J.D. Vance looks to build some bridges, even in GOP

As a high school student, bestselling “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance recalled, “People talked about Clarence as someone to look up to.”

“Not when I was there,” I interrupted.

And we laughed like people who went to the same high school, although in vastly different decades.

So did the host of our discussion, Bob Woodson, a former civil rights activist and founding head of the Woodson Center.

After I told Woodson, a longtime source of column ideas, how much “Hillbilly Elegy” shows that class and culture increasingly matter more than race in determining socioeconomic success, he invited young J.D. and me to talk about it in a video podcast, “Desegregate Poverty.”

It really is I who looks up to him, I noted, returning his compliment. He’s the one who turned his humble working-class upbringing in Kentucky and our shared hometown of Middletown, into a cultural and literary sensation and Netflix movie.

He also gained stardom as the “Trump anger translator” after the 2016 election, as journalists turned to his account from Flyover Country for clues about the working-class folks who energized Donald

Trump’s campaign.

The book doesn’t even mention Trump’s name. But Vance’s account of how family decline, childhood trauma, opioid abuse and the loss of dignity and purpose after the elimination of manufacturing jobs gave three-dimensional life to Trump’s “forgotten man” images and “American carnage” rhetoric.

Vance is more conservative than I am, but so, it seems to me, is most of our hometown, which only adds to the bitter frustration of those who feel the system has left them, as Vance puts it, on the “losing side of globalization.”

I agree that the erosion of family life has been brutal for Blacks and whites alike, studies show, even though Black families proportionately suffer worse.

We need to offer more than “Save the Family” slogans. For a while at least, J.D. was encouraged that his book was helping send Americans down that road.

“There was this moment where I actually thought I had accomplished something very meaningful because it seemed like folks were asking, what did we miss? What did we not see that was happening in the middle of the country with the white working class? Let’s try to empathize and understand where they’re coming from. Let’s try to make their lives better because that’s obviously a part of living and sharing the country with people ...”

That lasted maybe a few weeks before the discussion moved on to deny that job loss or the middle class feeling left behind by globalization were the reasons for Trump’s victory.

“Instead,” he recalled, “it was either that they (Trump voters) were racists or stupid or maybe Russia stole the election.”

That frustration, I believe, led to J.D.’s other news: He’s seriously pursuing the Senate seat occupied by Ohio Republican Rob Portman, who is not running in 2022. Before he has even confirmed whether he’ll run, his former employer Peter Thiel, venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal, has given $10 million to a super PAC that would support Vance’s potential run.

The former Marine, Iraq War vet and Yale graduate has an attractive resume, especially as the Republicans try to rebrand as the working-class party. But in a state Trump carried twice, his old Trump-bashing tweets may come back to haunt him.

I wish him well, as a fellow “Middie” alumnus. But if anything will challenge his warm Midwestern charm in pursuit of higher ground, this could be it.