Since this week’s announcement that Donald Trump has chosen J. D. Vance as his running mate, media outlets have been speculating about the 39-year-old hillbilly prodigy. In spite of his candid – and hugely popular – memoir, Hillbilly Elegy (2016), a certain mystery surrounds Vance. At only 39, with a history of criticizing Trump (not uncommon among Republican politicians), Vance has not yet created a stable image for himself. One thing is clear, however. He is quite different from the more establishment Republican alternatives Trump might have chosen to be his prospective Vice President.
We’re going to build factories again … together, we will protect the wages of American workers and stop the Chinese Communist Party from building their middle class on the backs of American citizens.
Vance’s friends and intellectual influences include several figures of the “Online Right.” He has cited the influence of Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, Catholic convert and journalist Sohrab Ahmari, “neo-reactionary” thinker Curtis Yarvin, and Catholic philosopher René Girard, among others. Girard in particular is important, for he not only educated Vance through his books, but is a favorite of Vance’s billionaire backer Peter Thiel, who studied under Girard during his time at Stanford. Vance’s conversion to Catholicism in 2019 is an important aspect of his political character, which blends conservative intellectualism with advocacy for Middle Americans. In an article written for the Catholic magazine The Lamp, he quotes St Augustine’s City of God, the philosopher of religion Basil Mitchell, and Girard: “Christ is the scapegoat who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims.”
Put briefly, Vance encountered this understanding of Christianity in the work of Girard, and then proceeded to look at his own flaws. He soon found that he had lost touch with virtue in his ambitious quest to leave behind the poverty and addiction which shaped his Ohio hometown:
I had immersed myself in the logic of the meritocracy and found it deeply unsatisfying. And I began to wonder: were all these worldly markers of success actually making me a better person? I had traded virtue for achievement and found the latter wanting. But the woman I wanted to marry cared little whether I obtained a Supreme Court clerkship. She just wanted me to be a good person.
Vance’s memoir secured him a following more among intellectuals seeking to understand Trump’s popularity than among the people he grew up among. But it is the latter’s interests he now champions: the industrious factory-workers whose jobs were exported to China, and whose sons and brothers were killed, wounded or traumatized in “global war on terror” after 2001. In this respect, Vance is the anti-Kamala Harris. He was not picked simply because he checks certain boxes. He was picked despite the fact that he was “another white guy.” A living breathing example of the American Dream, Vance can be held up as a role model for children – regardless of their skin color or gender – exemplifying that the circumstances of your early life don’t need to be your destiny.
Kamala grew up in comfort. Her parents were academics, her father a Jamaican economist, her mother an Indian biologist. Her political career was not distinguished. Yet, thanks to the prevailing identity-based DEI mindset prevalent within the Democratic Party, she was picked as Biden’s running mate because “he wanted to make history by picking a woman of color…” If we want children – of every race – to aspire to hard work and virtue, Vance is the ideal role model. If we want to teach children – of every race – to play the grifting game, Kamala is the Platonic form of the DEI hustler.
Harris has recently been the subject of online mockery after a video compilation was released which shows her repeating the same asinine, grammatically dubious phrase on dozens of different occasions: “What can be, unburdened by what has been.” DEI hides mediocrity, but only to a point. She went to law school at University of California Hastings. By contrast, Vance got into Yale Law School as an Appalachian white male veteran – without a doubt the worst thing a person could possibly be if one wanted to appeal to the New Haven Diversicrats. Yale Law, for all its faults, is the most competitive in the nation; Hastings, while perfectly respectable, comes in 85th.
As he has progressed from autobiography to the Senate and now to the brink of the second-highest elected office in the land, Vance has been supported by his good friend, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel. This, coupled with his endorsement by Elon Musk, has caused some to doubt the sincerity of Vance’s brand of “Maganomics.” One of Vance’s most striking policy aims is to shift the U.S. economy away from the big tech companies, whose wealth is highly concentrated along the coasts, and to reinvigorate the “real economy” of manufacturing. However, a closer look at Thiel’s work reveals that there is no tension between Vance’s vision of a revitalized Middle America and his close partnership with Thiel. As Vance writes in The Lamp:
[Thiel] argued that his own world of Silicon Valley spent too little time on the technological breakthroughs that made life better – those in biology, energy, and transportation – and too much on things like software and mobile phones. Everyone could now tweet at each other, or post photos on Facebook, but it took longer to travel to Europe, we had no cure for cognitive decline and dementia, and our energy use increasingly dirtied the planet.
Thiel even “defied the social template I had constructed – that dumb people were Christians and smart ones atheists.” Having experienced conversion myself, I can’t stress how important it is to abandon this stereotype of Christianity.
It can be difficult for the adult convert not to compromise on the tenets of his new faith by holding onto secular platitudes and liberal pieties. Vance’s pro-life stance, which seems considerably stronger than that of Trump himself, reflects his genuine belief in the sanctity of life. By contrast, Harris, who is a Baptist, has insisted without justification that “to support a woman’s ability – not her government, but her – to make that decision [to have an abortion] does not require anyone to abandon their faith or their beliefs.” This ignores that the General Board of American Baptist Churches officially opposes abortion as a means of evading responsibility for conception, and that many Baptists, especially those in the Southern Baptist Convention, do not believe in its permissibility at all. But then, argumentative rigor is not Harris’s strong suit. Another of her incomprehensible statements made the headlines recently: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
The divergence of the two likely vice-presidential candidates on the question of America’s place in the world is perhaps the most political important difference between them.
Harris’s recent “forceful case” for American interventionism is a typical expression of liberal interventionism. I have no trouble imagining her sending Vance’s friends in rural Ohio abroad to fight in ruinous misadventures until the trans flag flies over Tehran. (Look out for my upcoming article on Iran for more warnings about the difficulty of dealing with that problem.) Nor can we expect competence, if the scattered, lurching withdrawal from Afghanistan a few years ago is any indicator.
Admittedly, it does remain true that the democrats did take U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. No, not well. No, not prudently, nor at the right time, nor with the right preparations. But they did it. On the other hand, the Biden-Harris administration has not shied away from intervening indirectly in foreign conflicts, even if the aid it has given to Ukraine and to Israel has been too little to give those countries victories in their wars against, respectively, Russia and Iranian proxies.
Trump and Vance offer something different. There are two foreign policy futures one could reasonably foresee under a Trump-Vance administration. The first is blockheaded isolationism and geopolitical naïveté. Today’s Republicans leaders are not likely to blunder into any stupid “forever wars,” but they do risk abandoning Europe to Putin, the Middle East to Islamism, and East Asia to an ascendent China.
America has real enemies, and they cannot be ignored. That is why Vance must never repeat his comment about how he “doesn’t really care” what happens in Ukraine. If something bad enough happens there, it won’t stay in Ukraine, and he should know better.
But if you look more closely at Vance, it seems likelier that the new Republican Party will uphold America’s role as a great power, but do so more wisely than the Democrats have since 2020. Vance, in his acceptance speech, railed against the Chinese fentanyl coming up through Mexico, where there was once a border before Biden destroyed it. Vance understands deeply the threat posed by an aggressive China, particularly economically: “We’re going to build factories again … together, we will protect the wages of American workers and stop the Chinese Communist Party from building their middle class on the backs of American citizens.” That is not the rhetoric of someone who is going to abandon our Taiwanese allies (and their crucial semiconductor factories) to China. It’s the rhetoric of someone who understands Chinese subversion.
It was Trump, not Biden, who imposed tariffs on key Chinese goods, and it will be Trump, not a Democrat, who will keep their poison out of American heartlands by restoring a well-policed southern border. Vance, whose own mother suffered terribly with drug addiction, understands the importance of supporting Trump in this fight.
The Democrats deserve some limited credit for supporting Israel’s fight against Hamas, albeit haltingly and grudgingly. Vance, in a telling CNN interview, does much better, for he would let the Israelis take the lead without constantly fiddling with the flow of necessary American aid: “I think that our attitude vis-a-vis the Israelis should be, look, we’re not good at micromanaging Middle Eastern wars, the Israelis are our allies, let them prosecute this war the way they see fit.”
Finally, we can cautiously hope that worries about Trump or Vance abandoning Ukraine are overblown. The terrible war there has revealed Putin’s many weaknesses. The Russians have repeatedly embarrassed as well as incriminated themselves. Vance is less concerned about Eastern Europe than East Asia or the Middle East, but he says himself that he has no intention of abandoning Europe. My hope is that he approaches the Putin problem seriously. Some of what he says indicates that he will:
We’re talking in the United States about ramping up our production of artillery to 100,000 a month by the end of 2025. The Russians make close to 500,000 a month right now at this very minute. So the problem here vis-à-vis Ukraine is America doesn’t make enough weapons; Europe doesn’t make enough weapons; and that reality is far more important than American political will or how much money we print and then send to Europe.
Vance is right. Ukraine needs weapons, and the Western world needs to make many more of them. The major difference between Vance’s approach and the Democrats’ is that Vance expects Europe to wake up to the danger on its doorstep and shoulder a burden commensurate with its proximity to the conflict. That the American taxpayer has been generous in subsidizing Europe’s security for 75 years is not an excuse for Europeans to continue to shirk their responsibilities. Yes, the US must help Ukraine not merely survive, but win. But it must do so in a clear-eyed way.
Perhaps I will be disappointed. It would not be the first time. But watching Vance’s acceptance speech in Milwaukee, I had the sense that something big has shifted in America. Sometimes, in interviews, I ask guests what one thing they would change about the world if they were given a magic wand. Right now, I would pick having Donald Trump and J.D. Vance running America’s executive branch. The billionaire and the hillbilly are an odd couple, no doubt. But each, in their different ways, has shown courage under fire – and a commitment to putting not just America but ordinary Americans first.
The contrast with the Diversicrats could not be starker.