love Hitler”).
Some Republicans, including those who have directly employed the people in these chats, condemned these messages. But Vice President J. D. Vance had a different, and more telling, response. “I refuse to join the pearl clutching,” he posted on X defiantly.
When a political ally does something controversial, there are three ways to respond: defend it, repudiate it, or deflect attention away from it. Defense is the obvious option if you think the action is acceptable enough to the public. Repudiation makes sense if the matter is so toxic that you can’t afford to keep the guilty party in your coalition.
Deflection is the response of choice only when the behavior of an ally is too toxic to defend, but so widespread within your coalition that you cannot afford to criticize it.
Deflection can take different forms. You can insist that the story does not merit attention, because other issues are more important (as if the public can entertain only one subject at a time). Alternatively, you might claim that the offenders in question are too powerless to be held publicly accountable. Vance employed both tactics. “Grow up! I’m sorry; focus on the real issues. Don’t focus on what kids say in group chats,” he said on The Charlie Kirk Show. This despite the fact that the participants included people in their 30s, and many work as high-level staffers in Republican politics.
A decade or so ago, as illiberal norms were spreading in progressive spaces such as universities, deflection was by far the most popular way for Democrats to address the subject. Why focus on the excesses of the left when the right is doing worse things?, many progressives would insist, as if the awfulness of the other side precludes ever criticizing one’s own. Or they’d say the troublemakers were just young people—“college students” was a common shorthand—doing silly things they’d soon outgrow. It was never true that left-wing illiberalism was confined to campuses, or that campus illiberalism was confined to students, but the pretense was useful for purposes of deflections.
If progressive illiberalism had been confined to a handful of unruly teenagers, cutting them loose would have been easy enough. The fact that allies were so reluctant to repudiate leftist cancel culture was itself a sign that these illiberal ideas weren’t marginal. The reliance on deflection was a sign of underlying changes within the progressive coalition, which suddenly included a lot of radical, illiberal activists whose ideas and rhetoric alarmed the general public.
This dynamic is now playing out on the right. Yet the rhetoric in the Republican chats is far more disturbing, in both its nature and its influence.
That a group of ambitious professional Republicans can spread nakedly racist messages without rebuke signifies the transformation of conservative political norms in the Trump era. Party members now regularly engage in what the political commentator Richard Hanania has called the “based ritual,” a kind of game of rhetorical one-upsmanship. The only professional risk they perceive is being seen as insufficiently devoted to the MAGA cult. Displays of devotion involve espousing authoritarian, racist, and sexist concepts.
Given Vance’s evident ambitions to succeed Donald Trump as the Republican standard-bearer, his response is revealing.
The vice president apparently grasps that openly defending references to Black people as “watermelon eaters” and quips about sending political rivals “to the gas chamber” would hurt his political standing, but he also clearly needs these Young Republican leaders if he hopes to consolidate the Trump base behind him. Deflection is a calculated response. In the racist provocations of conservative cadres, Vance clearly sees the future of the party he intends to lead.
