Does JD Vance Have Anything At All To Offer America Besides His Own Hollow, Rotten Careerism?

On CNN yesterday, Andy Beshear demonstrated how he might handle Vance if Kamala picks him to be her running mate: “J.D. Vance is a phony; he’s fake. I mean, he first says that Donald Trump is like Hitler, and now he’s acting like he’s Lincoln. The problem with J.D. Vance is he has no conviction, but I guess his running mate has 34.”

Every week, PunchBowl takes the pulse of DC insiders— senior Capitol Hill staffers and lobbyists-- and last week the setting of the survey ("The Canvass") was at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Most respondents, they reported, thought Trump “should have picked Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin as his running mate instead of Sen. JD Vance (R-OH). Nearly 80% disapproved of the Vance pick. Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and Senators Tim Scott (R-SC) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) all fared better than Vance in the poll.”

And these are professional Republicans we’re talking about here! Rural activists Bryce Oates and Jake Davis, on the other hand, aren’t Republicans, professional or otherwise. They took a look at Vance’s populist charade over the weekend. “Like the huckster from the big city (Trump), Vance is the ‘small town’ shill who says the right things as he picks your pocket,” they wrote. “Together, they would be the most dangerous duo of con men in American political history.

What makes Vance so dangerous is his compelling life story. As two trailer-trash kids from rural Missouri who grew up with nothing, our hats are off to Vance for his ability to craft a political identity with a display of populist rhetoric: guttural disgust of the corporate oligarchy. Wall Street barons. Pharmaceutical cartels. NAFTA. The forgotten heartland. Yes, this is the language that resonates with our people. But we find it offensive when an Ivy League venture capitalist in a Brioni-style suit tries to pretend he is a champion of Appalachia and the Rust Belt.

Vance first hit the national spotlight in 2016 when he published Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir describing the poverty and addiction that surrounded his life growing up in Middletown, Ohio. The book flew off the shelves after Trump was elected in 2016. He became the darling of liberals and members of the Beltway press who were trying to understand “Trump Country.” The mainstream news media gave Vance a national platform that led him to where he is today.

Hillbilly Elegy is filled with stereotypes and generalizations about rural and small town America. Beneath its surface, Vance’s “elegy” is a lament revealing deep-seated contempt. He blames working class people for systemic failures, saying “Individuals created these problems, not the government, not a corporation.” In one cliché after another, Vance presents moralistic solutions: get a job, stop doing drugs, stay married and go to church. He has little to say about the role of companies or policies in destroying rural communities. Instead, he blames big government for coddling drug addicts and welfare queens, and calls for cuts to government programs that serve the poor and working class in the small town regions he pretends to represent. In short, Hillbilly Elegy is nothing more than an autobiography of a wannabe MAGA culture warrior.

What  matters to us is what lies behind his supposed populism and corporation-bashing. Is it anything more than election-year bluster?

Back when he was an elitist investment banker at Narya Capital, the now defunct firm he founded with the backing of Peter Thiel, among others, Vance didn’t call for reigning in hedge funds or busting up monopolies, nor did he stump for the working man. His hometown is a Cincinnati suburb with a population of 51,000. That doesn’t make Vance an expert on rural America. Neither do his plans to share a grave plot in the eastern Kentucky coalfields. Does he know anything at all about the lives and struggles of coal miners? Vance, no doubt, would do all he can to defund the Inflation Reduction Act that is creating thousands of jobs and fixing up infrastructure all over the broad region defined as “coal country.” Does he understand anything about the important role of the federal government, both in spending and in staffing?

The video presented at the Republican National Convention Wednesday night before Vance’s acceptance speech showed him walking the rows of idyllic corn fields, but what is his position on the pending Biden Administration livestock rules and support for building many more small town meat processing plants?

If he gets his policy ideas from Project 2025 for the farm bill,  it will open the door to huge profits for corporate agribusiness. Thousands of jobs will disappear, family farms will be lost, pollution will skyrocket and the infrastructure needs of small towns across rural America will continue to deteriorate. Thousands of working-class people will lose their SNAP benefits (aka food stamps) and their healthcare. Ditto for access to Head Start, which provides childcare services across rural America.

When it comes to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), free trade and the conversation about tariffs that Vance will trigger, we are as concerned about the Democratic response as we are about Vance’s extreme views. If corporate Democrats come out of the woodwork to advise whoever the nominee is to become the “free trade” candidate, they’ll try and chase the Big Ag vote once again— and they’ll fail.

…The Democrats’ first attacks on Vance are rightly focused on his horrific abortion views. Millions of rural voters support abortion rights and have turned out and voted down abortion bans. Vance’s Christian Nationalism is also a good target. Millions of rural people oppose this scary version of faith that eliminates the separation of church and state. Our concern is what comes after that.

Rather than double down on free trade, the Democrats should talk about the real and essential role of federal funding in our hometowns— funding that Vance opposes. But the rhetoric needs some substance. What if the Democrats centered their defense of SNAP and other essential public services Vance and the Republicans [are working to kill]? That would be a political winner in rural America. What if they were able to speak coherently about how factories are being built, solar panels are getting put on farms and small town businesses and high speed internet is being installed by Democratic-sponsored bills? Vance wants to end this funding, but he will also use its successes for political gain. What if Democrats talked about how our farms and forests are receiving billions of conservation dollars to support jobs and environmental benefits? Again, Vance is against them.

But if the past is any guide, the Democrats won’t do that, nor will they effectively call out Vance for being the fraud he is. And that will leave thousands of working class people (yes, there are many thousands) working to ramp up progressive political change through the Democratic Party in rural and small town communities finding it hard to justify Biden’s NAFTA vote or lack of action on the farm bill. And that’s because, like the Republican vice-presidential candidate, the Democratic Party establishment doesn’t understand the diversity or real-life needs of small towns, the working class, nor the economic realities of rural America.

Now that Biden has dropped out of the race, the Democrats have a lot on their collective plates. But this opening allows them to reset the table, learn from their mistakes and clearly commit to fighting for and talking about what matters. Focusing on policies that support rural and small towns and the working class could be a significant piece of a strategy to defeat the Trump-Vance duo, but with so little time left they must move quickly or Vance may just become Donald Trump’s working-man whisperer.

Vance has created a dishonest biography for himself very similar to the one that Ohio congressional candidate Jerrad Christian has actually lived. Christian is a candidate from the Appalachian region of the state who was raised in an economically struggling family and joined the Navy to learn the skills he needed to stabilize his life. I asked him how it felt to see Vance using his story in his stump speech. He told me that it isn’t just Vance! His own opponent, Troy Balderson plays the same game. “J.D. Vance and Troy Balderson are always trying to pass themselves off as champions of the working class, but their actions do not reflect their voices. Vance, with his polished Ivy League background and childhood golf lessons, pretends to understand what it’s like to struggle, while Balderson claims to stand up for rural Ohioans. Yet, both support policies that favor big corporations over the little guy. Crushing small farms and taking away freedoms from American people. I was raised poor, and I know firsthand how important government assistance is. Without programs like SNAP, my family would have gone hungry. We often had to rely on the kindness of relatives, sleeping on couches at times to avoid homelessness. Vance’s disdain for these lifelines and Balderson's voting record, which aims to cut the programs, show how out of touch they are with the real struggles of the everyday people of my home.”

Christian is exactly the kind of political leader we need in Congress instead of more Vance-Balderson types. Please consider helping him to get his message out here. “Both politicians,” he said, “pretend to fight for American jobs, but their support for every corporate-friendly policy tells a different story. They back measures that help big businesses outsource jobs, hurting the American workers they claim to protect and the hypocrisy is clear— they talk a good game, but their actions reveal who they really are. In reality, Vance and Balderson’s agendas are all about helping corporations, not the working class. Their funding comes from billionaires, oil companies, and the big pharma they claim to battle against. Their policies threaten the safety nets that many people, of our home, depend on. They may say the words that many want to hear, but those words mean nothing as men like them poison our drinking water, take away our education, and strip us of our rights. They cloak themselves in promises of progress while undermining the very foundations of our communities. It's time we see through their empty rhetoric and stand up for our futures, for our children, and for the integrity of the American people.”