July 18, 2024
J.D. Vance Is the Perfect Troll
The Republican vice-presidential candidate’s speech last night was a guided missile aimed at working-class voters. Countering it will take a lot more than not being Donald Trump.
J.D. Vance, his wife, Usha (in the blue dress), and his family on stage in Milwaukee. His mother Bev, a former addict whom Vance described last night as “10 years clean and sober,” is on the left.
(Joe Raedle / Getty)
Milwaukee—Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Look at J.D. Vance’s record, as many of my colleagues here have done over the past few days, and you see a man without qualities, who will say and do whatever it takes to continue the ascent that took him from the hollers of Appalachian Ohio to Yale Law School to the top of the New York Times best-seller list to the United States Senate, and now to the second spot on the Republican ticket.
But that wasn’t the man I saw here at the Fiserv Forum last night. Or at least that wasn’t the way he seemed—not on the convention floor, and probably not to the television audience. The Vance I saw last night gave a speech that, with its trenchant critique of deindustrialization, sober acknowledgement of the domestic costs of imperial adventurism, and stirring evocation of working-class pride, could have easily been delivered by his Democratic colleague from Ohio, Sherrod Brown:
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“Jobs were sent overseas, and our children were sent to war,” Vance said. “America’s ruling class wrote the check, and communities like mine paid the price.”
It is simply impossible to imagine Joe Biden, who voted for the Iraq War and was a Senate cheerleader for NAFTA, saying anything like that.
Or consider Vance’s five-sentence explanation of the housing crisis:
Wall Street barons crashed the economy and American builders went out of business.
As tradesmen scrambled for jobs, houses stopped being built.
The lack of good jobs, of course, led to stagnant wages.
And then the Democrats flooded this country with millions of illegal aliens.
So citizens had to compete—with people who shouldn’t even be here—for precious housing.
Some on the left—including Bernie Sanders—have long argued that Democrats need to better define not just their aims but their enemies too, and that the road to victory lies in picking a populist fight against Wall Street and the billionaire class. Given the party’s reliance on Wall Street donors since the days of Bill Clinton, this has been a tough sell. And it is certainly true that Vance’s claim to be a tribune of the people is belied by his sponsorship by—and devotion to—Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder, Facebook investor, and, through his holdings in Palantir, government contractor and war profiteer.
But as my colleagues have noted, Vance’s shameless hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug, enabling him to deliver lines like “We’re done catering to Wall Street. We’ll commit for the working man” with smarmy sincerity.
Despite having an extremely accomplished wife (who, judging by her own speech last night, is also poised and personable), Vance—whose opposition to abortion allows for no exceptions—will probably not bring many women into the GOP fold. But then for Republicans these days, as Trump’s walk-out song last night reminded us, “It’s a Man’s World.” And though he apparently had a close trans friend in law school, his opposition to gay marriage—one of the few fixed points in his chameleonic career—might not help him grow the ranks of Log Cabin Republicans. (Though it clearly hasn’t hurt him with Thiel.)
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But the vision of belonging he invoked—a Midwestern-nice version of blood and soil nationalism—could have been grown in a lab aimed at winning Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Vance’s repeated invocation of his family’s Kentucky cemetery plot was signal that, though inaudible to rootless cosmopolites like your correspondent, likely resonated powerfully with the Appalachian migrants whose descendants make up a crucial voting bloc up and down the Ohio River valley.
By choosing Vance as his running mate, Trump has done three things—none of them good news for Democrats. Like Joe Biden in 2020, he has shown the confidence to pick a strong former critic, rather than an innocuous cipher. But unlike Kamala Harris (at least on recent evidence), Vance is also the perfect troll candidate. His speech was laced with deep cuts from not only anti-NAFTA Democrats like Brown and Sanders but also JFK (“citizens who ask what our country needs of us…”) and even FDR:
We have a big tent on this party, on everything from national security to economic policy.
But my message to you, my fellow Republicans, is—we love this country and we are united to win.
Now I think our disagreements actually make us stronger…. And my message to my fellow Americans, those watching from across the country, is shouldn’t we be governed by a party that is unafraid to debate ideas and come to the best solution?
If you don’t think the sting at the end of that last quote was aimed squarely at the Democratic National Committee’s recent machinations—not just around an early virtual roll call but also stifling debate on Palestine and Gaza—you are badly underestimating the opposition.
Which was the mistake many of us made in 2016. Because the final thing Vance brings his party—in addition to his celebrity status, military record, fluency on the stump, and the inoculation his Indian wife and her immigrant parents offer against blanket charges of racism, sexism, and xenophobia—is the chance to change the subject from Donald Trump’s many past crimes and misdemeanors to a vision of the future. The delegates exited to Fleetwood Mac singing “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow),” which, as John Nichols reminded me, was the theme music for Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. Ouch!
You and I might not want to live in the home-owning, family-centered, factory-working, deeply rooted patriarchal American Vance conjured for his audience last night. Especially since his devotion to the “Drill, baby, drill!” policies of his running mate will render it, and the rest of the planet, uninhabitable. But it would be foolish, and dangerous, to deny its appeal. Or to try to defeat it without laying out a competing vision of an America that, while not centered around blood and soil, gives voice to the yearning for a common home, shared values, and attainable prosperity.
Because we tried that in 2016, and it didn’t go well.
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D.D. Guttenplan
D.D. Guttenplan is editor of The Nation.
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