The first time I read anything by J.D. Vance was when I came across a copy of Hillbilly Elegy at an airport bookstore one day. I had already heard plenty about the book. At the time, his memoir of growing up poor in Ohio was all the rage among liberal pundits and readers, who saw it as a sort of window into the mentality of the white working class when this demographic was being blamed for the rise of Donald Trump. I was working as a reporter at the left-leaning outlet The Intercept, where most of the staff thought Trump represented an existential threat to the country. It was this segment of white-collar liberals who turned to Elegy to try to understand the Trump phenomenon.
As I thumbed through the book, I initially struggled to see why they were so drawn to it. Vance made clear that the primary problem he saw in the community he grew up in was cultural. He seemed to view his friends and family as victims of their own self-destructive behaviors and counterproductive mindsets. He, unlike them, made it out, attended Yale Law School, and found success. It was the kind of narrative conservatives loved when it came from someone like Ben Carson, who like Vance grew up in poverty but achieved fame and fortune, and went on to argue that poverty is a “state of mind.”
“Vance was delivering the same message about white working class people.”
It was easy enough for me to see why Carson had become a conservative icon: He told the right that neither racism nor poverty had been an obstacle to his success—which gave Republicans permission to say that all America’s poor and minorities really need is a tax cut and maybe a stern lecture by their local pastor about the Success Sequence. But why were Democrats so enamored of Hillbilly Elegy? Perhaps it came down to the fact that Vance was delivering the same message about white working class people, at the very same time Trump was laying the blame for working-class ills on globalization, specifically immigration and free trade.
It shouldn’t be any surprise that the one time Vance wrote for The Atlantic, it was to denounce Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign for offering an “easy escape” that ignored the spiritual decay afflicting American communities. He recounted the story of a teacher from his hometown who told him she was expected to be a shepherd “to these children, but they’re all raised by wolves.” Vance then editorialized that “those wolves are here—not coming in from Mexico, not prowling the halls of power in Washington or Wall Street—but here in ordinary American communities and families and homes.” Ultimately, this was an anesthetizing message for America’s elites: Don’t worry guys, you aren’t to blame for any of this.
But Trump’s unexpected victory in that year’s election forced many Americans to reexamine their own beliefs about politics and society. J.D. Vance was no exception.
In 2017, Vance decamped from the Bay Area and settled back in Ohio. Whether through conviction or political opportunism—or as is common in politics, a mix of the two—he also began to change his analysis of the problems that were plaguing his hometown and so many others. He went from giving talks at the Brookings Institution about cultural factors driving family instability to pointing to public policy as the primary culprit.
In May 2019, years before his 2022 run for the US Senate, Vance gave a speech at The American Conservative’s annual gala in which he started to shed the up-from-your-bootstraps libertarianism of Elegy. He criticized the left for ignoring the role of “family and community” in combating social problems, pointing to the example of a child he knew who had grown addicted to opioids. But he also had strong words aimed at conventional conservatives: “There’s unfortunately too many of them, who look at that kid and say, ‘Well, he just needs to exercise some more personal responsibility, and he’ll have his fair share of the American Dream.’”
He went on to denounce corporations for failing to live up to their responsibilities to workers, families, and communities. And then he committed what increasingly has been seen as his cardinal sin by the very liberal media that once treated him as a rockstar: He praised Trump for having opened up “the debate on a lot of these issues, from foreign policy, to health care, to trade, to immigration.” By the time he ran for the Senate, Vance was a pariah among his former admirers, who were horrified by his support of Trump.
During the 2022 Senate race, Vance’s former Yale roommate Joshua McLaurin, a Georgia state lawmaker (and, by coincidence, a former classmate of mine at the University of Georgia) leaked a 2016 Facebook message in which Vance warned that Trump could be “America’s Hitler.” McLaurin’s intention was no doubt to make Vance look like a cynical hypocrite.
But a close read of the message suggests that Vance was maybe even a little more dovish toward Trump than he let on in public at the time. “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler,” he wrote (my emphasis). Take a look at the words in italics. They suggest Vance’s position on Trump in 2016 and the one he adopted ahead of his Senate run weren’t so far apart, after all. It’s possible that after watching the Trump presidency and the debates that ensued, Vance came to believe that Trump did “prove useful” in moving the party forward on a number of issues.
Ultimately, Vance’s most dramatic shift wasn’t his reassessment of Trump’s character but his embrace of a populist political agenda. Upon taking office in 2023, Vance was quick to hire Jacob Reses, a former legislative staffer to fellow populist (and Compact contributor) Sen. Josh Hawley, as his chief of staff. Reses, whom I met and spoke to off the record a number of times when I was a Capitol Hill reporter, isn’t your typical Republican staffer, most of whom are party-line College Republican types. He is a religious Jewish American who seems to take Abrahamic scriptures and their values seriously. While working for Hawley, he was the mind behind much of the Missouri lawmaker’s legislation targeting the corporate exploitation of the poor. Reses brought the same spirit to Vance’s office.
While serving in the Senate, Vance has unsurprisingly been a staunch social conservative: He is pro-life and an immigration hawk. But with the possible exception of Hawley, he has probably been the GOP senator most willing to work with Democrats to push back against corporate power and support working families. Here are a few examples:
- He co-sponsored a bill with Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) to lower the price of insulin.
- He backed legislation with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to claw back executive pay when big banks fail.
- He spearheaded legislation with Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) to regulate the rail industry following the disaster in East Palestine.
- He worked with Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) for drug price transparency and to promote greater credit-card competition.
- He introduced a bill with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) to battle corporate mergers.
This doesn’t mean that Vance is a leftist. He hasn’t supported any Democratic proposals to dramatically increase taxes on the rich or redistribute wealth, and don’t expect him to back Medicare for All. Vance is a Republican populist, not a Democratic socialist. He is concerned with concentrated power and a lack of opportunity among those at the bottom, but he is uncomfortable simply taking from the top and giving to the bottom.
“Fellow Republicans take Vance’s populism seriously.”
Fellow Republicans take Vance’s populism seriously. The Club for Growth, a long-time party corporate enforcer, spent millions against Vance during his Senate primary, and party bigwigs like Rupert Murdoch and Ken Griffin tried to block his selection as Trump’s running mate.
From the outside, these differences can be hard to see. We tend to see people in our in-group as diverse and people in the out-group as all the same. On the right, you see this when conservative commentators describe President Biden as a socialist or pretend there’s no difference between Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Chuck Schumer.
On the left, this bias has taken the form of describing Vance as a “fake,” in the words of The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner, or a “right-wing troll disguised as a populist,” in the words of the Princeton political scientist Jan-Werner Müller. On Monday, I received a news release from the advocacy group Social Security Works warning that “Trump’s pick of Vance underscores his threat to Social Security,” despite the fact that Vance has strongly opposed cutting entitlements. The group’s evidence? They point to a 14-year-old blog post Vance wrote as a student in which he praised Paul Ryan. Well, all Republicans are the same, right?
For much of the left, analyzing Vance is simple: He once denounced Trump and now embraces him. Therefore, he is a cynic and a con man willing to do anything for power. But making compromises for power isn’t always malicious. In our political duopoly, you have to endorse one set of leaders or another in order to do anything constructive.
“Making compromises for power isn’t always malicious.”
Does Vance, who is morally opposed to abortion and who fears the excesses of immigration, fit in with the Democratic Party? Of course not. Maybe he doesn’t really fit in with a party run by Mitch McConnell, a handmaiden for corporate America and unrelenting economic globalization, either. But he had to make a choice as to which party he would run in and which party he could influence, and the vice-presidential pick suggests that he chose correctly: He will now be able to influence policy in a way he didn’t as a Trump whisperer for liberal elites.
People on the left make similar compromises. AOC believes that Israel is committing a genocide in the Palestinian territories, but she is backing Biden, despite the fact that he is continuing to arm the Jewish state. It isn’t that hard to figure out why: She thinks his policies are still better than Trump’s. Is that really any better than Vance overcoming his misgivings about Trump and choosing to support him because it could lead to more populist policies being implemented? Well, apparently it is, because the media won’t cease to badger Vance over his loyalty to Trump, while mostly ignoring his bipartisan work and unorthodox policy trajectory.
None of this is to say that Vance’s elevation to the vice presidency, should Trump win this year’s election, will usher in a new era of Republican populism. The majority of the party’s lawmakers in Congress are still standard-issue Reaganites, and a GOP trifecta will likely move public policy to the right, not to the left. But Vance could choose to be an assertive veep—more of a Dick Cheney than a Kamala Harris. He could make sure that Trump appoints people to executive agencies who prioritize the interests of workers and families. He could also set himself up to lead the party in the future, helping build up an army of populist policymakers who gradually work to shift the party consensus. In a future Vance-led GOP, we could expect far more government support for families, less immigration into the country, and reduced involvement overseas.
How might the left approach such a party? I would expect progressives to stand by their core values, and that might mean pushing back on the populist conservatives’ embrace of immigration restrictions. It might also mean challenging the idea that all we need in the economy is a fairer set of rules, rather than more redistribution. Can we really reduce inequality without considering real tax increases on the very rich? Antitrust can only get so far.
But the left should also realize that you can’t improve economic conditions for ordinary Americans with just one faction in one party on your side. I spent a decade in Washington, DC, as a reporter and organizer, and that decade included observing how America’s powerful interests work. Everyone from Wall Street to AIPAC to Big Pharma made sure they had friends on both sides of the aisle. There is no way for working people to win without expanding their influence in the GOP—something Teamsters President Sean O’Brien understood when he chose to give a keynote speech at the Republican National Convention, over loud protestations from the left.
It will be a slow and agonizing process, as political change tends to be. But if decades from now, we try to identify the moment when the Republican Party started to become a little bit more sympathetic to workers and a little less slavish toward big business, it might turn out to be the moment Vance went from scolding the people he left behind in Ohio for the benefit of the liberal press to concluding that maybe all this time they had been on to something.