Thread by @DrLisaCorrigan

Let's talk about JD Vance's approach in the debate. It's it's soft fash and it's a way of mainstreaming "traditional family" fascist aesthetics. A short 🧵:

1.) Soft speaking is prized as a rhetorical skill. It makes social violence more palatable (in the family and nation). It's more likely to draw women in (see also the pink tie). The contrast is when he talked over the female moderators and flashed anger at being fact-checked.

2.) His repeated strategy of pointing to alleged similarities to Walz is designed to move the Dems right and manufactures consent for the GOP agenda.

3.) Calling Walz by his first name produced an implied intimacy but also equality between the two men's accomplishments, despite the fact that Vance is wildly unqualified. He's the Dan Quayle of the moment.

4.) Trying to be chummy in a gentler voice produces a softer fash alongside the lies about his support for a pregnancy registry, a national abortion ban, and forced labor for grandma (who will now be raising the grandkids, despite the fact that he's slashing Medicare)

5.) Aesthetically, we see this in the fash women with Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her prairie dresses or with Casey DeSantis and her Disney princess schtick. Given the attention to Vance's goth eyeliner, the pink tie and soft speech attempted to normalize his violence.

6.) Given that Vance lies like he breathes, this was an attempt to create some aesthetic coherence to his completely unmoored and opportunistic politics. But you can't put lipstick on a pig, as we learned in 2008 (that was forever ago 🙄).

7.) Don't get it twisted, though: Vance is the most overtly bloodthirsty candidate at the top of a presidential ticket since Andrew Jackson.

8.) The sexual politics of fascism is actually quite widely studied & the extremely oppressive natalism, restrictions on contraception and abortion, support for misogynist violence, and anti-immigrant sentiment converge in race/sex panic to justify widespread violence.

9.) His wife functioned a prop to justify the hypermasculine worldview, particularly as he distanced himself from any responsibility for housework/childcare/balancing the family with labor. He doesn't see himself as a father but as a breeder with echoes of Musk & other fash dads.

9.) It's no wonder that they are all so preoccupied with the slur "cuck." It speaks to the internal dynamics of white masculinity in the fash moment. They're all so unmoored and anxious about being exposed.

10.) This was the dynamic at midcentury because J. Edgar Hoover had so much sexual dirt on men operating in the political sphere and he used it as interpersonal (and sometimes political) leverage against them.

11.) This dynamic around "cucks" is just insecure white masculinity peacocking for each other trying to outdo the most extreme version of themselves. This is why the contrast with Walz was painful at times to watch.

12.) The soft fash is a mask for the racial and sexual violence:

10.) It's no wonder that they are all so preoccupied with the slur "cuck." It speaks to the internal dynamics of white masculinity in the fash moment. They're all so unmoored and anxious about being exposed.

11.) This was the dynamic at midcentury because J. Edgar Hoover had so much sexual dirt on men operating in the political sphere and he used it as interpersonal (and sometimes political) leverage against them.

12.) This dynamic around "cucks" is just insecure white masculinity peacocking for each other trying to outdo the most extreme version of themselves. This is why the contrast with Walz was painful at times to watch. But soft fash is THE mask for the racial and sexual violence.