After winning Donald Trump’s endorsement, J.D. Vance won the Ohio Senate Republican primary on Tuesday night. To win Trump’s endorsement, Vance had to apologize to Trump for his past anti-Trump apostasy and go full MAGA in his Senate campaign.
Now Vance, only 37 years old, has an excellent chance to become a Senator from red state Ohio and add his voice and vote to a Republican Senate caucus dominated by die-hard Trump loyalists.
In his campaign Vance has said many things I find deeply offensive. And as someone who views Trump’s political rise as a national tragedy, I view any politician who vies for Trump’s patronage as committing an act of moral bankruptcy.
So, my first instinct is to write Vance off as just another Hawley, Graham, Cruz, or Cotton. Write him off as part of the political firmament that I view as a noisome political graveyard, “a madding crowd of ignoble strife.” (1))
Yet.
There’s much I’ve admired about J.D. Vance. He grew up in Appalachia in communities and in a family deeply troubled by poverty and drugs. With the primary help of his grandmother to whom he gives full credit, he escaped his probable, predictable fate, served in the military, achieved academic success and graduated from Yale Law School.
Vance’s 2016 book “Hillbilly Elegy” told his story and made personal, authentic, and poignant arguments about the necessary role of personal agency and responsibility in addressing the addiction and poverty problems of Appalachia. It was made into a movie, panned by critics, but enjoyed by me.
When Trump began his political rise and used coarse and racist appeals to Appalachia-like communities across the country, Vance condemned Trump’s approach, using the apt metaphor of addiction, as Trump promising a quick, heroin-like high that would end in nothing but tears.
Then, Vance seemed to me to be an all-around admirable person, and I was eager to see what he would do next.
But he turned Trump. He even grew a beard to make himself resemble Donald Trump Jr. My instinct was to cancel Vance, which, outside the confines of my own mind, was an entirely insignificant thing for me to do, as I’ve never met J.D. Vance, and he would have no reason to know who I am or care what I thought about him.
In wanting to write something about Vance after his primary victory, I watched a speech he gave in November to close out a “National Conservative” conference. (2) His main thrust was that the universities have been corrupting the morals of our youth and conning them into falsely believing that a four year college degree was the solution to their problems. Instead of “knowledge and truth,” the universities were promoting “deceit and lies.” Vance closed his speech with a quote from Richard Nixon: “The professors are the enemy.”
It was a standard speech in the centuries-old tradition of American anti-intellectualism. (3) There was little to nothing in the speech I could agree with. Yet. There was a warmth and likeability to Vance in his affect. And when he gave some anecdotes about people in Appalachian Ohio, I sensed a genuine warmth for these people, a genuine affection. I sensed he was sincere in wanting to help them.
At first, I wondered whether I could justify Vance’s turn to Trumpism. He had been brought to the mountain of Silicon Valley wealth and tempted by the devil in the person of Peter Thiel. (4) He was too young and too impressionable and too ambitious to resist so like Faust (or like the John Cassavetes husband character in “Rosemary’s Baby”), Vance sold his soul. Or maybe he just rented it out to Thiel.
And after all, isn’t it a politician’s job to get elected?
But no, I couldn’t justify the things Vance had said. So, then I thought I ought to go with the conventional wisdom of people like me (conventionally viewed as never-Trumper, East Coast intellectual elitists) and consign Vance to a circle of my own political hell as others might similarly consign me.
But that seemed wrong, too. After all I had really admired Vance and even continued to like aspects of his personality when I saw him speak.
Then I thought about people I know well, friends and relatives, who have views on issues I find repellent or who have said things I find repellent. I haven’t cancelled them, I haven’t excised them from my life. Some of them are people I love. So, why can’t I live with a nuanced view of J.D. Vance? Why can’t I accept that this 37 year old man, still so early in his life, is capable of a lot of good and is also capable of giving in to baser instincts. Like every human on the planet.
So, I’ve decided to take the Gollum approach.(5) I’ll hate some things about Vance and love other things.
And I’ll remind myself that arriving at a fixed definition of an entire person, whether a stranger like Vance, or someone I know well, is more often than not an act consisting of a varying mix of carelessness, laziness, and hubris.
(1) Reference to a famous line from the poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
(2)
(3) The late, great historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a book, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life as a reaction to the 1950’s disdain for Adlai Stevenson as an “egghead,” to McCarthyism, and to Eisenhower who defined an intellectual as a “wordy and pretentious man.” (For pretension, see my footnote (1) above.)
(4) Billionaire VC Thiel bankrolled Vance’s campaign
(5)
People you love deserve a longer leash and more nuance than a politician you've never met. I think it's ok to judge a politician or public figure in a way that you wouldn't a family member or friend.
The inability to hear opposing political views from people you love has become remarkably more difficult in the last five years. I agree that is difficult to put my mom’s best friend in a category of someone to stay away from. Yet that thought would not have entered my mind ten years ago. My 100 year old aunt says that she had never seen or experienced such a divide before Trump came to power.