Why I Still Like J.D. Vance (2016 Version)

When Vance gave voice to the forgotten working class.

J.D. Vance. Photo credit: The Washington Post/Getty Images

What do we say to someone who loses a factory job? What do we say to people living in communities where manufacturing jobs have left and there is very little prospect for other good-paying jobs?

When I read my fellow compatriots on the center-right, the answers tend to be either that manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back or that if they came back it would raise prices on consumer goods.

What we have told working-class Americans is that it is up to you to figure this out. Find a job, any job, even if it pays much less than your previous one. Maybe you should move to a new place where there is work. Go to college and gain new skills even if you rack up debt. Maybe the worst thing we tell people is that they are lazy or druggies or whatever.

What I’ve noticed is that when conservatives talk about the economy, they talk about it in the aggregate. There is talk about growth and the affordability of goods. What is missing is the talk of people, and workers.

Since his nomination to be Donald Trump’s Vice President, J.D. Vance has received a ton of criticism and much of it is well-deserved. The junior Senator from Ohio and author of the book Hilbilly Elegy has become an object of derision among Democrats and Never-Trump Republicans. His change from a Never Trumper to Donald Trump’s Vice Presidential running mate has sent the political class chattering and angry. People are angry at Vance for different reasons, but one of them has to be a sense of betrayal. As I wrote back in 2021,

What makes Vance’s switch so hard is because it feels like a betrayal. This was someone who a few years ago wasn’t simply anti-Trump, but gave clear, moral reasons why following Trump was so wrong. He appeared as an avatar of integrity at a time when other conservatives were taking the easy way out and support Trump.

Vance has made some moves that have just opened himself up for the media scrutiny he is facing right now: I think he’s learning that trying to be an online edge lord putting down “childless cat ladies,” might give you like on Twitter, but might not win you votes in Tomah, Wisconsin.

While he does deserve the anger he is receiving right now, a part of me has softened my scorn for him. No, I’m not becoming MAGA, but Vance’s machinations and the reaction from former friends have made me wonder about Democrats and anti-Trump conservatives who haven’t learned why Donald Trump is such a force, and why people are so willing to vote for him even with all of his deficits. To understand Vance and Trump, you have to understand what has gone on with working-class Americans and how both parties have ignored them to their detriment and to the detriment of American democracy.

I am the son of two auto workers. Both my mother and father worked for General Motors in Flint, Michigan. Most people know the story of Flint, but for those who don’t here is what I wrote in 2020:

Beginning in the early 1980s, Flint underwent the massive downsizing of General Motors. In the late 70s, General Motors had 80,000 employees working for them in the Flint area. Today, there are around 8,000.

Such a massive change left Flint reeling. Once well-kept houses were now trashed. Stores closed and people moved away. In the space of a decade, the city became so deep in debt and the state had to come in to help right the ship. One of the times the state intervened led to the now-infamous Flint Water Crisis where the water supply became contaminated with lead. Flint had a population of nearly 200,000 in 1970, a year after I was born. Today it is around 99,000. The city that I grew up in was relatively prosperous. It wasn’t perfect, but people took care of their homes and life seemed great. That Flint no longer exists. All that’s left are the memories.

Whenever I return to Flint, like I did in July to bury my mother, you end up seeing a lot of boarded-up buildings, next to others that were just left to rot and decay. Flint has become one of those forgotten places that dot the Midwest and other parts of the United States. While we are talking about what candidates are “weird” or not knowing a Presidential candidate is black, places like Flint or Youngstown are dealing with rising rates of inequality as John Halprin so wonderfully noted in the Liberal Patriot.

I won’t go into a long explanation of the book (though Michael Mohr has an excellent essay defending the Hillbilly Elegy- but not Vance.), but what struck me when I read it back in ‘16 was the similarities between folk from Appalachia moving to find work in other parts of the country and the migrations that brought millions of African Americans from the South to factory towns in the North, like my father. Indeed, the east side of Flint growing up had an enclave of hillbillies who came from places like Kentucky to work at General Motors. It was a reminder that as much as race has framed American history, so has class. What Vance did in that book is put a face on working-class Americans and how changes in the economy affected them. And he did it from a conservative viewpoint.

As someone on the center-right, I was frustrated by the lack of attention given to the working class. Which is why Hillbilly Elegy was such a game-changer. Here was someone who was a conservative, who talked about personal responsibility, but also wanted to find ways that the government could help. On top of that he also didn’t like Trump. I thought he was the person this nascent movement in the GOP needed to not only understand why people voted for Trump, but how to best counter him and provide an alternative.

Of course, that didn’t happen. But why? Why did he change? Why did he become this raving asshole?

It would be easy for me to just see him as an opportunist and at some level he is. But in an interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in June, he explains his journey. He recounts a meeting with a CEO at a conference:

Let me give you one story: In 2018, I was invited to an event hosted by the Business Roundtable, an organization of C.E.O.s…He was almost a caricature of a business executive, complaining about how he was forced to pay his workers higher wages.

He said: “The labor market is super tight. What Trump has done at the border has completely forced me to change the way that I interact with my employees.” And then he pivoted to me: “Well, you understand this as well as anybody. These people just need to get off their asses, come to work and do their job. And now, because we can’t hire immigrants, or as many immigrants, we’ve got to hire these people at higher wages.”

The fact that this guy saw me as sympathetic to his problem, and not the problem of the workers, made me realize that I’m on a train that has its own momentum and I have to get off this train, or I’m going to wake up in 10 years and really hate everything that I’ve become. And so I decided to get off that train, and I felt like the only way that I could do that was, in some ways, alienating and offending people who liked my book.

He then continues to talk about how those on the center-left and center-right are oblivious to those who work for them:

The people on the left, I would say, whose politics I’m open to — it’s the Bernie Bros. But generally, center-left liberals who are doing very well, and center-right conservatives who are doing very well, have an incredible blind spot about how much their success is built on a system that is not serving people who they should be serving.

None of this excuses Vance’s choices in following Trump, but it is interesting to read how even after he wrote this book to talk about the problems facing the working class, the upper classes in both parties still didn’t get it. Instead, they saw the working class as lazy.

If there is anything that I’ve learned over the years of Trump’s rise, it is how the anti-Trump coalition of Democrats and Republicans has talked forever about how Trump is a threat to democracy and I think he is. But I’ve heard scant talk about why he is so popular. Why is that? Why is there no curiosity as to why a man who has said things that would have ended the careers of other politicians, a man who incited a riot in the hopes of stopping the certification of an election could become president again? Why has someone who could damage if not end American Democracy not sending working Americans into a panic?

Maybe it’s because they might have given up on the idea that American democracy is for them.

On his substack, Renew the Republic, Frank DiFestano noted the response to the different tone of the concluded Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. The focus towards working people has rankled many people. Take a look at Twitter and you will see anti-Trump Republicans who see the supposed move away from free markets to as an abandonment of principle. DiFestano takes some time to explain why the party might have made this shift by looking at working Americans and how the rest of the country feels rather ambivalent towards this large group. Of course, you have to define these folks. So, who are they? He describes them as such:

What then actually makes you working class in America? Whether you have access to influence inside institutions. Social class means access to the people who run things.

The key here is not how much money these people have, but whether or not they have access to power. As he notes, if you are in the upper classes, or as Chris Arande says in the front row and you have a kid who wants to be an investment banker, you can talk to a friend to arrange an internship. Need a job? You might know someone who is a friend of a friend who can help you land employment.

When it comes to the working class, there might not be those social networks available to help you. I would add that in the past there were social networks like unions that could help you find work and stay in work. Most of these people don’t have access to institutions in society and DiFestano notes that they find the doors more often than not locked and unavailable.

In the years since Ronald Reagan left office, the Republicans have become more and more a party interested in tax cuts, cutting the federal budget, free trade, and little else. None of these are bad in and of themselves, I think too often the party became interested in theory and not real people. You could talk about the wonders of the free market, but rarely ever talk about the workers that made such a market possible.

There are those on the right that have called for change focusing more on workers and not just on tax cuts. Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat wrote a book called Grand New Party, where they called for the GOP to focus more on what they called Sam’s Club Republicans. They said the party needed to focus on this new working class base with actual ideas or else a demagogue would come and exploit this social and economic class. Donald Trump, anyone?

What is needed is a conservative economic policy that has at its center, the free market serving the people instead of the other way around. Thankfully there are people out there that are trying to do just that.

There are groups like American Compass on the right that are going against what has been called “market fundamentalism” to focus more on the American worker. Oren Cass who leads American Compass wrote a great book a few years ago on how conservatives can reach out to workers. They are less friendly towards free trade and more open to things like tariffs. I will be honest in saying that I am wary of using tariffs. Yes, Reagan did use tariffs back in the 80s with autos and George W. Bush used them with steel, but I think that it should be used carefully and sparingly. But while I disagree with Cass and American Compass on the means, I do applaud them for at the very least caring about American workers.

Glenn Hubbard, former economics advisor to President George W. Bush, is more of a traditional Reaganite, but strongly believes in policies that can help retrain workers who lose jobs because of economic change. I lean more towards his approach of place-based economic aid that will help workers and communities weather economic storms. Unlike many traditional conservatives, Hubbard wants to make sure that the market is doing more than just bring growth, but is also fostering “mass flourishing.” Writing recently for the Wall Street Journal he wrote:

…a conservative economic platform should recall why conservatives have stressed the benefits of markets. The goal, as my Columbia colleague and Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps puts it, is “mass flourishing.” That is why we want markets to work—to advance innovation and productivity and allow communities to make that flourishing possible.

As far as the government’s role, a contemporary economic agenda should recognize a limited measure of successful industrial policy. Two roads should be on offer. The first is to provide more general support for basic and applied research, while letting market forces determine winners and losers. The second is to assign specific goals to particular interventions. The Apollo program’s goal was to put a man on the moon in a decade. The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed sought vaccines against Covid.

I lean far more toward Hubbard’s view than Cass, but both are making the same point: what is the point of the market? What is the market for? Who is the market for? Getting back to J.D. Vance, I truly miss the Vance of 2016. I wonder what could have happened had he not joined Donald Trump and become an edge lord. Would he have helped Never Trump Republicans bend a little in order to reach out to working-class voters?

There was a time in my life when I would have believed that Vance could have stayed and made a difference. But I’ve become more cynical as of late. Too many of the old guard of Republicans are set in their ways, unwilling to change their minds of even become a tad bit more flexible on the role of government. The system as it is benefits them, so why change?

Hillbilly Elegy reminded us that there are places in America where things are not going well. These places are full of actual people living actual lives that are in need of some assistance. How will our political system deal with this problem? Again, why I have a lot of problems with the J.D. Vance of 2024, his less-than-inspiring speech at the Republican National Convention about his family home in Kentucky was a reminder that place matters as much as ideas. Critics fear that Vance was subscribing to blood and soil nationalism, but Farah Stockman of the New York Times reminded people that in spite of Vance’s dangerous rhetoric on abortion and election denialism he has a point about place that his critics don’t get:

People who speak of America as an idea tend to have a global outlook, arguing for more immigration, free trade and a robust role for the United States around the world. Those who emphasize that it’s also a homeland see the country’s resources as being squandered on outsiders, while the needs of citizens are brushed aside.

There is so much that is troubling about Mr. Vance and the MAGA movement in general — election denialism and support for insurrections come to mind — but this message resonates, especially among the working class. I’ve spoken with American workers who compete with undocumented immigrants for low-wage jobs in home construction and landscaping and they speak of the downside of the notion that America is an idea — anybody can walk across the border to claim it. Any soldier in an ill-fated war that tried to export America’s self-evident truths to foreign lands may understandably prefer to think about the country as a homeland rather than a set of principles that must be defended everywhere.

The Vance is 2024 isn’t that interesting. He decided to do things that has basically brought him bad media. But the Vance of 2016 still matters. He still matters in talking about those forgotten places in America where both parties have nothing to say to someone who loses their job.

I want to believe that some change is coming. I want to believe that there can be hope for working-class families in Flint and other places across this nation. I want to believe both political parties might notice working men and women again. But the blindness on the left and right, the blindness of Trump, and the cynicism of Vance tells me that change is not coming.