What happened to JD Vance?
The 2014 version had a lot more to offer than the guy who now exemplifies the toxicity of Trumpism.
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Americans have been waiting for decades, since the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, for a political leader who offered the promise of bringing the nation together rather than emphasizing and exploiting our divisions.
Trump’s newly named running mate, JD Vance, with his background in a family hailing from rural Kentucky and his past interest in reaching out to Americans of different races and cultural backgrounds, could once possibly have played such a role. But to seize an opportunity to gain political power, Vance has spent the past several years transforming himself into a bigot who employs anger and resentment as political tools. He’s thereby made himself into an exemplar of the Republican Party’s toxic politics during the Trump era.
Many of those involved in RFK’s tragically short 1968 presidential campaign view his assassination as a lost opportunity, not only possibly to hasten the end of the Vietnam War, but also to build desperately needed bridges of empathy between disparate regions and communities. Before he challenged Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic presidential nomination, Kennedy famously visited some of the desperately poorest and most isolated communities in the nation. Many of them were Black communities, including in the Mississippi Delta and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
But RFK also visited Kentucky communities at the heart of Appalachia — just like the town Vance’s family hails from — where he found the very same sort of desperate poverty, childhood malnutrition, and sheer desperation that he had seen in Mississippi. Kennedy went on to ground his presidential campaign on an effort to build bridges of understanding between such isolated communities, and upon the promise of committing the nation to lifting them all up.
The rise of the Southern Strategy
While RFK’s idea may initially appear to have been pie in the sky, it actually reflected one of the organizing principles of the New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. Both of those initiatives were grounded on building economic and political connections between rural and often overwhelmingly white communities and urban, racially diverse ones, particularly through agricultural and food programs like SNAP, which provided reliable sources of income to farmers while providing food to the poor. It was that fundamentally pragmatic strategy of building affinities between diverse American communities that made the Democratic Party the dominant political force in much of the country for decades.
But, of course, much of recent American political history since RFK’s death has been marked by a politics of racial division as deeply cynical as RFK’s vision now appears strikingly optimistic. This process began in earnest with Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign, which made former Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s so-called Southern Strategy the foundation of a resurgent Republican Party politics.
“Southern Strategy” was in fact a misnomer, since the strategy focused on manipulating the racial and cultural resentments of white Americans throughout the nation as a lever to induce them to abandon the Democratic Party, which had by then inextricably identified itself with the civil rights movement. It worked brilliantly.
Over a period of decades, white voters not only in the South, but also in areas like Appalachia, became part of a new Republican Party base that was fed a constant stream of coded appeals to racial resentments. Ronald Reagan added to the formula by identifying the GOP with increasingly politically active white evangelical communities, as well as “traditionalist” Catholics. As reflected in his repeated addresses to “right to life” marches, Reagan did this in part by making the overruling of Roe v. Wade a foundational plank of the Republican Party, and thereby implicitly appealed to a growing resentment of changing gender roles, and the accompanying empowerment of women.
With the election of Trump in 2016, the Southern Strategy reached an unlikely apotheosis. By appealing to elements of the right — particularly Christian nationalists — and exploiting racial bigotry more overtly that either party had since the early 1970s, Trump attracted even more rural and exurban whites to the party (albeit at the cost of repulsing more affluent suburbanites) and thereby won an unlikely Electoral College victory. By 2017, when Trump declared that neo-Nazi and KKK rioters who had gathered in Charlottesville to protest the removal of a Confederate monument were “very fine people,” the GOP had transformed itself into a party fundamentally reliant on supercharging racially and “culturally” charged fear and resentment.
While Trump has long spoken of expanding his base by appealing to working class Hispanic and Black Americans — and pundits have touted the prospect of such a “realignment” of non-white voters — that goal has never been easy to reconcile with the fundamentally xenophobic and racist nature of Trump’s “movement.” And in his short tenure as Trump’s running mate, Vance — whose purported working class Appalachian roots the GOP endlessly touts — has demonstrated just how fully Trump’s politics of resentment and division are at odds with the idea of broadening the GOP.
Indeed, Vance’s personal political journey demonstrates that the exploitation of racial and ethnic divisions, along with misogyny, are central to Trumpism.
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Vance wasn’t always like this
It’s well known that Vance was a “never Trumper” until well into Trump’s presidency. But it’s now becoming clear that Vance’s enthusiastic conversion to Trump’s cult of personality was accompanied by a far more dramatic transformation of his normative and political views.
The scale and cynically opportunistic nature of Vance’s rapid self-transformation is becoming clearer as former friends and associates, some of whom he has discarded along the way, have come forward. The most revealing material, so far, is the correspondence between Vance and his former Yale Law School classmate (Vance graduated in 2009) and friend (until 2021), Sofia Nelson, an LGBTQ+ person, that was published and discussed in a recent New York Times piece.
The Vance of less than 10 years ago that emerges from the correspondence, while a self-described conservative, was the very obverse of the resentment-driven man who derided Vice President Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg as “childless cat ladies.” The Vance of as recently as 2014 appeared to be eager to build bridges with persons quite different from himself, among them Nelson.
Nelson recalled to the Times that, as they recovered from transition-related surgery, Vance visited to provide well wishes, and said, in substance, “I don’t understand what you’re doing, but I support you.”
Pre-Trumper Vance’s apparent empathy also apparently extended beyond racial lines. In the wake of October 2014 killing of Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer — which gave rise to protests that presaged the Black Lives Matter movement — Vance wrote to Nelson saying, “I hate the police. Given the number of negative experiences I’ve had in the past few years, I can’t imagine what a Black guy goes through.”
Had the Vance of 2014 emerged as a national political figure, he could well have taken up something like the mantle RFK had laid down in 1968. Indeed, Vance’s apparent interest in identifying commonalities among Americans of different races, sexualities, and geographical backgrounds was the very foundation of the kind of project RFK envisioned.
But, of course, the JD Vance of 2024 is a far cry from the JD Vance of 2014. During a few short years, Vance has transformed himself from an individual who sought out and sought to build bridges of friendship and empathy with people different from himself, into a proudly intolerant man, who seems singularly focused on demonizing the majority of Americans who don’t fall within Trump’s white, Christian “people’s community.”
Just how and why Vance set out to change himself so fundamentally is a matter of dispute. But the consequences of his self-transformation are clear: the new Vance just happened to endear himself with a group of right wing extremists, not least among them Peter Thiel (the Silicon Valley billionaire who made Vance rich, and then funded his nascent political career) and Donald Trump.
The collateral consequences of Vance’s self-remake are also starting to come into focus. For example, Vance’s friendship with Nelson came to an abrupt end when, in 2021, he publicly announced his support of Arkansas legislation barring minors from receiving gender affirming care.
We can only speculate about whether Vance has any regrets about the harm he caused to those he discarded during his rapid journey to Trumpism. But he sure moved fast.
Vance chose to ground his fast-rising political career in his home state of Ohio, and he did so based on the very most extreme version of so-called cultural conservatism that can be found in the Trump-era GOP. Far from championing efforts at building bridges of empathy and understanding between Americans of different cultural, racial, and economic backgrounds, Vance based his political appeal, from the outset, on promoting division.
One reprehensible, but typical, example is Vance’s recent appearance with Megyn Kelly. While it was billed as an effort to “clean up” Vance’s now notorious “childless cat ladies” remark, the interview ended up providing an opportunity for him to double down on his politics of demonization.
Vance declared that “Democrats” — by which he clearly meant women who desire personal autonomy — are “anti-child” and “anti-family.” He then went on to declare that these “anti-child” women were endangering the nation by failing to reproduce, asserting that if the shortfall in “American” babies is made up for by increased immigration, the nation will be destroyed.
This is only the tip the iceberg of intolerance that comprises the remade JD Vance. Almost needless to say, he no longer expresses his previously stated empathy for the negative impact of systemic racism on Black Americans. He also openly yearns for the day that LGBTQ+ Americans can no longer marry.
And where RFK sought to unite Americans in a common project of helping the poorest among us to emerge from poverty, Vance, as reflected in his book, Hillbilly Elegy, advances the claim that the most desperate Americans are largely responsible for their plights, and therefore underserving of much help.
Vance’s politics are now, like Trump’s, fully grounded in exploiting divisions of race, religion, and culture. A religious person might say that Vance sold his soul for success. But there is a more mundane interpretation. Vance may never actually have been a person of serious moral commitments, given how easy he has found it to turn on his friends, and to adopt an ideology he almost certainly knows to be repugnant.
As Vance’s former law school roommate put it, “He is using his tremendous intelligence and thoughtfulness to deliberately choose contempt as a political strategy, as opposed to building the bridges he used to talk about building.” Nelson put it more bluntly: “He’s willing to adopt whatever positions to amass money and power … His only real core value is advancing his career.”
Toward a real populism
But putting Vance’s normative mediocrity to one side, the hope of building a politics grounded on common interests — rather than differences — remains alive; indeed, it has been the animating principle of Joe Biden’s efforts to rebuild infrastructure in industry in both rural and urban America. And it is also the animating theme of Kamala Harris’s remarkably successful nascent presidential campaign.
One curiously hopeful example, from the Appalachia of Vance’s roots, is provided by musician Tyler Childers. Childers, who hails from rural Kentucky, by his own account spent over a decade abusing drugs and alcohol. Nonetheless, he also succeeded in building a career as a musician grounded in the traditions of Kentucky, including the coal mining industry on which his family relied. In 2020, in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, Childers released a bluegrass-inspired album that concluded with a song called Long Violent History that imagines a rural, white Kentucky community beset by police violence of the sort that’s common in Black communities.
As Childers later explained, the song was an attempt to cause his audience to, in Vance’s words, “think about what Black guys go through,” and thereby see past their own lives to the troubles faced by others. Childers went on to say that some rural white members of his audience were unhappy with the song and acknowledged he might have lost some of them as fans. But unlike Vance, Childers has been willing to take the chance of making people uncomfortable.
In another contrast with Vance, who established a short-lived charity purportedly about helping Ohioans beset by substance abuse, but that apparently accomplished little to nothing, Childers and his spouse established a real charity focused on philanthropic efforts in Appalachia.
At the same time, Childers has been supporting progressive politicians in his GOP-dominated state, including Kentucky’s very popular Democratic governor, Andy Beshear. Beshear, who is among those Kamala Harris is reportedly considering as her running mate, managed to avoid many needless deaths during the pandemic by following medically sound public health measures over the strong opposition of the GOP-controlled legislature. He’s also made it a priority to expand access to health care, particularly for Black Kentuckians.
So maybe, just maybe, there’s hope that RFK’s dream could be realized after all, even as people like JD Vance work to undermine it.
That’s it for this week
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Something we should all remember -- and never stop pointing out to Neanderthals like Vance: pro-choice progressives are NOT "anti-children." We are against women being forced to have UNWANTED children. Statistics show that unwanted children are more likely to be abused, to become abusers, and to commit a disproportionate share of crimes. One notable study even demonstrated a correlation between the number of unwanted children and crime rates nationwide. Pro-choice advocates want all children to be loved, cherished, and raised to be productive citizens. There's nothing "anti-family" about that!
JD Vance is showing true Trumpist hypocritical colors. While Trump goes on about immigrants, his wife and in-laws remain immigrants, and his first wife too. All of his children that he actually acknowledges have one immigrant parent. JD Vance has a wife who has immigrant parents. She is not an immigrant, but his in-laws are. Should they go back to India? By saying that if we create Americans by allowing immigrants in, instead of by forcing women to breed, he is contradicting his own situation where his children exist because of immigrants coming to America. So is Trump. I would love to see the ads attacking both of them on their immigrant hypocrisy, since they are making this a central theme of their party in the election. I feel sorry for their children on all accounts. Shame on their spouses for supporting them. There is no way my husband could get away with saying such things and having any respect from our child or me.