VANCE WASN’T JUST SOME HILLBILLY
If anthropologists in the distant future want to understand the utter depravity of our political culture in the first part of the 21st century, they could do worse than to study the life of J.D. Vance.
Ohio’s junior senator, you might have seen, turned up at the criminal courthouse in Manhattan this week, with his ultra-trendy woodsman’s beard and blood-red tie, to viciously attack the prosecutors and witnesses in the trial of Donald Trump.
I can’t say from experience how you’re supposed to know when you’ve officially become part of an organized crime family, but if you feel it necessary for your professional advancement to show up at a courthouse and pay respect to a patriarch charged with fraudulent payments to a porn star, chances are you check all the boxes.
Vance isn’t just another wiseguy wannabe, however. He’s the walking embodiment of a Republican Party that has devolved into full-on farce.
You might recall that Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, burst into the public consciousness in 2016, when he wrote a blockbuster book called “Hillbilly Elegy.” The book (which I will admit to having skimmed at the time, like about 90% of the people who bought it) recounted Vance’s experience growing up in a Rust Belt community in Ohio decimated by job losses and drug dependency.
“Hillbilly Elegy” was embraced on the right for its indictment of cultural decay and its call to self-reliance; it was lauded on the left because it offered an explanation as to why good people would gravitate toward someone as reprehensible as Trump. That’s not my word, by the way — it was Vance’s, who called himself a Never Trumper at the time and warned Christian voters: “When we apologize for this man, Lord help us.”
I met Vance, for the first and only time, when he joined Katie Couric for Yahoo’s election night webcast that year. (I was Yahoo’s national political columnist and Katie’s sidekick.) He impressed me then as modest and cerebral. He seemed almost embarrassed by his sudden celebrity.
He wasn’t. My office shelves are full of these “books that miraculously explain our political moment” from over the years — “Don’t Think of an Elephant!,” “God’s Politics,” “The Radical Center” — and I’ve come to understand that their success is never an accident. Show me a book that captures the post-election zeitgeist of a worried intelligentsia, and I’ll show you a shrewd, ambitious author who sensed an opening and steered right into it. If the Pentagon could engineer a fame-seeking missile, it would look a lot like “Hillbilly Elegy.”
So I guess we shouldn’t have been surprised when Vance’s argument turned out to be mostly pretext and his convictions nonexistent. Almost immediately, Vance started entertaining a career in Republican politics. By 2022, when he ran for the open seat left by retiring Sen. Rob Portman, Vance had gone from Never Trump to Long Live the King; his conversion included a spirited embrace of Trump’s stolen-election nonsense. His financier in that race was billionaire Peter Thiel, who had also bankrolled Trump in 2016.
Now Vance is gunning to be Trump’s running mate, which is why he bravely waded through the leftist filth of Manhattan to show his fealty. He imagines himself starring in Hillbilly Vice.
Look, there’s nothing new about cynical opportunism at the highest level of our politics. Richard M. Nixon shredded reputations to make himself the ultimate Cold Warrior, then repositioned himself as a moderate in the Goldwater years. Bill Clinton used conservative talking points to deflect attention from his antiwar protesting days.
But there were basic lines of duplicity that neither Nixon nor Clinton nor any other American politician of the last century would cross — in part because they had some genuine convictions about the value of public service, and in part because a robust and reasonably trusted news media would never have let them get away with it.
We’re not there anymore. Our media is too damaged and fragmented to make anyone accountable for their lies. And Vance represents the new breed of Republican charlatan — willing to see the democracy riven and its institutions reduced to rubble if it means he can be TikTok-famous for a while and ride around in armored limousines. For Trump-era evangelists, the only true sin is anonymity.
I could spin this as though it’s not entirely a bad thing. Maybe it’s better that the Trumpist elite are mostly amoral operators, rather than true-believing extremists. Maybe it means that as soon as Trump loses (again) or falls out of favor in the polls, the J.D. Vances of the world will move on to some other vehicle and pretend they never liked him anyway.
But I’m not really that optimistic. History tells us that repressive movements enabled by cowards and hucksters are just as bad, if not worse, than those perpetrated by the legitimately hateful. You can wreck a country with cosplaying careerists just as easily as you can with bloodthirsty revolutionaries.
Maybe that’s the right elegy for our times.