This confuses me. Vance was his mother’s maiden name. She changed his name from Bowman to Hamel when she remarried. Why would he switch to her name? Fewer syllables?
It’s not surprising that someone who is raised in an environment with widespread drug use and poverty, a single-mom who is an addict and has a string of loser boyfriends, and eventually is raised by grandparents will have emotional problems. The lack of a solid family and economic foundation causes many problems. In some sense, it’s inspiring that he was able to rise above his upbringing since many people don’t. Unfortunately, he’s attached himself to the party that must be destroyed. The personal attacks on him are justified because they’re necessary to ensure Trump loses. But if he was just a regular person, I would be more sympathetic to his behavioral problems. I don’t think he’s bad at his core. I think he’s taken on these beliefs due to the environment he was raised in. Contrast that with someone like Trump. I think Trump is a bad person at his core and would be bad no matter what environment he was raised in. Trump is missing something that allows people to be empathetic and self-aware. I think Vance has those normal human emotions, but the environment he grew up in has warped them. I see Vance as redeemable, but Trump is not.
I believe he went to Vance because of his grandparents, not his mother.
Interesting. Why do you see Vance’s upbringing as having made him who he is today, but not Trumps’?
Sorry if this is a hijack. If it needs to be brought up in another thread I understand.
Oh, I can sympathize with him, and I would help him if I could. But none of that means that we should put him in a position to potentially screw up everyone else on the planet even more than he was screwed up.
That’s how he frames it. I didn’t even think about it being his mothers maiden name.
How I might explain it is comparing it to how it’s common for kids to be self centered and cruel at times, but eventually grow out of it. I’m sure many of us look back at situations when we were kids and really regret how our words and actions may have hurt other people. We may have even done hurtful things on purpose because we thought it was funny and had no concern about how it would make other people feel. Most people typically grow out of that. Not everyone does. Trump hasn’t. He’s still a middle-school bully. I don’t think that’s from upbringing. I think that’s a innate personality defect in him. Vance, on the other hand, has grown up in a stressful environment which I feel has shaped his personality to make him who he is. Pretty much anyone who grows up in a stressful environment filled with drugs and poverty will become an adult with behavioral issues and complications. To me, it seems like Vance’s personality issues are due to these stresses he had growing up. With Trump, it’s because he has some innate personality defects. I think Trump would be the Trump we see today no matter how he was raised.
But as has been mentioned, Vance is now in a position where his faults need to be magnified and criticized in order to help defeat Trump. Oh well. He’s an adult and has to live with his decisions. The difficulty he’s having to go through is part of his learning process. Hopefully it leads to a place of healthy self-discovery. But likely, it’s going to lead down a path to MAGA land. And, therefore, he needs to be crushed to limit the destruction he can cause.
There have been a number of stories about how Trump’s father, Fred, raised him. My understanding is that Fred was a cold, demanding bully, and settled for nothing less than perfection from his son (and he only turned to Donald as his presumptive heir after his eldest son, Fred Jr., turned out to not be interested in following in his father’s footsteps).
I strongly suspect that Trump’s continual crowing about his own supposed genius, and the “perfect” things he does, as well as his ruthless, bullying nature, are driven by his father’s shaping, and his own continuing desire to live up to what his father demanded of him.
That doesn’t mean that Trump wouldn’t have been a terrible person without his father’s influence, but it does help one understand why he acts the way he does. And, getting back to the OP, it suggests that Vance and Trump are peas in a pod, in a way, in that lousy (if very different) childhoods and parenting shaped their asshole personalities.
Lack of any indication that that ever happened?
Trump: Women love me, I can’t see why women wouldn’t vote for me
Vance: Women shouldn’t be allowed to have jobs
Sorry, I don’t follow?
I am not seeing signs that Individual-ONE was brought up.
Oh, I get you. Yeah, in many ways he’s still a whiny baby.
Yep, women are for breeding, and feeding offspring. Like cattle.
I hate this guy sòoo much.
“pursuing racial or gender equity is like the value system that gives their life meaning…”
Maybe he should try doing it sometime.
That honestly describes a large part of my upbringing to a T, and yet I didn’t wind up hating all women, nor did I start a family out of social obligation and go on to spend every day resenting them. And I didn’t even get an Ivy League scholarship out of it.
Whatever lingering trauma he may have suffered as a kid doesn’t excuse his being a mysogynistic weirdo.
I’d guess more han half the women I know had worse childhoods than Vance.
There’s an online theory that he’s a closet homosexual, and the basis is largely due to how his misogyny contrasts with Trump’s.
Trump has a heterosexual misogyny. He views women as sex objects, and if they aren’t then he considers them useless, or threatening.
Whereas, the theory goes, Vance doesn’t relate to women that way, because he’s not attracted to them. Rather, he sees women as functional, in that they fulfill a role of providing children.
It’s supposed to also explain why he is so bothered by unmarried, childless women. They represent women who are available, and while Vance has learned how he is supposed to relate to an available woman, he doesn’t want to. That’s why he wants those women shuttled into their proper role as wives and mothers; it alleviates his discomfort with relating to them.
We are also supposed to draw insight from his marriage to an Indian woman, since Indian culture is said to accept functional marriages and an emphasis on children, instead of those marked by passion (although I don’t know if this has merit, since his wife’s native culture might be American, and her heritage might have had little impact).
Finally, the theory is supposed to be bolstered by a reference in his book, where he was a kid who asked his grandmother about being gay. She turned it into a sexual thing, when he was just a boy, but it might speak to his innate attraction to men over women.
Of course, we have lots of reason to ascribe his views on women to his dysfunctional mother, but it’s a curious thought nonetheless.
…
Meanwhile, what shocks me the most about Vance is how little criticism he’s received for having such little experience in government, especially considering how young he is.
I guess Trump made republicans lose all interest in experience for the job.
I am going to guess that he put some effort into pursuing homosexuality but, given his evident complete lack of social skills, it was a dismal failure, so he settled for a heterosexual relationship to salve his damaged self-image. He is a frustrated gay man who hates the woman he loves as much as he hates himself, a wound-tight paradox ready to sproing into catastrophe at the slightest triggering.
I suspect that even if Peter Thiel had decided to make you a millionaire, you still wouldn’t have turned out like Vance.