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Tuesday
By now we’re all becoming aware of the neologism “sane-washing,” which the corporate media has been doing with Donald Trump and which Todd Beeton of The Conversation says is starting to happen with J.D. Vance as well. While the word may be new, however, the phenomenon is not. In fact, it’s the central joke in John Gay’s 18th century musical comedy The Beggar’s Opera.
“Sane-washing,” the Urban Dictionary tells us, involves “attempting to downplay a person’s or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public.” As problematic as it is to sane-wash Donald Trump, however, it may be even more dangerous to do so with Vance given (1) his extreme positions on a variety of issues and (2) the very real possibility that he would rise to the presidency in a second Trump term and more competently carry out such an agenda. There are rightwing billionaires who, confident that Trump won’t survive a second term, are salivating at the prospect of President Vance.
Or as Bill Kristol of The Bulwark puts it, Trump’s selection of Vance
cemented the fact that a Trump second term [will] be a Project 2025 and America First endeavor [and] the somewhat incoherent, anti-liberal and anti-democratic impulses of early Trumpism [will turn] into a far more purposeful and full-blown American authoritarianism.
Vance worked on sane-washing both Trump and himself in his debate with Tim Walz last week. Beeton first points out how he sane-washed Trump:
When Vance said, for example, that Trump governed on “common sense wisdom” as president, or when he suggested Trump somehow saved Obamacare “in a bipartisan way,” or when he claimed that Trump “Peacefully gave over power” in 2021, Vance was gaslighting the American people on behalf of his running mate, all with a straight face. It was quite a performance.
But Vance’s major accomplishment, Beeton believes, was how he sane-washed himself:
Through his slick debate club demeanor, his nods toward moderation and civility, and his bizarre portrayal of himself as seemingly almost pro-choice, Vance was communicating to voters that he’s really not that weird. Forget all that stuff you heard about him, he’s actually Team Normal.
Vance must sane-wash himself to hide both his ties to authoritarian billionaires and to white Christian nationalists (there’s considerable overlap). Beeton points out that Vance spent this past weekend at a Christian revival event run by Lance Wallnau, who is thought to have coined the phrase “Seven Mountains Mandate.” The goal is to put Christians in control of seven spheres of society: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business and government. In short, to turn us into an anti-democratic theocracy.
“Seven Mountains Mandate” is a project of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), led by the evangelical Wallnau and others, but it also has buy-in from members of the radical Catholic Opus Dei society, which boasts such members as Leonard Leo (largely responsible for stacking and cultivating the Supreme Court) and Kevin Roberts, author of Project 2025. That radical Evangelicals and radical Catholics would be finding common cause at this juncture seems strange, but perhaps it’s a pragmatic alliance in the service of ending American pluralism. Vance, who has written a forward to Roberts’s forthcoming book Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America, is himself a radical Catholic and may be attending the NAR conference to help cement the alliance.
Matthew Taylor, author and religious scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies who has researched the NAR, calls Vance’s appearance at the event an “endorsement of one of the worst, most conspiratorial, Christian supremacist spectacles in the country.” In other words, Vance is in dire need of sane-washing both his relationship with Wallnau and with Project 2025.
Sane-washing is used to comic effect in Beggar’s Opera. The major joke running through Gay’s satiric romp, which Bertolt Brecht would later rewrite as Three Penny Opera, is that the upper class is no different than the criminal underclass; they just make crime look, well, sane and respectable. At one point the Peachams–who make their living fencing stolen goods and, when the moment is right, turning in their employees for the reward money—are discussing murder. When Mrs. Peacham remarks to her husband that it’s fortunate none of their pickpockets has recently killed anyone, her husband shrugs it off:
Peacham. What a dickens is the woman always a whimpring about murder for? No gentleman is ever look’d upon the worse for killing a man in his own defense; and if business cannot be carried on without it, what would you have a gentleman do?
Mrs. Peacham. If I am in the wrong, my dear, you must excuse me, for nobody can help the frailty of an over-scrupulous conscience.
Peacham. Murder is as fashionable a crime as a man can be guilty of. How many fine gentlemen have we in Newgate every year, purely upon that article!
The play widens its satiric lens in Peacham’s opening song:
Through all the employments of life
Each neighbor abuses his brother;
Whore and rogue they call husband and wife:
All professions be-rogue one another:
The priest calls the lawyer a cheat,
The lawyer be-knaves the divine:
And the statesman, because he’s so great,
Thinks his trade as honest as mine.
Peacham is especially hard on lawyers, whom he lambastes in another bouncy song:
A Fox may steal your Hens, Sir,
A Whore your Health and Pence, Sir,
Your Daughter rob your Chest, Sir,
Your Wife may steal your Rest, Sir.
A Thief your Goods and Plate.
But this is all but picking,
With Rest, Pence, Chest and Chicken;
It ever was decreed, sir,
If lawyer’s hand is fee’d, Sir,
He steals your whole estate.
To which Peacham then adds, “The lawyers are bitter enemies to those in our way. They don’t care that anybody should get a clandestine livelihood but themselves.”
As I watched Vance’s smooth presentation at the debate—between his gaslighting and his effortless lying, it was a tour-de-force—I thought of Gay’s first mention of Mac the Knife, the colorful highwayman at the center of the play. Mac has borrowed money from the Peachams, which he repays with bad checks:
Peacham. Was Captain Macheath here this morning, for the banknotes he left with you last week?
Mrs. Peacham. Yes, my dear; and though the bank hath stopt payment, he was so cheerful and so agreeable! Sure there is not a finer gentleman upon the road than the captain!
“Upon the road” refers to highway robbery. But sure, there is not a finer presidential ticket than Trump and Vance.
Further thought: I’ve compared Trump to Mac the Knife several times in the past (for instance, here) over how both manage to escape accountability time and again. On the steps of the gallows, the highwayman is saved by a royal reprieve, specially ordered up (in a meta-fictional moment) by the opera’s beggar author so that his play won’t have an unhappy ending. Much of the fun of the play lies in Mac’s escapes.
Of course, Mac never has the power to pardon himself, a power Trump will undoubtedly exercise if he is returned to office.
The other difference between Mac and Trump is that only one of them is a good-natured, open-hearted thief. The other is just a thief.
