Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping a Democracy

by Joyce Vance

Dutton Press

224 pps./$28.00

Joyce Vance is an attorney and left-wing pundit who makes frequent appearances on NBC. She is also the author of the new book Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping a Democracy.

Giving Up is Unforgettable is everything wrong with liberalism in just over 200 vapid pages.

“When you’re a United States attorney, your job involves prosecuting crimes and defending the United States when it gets sued,” Vance writes.

But when it comes down to it, the job is to protect people’s civil rights. That means making sure that a criminal defendant accused of the most horrific crimes still receives due process.

The same Vance who wrote those words later wrote:

If you really care about the Court and you’re Brett Kavanaugh, and you don’t care about yourself, you should voluntarily withdraw your nomination. You know that even if you think you’re innocent, your presence on the Court will cause all kinds of problems.

The main thing to know about Giving Up is Unforgivable is that it’s not really a political book, but more of a self-help manual. If you’re a leftist, like Vance, the only way to fight against Trump and MAGA in the current political climate is to use cliches and appeal to abstractions. You can’t credibly argue that illegal immigration is not a problem, you can’t really argue that James Comey was a clean FBI leader, and you certainly can’t argue that Antifa is a peaceful group or that academia is not left-wing. So other tactics are required.

There’s an old adage among lawyers that goes, “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table.”

Joyce Vance is not exactly “pounding the table,” but she does draw a nice warm bath of virtue-signaling for her discombobulated fellow leftists. Does she write about “civil rights icon” John Lewis and her pilgrimage to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, a holy shrine for liberals wishing to shine their halos? Of course she does. Does she talk about the lawfare against Donald Trump? Certainly not. She mentions Jan. 6 over a dozen times in precisely the way you would expect. Russiagate, not once. Of course, Vance laments “transgender children who are being denied gender-affirming care.” But James Comey does not appear.

Because the facts are not on her side, all Vance has to offer is therapy. She reveals some steps liberals can take to “win back our democracy” against “authoritarianism.” Some samples:

Be Smart. Understand that forces that don’t have your best interests at heart will try to manipulate you. They will do it with disinformation and use it on social media in a way that permits them to exploit fears and concerns.

Be in Community. The old adage “Never worry alone” has new meaning. Being in community is part of how we survive the next four years. Don’t worry about democracy by yourself; share with friends.

Understand That Protecting Democracy Comes in a Lot of Flavors. Democracy is about the ability of individuals to act on their own views and beliefs. Different issues matter to different people. If everyone devotes their energy to the issues that matter most to them, then all the work gets done.

Never Bet Against America. Refuse to believe that government doesn’t work. We elect representatives to do a job. It’s time to stop tolerating poor performance and acting as though there’s nothing we can do about it.

Remember, this is a woman who was U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. She served on the United States Attorney General’s Advisory Committee of U.S. Attorneys in October 2009 and co-chaired its Criminal Practice Subcommittee. Yet Vance comes across as a dingbat.

She doesn’t see that what is happening under Trump is precisely an example of Americans “never betting against America.”

Americans voted to stop illegal immigration, reverse media censorship, and police urban rioting by communists. Afraid to address these facts, Vance instead opts for burnishing her left-wing bona fides by quoting from a shopworn lineup of celebrated titans like Martin Luther King Jr., Ronald Reagan, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—for her own purposes, of course. The difference is that those men had specific arguments against specific evils in the world, whereas she is recycling their words for her own lack of arguments. 

A sample:

Yes, Donald Trump has undeniably turned away from democratic principles and put the country on the path toward authoritarianism. The Supreme Court has inexplicably played along in key moments. But the fact that you start down a road doesn’t mean your final destination is inevitable. We live in unpredictable times. Guardrails could suddenly reemerge in the form of people with character and conscience or a reconfiguration of congressional majorities. The combined opposition from the people, the courts, and some members of Congress may suddenly create that moment of national consensus we’ve been struggling to find. But it’s more likely that we are in this fight for democracy for the long haul. It won’t be a straight line forward, so we’d better get ready to face it with grace, style, humor, and one another. We can’t let the fight for democracy become drudgery; we have to prepare ourselves for it joyfully without taking it any less seriously. It’s a plan for the worst and hope for the best kind of moment. The most important piece of knowledge to carry with you is that you are not powerless. That’s a myth, constructed by the very same people who understand that an autocrat’s biggest vulnerability is a well-informed, engaged citizenry. Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who fought back against Soviet oppression by exposing it, wrote, “The simple step of a courageous man is not to take part in the lie.” We can all do that. It requires bravery, and we will summon it together.

In September 2018, Vance appeared on a panel at the Texas Tribune Festival to discuss Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. It was a hot topic, as Kavanaugh had been accused of sexual assault. It was a false charge. Given the opportunity to call for due process, Vance instead declared Kavanaugh, an innocent man, guilty (the 42:00 mark of this video).

“If you really care about the Court and you’re Brett Kavanaugh,” Vance said, “and you don’t care about yourself, you should voluntarily withdraw your nomination. You know that even if you think you’re innocent, your presence on the Court will cause all kinds of problems.”

So on questions like due process—one of the fundamental principles of our Constitution—this so-called elite attorney prejudged an innocent man in public forum and declared him guilty. She quotes Solzhenitsyn about lies, but Vance herself is exactly the kind of person who would have thrown the Russian writer in jail.

Giving up on Joyce Vance is not only forgivable, it’s a civic duty.