To Know Him Is to Hate Him And nobody hates JD Vance more than JD Vance.

It’s time again for your weekly checklist of Losers and Winners, and a reminder that all of the chaos, tumult, awfulness, and catastrophe you are experiencing is caused by people.

Tariffs, my friends, do not exist in nature. They are constructed. Bombing a civilization into the Stone Age is a choice made by a (not very smart or moral) human. A fair society is built on a foundation of accountability. Minh Ly, the author of Answering to Us: Why Democracy Demands Accountability, gave me an incredible analogy a few months ago. It’s possible you’ve read about it in this column before, but here we go again:

Imagine you live in a small village. You hire a sheriff and give him the only gun in the region. Without any mechanism for accountability, this sheriff may or may not become a king-like figure, able to kill or coerce anyone on his own whims. The gun — or any power we bestow upon our leaders — needs to be in service to a civic purpose, not in service to calcifying control in the hands of the person who wields it.

It sounds pretty obvious. The sheriff in this analogy must understand that if he uses the gun for his own purposes, he will face consequences. The more power we bestow on our leaders, the more severe the consequences ought to be for its misuse.

https://www.lincolnsquare.media/p/winners-and-losers-to-know-him-is