James David Vance is now, without question, the most successful and important American under the age of 40, having lived a triumphant cultural and political life without any clear parallel in modern American history. Only 20 years ago he was rising out of the chaotic and complex circumstances he detailed in his wonderful book, Hillbilly Elegy—I say “complex” because, as Kevin Williamson detailed in his review for COMMENTARY, the issue for Vance was not actually economic privation.
Williamson wrote of Vance’s summation of his early days: “His Kentucky-exile grandparents are secure and prosperous in spite of their own humble origins and a long period of alcohol-fueled domestic strife; they own a nice, four-bedroom home and drive new high-end cars—convertibles, even. Growing up in a small town in Ohio in the 1990s, Vance lived in a household with an annual income exceeding $100,000, or the equivalent of about $175,000 a year in today’s dollars.” His life story is about human frailty and the damage it can cause—a father who literally surrenders his paternity to a soon-gone stepfather, a mother whose drinking and drugging make his occasionally terrifying and violence-obsessed grandmother the only real beacon of stability in his life.”
Vance tells a great American story because he turns out to be a great American story—an impressive kid who impresses elders in high school and workplaces and the military and college and law school with his seriousness and determination and sees a path out of the chaos rather than falling into it. Some of it is as seemingly simple as taking a job and showing up for that job on time, a challenge that seems to defeat many of his peers. Some of it is as profoundly complicated as seeing the dysfunction of those he loves and determining not to sink in it.
He published Hillbilly Elegy at the age of 31, and at the time, he held views largely congruent with the ones expressed in this magazine. A belief in personal responsibility. Hawkish foreign-policy views ironically first presented to the public on the Frum Forum website run by my old friend the ur-Never-Trumper David Frum. A sense of the importance of the American experiment and a critic of the kind of detour from true American greatness represented by the resentments expressed by Donald Trump and the burgeoning MAGA movement. In 2016, he said Trump “was leading the white working class to a very dark place.” In June 2017—just seven years ago—he wrote a book review for COMMENTARY at my invitation about Amy Goldstein’s portrait account of the distressed rust-belt town that was home to then-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. Here’s how that review ends:
“The tendency in our politics is to reach for the familiar and the easy: We should cut taxes to spur economic growth and bring Janesville’s jobs back. If that doesn’t work, we should retrain Janesville’s workforce for new jobs. If that doesn’t work, perhaps the workers of Janesville should just move. There may be limited virtue in some of these ideas—our society could do for a lot more geographic mobility, for instance—yet they also seem to miss the point.”
He goes on: “Our entire economic playbook is the consequence of a 40-year conversation started by Ronald Reagan, a man who wisely recognized that the paradigm of the previous four decades had broken down in an era of stagflation. Now we argue about whether to blame unscrupulous Wall Street bankers or an overreaching federal government. We talk about whether to increase the minimum wage, and if so, by how much. I could go on and on, but as I read Goldstein’s wonderful book, I found myself asking: Would any of it make a significant difference to Janesville?”
He concludes: “The answer, I fear, is no. We have entered what Senator Ben Sasse calls a ‘historically unique’ period of disruption, one in which millennials change jobs more frequently than previous generations, exciting industries require new skills and training, and our families and communities struggle to respond effectively. Yet our politics and our policy thinking are boringly conventional. That should worry you, not just because the people of Janesville are decent and hardworking, but because the problems of Janesville will almost certainly come to a town—or big city—near you.”
Frustrated with the inability of public policy to take proper account of the problems afflicting the places America seemed to have passed by, he locates in this review the problem as he did in Hillbilly Elegy—the problem that there is something inchoate in American life that seems to be encouraging self-destructive behaviors that cannot be readily improved by politicians and think tanks:
“One temptation, for both the residents of Janesville and certainly for the reader, is to take stock of the situation and to lash out at something—at the ‘system,’ at capitalism, at government overreach, at Paul Ryan, even at God. Yet the great virtue of Goldstein’s Janesville is that it refuses to indulge in the trite simply because it might prove cathartic or reassuring.”
He has traveled since along a path that you can say is evolutionary—as in, he became less pessimistic and more determined to heal the “system” rather than throw up his hands in despair. Or you can say he saw a market opportunity and took it. Young and brilliant and wealthy and energetic, with genuine cultural provenance, he started to agree publicly with the citizens of Janesville that they had been screwed and that Washington and the elites were doing the screwing.
It is at this point he begins to embrace not the complexity of his own life story but a different kind of “familiar and easy”—which is to say, the advocacy of Donald Trump as the voice of the left-behind America. Having denounced Trump in 2016, he pronounced himself reformed by 2020. It was, we can now see, the most brilliant political play of his generation. Two years later he was elected a senator from Ohio and 19 months after his swearing-in he is now the vice-presidential candidate on the ticket in the lead. Richard Nixon was 39 when Dwight Eisenhower chose him as his vice-presidential nominee. Nixon went through many turns—losing the presidential race in 1960, losing a race for governor of California in 1962—while pressing on relentlessly until he achieved the presidency in 1968 and then the biggest electoral margin in American history in 1972. When he was sworn in, after 16 years of triumph and loss, Nixon was not yet 50 years old. Vance is going to be in our lives as a major political figure for decades to come. Get used to it. But what are we going to have to get used to?
You can’t argue with the triumph of his journey. What you can argue with is the ideas he is now espousing. He speaks slightingly and dismissively of the Ukrainian effort to turn back the Russian invaders, contending as so many on the Trump Right do that the money going to Ukraine is coming out of the mouths of the people of Janesville when the story of the last year of Trump and the first three years of Biden is a story of unprecedented top-down government largesse. In two years we have sent about $100 billion, mostly in the form of already-built equipment, to Ukraine, or about $50 billion a year at a time Washington is spending $6 trillion a year—or 1.6 percent. For that 1.6 percent we are helping to pin down and retard the ambitions of the nation that has brought war back to the European continent, where two huge wars nearly destroyed Western civilization.
Look, I believe people’s views can change markedly and that they can come to believe things they once did not believe. But Vance’s market opportunity as a politician involved a deliberate choice to align himself with a vanguard of the Right that has become consumed by the idea there’s something morally depraved about our support for Ukraine. This choice on Vance’s part seems more instrumentalist than conviction-driven, but again, I guess you can’t argue with his triumph.
How permanent this change is we cannot say. Richard Nixon, chosen not only for his youth by Eisenhower but because he was the most articulate and tough anti-Communist voice in the GOP, became the author of detente 20 years later—a policy the young Nixon would literally have seen as a surrender to evil. Vance’s rebirth is surely as conditional and transactional as the policy views of the man under whom he hopes to be serving for the next four years.
One person who has not, in fact, turned on Ukraine is…Donald Trump, who has very deliberately refused to embrace the isolationist view even as he hints he will end the war the day he’s inaugurated. There’s talk that Trump will reappoint Mike Pompeo as secretary of state, and if he does, that will be a sign the vanguard is not seizing control of American foreign policy. The question raised by Pompeo and wherever Trump will go on foreign policy is this: Will people of principle be weakened by their attachment to larger ideas or will they be strengthened while the chameleons led by Vance will be on the lookout for the next time to change their colors?
It is important to note that Vance has been stalwart in the right way about the war between Israel and Gaza. He said as much in a May address to the Quincy Institute, the new home of bipartisan American isolationism. To prevent a wider regional war in the Middle East, he offered this: “The way that we get there in Israel is by combining the Abraham Accords approach with the defeat of Hamas. That gets us to a place where Israel and the Sunni nations can play a regional counterweight to Iran. We don’t want a broader regional war. We don’t want to get involved in a broader regional war. The best way to do that is to ensure that Israel, with the Sunni nations, can actually police their own region of the world.”
That’s good. It’s the voice of a serious man, the serious man Vance was when he was younger and, one hopes, the serious man he will be if he ends up a heartbeat away from the presidency. Most important, I hope he sees his story as the story of what America can offer those Americans who show the determination to succeed even if their own personal circumstances seem designed to lead them to the very dark place Vance once thought Trump was tempting his own family members toward.
