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Am I correct in labeling Vance as Grey Tribe and not Maga?
They’re not mutually exclusive. He’s probably culturally grey/violet- one of the eccentric blue tribe subgroups(at some point red tribe subgroups like that need to be pointed at- they’re more real than either the grey or violet tribes). Maga is just a political agenda around immigration restriction and reshoring, that probably comes with some additional ideas like a certain degree of law and order and cultural conservatism.
WTF is violet?
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I think this piece by Vance gives a pretty good background on his perspective. He's firmly anti-libertarian and believes that the government should aggressively and proactively use its power to create good outcomes. "Good outcomes" in his book being largely family-centric rather than business-centric. He cares a lot about declining fertility rates for example.
The main thing that I think doesn't quite come through in that article is his high willingness to play hardball. For example he has advocated for defying court rulings that obstruct a new administration's ability to fire bureaucrats and replace them with their own people.
I don't know how you categorise "grey tribe" versus "MAGA" but I would say Vance combines Trump's willingness to defy norms and break the rules with a much more coherent and strategic sense of what he seeks to achieve by doing so.
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Left has been busy improving Vance's wikipedia page and turned Vance from a populist guy sympathetic to Grey Tribe / NRx ideas into a an alleged neoreactionary.
Welp, I wasn't sure about this Vance guy, but now I'm sold.
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Maybe a bit of everything, in different respects?
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Depends heavily on how you're reading the tribes. If they're about political allegiance or what clothes you wear, yeah. If they're about how you were raised and what things you value, it's... well, at least dependent on how much you trust Vance's story. His upraising and claimed norms are incredibly lower-middle-class Borderer, in a lot of ways that are pretty heavily opposed to Grey Tribe aspects and auspices, and not just in ways that are pandering to social conservatives.
But he's a politician, and his mouth is moving. So he's lying, it's just a matter of what direction.
As someone whose life story was a bit like Vance's (except in rural north Alabama instead of small town southern Ohio), it's weird. I grew up not really fitting in with the place (was too much of a nerd) and as an adult would rather hang out at the bar with your average blue tribe dilettante (I really like smart right wingers and or grey tribe types, but they're rare in my local college town social scene and or keep their mouths shut. I'd much rather talk to a liberal lawyer/law student than some low-info Boomer Gen X Reaganite or Trumper who hasn't updated their talking points since the 1990s.) than your local rednecks (I can talk enough about cars and football to fit in, though, and one of our regulars was impressed that I was the first non-tradesperson he'd met who knew what a glazier is.), but I don't really share their values. Somehow, in spite of not having been raised in the church, I turned out a fairly conservative person. I don't know what separates me from the average hicklib (There are plenty of those to be found in an SEC college town scene.), but at some point in my late teens/early 20s I felt it necessary to forgive my classmates for not having accepted me, to thank my teachers for what they did do, and while I'm not a churchgoer I've made my peace with God. Most of the people in the ruralville I'm from are decent and mean well, and as for the ones who aren't, there's trash everywhere I guess.
As for the borderer stuff, I don't know if Vance was or wasn't hamming some things up (The gist of his family having been part of the Great Migration strikes me as accurate, and while my father's side aren't from Appalachia they did migrate from the south to the rust belt and have been badly hurt by that area's economic decline and their own dysfunctions. My mom's side were the hillbillies, and apparently meeting them was something of a culture shock to my dad who'd grown up middle class in the Midwest.), but he nailed the toxic push-pull relationship between Mom and Mamaw (I do not believe that he was lying about that.) such that I was unprepared for that trip down memory lane and spent some time in tears.
I will say that I sympathize deeply with Vance's reactionary streak, even if I'm not sure (and I don't know if he's sure either) what the answer is.
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Venture capitalist Thiel acolyte, Ivy grad, married an Indian woman he met in grad school.
"He's literally me, but pudgier and with a better beard."
I'm calling him as grey, but also a bit of a chameleon who conveniently goes along with what's popular.
He looks eerily like Adam Scott (the obnoxious new manager) in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
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