“It’s All Just So Weird ”: The Resistible Rise of J.D. Vance
For what reason is a man likely to step over the line? I answered, “Ambition, love, fear, money.”
From “All the King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren
Even in his current state as the picture next to the word “hypocrite” in the dictionary, Donald Trump’s choice for vice-presidential running mate is not solely a figure of fun.
There’s also a strange pathos to J.D. Vance.
When I read his “Hillbilly Elegy” this past week—it’s a grind—I tried to forget Vance’s past few months of down-spiraling and envision him as he was when he wrote it circa 2017.
Various commentators have found some empathy for Vance, even as we await what comes of the possibility that the Trump campaign will kick him to the curb.
Reading his fairly slim (which is also to say scattershot and episodic) memoir, you have to admit he was truly traumatized by his family. This includes his grandfather Pawpaw, a “terrifying hillbilly, made for a different time and place”, who was nonetheless crucial in raising him as his substance-abusing mom worked through bad husbands.
Indeed, there is some folk wisdom in its pages, some cogent discussion of society’s ills and of the nation’s disenfranchised. There are also some dubious parables of the hillbilly among the swells. (He insists he’s baffled to find at age 24, post Ohio State and Yale Law, that there are varieties of white wine.)
He also insists he did a spit take at the same dinner, shocked out of his gourd by the crappy taste of…what they call sparkling water. It’s carbonated! Like, all fizzy. Who knew?
In Ron Howard’s mostly ill-reviewed film adaptation of the book, Frieda Pinto as his loyal girlfriend and wife-to-be Usha talks him through the mystifying cutlery at the table. Each reader will have to judge whether such testimony is tepid or charming.
The extensive posturing throughout the book is partly in service of his messages on class bias. When he shamefacedly self-identifies near the end as “a tall, straight, white male” who nonetheless felt out of place at Yale, you may want to say, dude, just take the win and flex on!
With such humdrum crises moving his bildungsroman forward, one awaits his Marine Corps days. Turns out the hard part is those early wake-ups.
To his credit, Vance avoids stolen valor. Aside from a hint that he joined some civil affairs visits to villages outside the wire while in the war zone, he has not oversold his tour of some months in Iraq as anything bold. He feels “lucky to escape any real fighting.” (He learns self-reliance, though onstage he somehow still has a Beaver Cleaver gormlessness--albeit adding, in 2024, a jigger of snarky Eddie Haskell.)
Had Vance not taken such a hard, skidding turn to the right after all the posturing as a lonely specimen of the real people, I might have cheered him on a bit. You do you, hillbilly hero, build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung.
Ah, but.
Having clerked one summer for Texas senator John Coryn (mostly vetting docs for Judiciary Committee work), Vance spares not a word about the redoubtable Republican. Yet he was quick to trade the Rust Belt for the Beltway.
Upon returning to Ohio to commence his law career he quickly set out to carve out a political identity, and soon enough storied PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel (and his fellow richie David Sacks, in league with invidious pal Elon Musk), snapped him up as a like-minded venture capital type. Whether for his v.c. prowess or his gradually cultivated, right-leaning politics mixed with religiosity (he became a Catholic, which happened to suit his new mentors) he became their boy. By the time he undertook a race for the Senate from Ohio, Thiel and cadre were ready with a $15-million war chest that brought him from the rear to the front of the pack. And despite the fervent warnings he’d publicly shared about the dangers of The Donald, he tongued the ring at Mar-a-Lago (Thiel officiated) and won the key Trump endorsement to gain a Senate seat in D.C.
The rest has become what the GOP may find to be a polling hole Vance won't quit digging. Although he’d previously self-identified as a “never Trump guy,” calling the vituperative oaf “reprehensible,” a “cynical asshole” and “cultural heroin,” he went all in and once he had bewitched Trump’s doltish sons (as a trio they give beards a bad name), the path was laid.
“[Vance] is someone,” railed the Democratic National Committee when the pick was made known, “who supports banning abortion nationwide while criticizing exceptions for rape and incest survivors; railed against the Affordable Care Act, including its protections for millions with preexisting conditions; and has admitted he wouldn’t have certified the free and fair election in 2020.”
Of the “childless cat ladies” gaffe, what more can be said? “Sometimes,” he wrote in his book before it rocketed to a long run on the bestseller list (even as his dealings with Thiel’s cabal made him richer still), “I view members of the elite with an almost primal scorn.”
Cited in his memoir is a friendship with a trans Yale classmate named Sofia Nelson, now a public defender in Detroit, and imprecisely described in his book (he later apologized) as “an extremely progressive lesbian with a fantastic sense of humor.” Although she still carries a fondness for him and his wife Usha, Sofia sees their re-boot as “a loss of integrity”—a grasp for “money and power” over abandoned principles.
In Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer-winning novel, quoted above), protagonist Jack Burden finds “the convulsion of the world” dragging him from newspapering to a gig as despot governor Willie Starks' lapdog. (The story unfolds in a psychic landscape that is highly akin to Huey Long’s Louisiana, and also to Trump’s demagogic ascent).
The similarity is only amplified in the Oscar-winning 1949 film version. The novel (now to be had in a well-curated restored edition) is a compelling read, all the more so when you recognize Vance as kin not only to Burden but also to the power-hungry Willie. Each goes to the dark side, where Vance by now surely realizes he is stuck.
There’s even a moment when the backwoods pols realize how useful a foil Willy Stark will make, but the line could have been written to describe Vance’s role, however misplayed, in the current election cycle. “If you want to listen to a boy from the sticks,” says one corrupt pol, “I know just the guy.”