Identitarianism

[A]t the core of Vanceonomics is a preferential option for government intervention. Vance, for example, has spoken in favor of raising the federal minimum wage and even supported to that effect as a senator, despite the well-documented negative economic that such raises have on the job prospects of younger, poorer, and less-educated Americans.

This is not the only area in which Vance’s economic position aligns with the preferences of American progressives. Vance’s support for expansive antitrust laws that go far beyond the consumer welfare standard, which assesses the impact of proposed mergers and conduct on consumers, places him in the same camp as Senator Elizabeth Warren and former Federal Trade Commissioner Lina Khan, the latter of whom Vance once as “doing a pretty good job.”

Past and present advocates of expansive applications of antitrust insist that such measures ensure that large corporations don’t destroy market competition by leveraging their greater resources to establish monopolies by crushing medium- and small-sized businesses that might become potential rivals. In the past, Vance’s opposition to what Justice William O. Douglas once “The Curse of Bigness” was particularly directed against big tech companies. In February 2024, for example, Vance for the breakup of Google.

Vance’s antitrust views directly clash with long-standing critiques of expansive antitrust advanced by scholars such as, and. They pointed out that U.S. antitrust laws have been characterized by vaguely worded statutes and complex case law that introduce excessive uncertainty into the economy by making standard business practices, such as exclusive contracting, potentially unlawful. The subsequent shift towards the consumer welfare standard in court decisions from the late-1970s onwards simplified matters by focusing attention upon what really matters: the principle of consumer sovereignty, thereby limiting the type of government interventions that actually competition in the name, perversely enough, of preventing monopolies.

By contrast, Vance’s antitrust views downplay the extent to which more expansive understandings of such laws have been weaponized by companies to undermine existing competitors, but also by government officials seeking to punish businesses that refuse to cooperate with whoever is in the White House. Presidents ranging from to have gone down that path.

There is reason to be concerned that Vance might bring that outlook to the conduct of economic policy more generally. The vice-president has, after all, associated himself with those conservatives who have adopted the New Right’s friend-enemies logic to legitimize using the state to punish one’s political opponents. Penalizing people for their political views is hardly the purpose of, for instance, tax policy in any society that takes the rule of law seriously. Yet there have been occasions when Vance has expressed a desire to raise taxes on specific groups because of what he [sees] as their willingness to side with a “global oligarchy” instead of the United States.

Since Good’s shooting, facts have incrementally emerged that point to both the excessiveness of Agent Ross’s use of force and to his intent. Exhaustive reporting has helped establish many of the circumstances surrounding the Jan. 7 shooting, including through a multi-angle, step-by-step analysis of the incident. It’s a good start in determining whether the force was unreasonable. The fact that agents had been able to pass by Good’s vehicle; that Good was clearly turning her steering wheel and vehicle away from the agents at the time shots were fired; that there was a notable gap between Agent’s Ross’s body and the vehicle, at least at the time of the second and third shots; that he was the only agent on the scene to even attempt to use any kind of force—all indicate that resorting to deadly force was not reasonable under the circumstances. Prosecutors would, of course, want to test, corroborate, and build on that evidence through, among other things, ballistics analysis, complete autopsy and medical reports, and witnesses accounts. Definitively establishing where the agent was positioned when he fired the shot that, according to an independent medical pathologist’s report, struck the left side of Good’s head and likely killed her, will be critical.

The more difficult question, as in so many of these cases, is one of intent. Prosecutors must prove the agent’s thinking and motivation. To this end, there is evidence that Agent Ross did not view Ms. Good as an imminent physical threat. Multiple videos show, for instance, that Agent Ross’s own vehicle was able to get around Ms. Good’s SUV, that he chose to walk around the front of Ms. Good’s vehicle (thereby exposing himself to possible harm, and against DHS policy) with one hand occupied by a cell phone, and that, just prior to the shooting, Ms. Good told the agents, “I’m pulling out.” Other evidence suggests that Agent Ross may have shot because he felt annoyed or disrespected by Ms. Good and her partner, rather than out of fear for his safety. The former are improper motivations that would support § 242’s willfulness prong. From the outset, for example, videos show that Ms. Good and her partner stopped their SUV in the street and honked the horn repeatedly in apparent protest of the ICE agents. Additionally—and courtesy of the agent’s own cellphone video, which importantly provides a view of the incident from his perspective—we can hear Ms. Good say, “That’s fine dude, I’m not mad at you,” and her partner sarcastically tell Agent Ross to “go get yourself some lunch, big boy.” Perhaps giving a window into his irritation at these remarks or Ms. Good’s attempt to drive away, Agent Ross muttered after firing his weapon at her, “fcking btch.” He walked away from Ms. Good’s SUV, which had by that point crashed into a parked vehicle (a clear sign that Ms. Good was injured or dead), and gestured to someone else to “call 911.”

Together, these facts are more than enough to show the allegation that Agent Ross willfully used excessive force when he shot Ms. Good is a serious one. And because that allegation, if proven, would constitute a violation of federal law, it is wholly appropriate to open a formal investigation into the shooting. (Indeed, it is no wonder that an initial FBI review reportedly concluded that opening an investigation was justified.)

Based on what has been publicly released, the whole interaction between Good, Ross, and the other ICE officials was a series of unforced errors by the government. The entire encounter, even accounting for Ross’s own footage, illustrates the general lack of professionalism with which ICE has operated over the past few months and its abandonment of its own internal policies.

This article will not wade into the debate over whether deadly force was justified at the exact moment Ross fired into the vehicle (that debate will largely focus on a narrow legal question—did he have a reasonable belief that Good would use her car as a weapon to hit him—in a manner that will frustrate many observers, and should rely on a much larger tranche of evidence than many observers realize). Because even if Ross’s deadly force was justified in the moment he fired his weapon, what much of the nation has now seen was not professionalized or situationally appropriate law enforcement. It was a series of incredibly bad choices leading to an unnecessary death. At every step which led to the fatal trigger press, ICE could have behaved differently. It could have behaved more tactically. It could have behaved more humanely. The nation—to say nothing of Renee Nicole Good’s family—deserves an honest accounting of why it did not. […]

Minnesota defines a peace officer as “an employee of a political subdivision [i.e. a local municipality] or state law enforcement agency,” and only grants their federal counterparts arrest authorities for the purposes of state and local violations when a number of conditions are met. The most important of these prerequisites requires that the federal officer be on duty, acting at the request of a local or state officer, and operating pursuant to the supervision of that local or state officer. At this point, neither ICE management nor any executive branch officials have argued that these conditions were met; indeed, the tenor and tone of statements by the Minneapolis mayor and Minnesota governor would certainly suggest otherwise. The proper remedy, then, for Good’s obstruction of traffic would have simply been for the ICE officers to request that local police join in the response and facilitate the movement of her vehicle.

But let’s put this argument aside, for the moment.

Some political disputes are impossible to resolve because they involve fundamental principles—and, in some cases, fundamentally American principles: The fight over abortion, for example, pits one libertarian argument (for women’s individual bodily autonomy) against another libertarian argument (for the bodily autonomy of the unborn), at the root of which is a disagreement over a question of fact (whether there is a second individual with rights to consider). Some disputes are difficult but not impossible to resolve because they involve good-faith disagreements over preferences and priorities: Americans who are more risk averse tend to prefer a larger and more expensive welfare state and are willing to trade some quality and innovation in medical care in exchange for more certainty about prices and access to care, whereas Americans who are less risk averse are more open to approaches based on market operations, competition, and consumer choice. There is not really a correct or incorrect level of risk aversion, objectively speaking: We have different preferences based on our own situations, our own experiences, and our own temperaments. And that is precisely the kind of situation in which it is possible to come up with solutions based on, or at least adjacent to, that Pareto concept: When something is very important to the other side and not very important to you, that is the place to give in—and when something is very important to you but not very important to the other side, that is an opportunity for getting your own way.

But when political failure—or political treachery—is defined as cooperating with the other side or by giving the other side anything of importance to its partisans, then there is no room for compromise or consensus-building. At this political moment, Republicans are particularly perverse: If a Republican leader manages to win some Democratic support for a Republican proposal, this is taken by the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world as an indictment rather than as evidence of basic political skill on the simpleton’s theory that if the Democrats are for it, then it must be bad. Greene may be trying to rehabilitate her reputation lately, but that remains her fundamental orientation.

I have a sense, admittedly based on nothing more than subjective evaluation, that the Trump movement already is over, and that what we are seeing today is only its death twitches before rigor mortis starts setting in. A movement based on entirely negative deliverables—Épater la bourgeoisie!—is naturally going to be a short-lived thing. If my sense is correct, then this is a ripe moment—if anybody has the wit to make something of it. Doing that starts with looking across the table and starting the conversation: “Okay, then—what do you want?”

Agrowing network of churches, publishers, podcasts, and conferences in the United States and Europe has begun to “just ask questions.” These “questions” are about things like the “traditional narrative” regarding National Socialism and the Holocaust, the benefits of “race realism” and “ethnically homogeneous communities,” and whether interracial marriage or interracial adoption should be censured and considered “relatively sinful.”

Skinheads and Klansmen we have long had with us. What has happened over the last decade is something else, something more disturbing: it is an intellectual and indeed theological retrieval of racial supremacist and separatist ideas within Christian circles. As we exit what British historian Alec Ryrie has called the “Age of Hitler” – that is, the age when simply identifying an idea as fascist or Nazi was enough to discredit someone – we find ourselves needing to do something that has not been necessary since the Second World War: we must vocally refute and resist racial supremacy and narrowly exclusivist and hateful ethnonationalism. In this resistance, we must argue as Christians. And, increasingly, we must argue against other Christians – or at least against people who profess the name of Christ.

There are few better allies in this task than the French Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac. […]

The Jesuit theologian Pedro Descoqs, under whom de Lubac studied, famously defended Maurras. For Descoqs, and many Catholics at the time, an alliance with Maurras’s secular political movement was conceivable because of a reading of Thomas Aquinas that took his distinctions between the truths of supernatural revelation and the truths of natural reason to insinuate that supernatural considerations are not relevant to the political sphere. This drew on the Aristotelian idea that all natural beings are ordered to ends they can attain by their own powers. Maurras thus distinguished “political facts” from moral and religious realities, promoting a strict separation between orders of religion and politics. Descoqs defended Maurras, saying that his system dealt with this-worldly matters that need not be shaped by theological considerations. Religious considerations were increasingly deemed irrelevant to broader society and politics.

In Descoqs’s affirmation of Maurras, de Lubac sensed that Descoqs abandoned both the supernatural claims and the social demands of Christianity, thus becoming an ally of secularism. According to de Lubac, Maurras and his ilk opened the way to a Nietzschean “brutal return to instinct.” They celebrated base affections, fanning them into flame as “natural” aspects of human existence, and resisting the reformation of those “instincts” according to Christian revelation. In this, de Lubac sensed the legacy of Nietzsche, whose genius was his appeal to the desire for greatness. However, this desire for greatness was promoted to stoke hatred between groups, resulting in an interpretation of history as what de Lubac called a “war between the races,” which was antithetical to the universalism of the Christian faith, the call to charity, and the path of renunciation enshrined in the cross. De Lubac saw Nazism as a form of neopaganism that sought “to corrupt Christianity from the inside, paganize it, strip it of its universalism, its charity, and its sense of the cross.” De Lubac argued that the Nietzschean “racist faith” of the Nazis, which he described as a “myth of blood,” needs to be opposed by “our Christian and Catholic faith.”