The Advance of J.D. Vance

 

J.D.Vance

Rust Belt America

James David Vance [August 2, 1984] has had an extraordinary journey in life before becoming the fiftieth Vice President of the U.S.A. The early years were spent as part of the white working class in southern Ohio; born to a mother who struggled for years with alcohol and drug abuse, was neglectful of her children and at times terrifyingly threatening to them. Her parents, most especially her mother, Mamaw, from Appalachia, were the people who really brought up Vance, instilling in him the right values and it is to Mamaw to whom he pays special tribute for providing him with the stability he needed at home and for her constant encouragement for him to work to rise above difficult circumstances. However, his grandparents’ lives were not without incident! His grandfather, Papaw, was an alcoholic who came home drunk after being warned off the booze by his wife and she set fire to him. Clearly, Mamaw was the rock of the family and most certainly the mainstay of Vance’s upbringing and he gives many tributes for the values she passed on to him, and indeed, for all she did to set him off on his life’s journey.

In his 2016 best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, he describes his growing up in Middleton, Ohio and the summers he spent with the wider family in Jackson, Kentucky. In his book, Vance paints a bleak picture of life in such communities as his, describing an environment in which poverty was the norm, a ‘family tradition’ for many people. He relates that substance abuse and domestic violence were commonplace and hopes for a better economic future, rare. People simply did not expect to move on or up. But Vance also brings his conservative political sensibilities to the discussion. He does not shrink from pointing out that some of those originally around him are still living lives of quiet desperation but without doing anything themselves to improve their plight. And he remembers his frustration as a teenager, when working a summer job in a grocery shop, seeing impoverished neighbours always on their cell phones while he could not afford one.

A youthful J.D.Vance in the Marines

 After graduating from Middleton High School, Vance followed a well-trodden escape path from deprivation into the army. During his formative years in the U.S. Marine Corps, he was deployed to Iraq and no doubt during these four years, he further witnessed the enduring value of higher education. He moved on from the Marines to attend Ohio State University receiving a bachelor’s degree in political science and philosophy in 2009 and then went on to study Law at Yale which equipped him to gain a post in the multinational law firm, Sidley Austin LLP after which he gained experience in several Californian investment firms.

His excellent Hillbilly Elegy was published during the 2016 Presidential cycle when Hilary Clinton was pitted against Trump. The strange appeal of the millionaire Donald Trump to poor working-class whites living in the outback, proved to be a key factor in Trump’s success and many people contended that the poverty and discontent described in Vance’s book, explained why working- class white men supported a political

Fervent white working class support for Trump.
Can Vance really be comfortable with this quasi-religious 
enthusiasm?

outsider like ‘the Donald’. An interview with Vance by Rod Dreher of The American Conservative, publicised soon after the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, crashed the magazine’s website and Dreher opined that Trump’s success could only be understood by reading J.D. Vance. Others denounced the book claiming it perpetuated stereotypes of the Appalachian poor and questioned to what extent his family’s experiences applied to others.

Nonetheless, Vance’s book became a bestseller and prompted him to move back to Ohio from California. In 2021, the Ohio Republican senator, Rob Portman, announced he would not seek re-election in 2022, and after having declined several invitations to run for the Senate,  Vance decided to enter the race to replace him. During the 2016 Presidential election, Vance had voiced strong criticism of Trump, expressing fears that Trump was 'leading the white working class to a 

Trump and Vance rallying the troops

very dark place.”  But soon after entering the Senate race himself in 2021, he apologised publicly for his earlier criticism of Trump and made his sudden conversion to Trumpism a central tenet to his campaign while aligning himself publicly with the M.A.G.A. movement. [Trump remained highly popular in Ohio despite his having lost the Presidential election] Vance also repeated Trump’s claims, which he knew to be false, that there had been widespread voter fraud in 2016 when Biden won, a sure way to win Trump’s heart and importantly, those of his M.A.G.A. supporters!

One may assume this fundamental switch in political loyalty had more to do with Vance getting himself elected than in any genuine re-consideration of where his loyalties and opinions lay. Sadly, it worked! Buoyed by an endorsement from Trump, Vance was placed first in the Republican primary in May 2022 and in the November general election, he defeated the Democratic U.S. Rep, Tim Ryan, and was sworn in in January 2023. He was not yet 40. His writings testify to his acknowledgement of how fortunate he has been. “The statistics tell you that kids like me face a grim future; if they’re lucky, they’ll manage to avoid welfare; and if they’re unlucky, they’ll die of a heroin overdose.”

In his first Senatorial year, Vance amplified MAGA talking points on social media and podcasts hosted by right wing commentators but also co-sponsored bipartisan bills in Congress on issues such as CEO accountability for failed banks and publicly sparred with high-level Republicans like Mitt Romney and Mitch McConnell over U.S. aid to Ukraine which he supported. He is not an average Republican by any means and he has made it big!! He can be both admired for his tremendous life journey and criticised for his unashamed moral dishonesty and perhaps exploitative, self-seeking behaviour. I found the following quote by Vance about why he wrote Hillbilly Elegy [published when he was 31] in which we can see both a touching honesty and genuine self-knowledge:

“I want people to know what it feels like to nearly give up on yourself and why you might do it. I want people to understand what happens in the life of the poor and the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children. I want people to understand the American Dream as my family encountered it. I want people to understand how upward mobility really feels. And I want people to understand something I learned only recently: that for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us.”                                   

The Ambush which distressed so many observers

Elon Musk

In the present administration, the conservative side of J.D. Vance seems a more genuine quality than just mere expediency.  He has given backing to his boss's plans to reshape and scale back government and questioned the authority of US judges to stand in the way. But he seems often to have been overshadowed by Trump's cost-cutting tsar, Elon Musk, in his highly-publicised wrecking of multiple government departments. But in the area of foreign policy, Vance's first trip to Europe saw him berating U.S. allies at the Munich Security Conference, accusing European leaders of censoring free speech, taking in too many immigrants and undermining democracy; indeed, governing in anti-democratic ways. Then in late February came a televised meeting which began with Vance praising Trump's diplomacy and slamming the Biden administration, followed by the disastrous  argument with Zelensky and Trump in the Oval Office with Vance acting as Trump's attack dog in what appeared to be a pre-planned ambush of the Ukrainian leader. The distaste following that has been universal and the support of U.S. voters for both Vance and Trump has begun to reduce.

 .

In his Hillbilly Elegy, Vance described
how his mother trapped him in a car; drove
recklessly and told him they were going to die;
made him pee into a jar so she could use his clean
urine to pass a drug test; disappeared for sudden
unpredictable intervals; spent other people's money dishonestly;
 slit her wrists; crashed her minivan
into a telephone pole.

eee

J.D Vance and his mother in earlier years