Essential POV

Percentage of "normie" conservatives and libertarians who claim that Iran had no effect on the election: 0% Percentage of NatCons, Postliberals, and Vanceguard types who refuse to utter the word "tariff" in their election postmortems and wish to focus solely on Iran: 100%

This video explains a lot of what we've seen playing out over the last two years. And the last 72 hours. Vance is in fact intensely loyal to someone. It's just not Trump.

My first interaction with Megan Bashem was when she divebombed onto one of my threads about libertarian economic critiques of postliberalism. She intentionally and maliciously mischaracterized my position as a defense of "weed and porn," issues I had not said a word about, and then incited a sewer of her anonymous bots and sockpuppets on me to flood the replies with pure bigotry. When I pointed out that she had attributed stances to me that I never took, Megan spent the entire next week doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on her original lie...and obsessively repeating it in my mentions, all layered over with moralizing harangues that added to the original lie. She is a deeply sinful and disturbed person. And while I pray that one day she realizes the errors of her ways, the best thing you can do for her right now is to block her from your feed.

The results on Tuesday amounted to a direct and unambiguous voter repudiation of the "populist" economic nationalism represented by JD Vance and the NatCon/Postliberal/New Right. Voters rejected tariffs. They rejected the admin's failure to do anything about affordability. They rejected stubbornly persistent inflation, fueled by runaway spending extravaganzas out of Washington. They rejected the culture of cronyism and corruption around the White House's "industrial policy" initiatives, trade deals, and taking of public ownership in private companies. No other issue came close in the exit polls - not immigration, not crime, not even the Iran War (which was unpopular in its own way, but only added fuel to the raging tariff and affordability fire). Vance knows this, as do the Vanceguard loyalists who latched themselves onto him. But they can't admit it, because to do so would obliterate their political careers and their only channel for securing White House patronage. They already put 100% of their eggs in the populist-economic nationalist basket. That basket crashed on Tuesday and is now a soggy, putrid, rotting mess. But they can't say so because they don't have anything else to go to. So what are they doing instead? They're trying to deflect away from the economic problems (and economics-adjacent corruption problem) by making the entire narrative into the Iran war and nothing but the Iran war. To be clear: the Iran war *was* unpopular, and its bungled execution in particular weighed down the GOP. But it was only a secondary issue behind the deeper economic grievances, all of which predated the Iran war's outbreak in early 2026 and all of which had already taken a substantial toll on the admin's approval rating. But there's also something malicious in Vance's attempted flex here. He was part of the admin's decision to go to war. At times he was a dissenting part from particulars of its execution, at other times he was fully on board. But he owns that blunder too, and is now trying to rewrite the narrative in a way that (a) exempts himself from any culpability for Iran and (b) completely ignores the voter repudiation of his populist-nationalist economic agenda. Both moves are deeply disingenuous, and reveal Vance's own personal character defects as well as his unseemly political alliances. As his post-election comment hinted, his attempt to shed culpability for Iran depends on recasting himself as the brave dissenting voice inside the administration who tried to get Trump to do the right thing but was hampered and blocked by other "bad actors" who led Trump astray. And who were those "bad actors"? Vance stops just short of saying it outright, but the very obvious wink-nod game he's playing is right there in his comments: Israel. He is intentionally stoking a conspiracy theory that portrays Trump as having been captured and misled by Israeli interests against his own better instincts, as opposed to the incontrovertible fact that Trump has always been an Iran-hawk going back to the Obama years, if not earlier. But Vance's goal here is to strengthen himself by rebranding as the "brave dissenter inside the WH who was unjustly thwarted" while also sending a signal to the antisemitic sewer full of Tucker Carlson conspiracists, groypers, and postliberal bigots that he's cultivated as the core of his political operations. But then there's still the second part of Vance's flex - burying the economic issues that were at the heart of voter discontent. This is a flex rooted in fanatical ideological attachment to economic nationalism, and to tariffs in particular. If 2026 is correctly seen as a voter repudiation of tariff-centric economic nationalism, then Vance's entire strategy for 2028 goes up in smoke. Vance's whole game - as articulated in his 2020 Claremont Institute essay on globalism, in numerous speeches since then, and in his new book Communion - is that conventional free-market economics are not wrong. He genuinely believes that free-market economics are the reason why the GOP can't win, and the main reason why it underperforms when it has the majority. Vance's answer to all of this, of course, is to jettison free-market economics and expel it from the conservative coalition. He has stated so openly for years. He also thinks that his alternative - a large socially conservative welfare state, tariff protectionism, industrial policy, and basically Viktor Orban's model from Hungary repurposed in the midwestern United States - is the key to winning nationally. His entire 2028 strategy amounts to this: "Free markets can't win in the Rust Belt - in fact they're the cause of the Rust Belt's problems. My economic nationalism and populist alternative can though. It will secure Donald Trump's victories in the Rust Belt swing states from 2016 and 2024, and will make them a permanent part of my own coalition. I am therefore your only choice if you want to win!" Except Tuesday completely and thoroughly shattered that myth. Republicans got obliterated in the Rust Belt, and tariffs were a key factor in their loss. Vance spent more time campaigning in his home state of Ohio than anywhere else. His handpicked candidates there all lost. In the other Rust Belt states (PA, WI, MI) as well as adjacent states like IA and MN, the GOP ticket got obliterated. And state-level polling in the region showed that tariffs were also to blame with 60-70% disapproval. At the same time, tariffs and economic nationalism bombed in other non-Rust Belt states where Vance's electoral argument didn't apply. Voters in Texas, South Carolina, Alaska, Georgia, Mississippi, and North Carolina - all red state strongholds until very recently - had no interest in the protectionist snake oil that Vance was selling, and at most only tolerated it in smaller doses from Trump's first term because his other economic policies were relatively sane. Going all in on economic nationalism (and sometimes pairing it with rampant corruption and sleazy candidates) played terribly among normal suburban Republican voters in these states. They were repulsed into staying home or, in some cases, even voting D. A Republican candidate cannot win nationally without Texas, and they probably can't afford to lose many, if any, of the smaller traditional red states. So Vance's economic strategy has a huge problem: it plays terribly in traditional conservative areas, and it doesn't deliver on what it promises in the Rust Belt (indeed, it backfired there). That means Vance and the Vanceguard's only remaining option is to not only ignore the economic lessons of Tuesday - it must actively bury them by gaslighting and deflection away from the central role that economic nationalism played in the GOP's midterm disaster.