J.D. Vance’s repeated attacks on Haitian immigrants have led to a common complaint among Democrats: that he and former President Donald Trump are “scapegoating” immigrants by attempting to shift blame for the real problems in Springfield, Ohio, onto them.
The Republican ticket is indeed scapegoating Haitian immigrants. But for Vance in particular, there’s probably nothing haphazard or impulsive about it. In his own writing, the GOP vice presidential nominee has made clear the power — and potential dangers — of scapegoating, portraying “attempts to shift blame and our own failings onto a victim” as “a moral failing, violently projected onto someone else.”
But now that he’s taken an even closer look at Springfield, Vance appears to be seeing scapegoating in a different light: as a powerful political tool in the Republicans’ fight to reclaim the White House.
Vance’s previous writings on scapegoating also cast doubt on his claim that he is merely trying to draw attention to a worsening humanitarian crisis in Springfield. Instead, Vance appears to be putting his previous theories on scapegoating into practice, with potentially dangerous consequences for the people of Springfield.
Vance’s familiarity with conservative scapegoating discourse stems largely from his relationship with Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, whom Vance met at Yale Law School in 2011 and who subsequently became something of an intellectual mentor and professional patron to Vance.
During the course of their friendship, Thiel introduced Vance to the work of the French literary theorist René Girard, under whom Thiel studied 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 in which Vance finds himself.) Indeed, Girard’s influence on Vance was so profound that Vance has credited Girard’s work with causing him to “rethink his ideas about his father’s life.” [his] faith” by converting to Catholicism in 2019.
What did Vance learn from Girard about scapegoating?
Girard, a practicing Catholic who emigrated from France to the United States in 1947, was best known among intellectuals for his theory of “mimetic desire”: the idea that people desire things because they see other people desiring the same things. Think of a child on a playground who wants to play with a particular toy because he sees his friend playing with it first.
For Girard, this structure of desire formed the basis of all human societies, religions, and art: Over time, competing desires for limited resources led to personal rivalries and social conflict, ultimately leading to unmitigated violence. Eventually, Girard argued, societies developed ways of resolving these conflicts through what he called the “scapegoat mechanism”: societies would select an individual or group that had somehow harmed the larger community to be ritually punished, often by killing them. Punishing the scapegoat for its minor transgressions thus became a way of resolving the deeper tensions and rivalries within the social order. (In some cases, an animal such as a goat might serve as the sacrifice—hence the term “scapegoat.”)
But this entire ritual dynamic, Girard argued, was turned on its head 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, who had harmed the community in a concrete but limited way, Jesus was completely innocent of crimes against the social order that punished him, and yet he willingly submitted himself to death at the hands of the Roman authorities. According to Girard, the Gospel stories thus revealed the scapegoating mechanism for what it really was: a mask for violence in which the real moral guilt lay with the scapegoaters.
Vance has reflected clearly and even eloquently on Girard’s scapegoat theory. In a 2019 article about his conversion to Catholicism, Vance wrote, “In Christian lore, the ultimate scapegoat has not wronged civilization; civilization has wronged him. The victim of the mob’s madness is, like Christ, infinitely powerful—able to prevent his own murder—and utterly innocent—and undeserving of the mob’s fury and violence.” Summing up the religious significance of Girard’s theory, Vance wrote, “In Christ, we see our attempts to shift blame and our own shortcomings onto a victim for what they are: a moral failing, violently projected onto someone else. Christ is the scapegoat who exposes our imperfections and forces us to look at our own shortcomings rather than blaming our society’s chosen victims.”
In the same essay, Vance even reflected on the significance of Girard’s theory for the modern world: “Caught in the quagmire of social media, we identified a scapegoat and jumped digitally. We were keyboard warriors, reaching out to people on Facebook and Twitter, blind to our own problems. We fought for jobs we didn’t want while pretending we weren’t fighting for them at all.” Girard’s lesson was also personal for Vance: “The end result [of all this competition] for me it was that I had lost the language of virtue. I was more ashamed of failing a law exam than of losing my temper with my girlfriend.”
That realization led to a change of heart for Vance: “That all had to change. It was time to stop scapegoating and focus on what I could do to make things better.”
Five years after writing these lines, Vance seems to have changed course. Why? Scholars of Girard can offer a possible answer. Although Girard never said so outright, some of his interpreters have argued that Girard’s conception of Christian ethics—which in theory offers an alternative to ritual violence as a basis for social cohesion—cannot in practice serve as a basis for a large, complex, modern society. As one Girard scholar has written, “The gospel story is not a myth that unifies the entire social order.” In other words, while an elite spiritual minority may embrace Christianity as its guiding ethic, the majority of mass society will still require some degree of ritual violence to preserve itself. According to this formulation, scapegoating is not only inevitable but also 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 can be heard in Vance’s past comments about the foundation of the American nation. Unlike other New Right political figures such as Missouri GOP Senator Josh Hawley, who has openly called for Americans to embrace Christian nationalism, Vance has shied away from talking about Christianity as the foundation of American society. Instead, he has leaned 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 just fight and die for principles. They’re going to fight and die for their homes and their families and their children’s futures.”
And if mass society requires a certain amount of ritual violence to sustain itself, Vance seems willing to let it happen — he defended his comments even after several schools and municipal buildings in Springfield were evacuated amid bomb threats. (Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has since said that some of the threats came from “foreign actors,” though his office has not specified their origins.) Meanwhile, the city’s Haitian residents — many of whom are in the city legally through a federal resettlement program — have faced a sudden increase in threats and intimidation.
Vance appears to be aware, at least on a subconscious level, of his role in raising the stakes of the conflict.
“If I have to create stories that will actually get the American media to pay attention to the suffering of the American people, that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance said in an interview with CNN on Sunday. He later clarified that he meant “creating the American media that will focus on that,” but the implication was the same: Vance is deliberately stoking conflict to foster cohesion among his American-born political base, even if it results in real threats of violence against Springfield’s non-native population.
Meanwhile, the Girardian undertones of Vance’s comments are impossible to ignore. Vance has repeatedly pointed to the unsubstantiated claim that Haitian immigrants kidnap and kill residents’ pets and wildlife — a kind of perversely caricatural reenactment of the scapegoat myth — as emblematic of the pernicious 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,” which denotes something that grows through replication.
In short, Vance and his allies have stoked a meme-driven rivalry over limited social resources that now teeters on the edge of violence against a minority group, all in the service of rebuilding the communal foundations of national greatness. It’s a scene plucked straight from the pages of Girard — but the reality can be a lot messier than the theory.
