The Soft Sell of Hard Power

Ross Douthat's May 21st interview with Vice President J.D. Vance, published in the New York Times under the "Interesting Times" banner, is an exercise in laundering hard-right authoritarianism through a haze of pseudo-intellectual civility. Framed as a discussion about Catholic values, trade, and immigration, it instead serves as a soft-focus endorsement of deeply illiberal policies. The choice to publish this as a casual conversation obscures the gravity of the ideas. The New York Times grants Vance a platform not to be interrogated but to refine and sell a worldview that rationalizes cruelty, evades accountability, and redefines the borders of democratic governance.

There are passages in this interview that should have raised red flags among editors. They didn't. Instead, what we get is a portrait of a man rationalizing state power in theological terms, softening the implications of mass deportations, and invoking Catholicism not as a moral check on power but as a shield for it. The article's casual tone and uncritical posture mislead the reader about the severity of what is being proposed. This is less a discussion than it is a briefing.

"I do think that a lot of these illegal immigrants have to go back to where they came from. That requires more law enforcement officers. It requires more beds at deportation facilities."

A dispatch from the front lines of Xenophobia, presented as logistics. But it is logistics in the service of expulsion on a scale that echoes historical precedents many democracies now regret. Vance doesn’t question the premise, the human cost, or the social fracture such an effort would cause. He speaks of expanding detention capacity as if he were discussing warehouse space, not lives.

"You cannot have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement, and the courts tell the American people they’re not allowed to have what they voted for."

Vance is calling for - and indeed, conducting - an assault on constitutional liberalism. Vance frames the judiciary’s check on executive overreach as illegitimate because it contradicts what “the people” voted for. This populist card trick implies that majoritarian will should override legal process. In doing so, he positions the executive branch above the law when it claims popular backing. That’s the authoritarian temptation: not rejecting courts outright but delegitimizing them as obstructive.

"I think the best way of measuring where we’re headed here is whether we still have a $1.2 or $1.3 trillion trade deficit."

Vance repeatedly claims to want a smarter industrial policy. But instead of articulating any coherent strategy, he offers half-baked talking points about tariffs and regulatory carrots, ignoring the global complexity of supply chains and domestic realities of inflation. The trade policy he outlines is reactive and self-congratulatory, not structural. It has all the fingerprints of a politics more interested in symbolism than outcomes.

"We deport this guy, the courts hold that we’ve made a mistake... And our attitude was: OK, what are we really going to do? Are we going to exert extraordinary diplomatic pressure to bring a guy back to the United States who’s a citizen of a foreign country who we had a valid deportation order with?"

This admission is chilling. A U.S. vice president casually concedes that the administration knowingly deported someone against a court order and shrugs at the legal consequences. The question is not whether the individual was sympathetic. The question is whether the government respects its own legal obligations. Vance’s answer is: only when convenient.

"Maybe if we sent the very worst people to different places, then American prisons would be a little less violent."

Vance floats the idea of exiling prisoners to foreign countries not as a joke but as a policy vision. The premise is not that foreign prisons are more rehabilitative but more punitive. This offshoring of punishment recalls the logic of Guantanamo: export the problem, sever accountability, and silence the scrutiny.

The conversation's structure constantly pivots between lofty ideals and tactical justifications. Vance invokes faith, “common good,” and family, but these values are operationalized in ways that are punitive, not compassionate. His vision of society is exclusionary and hierarchical: protect insiders, isolate outsiders, and dress the whole thing up in moral sincerity.

The editorial decision to publish this piece in full, as-is, without critical framing, makes this piece even more egregious. The Times has effectively allowed Ross Douthat to provide a complimentary transcription service for authoritarian policymaking. Vance is not being interviewed; he is being staged.

What’s at stake here is more than Vance’s talking points. It’s the media’s complicity in helping those points metastasize into consensus. When brutal policies are cloaked in polite conversation, they become easier to swallow. The paper of record has an obligation to dissect power, not to serve as a megaphone for its worst representatives to coo over an authoritarian edge lord.

This interview deserved a rebuttal, not a broadcast.