JD Vance’s repeated attacks on Haitian immigrants have prompted a common refrain from Democrats — that he and former President Donald Trump are “scapegoating” immigrants by trying to shift industrial blame for the real problems in Springfield, Ohio.
Indeed, the Republican flag is a scapegoat for Haitian immigrants. But especially for Vance, there’s probably nothing random or impulsive about it. In his own op-ed, the GOP vice presidential candidate has clearly articulated the power — and potential dangers — of scapegoating, casting “attempts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto the victim” as “a moral failure that reflects violently on someone else.” “
But now, as he surveys Springfield, Vance seems to see the scapegoat in a different light: as a powerful political tool in the Republican bid to retake the White House.
Vance’s previous writings about scapegoating also called into question his claim that he is merely trying to draw attention to the worsening humanitarian crisis in Springfield. Rather, Vance appears to be putting his past of scapegoating into practice, with potentially dangerous consequences for the people of Springfield.
Vance’s familiarity with the conservative discourse of scapegoating comes primarily from his relationship with Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, whom Vance met in 2011 at Yale Law School and later became a sort of spiritual mentor and professional protégé for Vance.
During their friendship, Thiel introduced Vance to the work of French literary theorist René Girard, whom Thiel studied at Stanford University in the late 1980s and whom Thiel has since cited as a major influence on his political and religious thought. (Girard has become an increasingly popular figure in the conservative intellectual milieu Vance inhabits.) In fact, Girard’s influence on Vance was so profound that Vance has credited Girard’s work with making him reconsider. [his] faith” by converting to Catholicism in 2019.
So what did Vance learn from Girard about looking for a scapegoat?
Girard, a practicing Catholic who immigrated to the United States from France in 1947, was best known among intellectuals for his theory of “mimetic desire”—the idea that people want things because they see other people want the same things. Think of a child on the playground who wants to play with a certain toy because he sees his friend playing with it first.
For Girard, this structure of desire formed the basis of all human society, religion, and art: Over time, competing desires for limited resources gave rise to personal rivalry and social conflict that ultimately led to unmitigated violence. Eventually, Girard argued, societies developed ways to resolve these conflicts using what he called a “scapegoat mechanism”: The society would select an individual or group that had harmed the larger community in some way, where they would be ritually punished, often by killing them. Punishing the scapegoat for his limited crimes thus became a means of resolving the deeper tensions and rivalries of the social order. (In some cases, an animal such as a goat could serve as a sacrificial offering – hence the term “scapegoat”.)
But this whole ritual dynamic, Girard argued, collapsed with the advent of Christianity. For Girard, Jesus Christ played the prototypical scapegoat, but with one crucial difference: Unlike the traditional scapegoat, who had actually harmed the community in some concrete but limited way, Jesus was completely innocent of the crimes against the social order for which he was punished. him, and yet he willingly submitted to death at the hands of the Roman authorities. In Girard’s accounts, the gospel stories thus exposed the scapegoating mechanism for what it really was: a mask of violence where the real moral cause was the cause of the scapegoats.
Vance has clearly – and even eloquently – considered Girard’s theory of scapegoating. Vance wrote of Girard in a 2019 article about his conversion to Catholicism: “In the Christian narrative, the ultimate scapegoat has not wronged civilization; civilization has wronged him. The victim of mob madness is, as Christ was, infinitely powerful—capable of preventing his own murder—and wholly innocent—undeserving of the mob’s rage and violence.” Vance wrote a summary of the religious significance of Girard’s theory: “In Christ we see our efforts to transfer our guilt and our own inadequacies onto the victim for what they are: a moral failure violently projected onto someone else. Christ is the scapegoat who exposes our imperfections and forces us to look at our own shortcomings instead of blaming the chosen victims of our society.”
In the same essay, Vance even pondered the relevance of Girard’s theory to today’s world: “In the quagmire of social media, we identified a scapegoat and attacked digitally. We were keyboard warriors tearing people down via Facebook and Twitter, blind to our own problems. We fought for jobs we didn’t really want and pretended we weren’t fighting for them at all. Girard’s lesson was also personal for Vance: “The end result [of all this competition] At least for me, the fact that I had lost the language of virtue. I felt more shame about failing my law degree exam than losing my temper with my girlfriend.”
This realization made Vance change his mind: “It all had to change. It was time to stop making scapegoats and focus on what I could do to make things better.”
Five years after writing these lines, Vance appears to have reversed course. Why? Girard’s researchers can offer one possible answer. Although Girard has never said so directly, some of his interpreters have argued that Girard’s idea of Christian ethics – which in theory offers an alternative to ritual violence as a basis for social cohesion – cannot in practice serve as a basis for a vast, complex and modern society. As one Girard scholar has written, “The Gospel story is not a myth that unifies the entire social order.” In other words, while an elite-minded minority may adopt Christianity as their guiding ethic, the majority of mass society still requires some form of ritual violence to preserve itself. According to this formulation, scapegoating is not only inevitable, but also beneficial because it builds social cohesion among large, otherwise disparate groups of people.
Vance has not explicitly endorsed this idea, but echoes of it can be seen in Vance’s past comments about the founding of the American nation. For example, unlike other New Right political figures such as Missouri GOP Senator Josh Hawley, who has openly called on Americans to embrace Christian nationalism, Vance tends to shy away from talking about Christianity as the foundation of American society. Instead, he relies on a vision of American national identity rooted in attachment to particular places, family, and clan—which Vance’s critics have argued is little more than a thinly veiled form of nationalism. As Vance said in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in July, “People don’t just fight and die for principles. They go and fight and die for the future of their homes, their families, their children.”
And if mass society needs some ritualized violence to sustain itself, Vance seems willing to let it play out — after defending his comments even after several Springfield schools and municipal buildings were evacuated due to bomb threats. (Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has since said some of the threats came from “foreign actors,” though his office has not specified their origin.) Meanwhile, the city’s Haitian residents — many of whom are there legally through a federal resettlement program — have faced a rapid increase in threats and harassment. growth.
At least on a subconscious level, Vance seems aware of his role in raising the stakes of the conflict.
“If I have to create stories so that the American media really pay attention to the suffering of the American people, that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance said in an interview with CNN on Sunday. He later clarified that he meant he was “creating an American media that would focus on it,” but the proposition was the same: Vance is deliberately inciting conflict to foster cohesion among his native political base, even if it leads to the very real threat of violence against Springfield’s foreigners.
Meanwhile, the Girardian undertones of Vance’s comments have become impossible to ignore. Vance has repeatedly cited the baseless allegation that Haitian immigrants kidnap and kill residents’ pets and wildlife — a kind of perverse cartoonish reenactment of the scapegoat myth — as a symbol of the harmful effects of immigration on American life. In response, he’s encouraged his followers to flood the internet with memes of Trump protecting cats and ducks — “meme,” which is, of course, a derivative of the same word as “mimetic,” meaning something that grows through replication.
In summary, Vance and his allies have fomented a meme-driven competition for limited social resources that now verges on violence against a minority group, all in the service of repairing the communal basis of national greatness. It’s a scene ripped straight from Girard’s pages – but the reality could prove far messier than the theory.
