On Gavin Newsom and the Thing That Should Actually Scare You

I want to say something about Gavin Newsom that I know will be unpopular in some quarters, and I don’t care.

In an interview with Jen Psaki today, he said JD Vance scares him — almost more than Trump. He said the people around Vance have a nihilism to the way they talk about the world. And then: “I know these guys. I literally know them, not figuratively know them. Some of them are in the book, knew them back when.”

I know these guys too. Not as well as Newsom. But I spent years in the same world. And what he’s describing — the nihilism, the contempt for democratic arrangements, the willingness to say quietly that democracy is an obstacle — that is real. It is a thing you can feel in a room when certain people enter it.

Now. The above-the-fray crowd will note the French Laundry dinner. The good hair. The political incentives. He is right, they will say, but for the wrong reasons. He is a fraud who happens to be correct.

This is moral aestheticization. The elevation of connoisseurship above commitment. It is what cowards do when they are too afraid to make a decision that might cost them something personally. The purity of the vessel becomes the condition for accepting the message. It feels like sophistication. It is not.

The truth Newsom is speaking stands regardless of his motives. You do not get to dismiss the data because you distrust the instrument.

I was reminded of this watching the Fifth Column‘s post-State of the Union episode. Kmele Foster, Matt Welch, Michael Moynihan — three smart men I have read and listened to for years. The hosts, broadly, could not understand why people like myself would pour opprobrium on the Olympic Men’s Hockey Team for prostrating themselves in service of our illegitimate president’s maintenance of his own power by spectacle. But I digress.

I will give Kmele minor credit. He steel-manned the moral case I would make. He saw it. He granted it. And then he declared himself outside the tent of social morality on this question. Which is itself the phenomenon I am describing — done honestly rather than disguised as neutrality. Welch and Moynihan didn’t get that far.

But the men who stood there at the State of the Union chose their access and their comfort over the republic that made those things possible. That is a moral fact. The sophisticated observer who cannot name it is making the same choice by different means.

Newsom is not neutral. He has skin in the game. He knows these people. He is naming what he sees. That is not performance. That is witness.

He is greatly underestimated. By everyone.

The Vance observation is the one that matters. Trump is chaos. He burns things. The damage is real. But Trump is not an architect.

Vance is an architect. The people around him are architects. They are not interested in burning the republic down. They are interested in rebuilding it as something else — something that wears the costume of the republic while hollowing out everything the republic was designed to protect.

That is the more durable threat. The demagogue who burns the cathedral leaves rubble you can see. The one who rebuilds it as a prison does something harder to name and harder to resist.

Newsom named it. I believe him. I think you should too.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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