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July 20, 2024 - 4:15pm
Usha Vance’s Republican National Convention speech this week, in which she introduced her husband J.D. Vance, marked a rare foray into conservative politics for the esteemed attorney.
Years ago, she was considered something of a liberal darling, the subject of glowing profiles from the likes of MSNBC following the success of J.D. Vance’s bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. But as her husband’s political profile grew, and he went from a critic of Donald Trump to a MAGA ally, she found herself increasingly frozen out of the elite liberal circles in which she once mixed.
As a high-achieving female attorney at a progressive law firm and the daughter of immigrant parents, Usha Vance was widely assumed to be a liberal or a centrist by her peers, per a New York Times piece from 2022. Indeed, she’s been conspicuously quiet about her political beliefs throughout her career and was registered as a Democrat in 2014, though she has since changed her affiliation to the GOP and made two donations to Senate candidate Blake Masters, a favourite of the populist New Right and a friend of J.D. Vance.
Her husband’s recent political rise has alienated her from some of her colleagues. Ahead of the 2021 wedding of a high-profile law professor’s daughter — as Vance’s Senate campaign was gaining national attention — multiple guests asked not to be seated near the Vances.
Soon after, Usha starred in a 2022 campaign ad for Vance, praising him as a husband and father while avoiding overtly political topics. In response, her colleagues at the progressive law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson told the NYT they were “confused and disappointed” that she had supported him during his pro-Trump rebrand.
Like her husband, Usha attended Yale Law School. She went on to work as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, the court’s most moderate conservative. Supreme Court clerkships are among the most coveted jobs in the legal profession and can yield a $500,000 signing bonus upon moving to a major law firm, as she then did.
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SubscribeThese so called liberals are seriously pathetic
They’re sh.t and they know it
“This is what they do.” From the movie Tears of the Sun starring Bruce Willis.
Mannerless bigots. Not my idea of a Liberal.
It is easy to pretend to be liberal when it comes to recognising the humanity of others because of a difference of skin colour and wittering on about being kind when it costs nothing and is simply conformist behaviour in your circle. It is rather harder to be liberal when your unexamined ideas are challenged – then kindness and decency are forgotten and the inner Brownshirt emerges.
Simple case of being afraid to have your views tested. Easy to be dismissive and condescending when your opponent is a beer drinking truck driver. More of a challenge when they are smarter than you; better to shun them.
My money is still on the beer drinking truck driver to speak more sense though!
Tribalism and Dogma. Eternally ugly.
The author has laid out very clearly with example after example of how utterly illiberal, hate fuelled and racist these leftist are. So please stop calling them liberal. It’s not a minor point.
Yes, there is liberal left, but it has no power on the left.
You are absolutely correct.
Matt Taibbi’s Substack article last week, “The slow-Motion Assassination” references a quote from Plutarch about Caesar, saying that he, (Caesar) “…became odious to moderate men through the extravagance of the titles and powers that were heaped upon him.”
It strikes me that that concept of “moderation” amongst Caesars murderers, Trump’s visceral haters, and the newly forged critics of Usha and her husband, has no characteristic of modesty, or reasonableness. It’s essentially definitive of the odious envy that is often a trait of the less talented, so many of who reside in the social backwash which is the ideological Left.
Is it possible to moderate one’s contempt for a rapist fraudster (a convicted petty criminal) and his/her associates?
The problem is Mac, that all those characteristics have been bestowed on Trump with extremely dubious credibility, to put it mildly.
Havent you heard? The left celebrates gang rape these days, if the rapists have the right skin colour / religion.
…and showing contempt for the wrong kind of rapist can land you in jail in the west: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/06/28/german-woman-given-harsher-sentence-than-rapist-for-calling/
This shows how intolerant and regressive the “progressives” are. Melania Trump was no high flying attorney like Vance but they get the same backwards treatment: the assumption that they hold the same political views as their other halves.
Since when did saying “I do” mean a woman’s brain shrivelling up and falling out of her earhole like dried wax, to be replaced by a carbon copy of her husband’s?
It’s so insulting.
Most sane people hold the same views as Usha and Melanie’s other halves.
Quite right. Also the implied assumption that IF they don’t share their husband’s politics that they must be bad people anyway as otherwise they would have nothing to do with them. After all no decent person could love a MAGAite / Tory etc.
Indeed. See ‘mac mahmood”s comment above: a perfect demonstration of that.
Given that she did a campaign ad for her husband, it’s a reasonable assumption that she agrees with his political views, even if the ad was very generalised. I mean, was the message supposed to be: “I disagree my husband politically, so I’ll either not vote at all or vote for his opponent, but YOU should vote for him”?
Even if they do hold the same opinions as their husbands they still do not deserve to be treated with such intolerence and spite. Nobody does.
Just like a run-down seedy neighborhood, the old Republican Party lost its soul a few decades past. Trump came in like a noisy disruptive bulldozer and knocked down the whole thing. Now we are seeing a younger generation beginning to “move into” and rehabilitate the old “neighborhood”. Vance and many others like him are going to build some alternative to the Democratic establishment, which has also lost its soul but doesn’t know it yet. It will take perhaps a decade before the new young Republicans come fully into their own and it will be all uphill against a crazed but powerful opposition. Their advantage lies in that they are looking for answers to big problems while their opponents are obsessed with big answers to little problems.
I guess some of these liberals expected Usha to divorce her husband as soon as he ran for office as a Republican. Or if not then, once he endorsed Trump.
The whole ‘first wife” thing with male politicians is abhorrent. The handholding, the adoring glances are so fake. Why do smart women let themselves be no better than a WAG?
Victoria Beckham? Odd thing to say. She was a very successful pop singer as “Posh Spice” in her own right before she met David Beckham. And has been a very successful fashion designer under her own brand (I don’t know whether she actually does a lot of the “design” part or just hires staff). She is in no ways the inferior partner in that particular relationship.
Yes, you’re probably right. I’ve edited to WAG, which may or may not be more acceptable.
…I’d say Michelle is a better example that Vicky.
Someday, Lizzie, you might find some idiot stupid enough to marry you. I actually doubt that this will happen. Persons in successful marriages help each other. Sometimes one person sacrifices for the other. There is no magic formula.
I don’t care whatever anyone involved politics is targeting someone’s home, particularly when there are children involved is vile behaviour.
Well – the oddest thing for me in this short piece is that $500,00 ‘signing on bonus’. I’d be very comfortable being yarn-bombed with that as a recompense. Surreal times.
I doubt if the Vance family are very concerned about the boorish behaviour of some of their neighbours but I hope they skipped the wedding.
I disagree. Its really really tough to know you are disliked by some amorphous mass of people on the left and your old colleagues, but it’s actually painful to have neighbours “yarn bomb” your property. In effect signs have been put up around your property saying “Hate these people” and you know the people who did it live next door? That’s very unsettling.
Really shocking, I would have thought it was illegal, and if not it ought to be.
Gosh. Those neighbours and colleagues at her law firm seem horrible people.
The left is unfailingly small, petty, hypocritical and pathetic. I prefer not to notice them, being unworthy of the effort.
Gosh. They are criticism this high achieving woman for supporting her husband because they don’t like his politics. Gosh.
The correct word for these Democrat liberals is Puritans. They are the literal descendants of the new England settlers who affixed the Scarlet A to Hester Prine’s dress to show how virtuous they are. Their behavior has not changed in 300 years. They despise the Scotch Irish peasants who make up the white part of mid America. They get even madder when Scotch Irish whites ally with Indians, blacks and Mexicans. These are supposed to be the people who fawn on Puritans as benefactors and applaud their evident virtue.
Poor woman, she did not ask for this, nor does she deserve to be defined by her husbands actions.
This article has shocked me, though I suppose it should’nt have. What horrible behaviour by Usha Vance’s neighbours in DC, and such intolerence from her colleagues.
America really does seem to be in a lot of trouble.