JD Vance’s repeated attacks on Haitian immigrants have fueled a common refrain from Democrats — that he and former President Donald Trump are “scapegoating” immigrants by trying to shift manufactured blame onto them for the real-world problems of Springfield, Ohio.
The Republican ticket is indeed scapegoating Haitian immigrants. But for Vance, especially, there is likely nothing accidental or impulsive about it. In his own writing, the GOP vice-presidential nominee has clearly conveyed the power — and possible dangers — of scapegoating, casting “efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim” as “a moral failing, projected violently upon someone else.”
But now, as he doubles down on his scrutiny of Springfield, Vance appears to see scapegoating in a different light: as a powerful political tool in Republicans’ quest to reclaim the White House.
Vance’s past writings about scapegoating also cast doubt on his claim that that he’s merely trying to draw attention to a worsening humanitarian crisis in Springfield. Rather, Vance appears to be putting his past theorizing about scapegoating into practice, with potentially dangerous consequences for the people of Springfield.
Vance’s familiarity with the conservative discourse around scapegoating comes primarily via his relationship with the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, whom Vance met in 2011 at Yale Law School and who subsequently became a sort of intellectual mentor and professional patron to Vance.
In the course of their friendship, Thiel introduced Vance to the work of French literary theorist René Girard, whom Thiel studied under at Stanford University in the late 1980s and whom Thiel has since cited as a major influence on his political and religious thinking. (Girard has become an increasingly popular figure within the conservative intellectual milieu that Vance inhabits.) Indeed, Girard’s influence on Vance was so profound that Vance has credited Girard’s work with prompting him to “reconsider [his] faith” by converting to Catholicism in 2019.
So what did Vance learn from Girard about scapegoating?
A practicing Catholic who immigrated to the United States from France in 1947, Girard was most famous among intellectuals for his theory of “mimetic desire” — the idea that humans desire things because they see other people desiring those same things. Think of a kid on a playground wanting to play with a specific toy because they see their 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 rivalries and social conflict, which ultimately gave rise to unmitigated violence. Eventually, Girard argued, societies developed ways to resolve these conflicts using what he termed “the scapegoat mechanism”: Societies would select an individual or group who had somehow harmed the larger community to be ritually punished, often by killing them. The punishment of the scapegoat for his limited offenses thus became a way of resolving the deeper tensions and rivalries within the social order. (In some instances, an animal like a goat could serve as the sacrificial victim — thus the term “scapegoat.”)
But this whole ritual dynamic, Girard argued, was upended by the advent of Christianity. For Girard, Jesus Christ played the role of a prototypical scapegoat, but with one crucial difference: Unlike a traditional scapegoat, which had actually harmed the community in some concrete yet limited way, Jesus was completely innocent of any crimes against the social order that punished him, and yet he willingly submitted to death at the hands of the Roman authorities. In Girard’s telling, the gospel stories thus revealed the scapegoat mechanism for what is really was: a mask for violence in which the real moral blame lay with the scapegoaters.
Vance has reflected articulately — and even eloquently — about Girard’s theory of the scapegoat. Discussing Girard in a 2019 article about his conversion to Catholicism, Vance wrote, “In the Christian telling, the ultimate scapegoat has not wronged the civilization; the civilization has wronged him. The victim of the madness of crowds is, as Christ was, infinitely powerful — able to prevent his own murder — and perfectly innocent — undeserving of the rage and violence of the crowd.” Summarizing the religious import of Girard’s theory, Vance wrote: “In Christ, we see our efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim for what they are: a moral failing, projected violently upon someone else. Christ is the scapegoat who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims.”
In the same essay, Vance even reflected on the significance of Girard’s theory for the modern world: “Mired in the swamp of social media, we identified a scapegoat and digitally pounced. We were keyboard warriors, unloading on people via Facebook and Twitter, blind to our own problems. We fought over jobs we didn’t actually want while pretending we didn’t fight for them at all.” Girard’s lesson was personal for Vance, as well: “The end result [of all this competition] for me, at least, was that I had lost the language of virtue. I felt more shame over failing in a law school exam than I did about losing my temper with my girlfriend.”
That realization prompted a change of heart in Vance: “That all had to change. It was time to stop scapegoating and focus on what I could do to improve things.”
Five years after writing these lines, Vance appears to have reversed course. Why? Scholars of Girard may offer one possible answer. Though Girard never said so outright, some of his interpreters have argued that Girard’s idea of the Christian ethic — which in theory offers an alternative to ritualistic violence as a basis for social cohesion — cannot in practice serve as the basis for a large, complex and modern society. As one scholar of Girard has written, “The gospel story is not a myth uniting the entire social order.” In other words, although an elite spiritual minority may take up Christianity as its guiding ethic, the majority of mass society will continue to require some amount of ritual violence to preserve itself. According to this formulation, scapegoating is not only inevitable but useful, insofar as it builds social cohesion among large, otherwise diverse groups of people.
Vance has not explicitly endorsed this idea, but echoes of it are discernible in Vance’s past comments about the foundation of the American nation. For instance, in contrast to other New Right political figures like Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley, who has openly called for Americans to embrace Christian nationalism, Vance tends to shy away from talking about Christianity as the foundation of American society. Instead, he leans into a vision of American national identity rooted in an attachment to specific places, family and clan — which Vance’s critics have argued is little more than a thinly veiled form of blood-and-soil nationalism. As Vance said in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in July, “People don’t fight and die just for principles. They go and fight and die for their homes and their families and the future of their children.”
And if mass society needs some amount of ritualistic violence to maintain itself, Vance appears ready to let it play out — having defended his comments even after several schools and municipal buildings in Springfield were evacuated due to bomb threats. (Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has since said that some of the threats originated with “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 precipitous rise in threats and harassment.
At least on a subconscious level, Vance seems to be aware of his role in raising the stakes of the conflict.
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance said in an interview with CNN on Sunday. He later clarified that he meant that he was “creating the America media focusing on it,” but the suggestion was the same: Vance is consciously stoking the conflict to promote cohesion among his native-born political base, even if doing so results in real threats of violence against Springfield’s non-native population.
Meanwhile, the Girardian undertones of Vance’s comments have become impossible to overlook. Vance has repeatedly referenced the unfounded claim that Haitian immigrants are abducting and killing residents’ pets and wild animals — a kind of perversely cartoonish re-enactment of the scapegoat myth — as a symbol of the harmful effects of immigration on American life. In response, he has encouraged his followers to flood the internet with memes of Trump protecting cats and ducks — “meme,” of course, being a derivative of the same word as “mimetic,” denoting something that grows through replication.
In sum, Vance and his allies have stoked a meme-driven rivalry over limited social resources that now teeters on the brink of violence against a minority group, all in the service of repairing the communal foundations of national greatness. It’s a scene ripped directly from the pages of Girard — but reality may prove far messier than theory.
