Vance reveals 'there's a chance' he won't run for president in 2028: 'We've got 4 little kids' trib.al/DdoDBAg

I listened to @yhazony discuss my critique of the NatCon conference in Jerusalem with @willchamberlain. Yoram repeatedly mischaracterizes my position. A few corrections are in order. 1. Yoram claims that I am against JD Vance. This is simply false. He offers no evidence because he has none. I am a Trump supporter. Yoram, by contrast, is a Vance partisan. He all but admits it. Trump has two more years in office, and Yoram is already campaigning for his successor. Personally, I intend to make up my mind about the 2028 election in 2028. Today, the United States and Israel are fighting a war together against Iran. Yoram, however, is engaged in a bigger conflict: the war against John Locke. He dreams of the intellectual revolution that a Vance presidency might bring. 2. Yoram's dismissive treatment of the Declaration of Independence is bad history. Its contemporary political implications are worse. His effort to read Locke out of the American founding threatens to divide the grand coalition that Trump has assembled. In his conversation with Chamberlain, Yoram casts himself as the great unifier, dismayed, more in sorrow than in anger, by schismatics like me who insist on picking petty and unnecessary fights. It's a clever debating tactic, but it conceals the nature of his own project. He is the one calling on conservatives to choose sides in an intellectual civil war partially of his making. 3. I have had reservations about NatCon in the past, but kept them to myself. I shifted that posture do to NatCon's failure to confront Groyper antisemitism directly. Yoram has failed to grasp the gravity of the historical moment. We are witnessing an extraordinary resurgence of antisemitism, including on the American right. This antisemitism is a dagger not just at Jews but at the United States in general and at the Trump coalition in particular. It has domestic partisans and malign foreign supporters. I have never seen anything like it. Yoram's gut reaction to this wave is to rake the ADL over the coals for its liberalism. His current pose, suggesting that Tucker Carlson's departure from the Republican coalition turns the Groyper threat into yesterday's news, is just that, another rhetorical maneuver masquerading as an argument. The threat does not disappear because Yoram and his friends declare it politically inconvenient or safely behind us. 4. Yoram brands me a "liberal" because I insist that John Locke is part of the American founding. This is funny. It's like insisting that hydrogen is not a component of water. When I point out the error, Yoram denounces me as a partisan of hydrogen. Recognizing Locke's influence on the founding is not an ideological confession. It's a well-grounded historical observation. 5. Yoram has constructed a highly idiosyncratic account of intellectual history in which Edmund Burke stands in fundamental opposition to John Locke. But on many of the great political questions of their age, the two men stood on the same side, making different kinds of arguments in defense of a broadly shared tradition. The differences in emphasis between them do not require us to choose one and repudiate the other. We stand on the shoulders of both. We are heirs to a grand tradition that both helped shape. I am a "supporter" of Burke and Locke simultaneously, just as I am a "supporter" of both hydrogen and oxygen. I see no reason to choose between the essential components of something valuable that exists regardless of what attitude I adopt toward it. Yoram presents himself as the champion of conservative unity. But he is the one drawing artificial lines of division, imposing ideological tests, and treating those who reject his idiosyncratic categories as enemies. Yoram is the divider.