While his background and upbringing in poverty may make him seem like an enigma in the Republican party, he is as routine as they get. His rise highlights the failure of the liberal establishment’s strategy of adopting identity politics after they knew they couldn’t rely on class-based interests anymore and still receive big donor funding. This upbringing is merely a tool deployed to reach the upper echelons of elite power and appear as an average Joe, likeable. The collapse of the American economy and the haemorrhaging of jobs from the industrial heartland meant that liberal parties could either represent those who had been abandoned by capital or create new lines of attack to sustain the very corporate backers who left these Americans suffering. They chose the latter. JD Vance may seem like he is part of the former, but he is not. He represents how extreme these power-hungry elites have become.
Helpfully, the piece of work that brought him fame also charted his life story. Raised in Middletown, Ohio, alternately by his mother and grandmother, he describes a life marred by tragedy, disadvantage, and stress. He includes some genuinely charming anecdotes about his grandmother and his affection for her, making the best out of their lives in a town and a region forgotten by the American state. Some of his anecdotes were harrowing accounts of his mother’s struggle with addiction, offering young JD first-hand experience of the opioid crisis and the pain that corporate greed can inflict upon working families.
The podcast “If Books Could Kill” re-released their discussion of this book and it is well worth a listen. As soon as JD decides to join the marines, however, the book and, presumably JD himself, takes a familiarly sinister, and for the book’s part, boring, turn. He then takes on the role of American social climber. By serving in the Marines for a few years, and by Marines we mean the Marine press corps, he can climb through those barriers otherwise unavailable to most people with his background.
This totally unproblematic means of social mobility provides him with the ability to attend Yale Law School. He then takes great glee in pointing out all the differences between the upper classes and his own culture, like the class dynamics pointed out in the movie Titanic, set over 100 years ago. He is also in an inexplicable rush to get out of university, finishing it two years earlier than is usual. Probably, this is because his background precluded him from fitting in, so he could have had a cogent diagnosis of the problem of exclusive culture at elite universities, but instead he turns back to look at his own community and blame them for their own misfortune. This is the truly bizarre turn, as he presumably doesn’t think he has these personal deficiencies supposedly endemic in his rural Ohio town himself, but still feels excluded in Yale to the point where he wants to get out of there as soon as possible.
It isn’t the exclusive culture or the high barriers to entry, or the over-reliance on mega-donors or the intellectual hegemony of these universities that are the problem, it’s just the woke students and the Marxists that are the problem. You could wonder sometimes when exactly the change took place in JD’s mind, but at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter. He is well and truly on his way to becoming a Republican.
But this doesn’t mean he skips the chance to punch down at the community that raised him, instead deciding to point out some examples of what he calls weakness of character amongst the population of Middletown. These include pointing out that using food stamps to buy groceries and cash to buy alcohol is somehow some sort of dishonest scheme instead of plainly being the rules of the program itself. Apparently, there is no racial element to Ohioan’s scepticism towards Obama, but rather they resent him because he wears a suit to work. But his own suit-wearing success in that state would suggest otherwise. One story about a man regularly showing up late for work was apparently the entirety of explanation JD needed for why so few companies located there anymore. Not the expansion of these corporations into cheap labour markets like China or the heavy reliance on automation, the inherent laziness of working-class Americans was to blame.
This book received universal acclaim from liberal and conservative media alike. Always a cause for suspicion. Written around the time of the 2016 election, liberals were casting around for an explanation, an excuse for how they missed the rise and popularity of Donald Trump. Anything to shift blame from themselves and their own failed policies. A book like this deprived them of the need to take any responsibility. The rise of Trump was fuelled by the lazy incompetents outlined in this book by one of their own. Phew. On the conservative side, this is exactly the position they hold towards poor people in general. JD checked out as one of their own.
His transition into politics was also familiar. Going to Silicon Valley, ostensibly as a venture capitalist, but without doubt a career in politics also in mind. At the time of his candidacy for the Ohio Senate, I remember one of the Chapo Trap House guys imitating how Vance would sell his time working with billionaires to the masses of Ohio, spending his entire time there saying things like “A latte? Huh, I’ll have a beer”. This strategy seems to have worked. Attracting the attention of Peter Thiel (hopefully not too much), he received $10 million for his Ohio Senate race. How a gay man can offer so much support to someone who opposes same-sex marriage is not too much of a conundrum when you remember that Peter Thiel is a billionaire. Even Mayor Pete can see that.
These same liberals reacted shocked when, despite being one of the last to resist the temptation, he came out in support of Donald Trump, having previously compared him to Hitler. Now, he possesses the zeal of the converted. He is determinedly anti-trans rights, anti-abortion, and recently wrote an introduction to a book written by the mind behind Project 2025, a project that hopes to radically reshape all aspects of American society, from migration to education. A 2021 interview resurfaced where he stated that people with children should get more votes. This is just what it takes to be a member of the Republican party in 2024.
Someone like this reveals what the liberal establishment really feel about the working class. They allow him to be elevated to a position of prominence and act surprised when he turns out to be racist. There is no difference between JD Vance the marine, the venture capitalist, the Senator, the VP pick, the Republican. Those who like to think otherwise or act surprised are going to have a lot more surprises coming their way if him and Trump win the election in November. In 2016, there was an element of surprise amongst all political actors to Trump’s victory. Not this time. The conservative movement are ready for power now, and, at 39, Vance represents the potential horror they can inflict upon Americans and the world for years to come.
JD Vance represents what the Republican party has gone through under Trump as well as its xenophobic, fascist future. He also represents the output of a liberal establishment too blind to see their own role in bringing about a figure like Trump, and their eagerness to explain away their own failings.
